Politically homeless, former Green, voting for Kamala and Tim

click here for audio version - 2024election.mp3
interview with wholecommunity.news - September 2024
27 minutes

[00:00:00] I'm Mark Robinowitz.

[00:00:02] As we are all on the cusp of the 2024 presidential election in the United States of America, the biggest issues are not being discussed by any candidate. We are causing the sixth mass extinction of life here on Spaceship Earth. That is the big picture that should be the discussion for everybody, how we're going to be affected by it, what we can do to mitigate it, or even reverse it, but this isn't been close to a topic of conversation, not even among the minor party candidates.

[00:00:40] No politician dares admit the Earth is abundant yet finite. And this omission persists across political spectrums, despite the fact that limits to growth is a root cause for economic crises, immigration patterns, and many other topics in political discussions.

[00:01:04] Overpopulation times overconsumption equals overshoot. And overshoot is when a ecology can no longer sustain a population,

[00:01:20] whether of wildlife or to keep an advanced industrial economy going.

[00:01:25] Some people call this the polycrisis which is a combination of climate chaos, peak everything and limits to growth, resource depletion, habitat destruction, toxic pollution, emerging diseases (zoonoses: diseases that come from wildlife), economic stratification. And underlying all of this is the psychology of the mass denial of reality.

[00:01:53] But we're fond of addressing symptoms and not root -causes. So all the discussion about immigration usually ignores how we could stop destabilizing other countries if you don't want their citizens to relocate en masse. And many of the anti -immigration voices don't even want to admit that climate change and desertification are real. And these are not on the ballot for November 5.

[00:02:22] In contrast, Trump's puppeteers, the smarter ones, they know about ecological collapse and promote distractions to consolidate their power.

[00:02:33] Steve Bannon, one of Trump's close advisors, earlier in his life was director of the biosphere project in Arizona, an oil -money -funded experiment to see if domed cities could sustain life. But it found, unsurprisingly, that it was too small to generate enough of an atmosphere. We need the whole Earth. Billionaires won't survive in their hideaways if the rest of us asphyxiate from a destroyed atmosphere.

[00:03:06] J. D. Vance has a close ally named Patrick Deneen, who was recently profiled in Politico Magazine. He is a radical Catholic reactionary who has been concerned about peak oil and the impact of oil depletion on society, but his response isn't how we can improve cooperation and resilience, what has been called transition towns. His concern is more how the crises of using up finite resources could be manipulated to benefit autocracy, divide and conquer, looking for scapegoats.

The Seven Intellectual Forces Behind JD Vance's Worldview – POLITICO
www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/07/18/jd-vance-world-view-sources-00168984

www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrK9S5YxJfE
To Understand JD Vance, You Need to Meet the "TheoBros"
Mother Jones October 2, 2024

[00:03:53] Donald Trump is useful for some of the ultra -selfish, most notably Peter Thiel, who is a multi -billionaire behind Shady Vance and some of the other MAGA leaders. He runs a surveillance company called Palantir. He was one of the early boosters of Facebook, the reason I don't have a Facebook account. And he has bought himself a hideaway in New Zealand, which he hopes to flee to if things melt down here. None of these people have an interest in increasing community cooperation.

[00:04:33] And of course, the COVID pandemic accelerated these toxic politics of polarization and radicalization, Liz Cheney, the former Republican member of Congress, says this is not a policy election. I do not agree with former representative Cheney on virtually any policy, but I admire her courage in standing up to the Trump administration for being a co -chair of the January 6th committee to investigate the attempted decapitation of the capital and she was thrown out of the Republican Party for her integrity.

[00:05:16] Her ally Adam Kinzinger quit Congress instead of losing knowing that the Republicans would not vote for him. And these and others who are standing up to their own party are an interesting aspect to what is realigning of politics in America, but I fear the never Trumpers as courageous as they are, they don't quite see how modern conservatism helped pave the way for Trump.

"He is the most dangerous person ever. I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he's a total fascist. He is now the most dangerous person to this country. A fascist to the core."
- General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff during the second half of Donald's administration, he was in that position on January 6, 2021
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/11/bob-woodward-book-mark-milley-trump

[00:05:50] The Reagan administration four decades ago tolerated fundamentalist religion, including them in their party, and that was a key part of the preparation, as is the rise of extreme selfishness, which led to increased economic stratification. There's more overlap between the more rational conservatives, like Cheney and Kinzinger, and the more conservative Democrats, than there are between never Trump Republicans and the current leadership of the Republicans.

[00:06:27] There's not much overlap in terms of policy between the left populism of the Bernie Sanders faction of the Democrats and MAGA, but both express rhetorically support for overlooked constituencies, but the right -wing populists lack sincerity.

[00:06:47] Given my flavor of politics, a lot of liberal Democrats are surprised that I'm not a Democrat. But I tell them I quit the Democratic party in 1993. Clinton Gore dissuaded me, and early in their administration, they broke many of their environmental promises. The WTI toxic waste incinerator in East Liverpool, Ohio. Al Gore had promised before the election that they would not let it get turned on and it was turned on two months after they took over and it still burns today.

[00:07:25] I've been there, I've seen the smokestack at the level of the nearby elementary school. It turned out that Bill Clinton's college buddy, Jackson Stephens, was a primary investor, and Hillary Clinton had done legal work for the project. She's also tied to the incineration industry through a former board membership of LaFarge Cement, which switched from natural gas to burning hazardous waste while she was on the board.

[00:07:54] It was a Rosetta stone to see some of what is wrong with the Democratic Party.

[00:08:00] So I'm voting for the Democrats in November, but I don't expect them to extinguish the toxic incineration industry. There were many other capitulations -- the NAFTA treaty, and many other things.

[00:08:17] But that inspired me to join the Green Party. I voted for Ralph Nader in 1996, which was not a very serious campaign. And more notably, in 2000, which was a more serious campaign, Nader represents my views on health care and environmental policy and corporate power.

[00:08:42] I don't agree with everything completely and he would probably not agree with me on everything. I don't agree with myself on everything. But he has decades of integrity and service And in the parallel universe, where Ralph Nader could have become president, he would know his way around the federal government. And I have a deep respect for his decades of service to the American public.

[00:09:11] Unfortunately, Nader 2000 was peak Green Party. It had the most involvement and it never recovered from that, especially because Nader was blamed for the failure of Al Gore to become president in some ways correctly and in many other ways incorrectly.

[00:09:34] But the bottom line is the Greens were absolutely destroyed by that. The last Green Party presidential candidate I voted for was in 2008, the former representative, Cynthia McKinney. She had been the most courageous member of Congress during the Bush Cheney administration. But I was also disappointed that the national Green Party did virtually nothing to support her.

[00:10:02] I even visited the national Green office in D.C. a month before the election, on a trip to visit friends and family. But they acted as if they didn't know where the yard signs were, or stickers or anything, and I got the impression that no one else had ever visited their office to get anything for the campaign, and she came in last.

[00:10:28] Since then, the Greens have nominated three times Dr. Jill Stein, and I do not think that third time will be the charm. I heard her speak in Corvallis in 2012 and 2016. I was not impressed and I did not vote for her. I was appreciative to hear her in person but I wish I'd known in 2016 that the previous year she had flown to Moscow, russia to have dinner with Vladimir Putin. She also had dinner with General Michael Flynn, an unrestrained Christo-fascist in our country, and I think she needs to explain WTF. Why would she invite it to have dinner with these people?

[00:11:16] Recently, AOC in Congress challenged Stein saying she has done virtually nothing to increase local presence of the Green Party around the country. Not even to focus on local races, city council races, dog catcher, you know, various boards. Aiming just for the presidency is a pretty tough goal. She also is totally unqualified for the job. On paper, the Constitution just says you have to be 35 years old and born in the United States. But it helps if you have some organizational experience, some legislative experience. This is not a strict requirement,

[00:12:01] but it would be helpful to be taken seriously. She was even recently asked in a podcast interview how many members of Congress there are.

[00:12:11] Angela Rye (Breakfast Club, Sept. 12, 2024): How many voting members in the United States House of Representatives, Republican, Democrat, and Independent? How many total?

[00:12:18] Jill Stein (Green Party presidential candidate): How many total are there? What is it, 600 some?

[00:12:22] Angela Rye (Breakfast Club): No, it's 435.

[00:12:24] She didn't know. That's pretty basic. That's elementary school civics class, and she didn't know.

[00:12:31] Earlier this month, the Nevada Green Party actually used a Trump lawyer in a legal petition to the US Supreme Court to keep the Nevada Greens on their ballot because the Greens in Nevada failed to get their ballot petition done correctly when they asked for signatures to get on the ballot.

Trump lawyer helping the Greens
www.politico.com/news/2024/09/20/supreme-court-nevada-jill-stein-ballot-00180234

Trump's former lawyer asks SCOTUS to put Green Party's Stein on Nevada's ballot
Jill Stein was ordered off the ballot by the Nevada Supreme Court last week. Jay Alan Sekulow, a longtime conservative lawyer, is now representing the Nevada Green Party.
CHRIS GEIDNER SEP 13, 2024
www.lawdork.com/p/green-party-nevada-scotus

"for most of Sekulow's career, he was a First Amendment lawyer focused on religious liberty cases at the Pat Robertson-founded American Center for Law & Justice. (The ACLJ was formed as a sort of Christian, right-wing opposition group to the ACLU.) ....
"Now, ACLJ is representing the Nevada Green Party while ACLJ Action sat on the advisory board of the far-right Project 2025."

[00:12:55] The Greens are already being accused by the Democrats of covertly helping the Republicans and to actually hire a Republican Trump lawyer to help the Greens in their legal case doesn't look good.

[00:13:12] As almost no one has covered, but whole community news has, to some extent, the Green Party, both nationally and in Oregon, is splintered into factions, apparently based on whether they believe that COVID is real or not. It reminds me of the revolutionary groups in Monty Python's Life of Brian, the People's Front of Judea versus the Judean People's Front. Of course, a parliamentary system would be needed for the Green Party to have any traction at the national level.

[00:13:48] In Canada, the Green Party has actually had a couple of seats in their parliament, not enough to be all that noteworthy, but not zero. The German Greens have been more successful and even part of some governments.

[00:14:02] But with our winter take all, unless the Greens become exponentially more powerful and popular, they're not going to go anywhere even with so -called rank choice or instant runoff voting.

[00:14:16] There were novels Ecotopia and Ecotopia emerging by Ernest Callenbach, which had a Green Party equivalent in that story,

[00:14:28] which built a political base doing practical efforts, teaching people how to install solar electric panels on their homes. Unfortunately, the Greens haven't been much involved in anything practical.

[00:14:42] Just appearing every four years isn't very inspiring. Kamala Harris is presiding over what you could call the misogyny election.

[00:14:53] Donald, of course, is the greatest misogynist, probably in U .S. history. You also have RFK Junior, who has now formally endorsed him,

[00:15:03] who has his own issues with misogyny. We are long overdue for a female president, but I don't think it will be that earth -shaking. Many other countries have had women leaders,

[00:15:14] and that by itself is not transformative. Apart from symbolism, I'm old enough to remember Margaret Thatcher in Britain, and I was not a fan of her.

[00:15:25] I don't think Kamala Harris will be that bad, but it'll take more than change in gender at the top to totally transform violence in America.

[00:15:38] She clearly has been doing the understudy under Biden and no doubt will be ready to be the president of the United States.

the Biden - Cheney plan for using ethnic / religious warfare to break up Iraq to control the oil
www.oilempire.us/biden.html www.oilempire.us/new-map.html

[00:15:48] Perhaps the biggest disagreement that those of us who are liberal left whatever term you like is the administration's policy on Gaza. Rhetorically,

[00:16:01] she says she supports a ceasefire, but at the same time has been part of an administration that has run interference for the assault and continues to send weapons and diplomatic cover to Benjamin Netanyahu.

[00:16:19] If the election was only on Gaza, I would vote for the Greens. No question.

[00:16:29] And I do not like that this choice requires us to compromise. I wish it was different.

[00:16:35] Another disappointment that many on the liberal side have about Harris is that she has changed her view on fracking for oil and gas.

[00:16:49] In 2019, she was anti -fracking, and today she is pro -fracking, And some of the discussion is framing this as wanting to get at the votes in Pennsylvania where fracking for natural gas is a substantial industry.

[00:17:08] My view is that it's not so much about winning Pennsylvania's electoral votes, but that fracking postponed energy rationing.

[00:17:21] Any politician in her position would be in favor of fracking, not because they are blind to the pollution and climate impacts of fracking,

[00:17:33] but because conventional oil and gas is in sharp decline due to depletion. Fracking for natural gas is the largest energy source for the electric grid,

[00:17:48] fracking for oil, powers, food delivery trucks, and rush hour, and health care, and everything, aviation. So it's nice to imagine that solar panels are going to replace all of that.

[00:18:03] I've personally used solar panels since 1990, but the physics of it show that very concentrated energy is what makes economic growth physically possible,

[00:18:16] and that is the reason that she has flip - flopped.

[00:18:19] Of course, we could adopt a policy of recognizing that there are physical limits to growth, and we need to move away from endless growth on a finite planet. But you can't even get most of the environmental groups to acknowledge that even superficially.

[00:18:37] So it will be one of many disappointments that we will have with the Harris - Walz's administration.

[00:18:46] Another aspect of the election, which is now a fading, is the rise and fall of Robert Kennedy Junior, the MAGA Trojan horse. I think it is good that he endorsed Trump, because it makes it official, because he has always been part of MAGA as part of this campaign.

[00:19:09] He was initially encouraged to run for office by Steve Bannon and Roger Stone, a dirty trickster for the Republicans dating back to Nixon, who has Nixon's face literally tattooed on his body. You can't make this stuff up. Stone is on record saying that Donald should have picked him as the running mate.

[00:19:33] And while that didn't happen, he's on the transition team, should Donald win, with the promise of perhaps getting a cabinet position or director of the CDC or some similar place where he can help destroy our medical system.

[00:19:50] Junior's biggest donor to his campaign was Timothy Mellon of the Mellon Banking family, who is also the biggest donor to the Trump 47 campaign.

[00:20:03] He's also gone on tour with General Michael Flynn, who was part of January 6th, And Junior used his fundamentalism event to rail against immunizations.

[00:20:17] He is the best -funded, loudest anti -vaxxer on the planet. It is sad that he's gone from being an environmental attorney to an opponent of environmental regulation,

[00:20:32] and worse, endorsing a campaign that seeks to basically end environmental regulation in the United States under the guise of free market environmentalism.

September 29, 2024 "Rescue the Republic" Republican / MAGA rally in DC starring Junior and other MAGA leaders, Q-anon-sense promoters, anti-vaxxers, far right activists and others.
whowhatwhy.org/politics/us-politics/2022-defeat-the-mandates-rally-returns-now-rescue-the-republic/

Conspirituality has covered the psychology behind Junior's anti-vax and Presidential campaigns.
www.conspirituality.net

Rigorous Intuition has covered Junior's medical claims in detail.
www.rigorousintuition.com

Republicans disproportionately hurt by the pandemic due to disinformation
www.peakchoice.org/red-covid.html

[00:20:46] But free market environmentalism is an ideological position. It does not have a track record of effectiveness, a simple example is the way that lead in our air was reduced was not through credits or promises or other rhetorical tricks, but passing a federal law that said lead cannot be added to gasoline.

[00:21:10] People who are so left wing that they're now right wing, sometimes this is called horseshoe theory, where people, the further they get away from the middle, they become more similar to far right. And it suggests that our models of political spectrum are outdated and need revamping.

[00:21:35] There's not enough time to complete that between now and the election, but it's a long -term thing to consider. And of course, one of the underlying problems with RFK Junior is he is correct on one major topic, and that his dad, RFK the original, told him that the CIA really did kill his uncle, and he has kept that knowledge his whole life, he only came clean about the assassinations in 2013 when he was almost 60 years old and I would not wish that burden on anybody but to a small extent that burden has been on a whole society and to move beyond polarization and radicalization we'll have to take a deeply honest, non -partisan look at recent American history.

[00:22:34] A side note is in addition to Jill Stein, there is also the independent campaign of Cornel West, who is an interesting advocate for peace, especially in Israel and Palestine, but it's impossible to take his campaign seriously. He has zero experience coordinating anything administratively, no legislative experience. Those are essential requirements for being a effective president. So great rhetoric, but I'm not voting for him.

[00:23:07] And perhaps the most important reason not to vote for Stein or West is Project 2025 and the Supreme Court's presidential immunity ruling in July. Project 2025 has gotten a lot of attention from the Democrats, as it should, it would hurt a lot of people. It would wreck our healthcare system, destroy what protections we have for public lands and resource extraction and other environmental deregulation, getting rid of various firewalls that kept Trump from imposing his will unrestrained the last time. And the forces behind Project 2025 have learned from their discombobulation last time and they don't want to make the same mistake again. They want to be unrestrained on day one.

[00:24:01] It's notable that Trump and his minions are running scared away from project 2025 pretending they have nothing to do with it when its co -authors are the Trump administration veterans who still support them.

[00:24:19] Perhaps even worse is the Supreme Court's presidential immunity decision at the end of their last term where they said that the president can do anything he wants as long as it's called under official acts.

[00:24:36] The commentator Rachel Maddow, she called this a death squad ruling. In other words, the president could set up death squads and call it an official act and that would be exempt from judicial oversight. That is scary beyond words, and that is really what is up for consideration of the choice. One of General Flynn's deputies is a man named Ivan Raiklin, who calls himself the secretary of retribution. And he and Flynn and Trump and others want to arrest top politicians, including Liz Cheney and Adam Kinziger, journalists, government officials, CIA and FBI officials and veterans, without charge or trial because they have said they don't like Donald.

General Flynn's deputy and his threats to arrest Donald Trump's political opponents
www.rawstory.com/raw-investigates/ivan-raiklin/

www.youtube.com/watch?v=53GOVtHS5mA
'He intends to do it': Michael Cohen on Trump's threat to 'round up' opponents
MSNBC October 6, 2024

[00:25:37] There are many problems with US democracy versus the reality but this would be a brand new shift in our society Literally unprecedented and that is the scale of what we're dealing with with the election in November.

[00:25:57] Putting the Democrats into the White House again in November is one percent of what's needed for peace. Democracy is far more than elections, but if we have a government that rounds up the leaders of Congress and the media and federal agencies and incarcerates them without trial, then the illusion of democracy goes out the window.

[00:26:27] Harris or even Bernie Sanders would not be close to what would be needed, but it's a step in the right direction. There's a meme floating on the internet that voting is not like getting married. It's more like waiting for the bus. You wait for the bus that will take you closer to your destination as opposed to looking for perfection. This is not going to be a perfection election, not that any election is a perfection election, but the risk of what Trump 2.0 could be, I have no problem voting for the Democrats and then protesting the decisions I disagree with for the next four years.

[00:27:17] So thank you for your consideration.

 

Project 2025

Project 2025 suggests people with minority sexualities are engaged in child abuse, a form of pornography (not strictly based on naked photos). Later in the document it recommends the death penalty for such heresies. It doesn't directly mention Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel "The Handmaid's Tale," but the parallel is obvious.

 

p. 4-5

The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil
society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms
sexual orientation and gender identity ("SOGI"), diversity, equity, and inclusion— 5 —

("DEI"), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensi-
tive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used
to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule,
agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.
Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender
ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot
inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual
liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its
purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product
is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime.
Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should
be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed
as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that
facilitate its spread should be shuttered.

 

p. 554

Enforce the death penalty where appropriate and applicable. Capital
punishment is a sensitive matter, as it should be, but the current crime
wave makes deterrence vital at the federal, state, and local levels. However,
providing this punishment without ever enforcing it provides justice neither
for the victims' families nor for the defendant. The next conservative
Administration should therefore do everything possible to obtain finality for
the 44 prisoners currently on federal death row. It should also pursue the
death penalty for applicable crimes—particularly heinous crimes involving
violence and sexual abuse of children—until Congress says otherwise
through legislation

 

 

Key pages at PeakChoice.org