Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein has won the Illinois primary, which was held online and open to all residents of Illinois 13 and older. From the Green Party of Illinois:
Results are in from the Illinois Green Party’s first ever online primary. With a total of 153 ballots cast, Harvard-educated physician Jill Stein of Massachusetts has won the primary with 71% of the vote. Legendary sitcom actress Roseanne Barr, whose name was not on the official ballot but became an officially recognized candidate by the GPUS after the ILGP’s registration deadline, earned 18% of the vote as a write in. San Diego air quality inspector Kent Mesplay received 5% of the vote. Nearly 5% of the votes were cast as “Undecided” and three unrecognized write-in candidates received less than 1%.
Unlike the taxpayer-funded Republican and Democratic primaries, the Illinois Green Party cost very little and allowed any Illinois resident age 13 years or older to participate. Participants were allowed to join the party and cast their vote at the same time. Caucuses were held throughout the state to serve as a polling place for those without Internet access, and mail-in ballots were available by request.
Dr. Stein, a native of Highland Park, Ill., established a strong campaign presence in her home state. Following her campaign kick-off, Stein made several appearances in the Chicago area and at a mock election at Western Illinois University in Macomb. Her campaign also sent out several e-blasts to supporters during the course of the voting, including an e-mail endorsement from Rich Whitney, a two-time Illinois gubernatorial candidate who is well-respected within the party.
The Barr campaigned was helped by a media splash from her campaign kick-off, which happened at the beginning of the ILGP’s primary voting period. Though still in its early stages, her campaign has already brought in several members who are new to the Illinois Green Party.
“From the standpoint of party building, the primary was very successful,” said Election Administrator Patrick Kelly. “Thanks to the efforts of our candidates to reach voters, were able to grow our membership and by giving any Illinoisan who wanted to participate a chance.”
Playing off Stein’s success in the WIU mock election, the Illinois Green Party will convene it state membership meeting, March 2-4, at WIU in Macomb to select delegates to the Green Party’s Presidential Nominating Convention in Baltimore, Md. in July. If an apportionment plan is approved by the Green Party of the United States, Illinois would be awarded 31 delegates to the national convention who would be pledged accordingly: Stein would receive 22 delegates, Barr 5, Mesplay 2, and 2 would be unbound.
These results are unofficial pending approval of the Illinois Green Party Executive Committee.
Today Jill Stein’s campaign, aimed at securing the Green Party’s nomination for president, sent out a fundraising email with the pitch of “Double Your Green.” That is, if Stein raises ,000 in donations of 0 or less from 20 or more states, the federal government will then match donations of that amount dollar-for-dollar. Interestingly, the email contained a map of their progress toward that goal:
See below for a map showing how far along your state is toward qualifying for matching funds:
The sooner we qualify, the better. That’s when we start doubling our green for the Green Party, which means that Dr. Stein can invest twice as much on getting the Greens on the ballot, building our state and local parties, and putting our Green New Deal agenda in the public eye.
As of Monday, February 20th, two states have qualified (CA, MA), one state is close (NY) and four states are halfway there (IL, MD, VA, WI).
Our goal is to qualify in our first 10 states by March 15th.
States that have qualified: California, Massachusetts
Movements to the Mountaintop History as Collective Failure: Lessons from the Black populists Omar H. Ali February 19, 2012 GREENSBORO, N.C.–Famously, George Washington lost almost every major battle during the American Revolution, yet he won the war. His final victory at Yorktown is embraced as an example of individual perseverance in the face of overwhelming odds.
In our winner-take-all culture, we tend to glorify the winners, emphasizing the individual–from historical figures, such as Washington, to contemporary figures, such as Oprah Winfrey or Barack Obama. We learn about them as individuals who “make it”–on their own, through extraordinary acts, with vision, and a little bit of luck. The formula: They struggled, they failed, but pressed on until they won (glory, money, the war, the vote, the presidency).
But what if in history there is no such thing as “the individual” or “winning”?What if there is only the seamless process of collective creation–no victory (no defeat), only what people do together? Back stories–the ones you don’t usually hear–can teach us about collective creativity, about the fleeting nature of winning and about the production of history of many people doing mostly ordinary, but sometimes, extraordinary things together.
What most of us learn about “black history” entails the people and/or movements that succeeded in making political changes–notably, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement. But what about those who didn’t make it to the mountaintop? What about the dreams that remain unfulfilled and the movements that failed?
Black populism, the movement of black farmers, sharecroppers, and agrarian workers from 1886 to 1900, was such a movement. It sought, but was not able to make, the economic and political reforms that were so desperately needed by a generation of Southern African-Americans coming out of slavery. Black populism was also the largest independent black political movement in the region before the modern civil rights movement. Read more …
Omar H. Ali is associate professor of African-American history at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and author of “In the Lion’s Mouth: Black Populism in the New South, 1886-1900″ (University Press of Mississippi, 2010).
(Madison, WI) – The Wisconsin Green Party is conducting a Presidential Primary by mail, with ballots sent to all dues paying members of the Party this week. Mailed ballots must be returned by March 2nd, the day before the WIGP State Nominating Convention and Spring Membership Meeting.
The Primary ballot includes four candidates. Roseanne Barr (CA) [...] Green Party Watch
The Huffington Post published an article today about the “the more than 300 lesser known Americans who have registered with the Federal Election Commission to run for the highest office in the land.” Those mentioned include Green Party candidate Mike Ballantine, and Independent candidates “Naked Cowboy” Robert Burck and “Average Joe” Schriner.
The article also claims that Libertarian National Committee member Wayne Allyn Root is running for president:
The smart money may be against a third party candidate, but sports handicapper Wayne Allyn Root, hopes to be the Libertarian Party presidential candidate. The Las Vegas resident served as the party’s vice presidential nominee in 2008 and points to England, where a third-party candidate was able to make an impact in the last election after turning in a great debate performance.
Root is also the executive producer for the Travel Channel’s “Ghost Adventures.” He believes a one-year tax holiday would have been more successful at saving the economy than the stimulus package passed by Congress was. Root would like to introduce a flat tax.
His vocation as a sports handicapper on radio and TV stations isn’t much different from the profession of a stock analyst, he said, noting that critics point to his occupation to marginalize him.
But, Root believes a sports handicapper is well suited to understand the country’s character.
“America is the biggest gambling nation in the world, especially when it comes to gambling on small-business creation,” he said. “It’s the risk-taking entrepreneurs that made America great.”
Despite the report, Root has not filed with the FEC as a presidential candidate and is not currently seeking the Libertarian Party (LP) nomination. Nevertheless, he is often mentioned as a potential vice presidential nominee.
Candidates actually seeking the LP nomination include former air traffic controller RJ Harris, activist R. Lee Wrights, and former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson.
STATE: Partisan trenches (THE PRESS-ENTERPRISE – Riverside CA) New voter registration totals from the secretary of state once again show that the large political parties hold a shrinking share of the electorate, while the number of independent voters continues to grow. Democrats now compose 43.6 percent of the state’s more than 17 million registered voters, while Republicans make up 30.4 percent of voters. But 21.2 percent of registered voters — more than one in five — now identify with no political party.
Rise of registered Republicans on the Treasure Coast (WPEC – CBS 12 – St. Lucie FL) Many Independent voters are now registering Republican. Voters tell us it’s happening so they can weigh in on such an important presidential primary.
Poll results show Rehberg-Tester Senate race in virtual tie (By ROB CHANEY of the Missoulian) Republicans made up 28 percent of the Montana poll respondents, while 24 percent declared themselves Democrats. A surprising 46 percent said they were “independent or something else,” which was the highest total among the mountain states and far above the national average. Utah was the next closest independent state (35 percent), while only 13 percent of Wyoming residents called themselves that.
Andrew Gumbel, the ghost writer for Amanda Knox’s ex-boyfriend’s forthcoming Authentic Autobiography, has had his recent attacks on the Oscar Internet voting plan featured in The Guardian and reprinted in the LA Times as an “original” Op Ed.
He says The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was duped into accepting an Internet voting system for the vote on the Oscars in 2013. In the ghost writer’s opinion, a trustworthy Internet voting system is impossible to achieve with current technology. As “proof” he cites a list of anti-Internet voting extremists, including Ron Rivest and Alex Halderman (who are well known for having bullied West Virginia Secretary of State Natalie Tennant in a public forum on Internet voting.)
Leaning on Rivest, Halderman, David Dill, and a couple of others, Gumbel writes, “Computer security experts have warned [of] … cyber attacks that could falsify the outcome but remain undetected.” Well, that is one scary story! Imagine – Anonymous hacks into Oscar’s computer and votes for Bollywood’s Rakhi Sawant in every category, and nobody knows it was him! That would truly be a disaster!
But has anything like that ever really happened?
The answer is a big NO! Internet voting has been conducted in Norway, Switzerland, India, Canada, and here in the US in several places, including West Virginia. In every case, technical and political experts, including officials and the public, were satisfied that there were no undetected Leprechauns who snuck in and changed everyone’s vote.
As if that isn’t gunk enough, Gumbel then reveals that he told “the Academy’s chief operating officer, Ric Robertson, … of the near-total unanimity of computer experts [that Internet voting was insecure].” He says Mr. Robertson was shocked at the news.
Only one little problem with Gumbel’s report. In every successful Internet voting event, there were dozens of experts who worked on the project, and who knew it could be done. So, no “unanimity” there.
Come on Mr. Gumbel; stop throwing your gunk at Oscar!
Below are the video and transcript of an interview with Rocky Anderson, former mayor of Salt Lake City and 2012 presidential nominee of the recently formed Justice Party, from the Real News Network.
Bio
Rocky Anderson is the presidential candidate and founder of the newly-formed Justice Party. Anderson served as Mayor of Salt Lake City, Utah for two terms, and he rose to nationwide prominence as a champion of several national and international causes, including climate protection, immigration reform, end to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, restorative criminal justice, GLBT rights, and an end to the “war on drugs.”
Transcript
PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I’m Paul Jay in Washington.
Well, if you watch television these days, you’d think there will only be two candidates for president, President Obama and Mitt Romney—the most likely Republican representative. But in fact there is another serious challenge, serious at least in terms of his ideas. I guess it’s yet to be determined how serious it can be in terms of actual effect. That person is Rocky Anderson. Rocky is the leader of a new Justice Party. He’s running for president, and he was the mayor of Salt Lake City. Thanks very much for joining us, Rocky.ROCKY ANDERSON, U.S. PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE, JUSTICE PARTY: It’s great to be with you. Thank you.JAY: So a lot of our viewers may have seen some of your interviews on some of the other, I guess, alternative networks. You’ve also been on some mainstream television when you announced the Justice Party. So instead of going over your whole program again—and we may even link to some of those interviews—I want to jump into one point that you’ve been focusing on, and that is the issue of money in politics. And you’ve been talking a lot about the need for a constitutional amendment to overturn the Citizens United Supreme Court decision. But that money in politics certainly existed before such a decision. You know, the 1 percent of the 1 percent has been more or less dominating U.S. politics, almost, maybe, since there was a United States of America. And you talk about the need for new paradigm, sort of addressing the system, not just changing the faces of the president. So how do you grapple with this sort of deeper problem?ANDERSON: Well, our system has been rotten to the core for many years. The Citizens United case just made it so clear how bad it really is. Finally the American people are sitting up and paying attention.I was on the board of directors of Utah Common Cause for a number of years, going up to our state legislature, urging them to pass legislation to prohibit gifts by lobbyists to legislators year after year. They acted toward us with such utter disdain, as if there weren’t a problem with legislators sitting on the front row of Utah Jazz games or being given golf packages or ski packages. It is just amazing how bribery has taken over our system of government, how those with the wealth really are in control. And it is at the bottom of every major public policy disaster in this country.Why are we the only industrialized nation on the face of the planet without a central health care coverage for every citizen? It’s because of the corrupting influence of money in our system, from the health insurance industry, from pharmaceutical companies. Same reason why we have these high drug prices. Why do people go to Canada to get the same drugs that they could buy in this country, but at much lower prices in Canada? It’s because of the corrupting influence of money from the pharmaceutical industry.JAY: Now, one of the—at the core of a lot of this is the control of the banking sector. And when it came time to—when the banking sector, after their own casino activities essentially led them to collapse and they needed a public bailout, that seemed to be a moment where there could have been some real challenge to that power, ’cause certainly the power of money in politics comes from this concentration of ownership. And when the big banks were on their knees and they needed the public money, one would have thought that was an opportunity to do something about it. So if you’d been president in 2008, what would you have done differently?ANDERSON: Well, certainly we needed to stabilize our financial system, but there should not have been this carte blanche given by Congress and the White House as we’re giving the banking sector billions of dollars, but without conditions. Nobody said you’ve got to be providing this money for loans for small businesses, for people who are trying to get into their first homes, pay off their mortgages, all these millions of people that are underwater in their homes. There were none of those protections for the American people. It was just another bailout for the banks, and then these folks kept stuffing their own pockets with millions of dollars.How anybody that got us into these problems in the first place, much of it through financial fraud—and we know that now—how they even maintain their positions of power in these entities, let alone getting the bonuses that they’ve taken away with taxpayer money—. And I blame not the greed on Wall Street so much, because we expect people on Wall Street to be greedy, and especially if they’re playing by the rules, to take advantage. But we have hired, through our elections, people in Washington and Congress and the White House who are supposed to be protecting our interests, and instead they’ve been betraying us every single day, as they’ve been the lap dogs for the financial industry.JAY: Well, how do you assess, then, Dodd-Frank and whatever regulations have actually come out of Dodd-Frank? What do you make of those efforts?ANDERSON: Well, I think it’s a good first step, obviously, but it’s in a sense window dressing. Why have we not brought back Glass-Steagall? Why do we allow there to be any banks that are considered too large to fail? That’s the whole problem is they know that they can engage in these very risky, sometimes illegal, sometimes fraudulent activities and there’s not going to be accountability. How do they get to that point? Well, they give more, for instance, to President Obama’s campaign than ever before in the history of this country, and so the Obama administration, they have not prosecuted one person for the illegal conduct that helped lead to our economic disaster, from which people are still reeling in this country.How is it that Goldman Sachs can be selling to their customers these perverse products, and at the same time betting billions of dollars against them without disclosing that to their own customers, to their own clients, and nobody pays a penalty for that? How can they market these instruments with these toxic mortgages, mortgages that they had to have known would not be paying off? How do they market those as AAA investments, the lowest-risk investments possible? How do they do that? And then the bottom falls out and not one person brought to account. That’s a pretty good return on their investments [crosstalk]JAY: Now, one of the things that’s been suggested by some of the economists we’ve been talking to is that there needs to be some way—an alternative form of banking, in other words—that one of—the power of the banking sector on Wall Street is partly in their ability to, you know, as you say, finance political campaigns, and especially if you look at what happened at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission when they tried to develop position limits. The lobbying effort was about 100 to 1 pro-Wall Street lobbyists to reformers. And they bring to bear massive resources. So very little gets done, both in terms of legislation and regulation. And some people are suggesting what there needs to be is some form of public banking so that there isn’t this form of blackmail. You know, this too-big-to-fail is essentially blackmail: you don’t come bail us out, your economy will be destroyed. So what’s your sense of this proposal of some form of banking as a public utility?ANDERSON: Well, I think there should be a people’s bank, in effect, where we’re not dependent on these large banks anymore. And I do think that these—any bank that’s considered too large to fail, that there ought to only be one thing that’s too large to fail, and that’s the American middle class. We should be breaking up these banks. Glass-Steagall should be put back into law so that you don’t have investment banks and lending banks and insurance companies all together, because that—without that, we would not have faced this economic crisis. And we owe it to the American people. Our government ought to be serving the public interest, rather than simply the interest of the folks at Goldman Sachs and the rest on Wall Street.But what do we expect when the president of the United States has surrounded himself with these folks? He’s not surrounding himself with public advocates. He’s surrounding himself, in terms of policy, with these Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street folks who go through this revolving door in government. And so there is so much that we can do if our government, if Congress and the White House were really focused on the public interest.The control of the Fed, for instance: why is it that the Federal Reserve can be basically under the table without disclosure, without congressional oversight, without congressional approval, be pushing out billions of dollars to the banks that are essentially controlling the Fed? It is the most corrupt system. Alan Greenspan going to Congress and saying publicly—and everybody treating him as if he was some kind of oracle—encouraging people to go to adjustable-rate mortgages, and then almost immediately he starts raising interest rates. I think there were 17 increases in a row in the interest rates, so that people who were going out, following his advice, getting those adjustable-rate mortgages, were absolutely getting hosed, when the banks once again were cleaning up.So we know of these problems. It’s time that we respond and that those who are elected to represent our interests start doing that. And we need—at the very top, we need somebody in the White House that’s going to make this case very clear to the American people and create the political demands so that nobody in Congress can ever get away with doing what they’ve done in the past, where there will be a real political price to be paid for those who continue to serve as the lackeys for the financial institutions who have taken such gross advantage of deregulation at the detriment, to the detriment of the American people and so many other millions of people around the world.JAY: Thanks very much for joining us, Rocky.ANDERSON: Thanks so much.JAY: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.
End
DISCLAIMER: Please note that transcripts for The Real News Network are typed from a recording of the program. TRNN cannot guarantee their complete accuracy.
Roseanne Barr’s presidential bid has penetrated the veil of media silence so deeply that North Carolina based national polling firm Public Policy Polling has included her in a head to head to head comparison with Mitt Romney and Barack Obama.
Obama wins with 47%, while Romney draws 42% and Barr stands at 6%, with [...] Green Party Watch
Monday evening the Senate Judiciary Committee approved Senate Bill 3, the Employment Opportunity Act, sponsored by Sen. Morgan Carroll, D-Aurora. The Act prohibits pre-employment credit checks that some companies use to screen candidates. Sponsors of the bill say such credit checks can prevent people with low credit scores from finding employment. The bill passed 4-3 on a party line vote.
“Credit scores were never intended to be used in hiring practices,” Carroll said in a statement released after the bill made it through committee. “Tying credit scores with employment opportunity creates a vicious circle that unfairly punishes struggling Coloradans. We should be doing everything in our power to get citizens back to work, and this legislation ensures that we are removing unnecessary punitive barriers and helping citizens get back on their feet.”
Senate Bill 3 prohibits employers from using credit report information unless it is directly related to the position for which a candidate is applying, such as a money or asset management role. If the employer decides not to hire an individual based on information from their credit report, they must disclose this to the applicant. Employers found in violation of this law would be subject to civil penalty. Seven other states have enacted similar laws to prevent credit report discrimination.
Approximately 25.5 percent of Americans currently have poor credit compared with a historical average of 15 percent, and it is estimated that up to 60 percent of employers currently run credit checks on prospective employees.
The bill will now be considered by the full Senate. The bill is sponsored in the House by Rep. Randy Fischer, R-Fort Collins. Republicans who voted against the bill in committee did not quickly return phone calls seeking comment.
GREENSBORO, N.C.–Famously, George Washington lost almost every major battle during the American Revolution, yet he won the war. His final victory at Yorktown is embraced as an example of individual perseverance in the face of overwhelming odds. 
Black populism, the movement of black farmers, sharecroppers, and agrarian workers from 1886 to 1900, was such a movement. It sought, but was not able to make, the economic and political reforms that were so desperately nee
Omar H. Ali
