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<h1><font>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.</font> <font>Anthropogenic</font> <font>climate change has become so politically charged it's obvious both Obama and Romney are avoiding it as a cynical political calculation.</font> <font>According to the Spokesman Review ( <a href="http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2012/sep/10/six-make-idaho-presidential-ballot/">http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2012/sep/10/six-make-idaho-presidential-ballot/</a> ) 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.</font><br>
</h1><h1><font><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/18/jill-stein-arrest-green-party-presidential-debate">http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/18/jill-stein-arrest-green-party-presidential-debate</a></font><br>
</h1><h1>Green party candidate Jill Stein's arrest highlights presidential debate stitch-up</h1>
<p id="stand-first" class="stand-first-alone">With Republican and Democratic connivance, a private company excludes third parties from debates and eliminates real choice</p><p class="stand-first-alone">Amy Goodman<br>
</p><p class="stand-first-alone">Thursday 18 October 2012 13.44 ED</p><div id="article-body-blocks">
<p>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 <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/new-york" title="More from guardian.co.uk on New York">New York</a> police facility, along with her running-mate, Green party vice-presidental nominee Cheri Honkala. <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/16/hofstra-debate-jill-stein-arrested-green-party_n_1971960.html?utm_hp_ref=elections-2012">Their crime</a>: attempting to get to the debate so Stein could participate in it.</p>
<p>While <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/mittromney" title="More from guardian.co.uk on Mitt Romney">Mitt Romney</a> uttered the <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/17/romney-binders-full-of-women_n_1974092.html">now-famous line</a>
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 <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/14/mandate-america-green-new-deal">Green party's presidential ticket for 2012</a>.
I interviewed Stein the day after the debate, after their imprisonment
(which ended, not surprisingly, not long after the debate ended). She <a href="http://www.democracynow.org/2012/10/17/green_partys_jill_stein_cheri_honkala">told me</a>: </p><blockquote><p>"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.</p><p>"Ninety million voters are predicted to stay home and vote with their feet that neither <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/barack-obama" title="More from guardian.co.uk on Barack Obama">Barack Obama</a> nor Mitt Romney represent them. That's twice as many voters than expected for either of them."</p>
</blockquote><p>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. <a href="http://www.opendebates.org/aboutus/executivestaff.html">George Farah</a>
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 <a href="http://www.democracynow.org/2012/10/16/secret_debate_contract_reveals_obama_and">gained control</a>over the debates from the nonpartisan League of Women Voters: </p><blockquote><p>"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."</p></blockquote><p>The League of Women Voters <a href="http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2012/10/5/expand_the_debate_this_is_what_democracy_sounds_like">allowed third-party candidate John B Anderson</a>
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: </p><blockquote><p>"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."</p></blockquote><p>Farah said that early contract was "tame" compared with the binding contract <a href="http://thepage.time.com/2012/10/14/moderator-role-under-scrutiny-before-the-debate/">leaked to Time magazine this week</a>,
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".</p><p>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 <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/democrats" title="More from guardian.co.uk on Democrats">Democrats</a> and <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/republicans" title="More from guardian.co.uk on Republicans">Republicans</a> control the debates, and limit the public's access to alternative views.</p>
<p>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 <a href="http://www.democracynow.org/2012/10/17/exclusive_expanding_the_debate_with_third">participate in the debate</a>,
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).</p><p>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:</p><blockquote><p>"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."</p></blockquote><p>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.</p><p>Now that the candidates have been unshackled, it's time to unshackle the debates.</p><p>• Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column</p><p>© 2012 Amy Goodman; distributed by King Features Syndicate</p>
<p>------------------------------------------</p><p>Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett<br></p>
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