[blind-democracy] Re: How Democrats and Republicans Collude to Block the Vote -- And How We Can Un-Block It

  • From: Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Sat, 19 Dec 2015 11:01:12 -0500

His articles also appear regularly in Truthout.

Miriam

-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Saturday, December 19, 2015 10:28 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: How Democrats and Republicans Collude to
Block the Vote -- And How We Can Un-Block It

This morning I listened to Henry Giroux, on Alternative Radio. If you don't
get this program over public radio, you can google it.
Henry Giroux is a straight talking Canadian professor who makes sense of the
fog being spewed by our mass corporate media.

Carl Jarvis
On 12/18/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

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5
How Democrats and Republicans Collude to Block the Vote -- And How We
Can Un-Block It Submitted by Bruce A. Dixon on Thu, 12/17/2015 - 12:39
by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon We hear lots of outrage about
how Republicans block the vote. But blocking the vote by keeping third
parties off the ballot with unjust laws in more than a dozen states is
a project Democrats share with Republicans. Both capitalist parties
know you can't vote against gentrification or mass incarceration or
for a peace and justice candidate if no such candidates or parties are
allowed on the ballot.
How Democrats and Republicans Collude to Block the Vote, And How We
Can Un-Block It by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon Black Democrats
chose not to fight to consolidate voting rights victories of the
sixties.
The US Constitution does not guarantee a right to vote, let alone the
right to have votes counted equally or at all. For a whole generation
after the passage of the 1964 and 1967 Voting Rights Act, black
Democrats enjoyed an historic window of opportunity. Till the early
1990s they had the moral and political upper hand on voting rights, a
favorable place from which they might have consolidated and nailed
down the right to vote with a Constitutional amendment A right-to-vote
Constitutional amendment would erase felony disenfranchisement, open
the way to weekend and holiday voting, and the establishment of
national standards for how districts are drawn, voters are registered
and votes are counted. It would override the malicious voter ID laws
Republican authorities in many states have instituted to keep Democrat
leaning voters away from the polls.
But to our lazy corner-cutting, self-seeking black political class,
hitting the ground to fire up a national movement to guarantee the
right to vote looked like too damn much work. The black political
class instead concentrated on getting elected and re-elected within
the rules that existed, building their own careers, and boasting and
roasting, coasting on and toasting to the triumphs of the 1960s.
Gradually, the terrain shifted beneath their feet.
A quarter century after passage of the Voting Rights Act, Republicans
began seizing the initiative to launch a block-the-vote offensive,
beginning with refusal to implement the Clinton era Motor Voter laws.
Twenty-five years down that road, the Republican block-the-vote
campaign has enacted unjust laws requiring millions of perfectly
qualified US citizens to produce expensive and hard to get
documentation. Republicans have criminalized voter registration and
absentee ballot drives by legislating minor clerical errors into
felonies. Felony disenfranchisement laws remain on the books in
several states with large black populations like Florida where up to a
quarter of potential African American voters are blocked from the
polls. Widespread instances of voter caging, selective mass challenges
and other block-the-vote schemes carried out by private parties and
local authorities to bar potential Democratic voters from the polls
have become regular features of every election cycle. Federal courts
all the way up to the Supremes have upheld block-the-vote laws and
kneecapped the Voting Rights Acts of the sixties.
Without a Constitutional right to vote, any act of Congress or a state
legislature, any whim of a mayor or county clerk, any malicious
decision of a state or local election authority can and might, if
you're black, brown, poor or belong to some identifiable group that's
not likely to vote Republican, block your right to vote. While it's
absolutely important to combat and condemn what has become an entire
evil galaxy of Republican block-the-vote measures, it is equally
important to note that none of these would have been possible if the
black political class, Democrats all, had taken advantage of its
historic opportunity to to mobilize and fight to write the right to vote
into the US Constitution.
In the big picture, the historic failure of our black misleaderrship
class of politicians, preachers and business types, almost all
Democrats, to nail down voting rights for the African American polity
should be no surprise.
While Republicans and Democrats have very different voting
constituencies, both capitalist parties get their money - and each
will spend somewhere between 1 and 2 billion in the current
presidential cycle, from the same narrow class of one per-centers.
Both parties are abjectly dependent on Big Oil, Big Ag, Big Chemical,
Big Insurance, Big Real Estate, military contractors and of course the
privatizers, hedge funders and banksters who crashed the economy in 2007.
So where are black America's issues in this or any election?
The answer is nowhere. Given their like-minded funders, both parties
favor permanent wars abroad, drones, boots on the ground, regime
changes, no-fly zones. Either party will keep spending half the US
government's expenditures on the military, with not much left for the
things that matter to the rest of us. Both parties are for runamok
privatizations of roads and public assets, and especially of public
education.
Republicans tell you man-made climate change is a myth or a hoax and
Democrats assure you it's quite real. but neither will negotiate a
climate change agreement or step up to lead the nation and the world
in retooling the global economy to avoid or mitigate climate disaster
that threatens the lives of billions. Both parties want to build more
nukes and frack everywhere including in deep offshore waters.
Republicans called Keystone XL a "job creator" and a Democratic
president reluctantly canceled it, but allowed the oil industry to
build the equivalent of ten other Keystones under the radar since
2010.
Republicans want to ban immigration, and while Democrats say they
favor a road to citizenship the Democrat in the White House has
deported two million. Both parties favor tax breaks and giveaways to
scofflaw corporations, and tout tourism, stadiums and gentrification
as the only economic development engines for urban America. And while
both parties bailed out the bankster and hedge fund guys who crashed
the economy, neither party wants to bail out student debtors, or
forgive homeowner and consumer debt.
Both parties brought us mass incarceration and the planet's foremost
prison state, and neither seems eager to seriously roll it back. And
with both capitalist parties silent on black unemployment (alarmingly
low Department of Labor black workforce participation rates of 60% are
almost certainly too
high) on black child poverty (3 in every eight black children) and on
the widening wealth gap between blacks and whites, your vote makes no
difference on any of this.
Republicans Block the Vote by Blocking Voters. Democrats Cooperate
With Republicans to Block Third Parties.
Both Democrats and Republicans know voters cannot cast their ballots
for peace and justice candidates or parties if no such people or
parties are allowed on the ballot.
Democrats and Republicans know you can't vote to forgive predatory
student, homeowner, medical and consumer debt, though they had no
trouble forking trillions over to the speculators, who crashed the
economy. So they can't let forgive-the-debt and jail-the-bankers
parties or candidates on the ballot either.
Democrats and Republicans won't let you vote on corporate tax breaks
or fracking or clean air and water. They won't let you vote on raising
social security or replacing Obamacare's mandates and private insurers
with a national health service. Republicans and Democrats won't let
you vote on fully funding public education or on creating millions of
green jobs to retrofit existing housing for energy efficiency and
begin building out the post-fossil fuel economy. So they dare not
allow candidates or parties with these views on the ballot.
Democrats and Republicans know you can't vote against gentrification
if no anti-gentrification candidates or parties in the election. You
can't vote to address persistent black poverty and unemployment either
if all the parties on the ballot are ignoring it.
How do they manage this? Since there's no Constitutional right to
vote, every state gets to make up its own ballot access rules for
parties. At least 9 states require third parties to come up with ten,
twenty, thirty thousand and more signatures of registered voters in
order to appear on the ballot. North Carolina requires 89,000 signatures
and Georgia 50,000.
Alabama and Tennessee require about 30,000. Pennsylvania, Illinois,
Oklahoma and a couple others require 24 and 25 thousand, Indiana
22,600 and there are more.
This is how Republican and Democrat politicians block the vote,
protecting themselves against competition from parties and candidates
not funded by billionaires and corporations.
So Ballot Access For Third Parties Is Broken. Oh Well. Why Bother
Fixing It?
So the two capitalist parties have locked down the electoral system
for their masters. This ain't new news. What do you want, a
revolution? I know I do. If that's what we ultimately desire, why
should we even bother with the electoral stuff at all?
The simple answer is that people ain't ready for no revolution, or not
nearly enough of them. The next steps in that direction involve an
enormous amount of small d democratic persuasion and organization.
Harriet Tubman said she could have freed a lot more slaves if they had
only understood they were indeed slaves. That hasn't changed. You
cannot organize hopeless people, people resigned to their fate. You
can only organize people who believe they deserve a better deal than
they're getting now.
The magic of elections is that it's a time when people are listening
for and more willing than most other times to take part in
conversations about how collective action on their part can make their
lives better. The left cannot provide that conversation if we're not
in the hunt, if we're not running our own campaigns with candidates in
our own parties with our own agendas.
Running as Democrats absolutely won't do it. My generation of
activists (I was born in 1950.) tried that - tried to hijack the
Democratic party from below in the 70s, 80s and 90s. It's a longer
story than I can tell here, but it didn't work.
Suppose for example you ran for county sheriff as a Democrat on a
platform against mass incarceration and won. County sheriffs are
responsible for county jails, so the first four simple things you'd
want to do would be to
(1) Fire and replace all the bad actors on your staff (2) Provide
decent nutrition for the prisoners under your care (3) Provide decent
medical care for the prisoners in your care (4) Provide meaningful
educational opportunities for the people in your care.
As newly elected sheriff, you quickly discover that you can't do these
things without the cooperation of other units of local and perhaps
state government. But never mind the Republicans, members of your own
party in elected office will denounce, obstruct and oppose you,
possibly on up to county executives, state legislators, attorney
general and the governor, if they're Democrats too. They'll use
donations from police unions, jail contractors and other
one-percenters to run candidates against you in Democratic primary
elections, and they'll skimp on supporting you in general elections.
But while you go out and get the votes only you can get, you'll be
expected to pile them in to support the same Democrats at the top of
the ticket who oppose you, It's their party, not yours, and party
unity under the top of the ticket is the standard, not mutual
accountability.
Without a party outside and to the left of Democrats, we can't wage
our own campaigns, we can't engage people in the real conversations
about what matters to them and what can be done. Without a party,
campaigns and candidates outside and to the left of Democrats we fail
to engage with people at the times they're actually listening.
So Who's Working to Un-Block the Vote? Jill Stein and the Green Party?
How is this happening?
The Green Party has lots of problems. It's moribund in some areas,
disconnected from involvement in visible movements in others. Every
other organization you can name has problems too, so the quest is not
for an already perfected vehicle, but one that's in the right slot and
can be adapted to the task.
Jill Stein was the Green party's 2012 candidate, along with running
mate Cheri Honkala, and will likely receive their nomination for 2016.
is the only peace candidate this year, the only one for cutting the
Pentagon budget, addressing black poetry, unemployment and mass
incarceration, the only one favoring abolition of student debt, and so
on. She's running with the express aims of helping build and
strengthen Green Party local organizations across the country, and
achieving ballot access in 50 states and DC, something no Green
candidate has ever done before. Even Ralph Nader, with more money and
steam than any Green candidate before or since, skipped Georgia, North
Carolina, Oklahoma and Indiana because the block to ballot access was
just too difficult.
This year, the Green Party and the Jill Stein campaign are already
organizing on the ground in North Carolina where 2.1 million African
Americans live, and in Georgia, which has the largest black population
of any of the 50 states, connecting with activists inside and outside
the party, enlisting the aid of old and new friends. These two states
have the steepest barriers to ballot access, requiring 89,000 and
50,000 petition signatures respectively. In the spirit of full
disclosure, I'm co-chair of the Georgia Green party and as part of the
Stein campaign's ballot access team, I have my own fingers in this. By
the end of February we expect to be well on the way to meeting the May
and July petition filing deadlines for these states, and to have
field-tested organizing methods and models viable in other states where
work will have already begun.
There are legal challenges to the unjust petition laws in court in
several states, but nobody is foolish enough to expect relief from the
courts in time for this election, if ever. There's ballot access
legislation drafted and introduced too in several states including
North Carolina but those same state legislatures are some of the same
people who created the problem.
On November 20 in Atlanta Cornel West, a Bernie Sanders supporter,
came out in support of what others at the meeting called Plan B for
Bernie supporters. When Sanders folds his campaign and endorses
Hillary Clinton (Cornel would say IF Bernie folds, not when) the good
professor says Jill Stein and the Green Party need to be already on
the ballot everywhere. But the Democratic convention is in August,
much too late to launch ballot access drives in the dozen or so states
where Democrats and Republicans have block-the-vote legislation in
place.
In the 1990s, they rocked the vote. I was there, and had an organizing
hand in registering 133,000 voters in the Chicago in 1992 alone. Go
ask somebody.
Now Repubs and Dems have blocked the vote. Our job now is to un-block
the vote, and it's underway. Expect to hear more about it here, at
www.jill2016.com, and on Facebook here.
To help out, email me at the address below, or you can fill out the
volunteer form or donate to unblock the vote at
http://www.jill2016.com/unblock_the_vote01 It's on.
Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report and co-chair
of the Ga Green party. He lives and works near Marietta GA and can be
reached via email at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.
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How Democrats and Republicans Collude to Block the Vote -- And How We
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. by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
. We hear lots of outrage about how Republicans block the vote. But
blocking the vote by keeping third parties off the ballot with unjust
laws in more than a dozen states is a project Democrats share with
Republicans.
Both capitalist parties know you can't vote against gentrification or
mass incarceration or for a peace and justice candidate if no such
candidates or parties are allowed on the ballot.
How Democrats and Republicans Collude to Block the Vote, And How We
Can Un-Block It by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon Black Democrats
chose not to fight to consolidate voting rights victories of the
sixties.
The US Constitution does not guarantee a right to vote, let alone the
right to have votes counted equally or at all. For a whole generation
after the passage of the 1964 and 1967 Voting Rights Act, black
Democrats enjoyed an historic window of opportunity. Till the early
1990s they had the moral and political upper hand on voting rights, a
favorable place from which they might have consolidated and nailed
down the right to vote with a Constitutional amendment A right-to-vote
Constitutional amendment would erase felony disenfranchisement, open
the way to weekend and holiday voting, and the establishment of
national standards for how districts are drawn, voters are registered
and votes are counted. It would override the malicious voter ID laws
Republican authorities in many states have instituted to keep Democrat
leaning voters away from the polls.
But to our lazy corner-cutting, self-seeking black political class,
hitting the ground to fire up a national movement to guarantee the
right to vote looked like too damn much work. The black political
class instead concentrated on getting elected and re-elected within
the rules that existed, building their own careers, and boasting and
roasting, coasting on and toasting to the triumphs of the 1960s.
Gradually, the terrain shifted beneath their feet.
A quarter century after passage of the Voting Rights Act, Republicans
began seizing the initiative to launch a block-the-vote offensive,
beginning with refusal to implement the Clinton era Motor Voter laws.
Twenty-five years down that road, the Republican block-the-vote
campaign has enacted unjust laws requiring millions of perfectly
qualified US citizens to produce expensive and hard to get
documentation. Republicans have criminalized voter registration and
absentee ballot drives by legislating minor clerical errors into
felonies. Felony disenfranchisement laws remain on the books in
several states with large black populations like Florida where up to a
quarter of potential African American voters are blocked from the
polls. Widespread instances of voter caging, selective mass challenges
and other block-the-vote schemes carried out by private parties and
local authorities to bar potential Democratic voters from the polls
have become regular features of every election cycle. Federal courts
all the way up to the Supremes have upheld block-the-vote laws and
kneecapped the Voting Rights Acts of the sixties.
Without a Constitutional right to vote, any act of Congress or a state
legislature, any whim of a mayor or county clerk, any malicious
decision of a state or local election authority can and might, if
you're black, brown, poor or belong to some identifiable group that's
not likely to vote Republican, block your right to vote. While it's
absolutely important to combat and condemn what has become an entire
evil galaxy of Republican block-the-vote measures, it is equally
important to note that none of these would have been possible if the
black political class, Democrats all, had taken advantage of its
historic opportunity to to mobilize and fight to write the right to vote
into the US Constitution.
In the big picture, the historic failure of our black misleaderrship
class of politicians, preachers and business types, almost all
Democrats, to nail down voting rights for the African American polity
should be no surprise.
While Republicans and Democrats have very different voting
constituencies, both capitalist parties get their money - and each
will spend somewhere between 1 and 2 billion in the current
presidential cycle, from the same narrow class of one per-centers.
Both parties are abjectly dependent on Big Oil, Big Ag, Big Chemical,
Big Insurance, Big Real Estate, military contractors and of course the
privatizers, hedge funders and banksters who crashed the economy in 2007.
So where are black America's issues in this or any election?
The answer is nowhere. Given their like-minded funders, both parties
favor permanent wars abroad, drones, boots on the ground, regime
changes, no-fly zones. Either party will keep spending half the US
government's expenditures on the military, with not much left for the
things that matter to the rest of us. Both parties are for runamok
privatizations of roads and public assets, and especially of public
education.
Republicans tell you man-made climate change is a myth or a hoax and
Democrats assure you it's quite real. but neither will negotiate a
climate change agreement or step up to lead the nation and the world
in retooling the global economy to avoid or mitigate climate disaster
that threatens the lives of billions. Both parties want to build more
nukes and frack everywhere including in deep offshore waters.
Republicans called Keystone XL a "job creator" and a Democratic
president reluctantly canceled it, but allowed the oil industry to
build the equivalent of ten other Keystones under the radar since
2010.
Republicans want to ban immigration, and while Democrats say they
favor a road to citizenship the Democrat in the White House has
deported two million. Both parties favor tax breaks and giveaways to
scofflaw corporations, and tout tourism, stadiums and gentrification
as the only economic development engines for urban America. And while
both parties bailed out the bankster and hedge fund guys who crashed
the economy, neither party wants to bail out student debtors, or
forgive homeowner and consumer debt.
Both parties brought us mass incarceration and the planet's foremost
prison state, and neither seems eager to seriously roll it back. And
with both capitalist parties silent on black unemployment (alarmingly
low Department of Labor black workforce participation rates of 60% are
almost certainly too
high) on black child poverty (3 in every eight black children) and on
the widening wealth gap between blacks and whites, your vote makes no
difference on any of this.
Republicans Block the Vote by Blocking Voters. Democrats Cooperate
With Republicans to Block Third Parties.
Both Democrats and Republicans know voters cannot cast their ballots
for peace and justice candidates or parties if no such people or
parties are allowed on the ballot.
Democrats and Republicans know you can't vote to forgive predatory
student, homeowner, medical and consumer debt, though they had no
trouble forking trillions over to the speculators, who crashed the
economy. So they can't let forgive-the-debt and jail-the-bankers
parties or candidates on the ballot either.
Democrats and Republicans won't let you vote on corporate tax breaks
or fracking or clean air and water. They won't let you vote on raising
social security or replacing Obamacare's mandates and private insurers
with a national health service. Republicans and Democrats won't let
you vote on fully funding public education or on creating millions of
green jobs to retrofit existing housing for energy efficiency and
begin building out the post-fossil fuel economy. So they dare not
allow candidates or parties with these views on the ballot.
Democrats and Republicans know you can't vote against gentrification
if no anti-gentrification candidates or parties in the election. You
can't vote to address persistent black poverty and unemployment either
if all the parties on the ballot are ignoring it.
How do they manage this? Since there's no Constitutional right to
vote, every state gets to make up its own ballot access rules for
parties. At least 9 states require third parties to come up with ten,
twenty, thirty thousand and more signatures of registered voters in
order to appear on the ballot. North Carolina requires 89,000 signatures
and Georgia 50,000.
Alabama and Tennessee require about 30,000. Pennsylvania, Illinois,
Oklahoma and a couple others require 24 and 25 thousand, Indiana
22,600 and there are more.
This is how Republican and Democrat politicians block the vote,
protecting themselves against competition from parties and candidates
not funded by billionaires and corporations.
So Ballot Access For Third Parties Is Broken. Oh Well. Why Bother
Fixing It?
So the two capitalist parties have locked down the electoral system
for their masters. This ain't new news. What do you want, a
revolution? I know I do. If that's what we ultimately desire, why
should we even bother with the electoral stuff at all?
The simple answer is that people ain't ready for no revolution, or not
nearly enough of them. The next steps in that direction involve an
enormous amount of small d democratic persuasion and organization.
Harriet Tubman said she could have freed a lot more slaves if they had
only understood they were indeed slaves. That hasn't changed. You
cannot organize hopeless people, people resigned to their fate. You
can only organize people who believe they deserve a better deal than
they're getting now.
The magic of elections is that it's a time when people are listening
for and more willing than most other times to take part in
conversations about how collective action on their part can make their
lives better. The left cannot provide that conversation if we're not
in the hunt, if we're not running our own campaigns with candidates in
our own parties with our own agendas.
Running as Democrats absolutely won't do it. My generation of
activists (I was born in 1950.) tried that - tried to hijack the
Democratic party from below in the 70s, 80s and 90s. It's a longer
story than I can tell here, but it didn't work.
Suppose for example you ran for county sheriff as a Democrat on a
platform against mass incarceration and won. County sheriffs are
responsible for county jails, so the first four simple things you'd
want to do would be to
(1) Fire and replace all the bad actors on your staff (2) Provide
decent nutrition for the prisoners under your care (3) Provide decent
medical care for the prisoners in your care (4) Provide meaningful
educational opportunities for the people in your care.
As newly elected sheriff, you quickly discover that you can't do these
things without the cooperation of other units of local and perhaps
state government. But never mind the Republicans, members of your own
party in elected office will denounce, obstruct and oppose you,
possibly on up to county executives, state legislators, attorney
general and the governor, if they're Democrats too. They'll use
donations from police unions, jail contractors and other
one-percenters to run candidates against you in Democratic primary
elections, and they'll skimp on supporting you in general elections.
But while you go out and get the votes only you can get, you'll be
expected to pile them in to support the same Democrats at the top of
the ticket who oppose you, It's their party, not yours, and party
unity under the top of the ticket is the standard, not mutual
accountability.
Without a party outside and to the left of Democrats, we can't wage
our own campaigns, we can't engage people in the real conversations
about what matters to them and what can be done. Without a party,
campaigns and candidates outside and to the left of Democrats we fail
to engage with people at the times they're actually listening.
So Who's Working to Un-Block the Vote? Jill Stein and the Green Party?
How is this happening?
The Green Party has lots of problems. It's moribund in some areas,
disconnected from involvement in visible movements in others. Every
other organization you can name has problems too, so the quest is not
for an already perfected vehicle, but one that's in the right slot and
can be adapted to the task.
Jill Stein was the Green party's 2012 candidate, along with running
mate Cheri Honkala, and will likely receive their nomination for 2016.
is the only peace candidate this year, the only one for cutting the
Pentagon budget, addressing black poetry, unemployment and mass
incarceration, the only one favoring abolition of student debt, and so
on. She's running with the express aims of helping build and
strengthen Green Party local organizations across the country, and
achieving ballot access in 50 states and DC, something no Green
candidate has ever done before. Even Ralph Nader, with more money and
steam than any Green candidate before or since, skipped Georgia, North
Carolina, Oklahoma and Indiana because the block to ballot access was
just too difficult.
This year, the Green Party and the Jill Stein campaign are already
organizing on the ground in North Carolina where 2.1 million African
Americans live, and in Georgia, which has the largest black population
of any of the 50 states, connecting with activists inside and outside
the party, enlisting the aid of old and new friends. These two states
have the steepest barriers to ballot access, requiring 89,000 and
50,000 petition signatures respectively. In the spirit of full
disclosure, I'm co-chair of the Georgia Green party and as part of the
Stein campaign's ballot access team, I have my own fingers in this. By
the end of February we expect to be well on the way to meeting the May
and July petition filing deadlines for these states, and to have
field-tested organizing methods and models viable in other states where
work will have already begun.
There are legal challenges to the unjust petition laws in court in
several states, but nobody is foolish enough to expect relief from the
courts in time for this election, if ever. There's ballot access
legislation drafted and introduced too in several states including
North Carolina but those same state legislatures are some of the same
people who created the problem.
On November 20 in Atlanta Cornel West, a Bernie Sanders supporter,
came out in support of what others at the meeting called Plan B for
Bernie supporters. When Sanders folds his campaign and endorses
Hillary Clinton (Cornel would say IF Bernie folds, not when) the good
professor says Jill Stein and the Green Party need to be already on
the ballot everywhere. But the Democratic convention is in August,
much too late to launch ballot access drives in the dozen or so states
where Democrats and Republicans have block-the-vote legislation in
place.
In the 1990s, they rocked the vote. I was there, and had an organizing
hand in registering 133,000 voters in the Chicago in 1992 alone. Go
ask somebody.
Now Repubs and Dems have blocked the vote. Our job now is to un-block
the vote, and it's underway. Expect to hear more about it here, at
www.jill2016.com, and on Facebook here.
To help out, email me at the address below, or you can fill out the
volunteer form or donate to unblock the vote at
http://www.jill2016.com/unblock_the_vote01 It's on.
Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report and co-chair
of the Ga Green party. He lives and works near Marietta GA and can be
reached via email at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.





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