I served as a national representative to the US Green Party in 2005 and I remember when I first questioned a mysterious $25,000 donation made by a Mr. and Mrs. Mazzes. I was not casting aspersions or insulting anyone to ask the question; "What did the Mazzes get or expect in return for such a huge donation." I was attacked, nonetheless.
The Mazzes are obviously NOT people working towards independent politics. These are people working with the (un)Democratic Party and PDA and DFA and other gateway groups who regularly use their resource to shut down our grassroots organizing. The Mazzes are not Greens. They are upper middle class faux progressive Democrats and they obviously were paying off some type of favor. I wonder who in our party most directly benefited from this donation (and the $12,000 dollar one that they also made). Would we accept money from George Soros if he came to us? Is he a Green or a "progressive" from this lists' perspective? I know that Dems see Soros as a rich progressive but any half awake Green knows the less than subtle differences between "blood money" or payola and a simple donation. I suggested in 2005 that we should no longer accept bribes this large and obvious. If we only accepted smaller donations, no one would ever again have to suspect that a donation was the cause of any undue influence.
The way to prevent this from happening in the future is simple - cap all donations annually. I suggest we apply a "tithing formula". Lets cap donations to the party at 10% of the annual full time salary of a federal minimum wage earner. This provides a scale that limits undue influence but doesn't stop many of us from "maxing out" with our yearly contributions. Those who wish to give more can give to individual races and candidates as they should. It would also allow for growth if we are successful in raising the minimum wage. It would be an assurance that Democrats and other such war criminals can't simply buy their way into our party. We could also set up a Green Card system where every party member donates a minimum amount of money (say, $36 a year minimum unless there is a hardship declaration - thats 10 cent a day, people). Based on this "tithing", the maximum individual donation would be the federal minimum wage x 2080 hours x 10%.
Currently, that formula yields us a max donation of about $1200 a year ($5.85 x 2080 hrs / 10 = $1216.80 dollars). This is what I currently give and that is exactly how I decided to give that amount.
Pat LaMarche said to me in an email earlier this year that she estimated Green numbers were somewhere "between half a million and 3 million". Lets say for the sake of argument that we might have about 400,000 active Greens in the U.S. If only 75% of that very low estimate are honest and decent people who would pay their $36 bucks (10 cents a day) and not falsely claim hardship, we would collect well over $1 million dollars annually from this program! Imagine how many campaigns we could effectively run with that kind of resource! How many more senate and congressional and mayoral campaigns would get checks for $1,000 dollars or $5,000 instead of the $100 or $200 they currently get? We could use that money to set up printing templates and services and help paper states run their own papers and organize the grassroots. We could set up ballot databases to help states organize to attain ballot status. We could help campaigns with professionally designed templates for brochures and web hosting, campaign co-ordinators and advisors! We would no longer need to beg rich Democrats for little chunks of "big money" as we would have already raised it ourselves. More importantly, we would have done so while remaining true to our ideals. We would never again need to worry about whether those "big donations" come from saboteurs with strings attached because there wouldn't be any "big donors".
The two arguments I most often hear against a Green Card program are, at best, ridiculous. Correct me if I am wrong. No one has yet.
1 - Poor people would be excluded from such a system.
I don't often use words like "Bullshit" in print but it would seem quite apropos here. These "poor people" we always hear so much about are already excluded from our party as it does 99.9% of its business ONLINE! Do "poor people" have $1,000 to buy a computer and $65 a month for DSL? Do "poor people" have thousands of dollars to travel to conventions? The "rich elitist scum" in our party already exclude "poor people" if $36 dollars is really to be used as any kind of yardstick. The current Green Card Plan only asks $36 a year and allows for hardship unlike our own current operating procedures. Get Real! We are talking about 10 cents a day - the equivalent of returning two bottles to the store. Get a grip, people! I've never heard an actual "poor person" make this argument, EVER, just the usual posers. It always seems to be middle class white people pretending to know something about poverty who wish to disparage low income workers by spreading crap like this. Is there anyone reading this who is worried that 10 cents a day might separate them from the Green Party because they just couldn't come up with it? Is there anyone truly unwilling to collect two bottles or cans a day to support the only party that works for peace, single-payer health care and a livable wage? Do we really want anyone working with us who is unwilling to do this, the absolute very least anyone could possibly do?
2 - Most states don't allow political parties to be dues paying mechanisms.
Fine. Then, we set this up as a Green "group" or PAC or fundraising mechanism, whatever name it is legally necessary to define it as. These semantics are largely irrelevant. We can use this group to organize our ballot drives and each state's own unique political organization. Duh! I would say that with only 18 ballot lines, we're pretty much a bad joke as far as political parties go, anyway. Wouldn't we be much better off organizing people around ballot access and local issues and actual campaigns that really matter than steering them towards the dysfunctional and irrelevant mess we have created for them at national? We could use this new organization to keep track of all Greens anywhere in the country regardless of their individual state's ballot status. This group would become an incredible organizing tool for the vast majority of states (which don't have ballot lines and therefore don't have BOE records to use to reach out to their Greens). We would have money and a centralized list of all those who support us and wish to work with us on issues and races.
The benefits of setting up such a system would be overwhelming but it seems that it is the same old "position, not mission" people who attack the Green Card most venomously. Is it really all that surprising that these people are often in positions of power within our party? They probably would have been run out of any other organization for incompetence or sabotage. A benevolent organization might perhaps ask people who are "helpful" on this level to set up the tables and chairs or help sweep up after. We have gone to the insane extreme of allowing these people to RUN our party (into the ground). Big mistake.
We need to revisit the Green Card idea and make it happen. It is the single most logical answer to so many of our collective problems;
- It basically eliminates worry about any specific group "owning" us (especially Democrats).
- It creates a brilliant fundraising tool, empowering us financially.
- It facilitates a grassroots voting mechanism that puts power into the hands of those who show they are capable of handling it responsibly.
- It eliminates the need for our overly-complicated and dysfunctional hierarchy.
- It will reward good organizers/organizations by eliminating the need for apportionment arguments and formulas because each state would be based on actual paid membership.
- A system like this would mesh perfectly with our core tenets, unlike the convoluted horsecrap that currently passes for policy within our very sick, near dead, political party.
Where's the down side?
