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  • Building the Greens Into A Sustainable Mass-Based Party of the Left

    An open letter to members and friend of the GA Green Party about our present status and the tasks before us from Bruce Dixon, co-chair GA Greens.

    Saturday, April 22

    Members and friends of the GA Green Party,

    We‘ve got a project. The project is to transform the Green Party from a marginal factor to a sustainable mass based party, able to compete with existing political parties and struggle for power over how our lives are lived and whether we have a planet to pass on to our children.

    Right now the Greens are not that party. For the last 20 years the Green organizing model has depended upon donors and volunteer energies, which ebb and flow. It hasn’t worked well. Our presidential candidate raised just got one percent of the vote. She wasn’t even allowed on the ballot in Georgia and several other states. The state and national Green parties are unable to raise money for needed staff and services, and in states likie Georgia we have failed to grow our Green parties beyond a few dozen or couple hundred activists scattered around a state. And other states are in a similar place. This is the Green Party we have inherited.

    Our project, our plan is to transform. We are going to build he Green Party in this state and around the country into something not seen in the US since the Socialist Party of a century ago….

    • a mass based,
    • sustainable
    • internally democratic
    • party of the left.

    Each of those terms are important, so let’s take them one at a time.

    WHY A PARTY OF THE LEFT?

    Politics is how we humans conduct our collective affairs. Political parties are how we come together to make that happen.

    The political terms right and left originated back during the French Revolution of the 1790s.  There was a moment called the Constituent Assembly when on the right side of the room there sat the blood-stained representatives of France’s overseas slave empire in Martinique, South America and Saint Domingue, which would soon become Haiti.  Alongside them was the Catholic Church which owned a great fraction of the country’s land, and France’s ancient greedy aristocracy which aimed to restore the monarchy by any means necessary.  On the left side of the room sat the landless peasants, and small farmers, urban workers, small business people, traders and shopkeepers, artisans and the unemployed. 

    Ever since then those who stand for the rule of unearned wealth and privilege, for aristocrats, oligarchs and the one percent have been called the right while those who fight for the poor and the oppressed, for workers, for the unemployed – for the 99% have been called the left.

    Remember that when people try to tell you somebody or something is or ought to be above or beyond “left and right” or that those are not real or relevant distinctions. They’re kidding you, and maybe themselves too. So we need a party of the left.

    Our aim is to build a mass party in Georgia, with tens of thousands of dues paying members over the next two or three years. Can such a thing really be done? Given that the Socialists were able to achieve numbers very much like that a hundred years ago in states like Michigan, the answer seems to be yes, it’s entirely possible.

    HOW DO WE MAKE A PARTY SUSTAINABLE, INTERNALLY DEMOCRATIC AND SCALABLE UP TO LEVELS WHERE IT CAN COMPETE FOR POWER WITH OTHER PARTIES AND WITH SOME OF THE NONPROFITS WHO VIRTUALLY OWN THE SOCIAL MOVEMENT?

    The answer is we organize Green parties as dues based membership bodies with officers directly accountable to members, who are defined by whether they’ve paid the monthly dues. Party building experiences almost everywhere outside the US confirms the viability of this model. It’s been used to sustain mass parties of the left on five continents, just not here in the last hundred years.

    Only a dues based membership assures our party’s efforts scalability, the resources to hire staff, to do mailings, to call meetings across the state and to create events and processes which engage its members in the activities, the direction and the governance of a statewide party. Georgia is not a small place. A statewide Georgia party should have events and spaces to hold them in Atlanta, Athens, Savannah, Augusta, Rome and a few other places.

    Party dues provide the only sound basis for internal democracy in a left party. Paid up party dues establish membership, and only party members in good standing can serve as or elect party officers, some of whom should be elected at frequent intervals, like every six months. Without this chain of responsibility between the party’s officers and the dues paying members, our party’s leaders are in practice accountable to nobody. With it they can act as a peoples party in ways that Democrats, Republicans and Libertarians, all beholden to one percenter donors cannot.

    SO THE STATE COMMITTEE HAS SET THE MONTHLY DUES FLOOR AT $10 PER MONTH, AND ENCOURAGES COUNTY LOCALS TO SET THEIR OWN DUES LEVELS.

    Why $10 a month?

    The answer is why not? At $10 a month a base of 300 members nets an income of $3000 per month, enough to hire a part time staffer or a space where we can have frequent, even weekly events, a necessity if we are to grow into a mass party. At 500-600 members we should look for some office and event space in a second city, Savannah or Augusta or Columbus or Rome, and at a thousand dues paying members we can hire another staff person and look for event/office space in a third Georgia city.

    $10 a month is the floor not the ceiling. We think those who have more will choose to give more if they know that many are pitching in at the minimum level of $10 per month. Of course the party has to maintain a month-to-month list of its dues paying members, something a small committee working with the treasurer can do.

    Won’t there be some people who can’t pay $10 a month? Shouldn’t Greens waive the membership dues for people of limited income, in the name of inclusivity?

    I think the answer should be no. If someone cannot pay $10 a month they don’t have to be a member of this party. We still love them, but party members should have some skin in the game. That which we pay nothing for we value little or not at all. $10 a month isn’t much, poor people juggle amounts like all the time, and they choose to spend their money on what they decide matters most. If we cannot make Green Party membership worth that $10 even for people of limited means, as left parties do everywhere else in the world we are probably in the wrong business.

    Critically, “including” free and discounted memberships breaks the chain of accountability between party officers and the dues paying members. It creates another class of members with no skin in the game, members for whom party membership isn’t worth a mere $10 a month. Are these the “members” we want deciding party policy and electing its officers?

    Green Parties in Chicago and Baltimore have just adopted the all dues model. Colorado, Ohio and some other states are walking this way as well. Richmond California has repeatedly elected a Green mayor and several Green city council people. The core organization that does this is called the Richmond Progressive Alliance, and it has about 300 dues paying members.

    Basing our party on membership dues will allow the Green Party to compete with the nonprofits for leadership in the social movement.

    Right now, nonprofit organizations pretty much own the movement because they are the only ones who can throw staff hours and resources at a problem. That means that donors and officers hand picked by donors set the priorities for the movement. That can’t be right. Even the most righteous nonprofits are accustomed to enforcing an artificial barrier between what they do and “politics”, as though hunger, housing, and the rest could somehow be separate from the political.

    Last year the Georgia Green Party tried to buy table space at the national conference of BDS, the movement to boycott, divest and sanction the apartheid regime of Israel. Amazingly we were turned down because the Green Party is “political.” As it is, the nonprofits and churches are the only organizations which can hire staff and the only ones that have guaranteed meeting spaces. That will only change when the party has its own offices and spaces.

    WHAT WE NEED TO DO BETWEEN NOW AND OUR JUNE 17 ANNUAL MEETING, AND BEYOND

    We need to begin emailing to our lists at least weekly, and we need to secure some additional lists as well. This Sunday April 23 should be the first of these. Every Sunday between now and June 17 is possible.

    We need to produce a variety of leaflets and handouts for use at public sites of all kinds. We need the first of these available for next weekend, April 28. This sounds like a job for the communications committee.

    We’ll want local committees to be responsible for tabling, being present at events, gathering names to add to our lists, using volunteers gathered by our phone banking efforts. We should supply the individuals and teams out doing personal encounters at street festivals, concerts, outside courthouses, in public parks or other locations with leaflets and forms people can fill out on tablets or cell phones to include themselves in our mailing lists.

    We’ll need another committee to work on the coordination an aggressive phone banking effort, not just of the roughly 4,000 names we have of people who took part in the Stein campaign, but of the people who give us their phone numbers in personal encounters. We need something like 12 thousand phone calls made over the next eight weeks.

    We need to identify and reach out to friendly existing formations and their leaders throughout the state, to explain to them how and why we are re-imagining Georgia’s Green Party, how we intend to build it into a mass based sustainable party of the left that will soon compete for offices and struggle for power.

    PHONE BANKING BUILDS OUR PARTY

    We need to call every number in our database.

    1. Every call informs people of the annual meeting, and invite them to it.
    2. Every call pitches party membership at $10 per month
    3. We should use the calls to target counties and refer people to local formation meetings in the fifteen or so counties where we have 50 or more names, and to virtual events we do on Facebook or other devices.
    4. We must also use the calls to recruit more phone bankers, and more people tabling and doing personal encounters with people using our printed materials and gathering names on forms for our database. This is how we grow our lists, and eventually our membership.
    5. The committee should establish an estimate of how many person hours it would take to make what might be 15 thousand calls by the end of June, a not unreasonable number if we expect to contact every one in that dataset who will talk to us two or three times between now and June 17.

    If we do not call and email these people, then for them the Green Party does not exist. Once we grow to a certain point, we will have to make a phonebank capability a permanent feature of our party, perhaps even a virtual one like the Stein campaign used. Meanwhile we can distribute sections of our database to callers as MS Excel spreadsheet attachments which will be sent via email, twenty names at a time, along with the script. Callers will be asked to fill out the fields after the names and numbers with appropriate data.

    We should have two or three online checkins available for those having problems on the calls. These can occur on the party’s ZOOM account, the meeting and phone numbers for which will be posted on the web site and included in the phone bankers’ email with the script and list segments.

    I can have phone scripts ready late Sunday of April 23.

     

    LIST BUILDING IS VITAL TO THE GROWTH OF OUR PARTY

    We’re not marketers, we’re a political party. Our approach to and use of these corporate social media platforms, which are really marketing platforms, must be a bit different from the approach of marketers. We’re seeking a very different sort of engagement than the marketer, who only has to convey the essence of her proposition in 140 characters.

    We have to tell some of the news. We can’tn always tell all people need to know about Medicare For All in 140 characters. We have to do quite a bit of what most marketers claim is impossible, to get folks to read, not merely to scan, to engage living breathing people to take part in their own liberation instead of just clicking an online petition. We’ll be trying to get people into meetings and encounters both in cyberspace and in their own cities and towns, and to build sustainable Green Party locals there.

    It’s critical that we build our current email list of 6,700 up to 20,000, to 60,000 or 100,000 or more. No list like that as ever been amassed by any state Green party, but it’s NOT impossible and it IS necessary. At 6,700 names our list only reaches one tenth of one percent of Georgia voters. A list of 60,000 hits only one percent of Georgia voters. Can we get our mailing list up to 20 or 30 thousand by this fall?

    Capitalist media oligopolies virtually ban our party’s messages from the air. Green candidates are rarely allowed in debates, and often denied ballot access. So email, social media, in-person encounters and the phone are what we have to build our Party’s reach right now. .

     

    EFFECTIVE TABLING, LEAFLETTING, CIRCULATING AT OTHER PEOPLE’S EVENTS

    EVERY LEAFLET MUST BE A LIST BUILDER

    Let’s say you hand somebody a leaflet about the Green Party, and they glance at it. The person says sure, I’ll read it later and if I am interested I will join your email list. To facilitate that every leaflet should have a URL or SMS where they can do that.

    We should – we MUST have MANY DIFFERENT Green party leaflets. Some on environmental issues, some on gentrification, some on mass incarceration, some on foreign policy issues, you name it. Folks who want to work on communications should be all over this.

    EVERY CELL PHONE MUST BE A LIST BUILDER

    Everybody’s got a cell phone. We must provide online forms accessible via cell phone so that a Green at a table or event can hand her cell phone to some interested person and have the person enter their own email address and digits on our list enrollment form directly. This is better than a printed page because inputting written entries takes time and some entries are list because writing cannot be deciphered.

    EVERY EVENT OUR PEOPLE ATTEND SHOULD BE EXAMINED FOR EFFECTIVENESS, FOR HOW MANY LIST ADDITIONS IT GENERATES

    Suppose we buy a table in downtown Marietta, for one of their Saturday morning things, or somewhere in Gwinnett or Dekalb or Atlanta or Savannah. This is what being a dues supported organization lets us do. I’ve been threatened with arrest for circulating a Jill Stein petition on a Saturday morning in Marietta because our party did not buy a table. Suppose stock it with leaflets and a couple people. We should examine how many list additions this kind of event gets us, so that we understand what kinds of events are most productive, and what kinds of approaches to people yield the best results.

    VIRTUAL EVENTS

    Between now and the end of the summer we should aim to conduct some vitual events, most likely Facebook video, though there may be other options along the line of briefings on key issues, like the end of the state legislative session and what atrocities have been committed there, reports on mass incarceration, and related issues, and others.

    WHAT ABOUT RUNNING FOR OFFICE THIS NOVEMBER?

    November of odd numbered years is election time for many cities and towns. Most of the offices up for grabs in an odd numbered November are so-called “non-paritsan” contests. Greens might consider backing some candidates for local office, but November 2017 is mighty close. We have to build a party before we can do effective campaigns – we have already tried to do campaigns without much of a party to back them or be accountable to.

    Focusing mainly upon the building of a scalable, dues based mass party in in 2017 will put us in good position to consider originating competitive campaigns for office in 2018.

    There’s a lot to do, enough for everyone who wants to build a party in this state to take hold of and play a part in. Thanks for all that many of you have contributed up to this time. We should look forward to finding ways to work with each other on the project of re-imagining and building the Green Party in the weeks and months to come.

    Thanks.

    Bruce A. Dixon

    co-chair, GA Green Party

  • OUR 2017 ANNUAL MEETING

    The Georgia Green Party will hold its 2017 annual meeting at the conference center of Georgia Perimeter College at 495 North Indian Creek Drive Clarkston Georgia Saturday June 17th from 9 am till 3 PM, doors open at 8:30.  Jill Stein, the Green party’s presidential candidate for 2016 will be our guest that morning and for some other events to be announced for Friday afternoon and evening June 16.

    We may try two breakout briefings, perhaps one on public education and the opt-out movement and another on the for achieving prospects for Medicare For All in the Trump era. There will be two other events to be announced for Friday June 16 at which Jill will be present.

    We expect to bring 80 to 100 people together from around the state on that Saturday. We believe we can accomplish this

    • by doing weekly mailings to our existing list informing them of and inviting them to this gathering;
    • through an aggressive phone banking effort to reach all 4,000 people currently on our list,
    • by tabling and other in-person outreach work at events of all kinds with list-addition forms on cell phones or tablets, and providing those doing that tabling with a variety of handouts on what the GP is and believes.
    • by launching a series of virtual events via Facebook or other means during the months of May, June and continuing after that.. 

    Successfully bringing off this 2017 summer meeting will put us on the road to becoming a statewide party of real significance, and give us the valuable experience needed to conduct an ever better winter meeting attended by three or four times that many.

    Clarkston, located in Dekalb County is a diverse and welcoming community with an interesting recent history. After 911 Clarkston hosted a wave of Afghan refugees. They stuck around two or three years until they figured out how America works at which time they lit out for the suburbs where they might have a chance at becoming white. The Afghans were followed by a wave of Iraqi refugees who stayed in Clarkston for two or three years until they figured out how America works and they also fled for the suburbs.  Clarkston’s third recent wave of immigrants and refugees have been from East Africa, from Somalia, Ethiopia and Eritrea. America works rather differently for them, so they have settled permanently into Clarkston alongside large existing communities of Caribbean and West African  immigrants in east Dekalb.

    Want to find out more, or how to help make it happen?  Fill out the form below, and we’ll be in touch.

    And consider joining the Georgia Green Party. Minimum dues are only $10 per month.

  • MIT Professor Says Top U.S. Officials Fabricated Intelligence to Justify Attacking Syria

    by Ann Garrison

    A top scientist in weaponry and the physics of explosions at the nation’s foremost institution of technology says the chemical event that the U.S. used as a pretext to attack Syria could not have happened the way the White House says it did. MIT Professor Emeritus Theodore Postol says the bogus U.S. reports indicate “a willingness to use intelligence claims that are false to make political points and political arguments.” (more…)

  • How Gentrification is Killing US Cities and Black Lives

    By Dan Arel

    Gentrification is a fact of life in capitalist America.  As long as the only value stable working class neighborhoods possess is the value which can be realized by flipping the real estate, expelling the residents and replacing them with stadiums, hotels, tourist attractions and wealthier, often white residents, it may be inevitable.  We have yet to see a different model of urban economic development advanced which allows working class neighborhoods to stabilize and survive. (more…)

  • Bernie Sanders: Company Man

    By Paul Street

    After his unsuccessful run for president, during which Bernie Sanders failed to challenge rampant vote theft and irregularities in primary elections from New York to California, he endorsed Hillary Clinton and re-joined the dismal dollar Democrats.  Now Sanders is pushing out the same bellicose “Russia did it” line as his DNC pic Keith Ellison, and the man who defeated him, Tom Perez.  But this is what company men do, isn’t it? (more…)

  • Challenging Islamophobia, Green Party Briefing Paper for candidates and activists

    WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Green Party’s Coordinated Campaign Committee has released a briefing paper titled “Islamophobia: Another Social Construction of Racism”. The paper is a guide for use by Green candidates and activists.

    “We are very pleased indeed to offer this new tool for Green Party candidates and activists,” said Hillary Kane, co-chair of the committee. “We want to help Green Party activists be effective organizers in resistance to the frightening Islamophobic rhetoric and policies coming from the current administration.”

    Green Party of the United States
    http://www.gp.org
    @GreenPartyUS

    For Immediate Release:
    Monday, April 17, 2017

    Contact:
    Scott McLarty, Media Director, 202-904-7614, scott@gp.org
    Hillary Kane, co-chair of the Coordinated Campaign Committee, 267-971-3559 (cell)
    Hugh Esco, co-author of briefing paper, 912-571-1833 (cell)

    Briefing paper and brochure

    Results of Green participation in April 4 local elections: 8/20 victories

    The paper debunks and deconstructs misinformation in the popular narrative about Muslims and Islam and suggests concrete steps which Green candidates and activists across the nation can take to defend human rights and freedoms against unconstitutional encroachment.

    “It is great that the Green Party is tackling Islamophobia head on by using this paper as a tool to debunk many myths and misconceptions that have plagued so many political party organizations,” said Farheen Hakeem, former co-chair of the Green Party of the United States and the first Muslim leader of a national party with FEC recognition in U.S. history.

    “It’s important for folks to read and understand this paper as we enter a time period where Muslims are targeted perhaps more than any other group. Post Trump America is more frightening than post 9/11 America for Muslims,” said Ahmed Eltouny, second vice chair of the Green Party of New Jersey and alternative delegate to the party’s National Committee.

    The paper is a collaboration between two veteran Green Party organizers. George Friday is former co-chair of the Green Party of North Carolina, a board member of Move to Amend, a life-long organizer, and long time anti-racism trainer. Hugh Esco is current co-chair of the Georgia Green Party and a two-time candidate for Lieutenant Governor of Georgia.

    Mr. Esco initiated the project when anti-Muslim rhetoric was on display during the 2016 presidential election. The paper is built on extensive research on Islam and deals with the bigoted response to it by reactionary political forces in the U.S. and western Europe.

    The paper synthesizes research documented in nearly a hundred citations from ten books, including the Quran, 39 articles from nearly as many periodicals, eleven academic studies by government agencies, advocacy organizations, and scholars. It incorporates feedback on late drafts from a handful of Muslims, many of them Green Party voters, supporters, and members, who address Islamophobic attacks on a daily basis.

    “This nation has a long history of demogogic political rhetoric. It is a tired old tactic to appeal to voter fears and ignorance which unfortunately still seems effective at winning elections,” said Mr. Esco.

    “Those in power have repeatedly appealed to this nation’s racism to divide working people and to maintain control of the wealth our labor provides,” said George Friday. “We hope this research will help Green Party activists across the country interrupt the hateful narrative and the spectrum of violence it enables.”

    The 13-page briefing paper is available for download from the Green Party’s website along with a trifold brochure summarizing its findings. The trifold was introduced at a book signing held in Atlanta, Georgia, on March 31 featuring Arun Kundnani, author of a history entitled “The Muslims are Coming: Islamophobia, Extremism and the Domestic War on Terror,” a work cited four times in the briefing paper. A video of Dr. Kundnani’s talk is embedded at this website, operated by the Party’s Coordinated Campaign Committee, which hosts the briefing paper and summary brochure as well.

    The paper summarizes research on a $200 million industry of propaganda designed to demonize people based on their faith.

    “As the Quran puts it, we should enjoin what is right and forbid what is wrong, but all scriptures for all faiths would agree on that,” said Hugh Esco. “If we are to end war and live in peace with our Muslim neighbors, both domestically and globally, we as Greens must embrace our role in challenging the Islamophobia and other forms of racism used to justify our nations violent policies.”
    MORE INFORMATION

    Green Party of the United States http://www.gp.org
    202-319-7191
    @GreenPartyUS

    Green candidate database and campaign information
    News Center
    Ballot Access
    Green Papers
    Google+
    Twitter
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    Green Pages: The official publication of record of the Green Party of the United States
    ~ END ~

  • Why Won’t the Black Political Class Won’t Denounce Trump’s Militarism? Because They Can’t.

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  • Are you or a loved one having trouble staying afloat? You’re truly not alone.

    by:Chuck Collins

    Originally published at Counterpunch on March 23, 2017

    While the media reports low unemployment and a rising stock market, the reality is that almost 20 percent of the country lives in “Underwater Nation,” with zero or even negative net worth. And more still have almost no cash reverses to get them through hard times.

    This is a source of enormous stress for many low and middle-income families.

    Savings and wealth are vital life preservers for people faced with job loss, illness, divorce, or even car trouble. Yet an estimated 15 to 20 percent of families have no savings at all, or owe more than they own.

    They’re disproportionately rural, female, renters, and people without a college degree. But the underwater ranks also include a large number of people who appear to be in the stable middle class. Health challenges are a major cause of savings depletion for these people, both in medical bills and lost wages.

    Plenty more Americans could be vulnerable.

    A financial planallynner will advise you to put aside three months of living expenses in financial reserves, just in case. So if your living expenses are $2,000 a month, you should try to have $6,000 in “liquidity” — money you can easily get to in an emergency.

    But 44 percent of households don’t have enough funds to tide themselves over for three months, even if they lived at the poverty level, according to the Assets and Opportunity Scorecard.

    Even having a positive net worth doesn’t mean you can always tap these funds, especially if wealth takes the form of home equity or owning a car.

    A Bankrate survey found that 63 percent of U.S. households lack the cash or savings to meet a $1,000 emergency expense. They’d have to borrow from a friend or family, or put costs on a credit card.

    Seven percent of U.S. homeowners are underwater homeowners, with mortgage debt higher than the value of their homes. And more and more people have taken on credit card debt to pay the bills. Meanwhile, student debt is rising rapidly and is projected to become one of the biggest factors in negative wealth.

    Conservative scolds will blame individuals for “living beyond their means” and being financially irresponsible. And individual behavior is important. But the financial stresses facing millions of families are more likely the result of four decades of stagnant incomes.

    Half the workers in this country haven’t shared in the economic gains that have mostly gone to the rich. Their real wages have stayed flat while health care, housing, and other expenses continue to rise.

    So not everyone is on the edge at this time of dizzying inequality, after all. The 400 wealthiest billionaires in the U.S. have as much wealth together as the bottom 62 percent of the population.

    This is only possible because of the expanding ranks of drowning Americans.

    Some politicians will scapegoat immigrants or other vulnerable people for this suffering. When this happens, hold on tight to your purse or wallet. They’re trying to distract you from the rich and powerful elites who are rigging the rules to get more wealth and power.

    They want to deflect your attention away from the reality that your economic pain is the result of deliberate government rules that give more tax cuts to the super-rich and global corporations, keep wages down, push up tuition costs, and let corporations nickel and dime you for all you’re worth.

    Congress and the Trump administration are proposing to cut health care, pass more tax cuts for the rich, and give global corporations even more power over you. They promise benefits will “trickle down.”

    Unless we speak up, the only trickle will be the expansion of Underwater Nation.

    Distributed by OtherWords.

    Join the debate on Facebook

    More articles by:Chuck Collins

  • The Republican Sabotage of the Vote Recounts in Michigan and Wisconsin

    by Greg Palast

    Originally published at TruthOut.org on December 17, 2016

    Michigan officials declared in late November that Trump won the state’s count by 10,704 votes. But hold on — a record 75,355 ballots were not counted.

    The uncounted ballots came mostly from Detroit and Flint, majority-Black cities that vote Democratic.

    According to the machines that read their ballots, these voters waited in line, sometimes for hours, yet did not choose a president. Really?

    This week, I drove through a snowstorm to Lansing to hear the official explanation from Ruth Johnson, the Republican secretary of state. I was directed to official flack-catcher Fred Woodhams who told me, “You know, I think when you look at the unfavorability ratings that were reported for both major-party candidates, it’s probably not that surprising.”

    Sleuthing about in Detroit, I found another explanation: bubbles.

    Bubbles?

    Michigan votes on paper ballots. If you don’t fill the bubble completely, the machine records that you didn’t vote for president.

    2016.12.16.Palast.middle.imagePhoto of Michigan ballot with bubble. (Image courtesy of Palast Investigative Fund, 2016)

    Susan, a systems analyst who took part in the hand recount initiated by Jill Stein, told me, “I saw a lot of red ink. I saw a lot of checkmarks. We saw a lot of ballots that weren’t originally counted, because those don’t scan into the machine.” (I can only use her first name because she’s terrified of retribution from Trump followers in the white suburb where she lives.)

    Other ballots were not counted because the machines thought the voter chose two presidential candidates.

    How come more ballots were uncounted in Detroit and Flint than in the white ‘burbs and rural counties? Are the machines themselves racist?

    No, but they are old, and in some cases, busted. An astonishing 87 machines broke down in Detroit, responsible for counting tens of thousands of ballots. Many more were simply faulty and uncalibrated.

    I met with Carlos Garcia, University of Michigan multimedia specialist, who, on Election Day, joined a crowd waiting over two hours for the busted machine to be fixed.

    Some voters left; others filled out ballots that were chucked, uncounted, into the bottom of machine. When the machine was fixed, Carlos explained, “Any new scanned ballots were falling in on top of the old ones.” It would not be possible to recount those dumped ballots.

    This is not an unheard of phenomenon: I know two voters who lost their vote in another state (California) because they didn’t fill in the bubble — my parents! Meet mom and dad in my film, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy:

    How did Detroit end up with the crap machines?

    Detroit is bankrupt, so every expenditure must be approved by “emergency” overlords appointed by the Republican governor. The GOP operatives refused the city’s pre-election pleas to fix and replace the busted machines.

    “We had the rollout [of new machines] in our budget,” Detroit City Clerk Janice Winfrey said. “No money was appropriated by the state.”

    Same in Flint. GOP state officials cut the budget for water service there, resulting in the contamination of the city’s water supply with lead. The budget cuts also poisoned the presidential race.

    The Human Eye Count

    There is, however, an extraordinary machine that can read the ballots, whether the bubbles are filled or checked, whether in black ink or red, to determine the voters’ intent: the human eye.

    That’s why Dr. Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, paid millions of dollars for a human eyeball count of the uncounted votes. While labeled a “recount,” its real purpose is to count the 75,355 votes never counted in the first place.

    Count those ballots, mostly in Detroit and Flint, and Trump’s victory could vanish.

    Adding to the pile of uncounted ballots are the large numbers of invalidated straight-ticket votes in Detroit. In Michigan, you can choose to make one mark that casts your vote for every Democrat (or Republican) for every office. Voters know that they can vote the Democratic ballot but write in a protest name — popular were “Bernie Sanders” and “Mickey Mouse” — but their ballot, they knew, would count for Clinton.

    However, the Detroit machines simply invalidated the ballots with protest write-ins because the old Opti-Scans wrongly tallied these as “over-votes” (i.e., voting for two candidates). The human eye would catch this mistake.

    But Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette stymied Stein’s human eye count. The Republican pol issued an order saying that no one could look at the ballots cast in precincts where the number of votes and voters did not match — exactly the places where you’d want to look for the missing votes. He also ordered a ban on counting ballots from precincts where the seals on the machines had been broken — in other words, where there is evidence of tampering. Again, those are the machines that most need investigating. The result: The recount crews were denied access to more than half of all Detroit precincts (59 percent).

    I met with Stein, who told me she was stunned by this overt sabotage of the recount. “It’s shocking to think that the discounting of these votes may be making the critical difference in the outcome of the election,” she said.

    This story was repeated in Wisconsin, which uses the same Opti-Scan system as Michigan. There, the uncounted votes, sometimes called “spoiled” or “invalidated” ballots, were concentrated in Black-majority Milwaukee. Stein put up over $3 million of donated funds for the human eye review in Wisconsin, but GOP state officials authorized Milwaukee County to recount simply by running the ballots through the same blind machines. Not surprisingly, this instant replay produced the same questionable result.

    Adding Un-Votes to the Uncounted

    Stein was also disturbed by the number of voters who never got to cast ballots. “Whether it’s because of the chaos [because] some polling centers are closed, and then some are moved, and there’s all kinds of mix-ups,” she said. “So, a lot of people are filling out provisional ballots, or they were being tossed off the voter rolls by Interstate Crosscheck.”

    Interstate Crosscheck is a list that was created by Donald Trump supporter and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach to hunt down and imprison voters who illegally voted or registered in two states in one election.

    An eye-popping 499,092 Michiganders are on the Crosscheck suspect list. The list, which my team uncovered in an investigation for Rolling Stone, cost approximately 50,000 of the state’s voters their registrations. Disproportionately, the purged voters were Blacks, Latinos and that other solid Democratic demographic, Muslim Americans. (Dearborn, Michigan, has the highest concentration of Arab Americans in the US.)

    The Michigan Secretary of State’s spokesman Woodhams told me the purpose of the mass purge was, “to clean our voter lists and ensure that there’s no vulnerability for fraud. We’ve been very aggressive in closing vulnerabilities and loopholes to fraud.”

    While Woodhams did not know of a single conviction for double-voting in Michigan, the “aggression” in purging the lists was clear. I showed him part of the Michigan purge list that he thought was confidential. The “double voters” are found by simply matching first and last names. Michael Bernard Brown is supposed to be the same voter as Michael Anthony Brown. Michael Timothy Brown is supposed to be the same voter as Michael Johnnie Brown.

    Woodhams assured me the GOP used the Trump-Kobach list with care, more or less. He said, “I’m sure that there are some false positives. But we go through it thoroughly, and we’re not just canceling people.”

    As to the racial profiling inherent in the list? Did he agree with our experts that by tagging thousands of voters named Jose Garcia and Michael Brown there would be a bias in his purge list?

    The GOP spokesman replied, “I’ve known a lot of white Browns.”

    Jill Stein didn’t buy it. Responding to both Michigan’s and Trump’s claim that voter rolls are loaded with fraudulent double voters, Stein said, “It’s the opposite of what he is saying: not people who are voting fraudulently and illegally, but actually legitimate voters who have had their right to vote taken away from them by Kris Kobach and by Donald Trump.”

    Crosscheck likely cost tens of thousands their vote in Pennsylvania as well.

    “It is a Jim Crow system, and it all needs to be fixed,” Stein concluded. “It’s not rocket science. This is just plain, basic democracy.”

  • Guilty of Grand Theft Overtime

    Tyler Zimmer reports on a ruling that denies overtime protection to millions of workers.

    A TEXAS judge just denied more than 12 million workers a raise with the stroke of a pen.

    U.S. District Judge Amos Mazzant issued an injunction to block a new rule from the Department of Labor that would have enabled millions of workers currently ineligible for overtime protections–for example, getting paid time-and-a-half when you work more than 40 hours in a single week–to become eligible.

    Specifically, the Obama administration regulation would have reduced the so-called “white-collar exemption,” which allows employers to avoid paying overtime for salaried administrative or professional workers who make more than about $23,660 a year–the equivalent of around $12 an hour for full-time work, and even less for workers pressured to work more than 40 hours a week.

    The new rule would have basically doubled the threshold where companies can stop paying overtime–but that was too much for Judge Mazzant. Because of his ruling, millions of dollars in income that would have gone to workers will instead remain in the pockets of employers.

    When the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) was passed in 1938, overtime protections were intended to apply to all workers. Only managers and supervisors with the power to make schedules were supposed to be exempt.

    Since the 1930s, however, a smaller and smaller percentage of workers have been covered by overtime protections. The rule change would have reversed that trend by expanding the number of workers eligible for overtime.

    According to the Economic Policy Institute, millions of workers stood to benefit from the Obama administration’s rule change, including:

    • 6.4 million women, who represent half of all workers would directly benefit;
    • 4.2 million parents and 7.3 million children under age 18;
    • 1.5 million Black workers (who are 8.9 percent of the salaried workforce but 12 . percent of those who would directly benefit from the rules change), and 2 million Latinxs (11.8 percent of the salaried workforce and 16 percent of directly benefiting workers);
    • 4.5 million millennials, defined as workers aged 16 to 34; and
    • 3.2 million workers with a high school degree, but not more education.

    WHY DID Judge Mazzant issue the injunction and why is he so keen on denying raises to millions of workers? Ross Eisenbrey at the Economic Policy Institute has an excellent critical breakdown of the legal details. But this isn’t at root a legal issue–it’s a thoroughly political one that has to do with the balance of power between workers and employers.

    An important starting point for understanding Mazzant’s move is the election of Donald Trump. The injunction will be one of many challenges to existing protections for workers in the next four years. But there is more than contemporary politics at play.

    Where did the FLSA come from in the first place? It is part of a web of bureaucratic machinery enacted during the New Deal era in the 1930s to regulate industrial conflict between workers and capitalists. All these laws were forged in the midst of the greatest working-class revolt in U.S. history so far.

    In 1934, there were three general strikes–one in Minneapolis, one in Toledo and another in San Francisco. These were mass strikes involving hundreds of thousands of workers that shut down entire cities and sparked a huge wave of organizing activity all over the country.

    These strikes resulted in a number of advances, including the successful unionization of the “Big Three” in auto manufacturing–a feat, like the unionization of Walmart today, that many at the time thought impossible. By the early 1940s, millions of workers had joined newly organized unions, more than doubling the size of the labor movement in the span of half a decade.

    This working-class upsurge didn’t go unnoticed by the ruling class, of course, but there were debates about how the wealthy and the state should respond to it.

    Some sections of the capitalist class wanted to try to maintain a status quo in which unions were basically illegal. Others associated with the millionaire Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt were reluctantly pushed to the conclusion that a carrot-and-stick approach was needed to quell the revolt and preserve the existing order.

    Roosevelt’s approach carried the day. This is the background for the passage of various labor reforms, such as the overtime protections included in the FLSA, as well as Social Security, unemployment benefits, legal rights to collective bargaining and so on.

    The positive aspects of these reforms were not given out for free–they were only won after hard-fought, militant struggles of millions of ordinary workers against their employers, the state and, in some cases, against their union leadership.

    Fast forward to 2016. A billionaire who is staunchly anti-union is now set to control the executive branch of the federal government alongside a hoard of anti-union Republicans who will control Congress.

    Mazzant’s attack on overtime is likely to be a mere opening salvo in a battle involving more brutal and ambitious attacks on workers, such as a national right-to-work law, the overturning of the Friedrichs decision affirming public employees’ right to collective bargaining, more legal restrictions on the right to strike, and on and on.

    What right-wing Gov. Scott Walker did to labor in Wisconsin, Congressional Republicans and Trump may seek to do to workers all over the nation.

    HOW SHOULD workers respond? The history of the 1930s presents some answers: Militant action in their workplaces, organizing the unorganized, and building the kind of broad-based unity and organizational strength in the labor movement that neither capitalists nor politicians can afford to ignore.

    This was what won the meager labor protections we have in the first place. The strides that labor made in the public sector during the 1960s and ’70s were also won through militant, ambitious organizing efforts–many of them inspired and buoyed by social movements of the era, above all the Black freedom struggle.

    These lessons from history are at odds with the common sense of contemporary liberals, however. For them, the reforms of the 1930s and 1960s were won by electing reform-minded Democrats with the foresight and resolve to do what was right.

    In contemporary terms, this approach translates into a strategy that emphasizes looking ahead to the 2018 and 2020 elections with an eye to “take back” the White House and the Congress by campaigning for Democratic candidates.

    Far from being a realistic solution, however, this failed approach is a prime cause of our present malaise. For decades, most of the labor movement has done little more than manage its own decline. It has brokered concessionary deals with employers and partnered with Democratic politicians in the hopes that the worst outcomes could be avoided through patient negotiation and cautious conservatism.

    You can only effectively negotiate from a position of strength. So long as strikes remain at historic lows and union density continues to drop year after year, the power of workers to stop attacks, like the injunction against expanding overtime protection, will continue to decline as well. To the extent that the union movement allows itself to be divided, all unions will be vulnerable to being conquered by Trump and employers.

    A renewed, militant labor movement based on class solidarity and rank-and-file democracy is the only way to turn the tide and stop the coming barrage of attacks from Trump and his ilk.

    Trump is actually vulnerable on a number of fronts–the most obvious being that he has no mandate for his reactionary agenda. He lost the popular vote in the presidential election by a margin of more than 2.6 million votes and “won” the election by garnering the support of little more than 25 percent of the eligible electorate.

    Trump is the most widely disliked president-elect ever since statistics were kept. The labor movement and the left should exploit this weakness to the fullest extent possible in order to thwart his anti-worker agenda.

    That is a task best accomplished through independent political action, protest and, most importantly, a wave of new organizing that leverages the widespread anti-Trump mood in the country to build a bigger labor movement and a bigger left.