[Vision2020] Amy Goodman on Green Party Presidential Candidates Arrests at Obama/Romney Hofstra Debate

[Ted Moffett]

 If the Green Party candidate was in the Hofstra debate, anthropogenic
climate change would have been addressed as an important issue.  Obama and
Romney are both morally bankrupt, to my mind, for not even mentioning
climate change in the debate, as they focused on massive CO2 emitting coal
energy as an important issue. Anthropogenic climate change has become so
politically charged it's obvious both Obama and Romney are avoiding it as a
cynical political calculation.  According to the Spokesman Review (
http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2012/sep/10/six-make-idaho-presidential-ballot/
) Jill Stein of the Green Party is on the 2012 Idaho ballot, though as an
independent.  Romney has Idaho's electors locked, thus Stein will get my
vote, as a symbolic act, though if I was in a swing state, I would have to
hold my nose and vote Obama.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/18/jill-stein-arrest-green-party-presidential-debate
Green party candidate Jill Stein's arrest highlights presidential debate
stitch-up

With Republican and Democratic connivance, a private company excludes third
parties from debates and eliminates real choice

Amy Goodman

Thursday 18 October 2012 13.44 ED

You may have noticed that the Green party presidential candidate, Dr Jill
Stein, was absent from the "town hall" presidential debate at Hofstra
University the other night. That's because she was shackled to a chair in a
nearby New York <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/new-york> police facility,
along with her running-mate, Green party vice-presidental nominee Cheri
Honkala. Their crime<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/16/hofstra-debate-jill-stein-arrested-green-party_n_1971960.html?utm_hp_ref=elections-2012>:
attempting to get to the debate so Stein could participate in it.

While Mitt Romney <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/mittromney> uttered
the now-famous
line<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/17/romney-binders-full-of-women_n_1974092.html>that
he was given "whole binders full of women" while seeking staff as
newly-elected governor of Massachusetts in 2002, the real binders were
handcuffs used to shackle these two women, who are mothers, activists and
the Green party's presidential ticket for
2012<http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/14/mandate-america-green-new-deal>.
I interviewed Stein the day after the debate, after their imprisonment
(which ended, not surprisingly, not long after the debate ended). She told
me<http://www.democracynow.org/2012/10/17/green_partys_jill_stein_cheri_honkala>:


"We are on the ballot for 85% of voters. Americans deserve to know what
their choices are. The police said they were only doing job. I said, 'This
is about everyone's jobs, whether we can afford healthcare, whether
students will be indentured.' There are critical issues left out of the
debate.

"Ninety million voters are predicted to stay home and vote with their feet
that neither Barack Obama
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/barack-obama>nor Mitt Romney
represent them. That's twice as many voters than expected
for either of them."

Even if Stein and Honkala hadn't been hauled off a public street and
handcuffed to those chairs for eight hours, Stein's exclusion from the
debate was certain. The debates are very closely controlled by the
Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD), which excludes third-party
candidates, among other things. George
Farah<http://www.opendebates.org/aboutus/executivestaff.html>is the
founder and executive director of Open Debates, and author of No
Debate: How the Republican and Democratic Parties Secretly Control the
Presidential Debates. Farah told me on the morning of the Hofstra debate
about how the CPD gained
control<http://www.democracynow.org/2012/10/16/secret_debate_contract_reveals_obama_and>over
the debates from the nonpartisan League of Women Voters:

"We have a private corporation that was created by the Republican and
Democratic parties called the Commission on Presidential Debates. It seized
control of the presidential debates precisely because the League was
independent, precisely because this women's organization had the guts to
stand up to the candidates that the major parties had nominated."

The League of Women Voters allowed third-party candidate John B
Anderson<http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2012/10/5/expand_the_debate_this_is_what_democracy_sounds_like>to
participate in a presidential debate in 1980, and in the decade that
followed, the two major parties, Republican and Democrat, sparred with the
League. In 1988, the parties tried to force the League into a contract
detailing how the debates would be run. Farah explained:

"It talked about who could be in the audience and how the format would be
structured, but the League found that kind of lack of transparency and that
kind of candidate control to be fundamentally outrageous and antithetical
to our democratic process. They released the contract and stated they
refuse to be an accessory to the hoodwinking of the American people and
refuse to implement it."

Farah said that early contract was "tame" compared with the binding
contract leaked to Time magazine this
week<http://thepage.time.com/2012/10/14/moderator-role-under-scrutiny-before-the-debate/>,
which governed the so-called town hall, moderated by CNN's Candy Crowley.
The 21-page "Memorandum of Understanding" includes a reference to their
standards for candidate eligibility to participate. The CPD requires that a
candidate have support from "at least 15% of the national electorate as
determined by five selected national public opinion polling organizations".

This is a classic Catch-22. In order to debate, you must have broad
support. In order to earn public support, candidates without huge campaign
war chests need the access that the televised debates offer. So the
Democrats <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/democrats> and
Republicans<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/republicans>control the
debates, and limit the public's access to alternative views.

If the Green party's nominee, Jill Stein, had been allowed to debate, what
might the public have heard? To find out, our "Democracy Now!" news hour
went ahead and invited major third-party candidates to participate in the
debate<http://www.democracynow.org/2012/10/17/exclusive_expanding_the_debate_with_third>,
virtually, the morning after. In addition to Stein, we had Rocky Anderson
of the Justice party and Virgil Goode of the Constitution party
(Libertarian party candidate Gary Johnson declined).

Instead of the Obama/Romney debate, where each attempted to trumpet his
superior commitment to fossil-fuel extraction, the public would have heard
Jill Stein say:

"We support a Green New Deal, which will put everyone back to work, at the
same time that it puts a halt to climate change and it makes wars for oil
obsolete."

Climate change is simply not discussed in these debates. That's just one
example. Imagine if we had a functional electoral system, with genuine,
vigorous, representative debates. Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala are on the
ballot in 38 states, and available as write-ins for the rest. Rocky
Anderson, with his new Justice party, is on in 15 states.

Now that the candidates have been unshackled, it's time to unshackle the
debates.

• Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column

© 2012 Amy Goodman; distributed by King Features Syndicate

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Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett
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