At 11:09 PM 6/24/04 -0700, Michael Alterman wrote:
if we are not a political party, and if building a third party capable of challenging the corporate duopoly is not our primary purpose, then I and many others have put in hundreds of hours of volunteer work under some very misguided assumptions.
Michael, et al- I have been helping build the Green Party since the mid-1980-'s, before it was a party. At the time, it was a coalition of non-demrepubs, looking for a better way of doing business. It was never part of our strategy in building the party that we would become only another political party, more interested in self servingness than in building a true patchwork majority. But there are a lot of independent thinkers out there who will not join Green Party, for whatever their reasons, yet they have just as much of a critique of the repubdems as we do. In the name of Party unity, we are asked to turn our backs on that constituency. In the name of movement unity, it is incumbent on us to work with that disaffected group, which COULD be a majority, and work for real, systematic change. Don "><"<>"><"<>"><"<>"><"<>"><"<>"><"<>" Organizing is Sorting in to smaller piles, Then dealing with them. Don Eichelberger Abalone Alliance Safe Energy Clearinghouse http://www.energy-net.org San Francisco Green Party http://www.sfgreenparty.org California State Green Party Issues Working Group Co-coordinator http://cagreens.org/giwg/ Green Community/GreenWorks project for sustainable small businesses http://www.sfgreenworks.org 2940 16th St., #309 San Francisco, CA 94103 phone 415-861-0592 done@energy-net.org done@greens.org