Hi it's Andrea! So what happens when you're faced
with candidate choices that don't leave you
feeling very excited about supporting either one?
I have some thoughts because many of you are
being faced with this sort of Republican vs. neoliberal
decision and you just feel between a rock
and a hard place. Well here in Colorado, for the
2018 general election, we have a
gubernatorial race and one candidate is a
Republican and one candidate is a Democrat.
I personally don't see
a substantive difference between the two, and let me
explain, we give you a few ideas why I think
that. Number one they're, both very soft on oil
and gas, and here in Colorado fracking is a
huge concern. We have one of the most fracked
counties in the nation here in Colorado. And
then they're both very much into privatization,
both of them are strong supporters of charter
schools and both of them are very soft and just
this general privatization and this public private
partnership way of doing business and of
supposedly serving the needs of Colorado
residents. Where these candidates are different
tend to be in their identities and sort of their
personal histories. On one hand, we have the
Republican candidate who's the grandson of a
former Denver mayor from the 1920s, who
actually was an associate and a member of the
local KKK organization, and on the other hand, we
have a Democrat who currently is a member of
Congress, who puts a lot of energy into voicing
his identity as an LGBT member of Congress, and
who supposedly was in Congress to work on
immigration reform. Well, if you look at his
track record, he wasn't a champion on either one
of those things. In case you haven't noticed, we
don't have a comprehensive immigration reform and
we certainly don't have federal job protections
for the LGBT community, for which transgender
people really, really need that protection. And so
here we are, we have basically two people that
are roughly the same, and don't have track
records of really, really solving problems that
really impact people here in Colorado, so there
are a lot of people on the Democratic side of the
globe, here in Colorado that are putting a lot of
pressure on left leaning and Progressive voters.
They must support this Democratic
candidate, because this other guy is so
terrible he's a KKK person of course, that's
never been proven to be true, but he is a
conservative and we know how he's gonna line up.
And again the track record of the Democrat
doesn't seem to be all that different from really
what the Republican is all about.
So progressive and left leaning voters here are
finding themselves between a rock and a hard
place. So one of the things that we need to talk
about it really is about what democracy actually
is, because we've all been conditioned into
responding to candidacies as being the only way for
us to express democracy. And that's part of it,
but democracy, we have to say, is a dictatorship
of the majority, and it's a system in which
everyone has a voice, everyone has an opportunity
to state their preferences about a certain
issue or certain candidate, and it's supposed to
be very participatory.
The thing of it is, is that here in
Colorado, our Democratic choices are not simply
for candidates, but we also have the ability to
vote on citizen-led initiatives, of course
referred measures that come from our state
legislature. And so I have a proposition that
hopefully will give you some ideas on how to deal
with this conundrum that you might be
having in your own election, in your own state.
Now I'm gonna stay for the record that what I'm
about to suggest is not an official position of
the Green Party, of any state Green Party that I'm
aware of; it is my opinion. But when you're faced
with a ballot that has not just candidate choices
but initiative choices, my suggestion to you at
least for the gubernatorial candidacy, is that
you don't even cast a vote for governor at all.
Whoa! What am I saying? That's really radical!
The way that laws get passed
here in Colorado is pretty much the way it is
everywhere else. It goes through your state
legislature. It's lands on the desk of the
governor, and the governor signs or vetoes and then
everyone carries on. So instead of voting for
governor here in Colorado, what my suggestion is
that we pay more attention to the legislative
candidates for House and for state Senate because
the governor's don't create legislation; they
simply enact them, and it's up to the state
legislature to put something in front of the
governor to sign or veto. And so we have several
races here in Colorado, where there are some
fairly interesting choices. One choice in
particular is in our Colorado House District 12,
where we have a woman named Theresa Stets, who
is an unaffiliated candidate who has been
endorsed by the Green Party of Colorado, who is
going to be strong against oil and gas
extraction. She's going to be working on the Labor
Peace Act which is roughly sort of a Right to Work
situation that we have here in Colorado. It's
going to be bolstering our state retirement fund
called PERA and doing some of these other things
that really are meaningful to the people of
Colorado and so that's. Why we're supporting
her. But I want to get back to this idea of what
democracy actually is. Yes, sometimes, that
includes voting, but many of us here are engaged in
activist communities, and I think that's really
the place where we need to practice the basic
principles of democracy, and what I mean by that
is accountability, transparency, principled
dialogue, principled debate coming to consensus
over issues, making sure that everyone has a voice
and a vote. And a lot of times we can
make that happen in our activist spaces, but we
need to understand that the reason why we're
often faced with these lackluster choices in
candidates is because they duopoly parties,
the Democrats and Republican parties and their
corporate partners, have conditioned us all to
accept only those particular candidacies and they
actually have hundreds of years ahead of us in
working on the system where our choices of
democracy have become very telescoped, and that we
really can't see democracy beyond the choices
that are served up. And so the challenge to that
for us is to build up our grassroots movements.
Now, this is where the actual principles of
democracy are going to be very, very important. We
need things to be fair. We need folks to have a
voice. We need folks to be able to make a choice.
We need a space where there's principled debate
and principled discussion so that we can come to
the right outcomes. So how do we build this mass
movement? Just a few ideas because I want to keep
this video short. But first of all, we have to
build community. That means that we actually have
to build relationships with one another and we
have to look out for each other's interests. Now
those of you that are engaged in activist
communities that do have some direct action
activities, this is a great opportunity for you
to think about what it's going to take in order to
have child care for your meetings, have a bail
fund, just in case people get arrested at your
actions, and some of these other sorts of mutual
aid sort of things. In some activist spaces
people even concern themselves with
food and shelter of the members, but it's
necessary, because the system now is really trying
to break us down economically. And you, want to keep
as many people together as possible and so that
kind of community building is going to be really
important. The other aspect that's really
important is a continuing political education.
You want to make sure that newcomers understand the
issues very quickly and fairly thoroughly because
you need to have as many people moving and
organizing and conducting outreach as possible.
The other thing that word outreach, that's
extremely important. You, want to make sure that
you're talking to people where you find them and
the temptation sometimes for us on the left is to
be so ideologically pure and to feel so superior
that we have a really hard time explaining what
we mean to people who might be interested in the
solutions that we have to offer, and so we have to
make sure that when we're talking to people, when
we're out reaching to people, that we're
giving them sufficient information but also
giving them space to connect our information with
their daily lives because, like it or not, the
real expert of people's daily lives are those
people themselves, and so we have to give space
for them to be able to talk freely about how
things are impacting them, and we can help out
with some more political education. Now this is
going to be really, really important, because the
duopoly parties, capitalist parties, they have hundreds of
years ahead of us, and so we also need to be
concerned with the long game, and I understand,
for those of us that are engaged in fighting
climate change for example, we're very
panicked about how many years that we have left
in an environment on this planet that can sustain
life, and so that it is an urgent situation. I
don't mean to downplay that at all, but we need
to recognize that things are not going happen,
change is not going to happen in one election cycle.
And while we may support a candidate today and
that candidate may not be successful, we need to
see that as the building blocks to the next round.
When you're talking about legislative offices,
a lot of times we're only talking about a two
year span. So we need to be able to also
radically assess and critique and understand what
works and what doesn't work when a candidate
doesn't win. That's also very important
information. So...you don't have to vote for
governor. Think about who's running for the
legislature. Think about those questions that are
going to be on your ballot. Those represent some
other choices that you can make without having to
be pulled into the lesser evil argument. You
don't have to be pulled into that, and ultimately
choosing consciously to not vote for governor or
for any other candidate slot on your ballot, is a
conscious choice, and it is permissible within
democracy to make that choice. So don't let
anybody bully you into something that you don't
want to do. So, I hope that gives you some
perspective that you can use when you're faced
with making these choices, you don't have to vote
for any candidate in particular, you can actually
leave some spots on your ballot open, but
consider some of these other options, and make
sure those options fit you and your community.
And do the work of building the mass movement,
because if we do that work correctly, we can
leverage this government any way that we want.
So, thank you very much for listening. Good luck on
that ballot. Don't be bullied into making a
choice you don't want to make.
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