[Sosfbay-discuss] Call for mass resignation from the Dem Party (Dave Lindorff, CounterPunch)]

[Drew Johnson]

Here's several follow ons that David Lindorff wrote re: his call for
Democrats to quit the Dem party and go independent.

It seems to be finally dawning on at least some progressive Dems that
their values will not be represented by the Dems anytime soon and some are
finally taking action.  There's even talk in these articles about forming
a new third party -- which is exactly what I've been predicting for months
now. How about us Greens pull ourselves together, get functional and be
the
progressive party that so many of these disaffected Dems have been looking
for.  This is a huge opportunity for us!


Green is Connection!

Drew Johnson
GPCA


First check out this note:
http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/
"Tally of Democratic Party Quitters

As of Monday morning, Oct. 1, well over 1000 people have signed the
petition to quit the Democratic Party because of the Democratic Congress's
refusal to end funding for the Iraq War, and its refusal to start
impeachment hearings."



http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/?q=node/43
What are Progressives Waiting For?
Tue, 10/09/2007 - 17:36 — dlindorff

The Democrats in Congress last Spring voted $120 billion to continue
funding of the War in Iraq, saying that they had been sandbagged by the
administration, with its so-called “surge” strategy. They promised that
come September, though, they’d take a stand and end the war.

In August, the Democrats in Congress, who had been mouthing criticisms of
the administration’s five-year crime spree of illegal wiretapping and
internet monitoring by the National Security Agency, caved in under
administration pressure and passed a “temporary” bill, authorizing that
warrantless spying on Americans by the NSA. They promised, though, to “fix
it” after they returned from summer recess.

Now they’re back, and they are voting to approve another $190 billion to
keep the Iraq War going full bloody tilt right through next year and the
end of Bush’s catastrophic second term of office, guaranteeing that the
next president, Republican or Democrat, will have the war as his or her
major preoccupation. And they are now talking about giving this criminal
president—and the next one and the one after that—permanent authority to
spy on Americans without a warrant, using the full technological powers of
the NSA.

And still progressive Democrats are standing by the party, afraid to say NO.

A few weeks ago, I published a call for progressives to quit the
Democratic Party. I said at that time that after 50 years of being dissed,
ignored, and, in the end, taken for granted, by the Democratic Party, and
after half a century of trying to “work from within” to remake the party
in its old New Deal progressive style, it was time to realize that only a
serious threat to withdraw our support had a chance of working.

My idea is simple. Progressives should simply quit the party. Not silently
and individually, but in a mass movement—loudly, visibly and as a group. I
envision mass marches on city hall voter registrars’ offices, long lines
at Democratic Voter registration drives, and rallies at Democratic Party
headquarters, at which people would fill out new registration forms,
changing their registration from Democrat to independent.

As I wrote at the time, if several hundred thousand, or millions, of
progressives would quit the party enmasse, it would have an electrifying
effect on the ossified and corrupt Democratic Party leadership. They would
see clearly that they could no longer count on the automatic support of
progressive voters next election day. And if they didn’t get the message
on their own, local Democratic elected officials would. They depend on
those Democratic registration lists for their money mailings and their
get-out-the-vote campaigns. Without those lists, local Democrats, for whom
turnout of the faithful is everything, would be dead in the water, and
they’d be hounding national party officials for action to bring
progressives back.

If we left by the hundred of thousands, all saying our bottom line was
ending funding for the Iraq War, and initiating impeachment hearings
against Bush and Cheney, you can bet that those things would start to
happen.

The immediate response to my little campaign was 1000+ people going to my
"I Quit This Party" page and signing onto the petition. But then things
began to slow down.

Progressive websites like Common Dreams, Truthout, DailyKos, and the like,
have not taken up the campaign. Without broad support to spread this
message far and wide, it won’t happen.

And unless progressives don’t take an action like this, the Democrats in
Congress have made it clear they will do nothing of consequence for the
rest of Bush’s term of office, and most certainly will do nothing to end
the war or hold the administration to account, through impeachment
hearings, for its many high crimes and misdemeanors.

While most progressives who have heard this call to quit the party, have
expressed excitement about the idea, there are some who raise the same
tired and discredited objections: We need to stay in the party to keep our
voices heard, reform takes time, if we quit, we leave the party to
conservatives, if we quit, we hand victory to the Republicans in 2008. And
we need to vote in the primaries.

Let’s take those one by one.

First of all, we’ve all been trying in one way or another to move the
Democratic Party to the left for 50 years, during which time, with the one
exception of 1972, it has moved the other way, such that today, Richard
Nixon would be considered too liberal to be a viable Democratic candidate!
And we don’t have another 50 years to keep trying this approach.

As for quitting and leaving the party to conservatives, this is nonsense.
A conservatives-only Democratic party couldn’t win a single election in
America. To win elections, Democrats have to have progressive votes, and
if we make it clear that our votes are no longer automatic, the party will
have to move left and win us back, or die.

As for the 2008 election, the current Democratic Party strategy of playing
to the middle, of giving in to the president, of ducking their
responsibility to end the war and to hold the president to account, are
going to lose that election. Forcing the party to change course by
quitting and threatening to withhold our support is the only thing that
can prevent that disaster.

Finally, the primaries. If you live in a state like California, Virginia,
New Jersey, South Carolina or New Hampshire, it’s no problem. You’re
allowed to vote in a Democratic Party primary even if you are an
independent, so go ahead and quit the party and vote in the primary. If
you live in a state like Connecticut or my state of Pennsylvania, where
you have to be a Democrat to vote in a Democratic primary, and you really
want to vote for Dennis Kucinich or Mike Gravel, or against Hillary
Clinton, you still have options. Quit the party now, and when you do it,
check with your election officials to find out the last day for
registering with the Party in order to vote in the primary. Go ahead and
re-register, cast your vote, and then quit again! There are no rules
limiting the number of times you can change your party affiliation.

Now it may be that I’m wrong, and that the party leadership is so afraid
of progressive ideas, so afraid of taking a stand on an issue of
importance like stopping an illegal war, or starting an impeachment
proceeding, that if progressives resign from the Democratic Party, that it
will continue on its death march. If so, then by quitting publicly, we
will have created the historic conditions for establishment of a new
party—a genuine progressive party that could threaten the sclerotic
two-party fake democracy that we have lived with since at least the
mid-1970s.

Either way, it seems to me we have no alternative.

The Democratic Party has made its position clear: We progressives don’t
matter any more. Our job is to hold our noses and vote for the candidates
they offer us, and while we can complain all we want about their policies
and principles, or lack of them, in the end, we are supposed to ignore our
principles and vote for whoever is a Democrat.

Now we have to make our position clear: No! We are no longer Democrats.
You can’t have our addresses. You can’t send us solicitations for money.
You can’t count on our votes. We are leaving the party, and until you end
funding the criminal war in Iraq and bring all American troops home, and
until you start impeachment hearings against the most criminal president
and vice president this nation has ever known, we are gone.

Quit the Party!



Almost 1000 Progressive Democrats have Become Progressive democrats
Fri, 09/28/2007 - 18:32 — dlindorff

Since the call went out on this little website September 21, urging people
to quit the Democratic Party in protest over the Congressional
leadership's refusal to end funding for the Iraq War and to start
impeachment hearings, almost 1000 voting Democrats have signed on to
announce their intention to quit the party and to stay out unless and
until those things are done.



http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/?q=node/36
Why Quitting the Party Makes Sense

Thu, 09/27/2007 - 14:23 — dlindorff

Since I posted my call two days ago for registered Democrats to
re-register as independent voters (and to sign the petition here which
will be sent to Democratic Party leaders when it's big enough to make an
impression), I have received some complaints from progressive Democrats
that it risks handing the 2008 election to the Republicans.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The Democratic leadership
strategy of continuing to fund Bush's War in Iraq, and of keeping
impeachment "off the table"--that is, of avoiding a frontal challenge to
the two key disasters of this administration, the war and the attack on
democratic government and the Constitution--is what threatens to hand the
White House and maybe even both houses of Congress to Republicans next
year.

It is clear that the reason Democrats won control of House and Senate in
November 2006 is that they campaigned on a promise to protect civil
liberties and to end the war. That promise brought independents in record
numbers across to the Democratic side. But Democratic election strategists
don't get this. They still harbor the illusion that unaffiliated voters
are middle-of-the-road or conservative-leaning people who only care about
so-called wedge issues, not the big issues of our day. In fact, my travels
across this country have taught me that the unaffiliated voter is usually
someone who is cynical about politics, believes that there is little
difference between the two parties, and that he or she is being screwed,
by corporations, by government, and by his or her own political leaders.

The sad truth is that the current Democratic Party deserves that opinion.
They briefly managed to convince these skeptics that they were better than
that, but in office, they have reverted to form, and these voters will not
be back in '06.

So what we need to do is give the Democratic Party a jolt. We may never
convince them that they need to be more aggressive about the big issues if
they want to win over the unaffiliated voters, but we can convince them
that they can no longer simply count on the support of the progressive
wing of the party, which they have taken for granted since the end of the
New Deal.

The way to do this, quickly and unambiguously, is for progressives,
enmasse, to resign from the party, officially at the voter registrar's
office. If Democratic Party officials see a fall off in Democratic
registrations, they will be thrown into a panic--especially if those
de-registrations are accompanied by comments, as on this petition,
explaining their reasons for resigning.

As I explained earlier, a de-registration campaign will also be powerful
because the ones who will notice it first will be local Democratic
political officials, who usually face very low-turnout elections and count
on using Democratic Party registration information for their campaign and
get-out-the-vote mailings and door-to-door efforts. If those lists start
to shrink they will positively freak out, and when they learn that it is
because progressives are angry, they will send the word to their
congressional delegations that something has to be done to placate the
alienated progressives.

This is the way things ought to operate, but in the top-down Democratic
Party of today, the system has broken down. I was recently at a meeting of
the Bucks County (PA) Democratic Committee, invited by a member to give a
brief talk in support of a resolution calling on Congress to impeach the
president. I asked for a show of hands of who in the room supported
impeachment, and nearly every hand went up, but at the end of my
presentation, when a member proposed such a resolution, the committee
chair refused to consider it, using parliamentary rules to block it. He
went further to argue against the idea, saying "We don't want to embarrass
our Democratic Congressman, Patrick Murphy," who has said he opposes
impeachment.

This is, of course, an ass-backwards notion of how democracy should work.
It's the grass roots of the party that should be telling members of
Congress how to vote, not the grassroots asking their elected
representative what it is okay for them to support.

Another argument I've heard against de-registering is that then people
cannot vote in primaries for progressive candidates, leaving the field to
the worst neo-liberals like Hillary. Not true. In most states, you don't
need to be registered Democrat to vote in a Democratic primary, so there's
no problem. Ask your election officials. But even if you do live in a
state that requires a party registration to participate in a primary
ballot, you can de-register now, register just in time for the primary,
and then de-register right after you cast your vote for Dennis or
whomever.

Finally, there are those progressive Democrats, like many of the folks in
PDA, who have talked for decades about "taking over" control of the
Democratic Party from the corporatist whores and pro-imperialists who run
it, but this has never happened. The closest we came was in the late 1960s
and early 1970s, but even then it was only a partial success and in the
end the old-line leadership sabotaged the party's own popularly chosen
presidential candidate, George McGovern, in 1972. Reforming the party,
even if it could be done, is a major project that, if possible at all,
will take years of concerted effort at the grassroots. We don't have time
for that now. With the Bush administration hell-bent on war with Iran, and
on gutting democracy and trashing the constitution in favor of executive
rule, we need something faster.

Nothing would be faster than having hundreds of thousands of progressive
Democratic Party members simply quit the party. In doing that, they would
not, in many if not most states, forego their ability to vote in
primaries. Nor would they be prevented from voting for a suitable
Democratic candidate in November 2008. But they would be putting a real
fear in the hearts of Democratic leaders and elected officials that they
could no longer be counted on to vote Democratic. And that's the fear we
have to engender.

It should be clear by now that until Democratic Party leaders really have
to contemplate losing the progressive vote, they are going to play to the
right, avoid the big issues, and simply ignore progressives, while
undermining their favored candidates.

It's time for action. Vote for Dennis in the primary if you wish, but Quit
the Party!



---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: [usgp-media] Time for mass resignation from the Democratic Party
(Dave Lindorff, CounterPunch)
From:    "Scott McLarty" <scottmclarty at yahoo.com>
Date:    Tue, October 9, 2007 07:26
To:      usgp-media at gp-us.org
         natlcomaffairs at green.gpus.org
         dcsgp at yahoogroups.com
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/?q=node/29

Time for a Mass Resignation From the Democratic
Party

Quit the Party!

By DAVE LINDORFF
CounterPunch, September 27, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.com/lindorff09272007.html


Cynthia McKinney is doing it. It's time for you
to do it too.

Have you, like many Americans, found yourself
wondering why President Bush, over and over
again, would hand the Democrats in Congress the
weapon needed to bring him down?

Just look at the list:

Last year it was the nominations of John Roberts
and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. Then, in
the new Congress, it was a $120-billion
supplemental funding request for continuing the
hugely unpopular war in Iraq, followed by a bill
to legalize the very National Security Agency
spying program which he has been running
illegally for the past half decade, and that has
had people of all political stripes in an uproar.
To top that off, knowing that the Democrats were
gunning for his Attorney General, Alberto
Gonzales, Bush made sure to have the NSA spying
bill put Gonzales in charge of the operation! And
now this same president is coming to Congress to
ask for another nearly $200 billion for his Iraq
War!

At first glance, you have to wonder, why on earth
would he do this?

But then look what happens:

In every instance, with the exception of the
latest Iraq War funding bill (and we know what's
going to happen with that), the Democrats have
folded and given the president exactly what he
wanted, causing apoplexy among the Democratic and
independent voters who put them in charge of
Congress last November. After all, Democrats ran
for office last year saying they would stand up
to the president, defend the Constitution, and
end the war. Now each time Bush taunts them and
they fold, public support for the Democratic
Congress slumps further, to the point that today,
they are even less popular that Bush-quite an
accomplishment!

This is a truly impressive strategy-surely the
brainchild of Bush's Rasputin, the dearly
departed (to Texas) Karl Rove, who long ago
understood that the Democrats would not have the
courage and strength of conviction to stand
against even a president as profoundly despised
and distrusted as Bush.

So all Bush has to do to promote a Republican
victory in the 2008 elections is keep putting
forward outrageous bills, keep expanding the war,
perhaps to include Iran, and keep undermining the
Constitution. The Democrats will enable or sign
on to each horrible act in turn. And with each
such shameless action taken by the Democratic
Congress, they further enrage 2008 voters.

The Democrats, under Senate Majority Leader Harry
Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (surely two
of the sorriest excuses for leaders that Congress
has had in modern history), simply don't get it.
They don't realize they're being played for
suckers and losers. And they don't even realize
that they are alienating their base.

Which brings us to what needs to be done.

The Democrats in Congress, and at the head of the
party, need to receive a serious wake-up call.
Since they're clearly too dumb or too out of
touch to realize what's happening, we need to
send them a message they can't ignore-the
political equivalent of a car bomb.

I'm talking about mass resignations from the
Democratic Party, with every person who resigns
and becomes an independent or who changes their
registration to a third party sending a message
to the DNC explaining why he or she is quitting.

It starts small with a few people here and a few
people there, but as Arlo Guthrie once put it,
pretty soon we're talking about a movement, and
you can join it right here!

A couple of months back, I set up an email
address for people to register at, and listed it
on my website. To date, over 600 people have
mailed in saying they are quitting the Democratic
Party until Democrats in Congress begin
impeachment proceedings against Bush and Cheney,
and until they cut of all funding for the Iraq
War.

Now it's time to really kick this campaign into
high gear.

A few days ago, Cynthia McKinney, the gutsy and
outspoken former congresswoman from Georgia who
filed the first and so far only bill of
impeachment against George W. Bush in the waning
days of the last Congress, called me at home to
say she wants to sign on. That's a nice start to
the campaign!

You read it first here: Former Rep. McKinney
Quits the Democratic Party!

So how about you? Think about it: If you were to
accept the official line, George Bush won the
presidency in 2000 by capturing the state of
Florida by 537 votes. And this movement has
already got more than that number of people who
are no longer going to be Democrats! If we could
get 537 people in each state of the union to sign
on and drop their party affiliation in protest,
the Democratic leadership would have to start
contemplating how many close states they are
going to lose next year because of their abject
failure to act on principle and with courage in
Congress.

Better still, if we could get 100,000 or 500,000
people to drop their party affiliation
nationwide, that would send a really powerful
signal.

The beauty of this plan of action is that it is
easy to do. And Democratic officials, from the
DNC to local officeholders and county committees
watch those registration totals like hawks, so
they'll spot any de-registering trend really
quickly. In fact, if registrations start to drop,
you'll see local party officials start pressuring
their Congressional representatives to take
action and do something to stem the flow. For one
thing, if you deregister, you're off their
mailing lists. That means they can't hit you up
for money, and they can't target you for
get-out-the-vote drives. (Meanwhile, in many
states, you don't even forfeit your right to
participate in Democratic primaries by dropping
your party registration, so you can still vote
against Hillary and the rest of the warmongers in
the party.)

Oh, you say, we can't just quit the party and let
the Republicans win again!

Really? And just what have we gotten for our
support for the Democrats in 2006? The war is
still fully funded, and in fact has gotten worse,
with 30,000 more troops in the country, not
counting the 100,000 or so private mercenaries.
Spying on Americans here a home has been
legalized, with the help of the Democrats. (Nancy
Pelosi can use threats of party discipline to
prevent members from moving on impeachment, but
she won't crack the whip to make them protect the
Bill of Rights, or to defund the war?) And Bush
is still issuing those signing statements, so any
bills of consequence that Democrats have tried to
pass have either been killed by Republican
maneuvering, or vetoed.

And public support for the Democratic Congress is
in the teens.

Clearly the only way to save the Democrats from
themselves is to make it clear to them that they
have to change or die.

And the way to do that is to join the "I Quit the
Party" movement!

So click here
<http://dlindorff.mayfirst.org/?q=iquitthisparty>
and be a quitter. (Remember to get a voter
registration form and follow through by
cancelling your Democratic Party affiliation!)

After you quit, then go to Dem.org
<http://www.stepfour.com/xdem/>, where Steve
Fornier is trying to help organize people who
have left the Democratic Party, but still want to
be democrats. To learn more about Fornier's idea,
read his recent CounterPunch article
<http://www.counterpunch.com/fournier09212007.html>.

Note: You can also help build the movement by
sending this article and link to every
progressive person and progressive website you
can think of. It's time to take quitting the
party viral.


Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time: an
Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia
Abu-Jamal. His book of CounterPunch columns
titled "This Can't be Happening!" is published by
Common Courage Press. Lindorff's newest book is
"The Case for Impeachment",
co-authored by Barbara Olshansky.

He can be reached at: dlindorff at yahoo.com

http://lists.gp-us.org/mailman/listinfo/usgp-media


-- 
JamBoi
http://www.greencommons.org/blog/63
"Peaceable: the ability to interact peacefully.  A skill set similar to
social or emotional intelligence that is unfortunately rare in today's
American culture, but can be developed by all.  The Green Parties need to
lead the way in Peaceableness."


-- 
JamBoi
http://www.greencommons.org/blog/63
"Peaceable: the ability to interact peacefully.  A skill set similar to
social or emotional intelligence that is unfortunately rare in today's
American culture, but can be developed by all.  The Green Parties need to
lead the way in Peaceableness."