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California's Green Candidate for Governor Arrested Outside Debate Tuesday Night
Oakland resident and Green Party candidate Laura Wells, 62, attempted to enter Dominican University's Angelico Hall at 5:20 p.m. when she presented a ticket that police said was not issued to her.
Green Party candidate for governor Laura Wells was arrested last evening while attempting to attend a debate between gubernatorial hopefuls Meg Whitman and Jerry Brown. The debate was held at Dominican University in San Rafael. (Photo by Marnie Glickman.) For security reasons, tickets to the event were numbered, coded and checked by campus security before ticket holders were admitted to the debate hall.
Police said Wells refused to cooperate with campus security when they requested she surrender the ticket.
Wells became argumentative and refused to leave the area, police said, even after she was warned that if she persisted she would be subject to a citizen's arrest because she was on private property.
A security officer placed Wells under citizen's arrest, and she subsequently was taken into custody by San Rafael police officers and escorted from the grounds.
Wells was cited and released for trespassing.
According to a statement released by the Green Party of California, she will be required to appear in court on Election Day.
"Republicans and Democrats will go to any lengths, even arresting candidates, to keep the truth from California voters," Wells said in the statement. "There are solutions, but voters aren't being allowed to here (sic) from independent candidates."
In 2002, as a Green Party candidate for state controller, Wells polled more than 400,000 votes.
Protesters associated with the Green Party of California who were upset that Wells was excluded from the debate picketed the event by wearing green gags covering their mouths.
"The debate is a fraud. Limiting it to Whitman and Brown is not just anti-green, it is anti-democratic and anti-republican," Wells said.
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48 Comments so far
Show AllDennis Kucinich was shut out from many of the Presidential debates. Controlling who plays means you control who wins. And controlling is what government is all about. Usurpers need not apply.
Ralph Nader faced arrest for merely showing up on the campus where the presidential debates were held held.
When will the world take notice of this profoundly anti-dmocratic nature of USAn politics and take action - boycott, sanction and divest!
...
Yeah, and that's why this country is in such a mess--third parties aren't allowed. The Repubs and the Dems want to dominate everything and any attempt by legitimate third parties to make their voices heard is met with rejection and even violence. Change is needed now!
And for at least the last 30 years the Dems and Repubs are all a part of the same party with a few differences around the edges that are made to seem as though they were core differences.
In a truly democratic society, shouldn't anyone, who has obtained the necessary signatures in order to get on the ballot or who is a member of a party that obtained sufficient votes in the last election, be allowed to participate in any public debate related to the government office that they are seeking?
Shouldn't we be allowed to make an informed decision, based upon all of the facts, about all of the canidates?
Isn't that what democracy is all about?
How long before the cops wake up and stop enthusiastically ushering our country into a full on Fascist police state? Do they really believe they and their families will be immune to these condtions? I have got a word for the LEOs out there; you are as much schmutz on the bottom of the Oligarchy's shoe as the rest of us. You are tolerated ONLY because you perform the violence our "leaders" are incapable of. Don't believe me, start arresting the uber-rich for their crimes and see how long you remain in the good graces of the force.
The reason military and law enforcement outfits require boot camp for new recruits is to weed out candidates who might question authority.
Great democracy we have here, don't we?
Contrast this with Canada, where in the last parliamentary election, it was unthinkable _not_ to include the Green Party leader in the nationally televised debate among the five potential PM's - even though they didn't (and still don't) hold any parliament seats at all.
And a party like the Bloc Quebecois would be a registered terrorist organization down here.
Well, I take your point, but it wasn't quite 'unthinkable' that the leader of the Green Party Canada not participate in the debates. It was only after a good amount of discussion, and over the initial objections of certain rival leaders, that Elizabeth May was able to join.
Democracy is a mockery in fascist amerika ! Just one more of many examples, of the empire controlled, police state, amerika has become.
The Truth is rarely allowed in the door of political discussion. It is handcuffed and escorted by armed thugs to the nearest cell.
This is a decent article. The one currently up at CNN claims her ticket was "bogus"--obviously not true. It may not have been in her name because they would not sell a ticket to her!
http://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/10/13/california.candidate.arrested/index.html
Well said. The main stream media knows that they cannot avoid giving this brave Green gobernatorial candidate some coverage which will result in her getting more votes. So they make every effort to delegitimize her by spurious aspersions to her character.
She got my vote already!!! Tony
If I lived in California, she would have my vote too.
I live in California; she's got my vote.
I'm sure this weekend cops will be at the Raiders-49ers game hauling off everyone who gets in with a ticket from a scalper.
On the other hand, Wells can get retroactive immunity if she will only leave the Greens and join The Party.
How's that freedom of speech thingy working for ya?
"Those who vote are not the ones that count, but those who count the votes." Stalin
"For security reasons...": yeah, right, the security of restricted and content-controlled "debates." And these alleged debates are more akin to games of ping-pong, anyway, than real debates.
That's why I have been saying for years that this country has a one-party political system (with two right wings).
Yes, United States, take a look at your own human rights situation before sermonizing China or Iran.
Indeed.
Par for the course.
This Chinese author quoted in the New York Times was taking an indirect swipe at some of his government's corrupt pro-business behavior while praising the Chilean government on the handling of the mine rescue. However, he could just as easily have been taking a well deserved swipe at the new normal in third world USA:
Zheng Yuanjie, a children’s story writer, wrote online Wednesday that he hoped the Chinese made crane would some day be used to rescue miners here. And Mr. Guan, the poet and blogger, wrote a few lines of verse about Chile’s rescue on the Web, ending,
What the government [of Chile] did warms our hearts They didn’t suppress the truth, They didn’t secretly pay anyone money, They don’t make irresponsible statements They don’t forgive those who should be responsible for it; And they don’t laud themselves with cliches.”
I'm proud that Laura is a part of my local Alameda County Green Party.
Less well known is that she is also a part of the best community organization I know about. Take a look at:
... http://ecovillage510.org ... in Oakland
Looking at the Calendar and the Links of the site you can see that besides a weekly peace walk, tai chi, poetry, potlucks and a Tenants Union, the neighborhood is also urging people to accompany Laura outside the gates of the governors debate.
You can't build a Party with no corporate links unless you also build social solidarity in ways that extend beyond the purely political. I'm happy to see that the Ecovillage and the local Green Party are doing that.
Laurence
PS. I already know about the evils of the Empire, and so do most of you. When people on this site start more talking about WHAT IS TO BE DONE, and what has been done, I'll be more interested in blogging here.
This site has nothing to do with organizing. Most posters are just trying to get the public to think a little. That's actually the first step before organizing.
So, don't stay away, LoB.
-TIA
Laura Wells has an excellent platform which all states, not just California, need in order to have a just government.
http://www.laurawells.org/platform.html
Yes - vote for Laura and vote Green! I took a look at the CA ballot and there are a lot of Greens listed - so I will vote as much green as possible this year (and from now on)
Last time I did not vote democratic was when I voted for Cleaver - from now on I will give my vote to the folks that have actually managed to make a bit of an inroad towards a third party.
fakedemocracy <----
This corrupt duopoly is election SOP in California and the national scene. Can't really speak for other states. And the problem goes beyond the debates. If I can equally vote for any qualified candidate on the ballot, I have a right to hear them all equally represented in the entire election process, including media exposure. I tried to watch the debate but couldn't stomach the Whore's smarmy grin after 5 minutes. Does anyone know if either of the two posers were asked about this issue or incident? We will never root out this corruption until elections are fully publicly funded or all candidates get an equal share of the pie. And don't even get me going about electronic voting.
The Republicans and Democrats have a lock on our election process, and they are not about to open that up to anyone else.
and they shamelessly call this country a "democracy".
this is sheer muscle flexing.
Decisive proof of the imbecility of hope: the fact any genuinely effective third-part movement will be suppressed with whatever brutality the Ruling Class deems necessary.
This is of course because here in the de facto Fourth Reich, the Democrats and Republicans are really only one Ruling Class party, their carefully scripted differences nothing more than Josef Goebbels theater to preserve the Big Lie of democratic process.
That's why I commonly refer to these parties as DemocRats (for their methodical betrayal of the Working Class) and GOPorkers (because they no longer hide the fact they are fascist pigs thrusting the U.S. ever closer to overtly Nazi-type despotism).
As I said, the imbecility of hope: the bitter truth the only "change we can believe in" is realization that the American Experiment in constitutional democracy is dead beyond any possibility of resuscitation.
I use Republicrats and Democretins often
Well folks, we're trying in NY:
http://www.howiehawkins.com/
And could use all the help we can get ....
I tried to post my support last night here. Maybe it was something I said -- who knows? Anyway, it didn't appear.
I've written to the Long Island contact for a yard sign. I have never put a yard sign out for anyone, so this is new, but you do have to start somewhere. I've got a crappy Altschuler one up the block and a Paladino one around the corner!
All right! Way to go! First one, then 2, then a few more, then ....
We CAN do this .....
Our police forces have taken on the role of protecting U.S. citizens from exercising our Constitutionally protected speech and assembly rights. Under the new rules, Dems and Repugs can have their conventions and events, but others get gassed and hit with sound canons (or clubs) or merely arrested or excluded. It happens in every city.
As for the two candidates for California Governor we are told we must consider, Meg Whitman is odious, but Jerry Brown is actually just another fiscal conservative who doesn't even ascribe to the progressive income tax.
Jerry talks better than the cold and exploitive Whitman. That's a plus, but both are falling all over themselves to criticize unions and state employees with pensions. Both support Prop 13, the death penalty, no tax increases for businesses, etc.
I'll vote Green, of course. I can never forget Brown's reaction as Mayor of Oakland when dockworkers protested the wars at an Oakland shipping port. The protesters were hit in the face and eyes by wooden dowels fired by the police. Brown made public statements at the time condemning the antiwar protesters, not the police. No thanks.
-TIA
Dennis Kucinich, Mike Gravel, and Ron Paul. What do these 3 Presidential candidates from the last election have in common? They were all anti-war candidates who were either marginalized or completely cut out of the debates, but third party people like Laura Wells cannot even get into the debates! Vote for third party people like Laura Wells because even if they do not win you will have the satisfaction of knowing you voted your conscience and did not waste your vote by being conned into betting on a fixed fight!
Were even the potential of a viable and genuinely progressive third party to emerge -- the Greens are denied that role by their bourgeois hatefulness toward organized labor -- recent history proves the Ruling Class would destroy it.
This would be done in probably three ways, whether by manufacturing a bogus scandal (Acorn), or by harsher measures including assassination of leaders (King, Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, possibly Paul Wellstone), or by simply gunning down the party's real or potential base (as was done at Kent State University and Jackson State College).
The innate and cowardly submissiveness of the U.S. population would do the rest.
Such is the bottom-line horror of the nation in which we live -- the reason hope is imbecility and change is impossible -- the reason those of us who still dare seek liberty have no choice but to flee to some other country before the borders are sealed here as they were in the Third Reich c. 1939.
(I myself would be long gone save for age and failing health. The latter denies me legal immigration to any other nation.)
Whoa!
"the Greens are denied that role by their bourgeois hatefulness toward organized labor"
I would suppose you have some basis for saying that - could you relate it?
Is it a problem re "organized labor", per se, or Big Labor? You have to admit that the leadership of Big Labor routinely supports Dems, for reasons that escape me. In '00, i was a bit nonplussed when, after marching in Seattle in '99 against NAFTA and the WTO, Big Labor turned around and supported free-trader Gore when there was an anti-NAFTA candidate on the ballot (the guy I voted for). I think you will find that the Greens as a whole, and certainly their platform, are considerably more pro labor than the Dems have ever been.
The Green in NY, Hawkins, running for Governor, is a member of the Teamsters, he is labor. Maybe you should check out a few of these Greens running and maybe you would change your mind ....
http://www.howiehawkins.com/
"I myself would be long gone save for age and failing health."
Do you have decent healthcare?
Thank you for pointing out my error regarding the Green Party nationally. Indeed I was unaware of Mr. Nader's many impassioned remarks in support of unions and economic democracy in general.
But the fact remains that in Washington state, where I was a working journalist during the 1970s and early 1980s and where I now live in retirement, every WashPIRG member I ever met and every local Green Party member I have met since then was as venomously anti-union as any Big Business Republican.
Every one of these Greens and WashPIRGers regarded organized labor as another of the "powerful interests" that corrupt our democratic process with political contributions, a connection subtly demonstrated by the "Standing Up to Powerful Interests" section of the WashPIRG website.
One example is here: http://www.washpirg.org/newsroom/voting/voting-news/proposal-to-open-major-electioneering-loophole-fails-at-the-fec
(My apology for the fact Common Dreams suppresses the full link, making it unusable; there is nothing I can do to prevent that.)
In any case much of this hatefulness toward unions -- and toward blue-collar people in general -- is a legacy of the antagonism generated by the Vietnam War: the malicious contempt of the draft-exempt bourgeois elite for those of us who served in the military, whether in Vietnam or elsewhere.
Another element of the Green attitude evident throughout Washington state is the party members' hatred of workers in extractive industries: loggers, fishers, miners. Rather than focus on the economic issues that compel such work, the Greens -- who are very influential in local environmentalist circles -- prefer to denounce the workers themselves.
Given those attitudes and the vehemence with which they were expressed I made the error of assuming they were expressions of U.S. Green Party doctrine generally and thus never bothered to look further -- research the party's platform etc. -- until you prompted me to do so.
Nevertheless both as a socialist and a union member (National Writers Union now, American Newspaper Guild formerly), I am delighted to learn that Mr. Nader himself supports collective bargaining -- never mind the bourgeois bigotry of so many of his Washington state colleagues.
And again my thanks and appreciation for pointing out my mistake.
*****
Apropos health care: I am a longtime member of the superb Group Health Cooperative, which I joined in 1972 as a political statement in support of socialized medicine and through which I now have the best Medicare Advantage coverage in the U.S., including dental care as good as any provided by employer-funded insurance.
But this is the very sort of protection that Barack the Betrayer -- for whom I voted -- will soon deny us via his $500 billion war on Medicare.
At present it costs me only $15 to see a doctor, and many appointments -- lab tests, injections etc. -- are free. A recent dental emergency that without Group Health would have cost me $675 out of pocket cost me instead only $17.
After Obama kills Medicare Advantage, I will have only so-called "Traditional Medicare," a program that in reality is nothing more than a health-cost rebate for the rich and that provides no dental care at all.
With its prohibitively expensive gatekeeper fees -- for example as much as $375 for the same doctor appointment that now costs me $15 -- "Traditional Medicare" will effectively deny me ALL health care, condemning me (if indeed I am still alive by then) to death by abandonment and neglect.
Hence obviously the Democrat Big Lie Machine is concealing a de facto "death panel" effect implicit in Obamacare, albeit not as the Republican Big Lie Machine claims.
Loren,
Just found your response. Thanx for posting it ...
I agree that for too long the environmental movement has defended "the environment" without taking into the account the basic needs of the humans which are, for better or worse, an integral part of it, as opposed to being either "destroyers" or "protectors" of it. i understand that attitude is changing, none too soon. That is a negative legacy/attitude the Greens will have to overcome if they wish to truly achieve and be worthy of the title of "the party of real people living in a real world" that includes an understanding of limits.
As far as the problem of unions, that is a thorny one in the sense that, we have to champion the real leverage they can provide in balancing the scales, as it were, while recognizing the tendency i have seen to "fight for their own" however "their own" are defined, and the devil take the rest. This leads to making deals with "the powerful" whereby they agree to abandon a general cause, e.g. single payer healthcare, in return for a custom tailored "cut-out" or benny exclusive to their "members". This is, in the end, a self-destructive strategy - as, IMO, their reaction to NAFTA and WTO legislation has proven. They have to learn, metaphorically, to see the forest as well as their own labeled trees - fighting for bennies for ALL.
So perhaps, metaphorically speaking, environmentalists need to see more of "the trees" and organized labor needs to see more of "the forest"? Maybe?
Your take on Medicare Advantage is interesting. My impression was that the Advantage plans were simply a way of privatizing Medicare. The problem you describe, it would seem to me, is not the ditching of the advantage plans as the failure to expand and improve the fundamental services that the public insurance program provides. i further think that the current Medicare system is being deliberately underfunded and shrunken so that folks will find it totally inadequate and will be driven into the arms of the private sector.
The single payer concept i support is based on HR 676 - an improved and expanded Medicare for all that addresses the problems you raise. Check it out, it is only 18 pages long!
Thanx. again, for your response, it includes similar critiques I have heard before of the Greens and is, indeed, something to be heeded and fixed where it exists. But this is one Green who believes that the welfare of ALL must be considered, promoted and fought for ....
"THE DEMOCRATS SUCK!"
Agreed ...
This is so disgusting. The thug police are no different than the brown shirts used by the Nazis. They will apparently do anything, arrest and incarcerate anyone. The worse thing is that they also appear to have no common sense and have no discretion to treat people with respect and dignity. They are enemies of the people in America. Hopefully they will open their eyes and change someday but they seem to be brainwashed.
It's time to take action to break out of this duopoly dictatorship. Build the Green Party. You can find Green candidates running in your state on Green Party Watch:
http://www.greenpartywatch.org/
Vote Green, but don't stop there. Contact a candidate to volunteer for their campaign. Put up signs, bumper stickers, write letters, make calls. Donate - the Progressive Party had yearly dues of $1, equal to about $35 today, and Greens can use every penny since they don't take corporate money.
The Green Party stands for peace, social justice, grassroots democracy and ecology. If we ever hope to reform our broken system and bring true democracy to America, we have to start by voting our hopes, not our fears, and building an independent progressive alternative to both corporate-sponsored parties.
Sounds good to me ...
i have another idea, how about Green supporters calling or e-mailing DN and asking Amy to have more Green candidates on her show. Deluge her with phone/e-mail. At this point it appears you have to be arrested to get on. It's time our "progressive" media stepped up to the plate ......
What is wrong with this picture? Some rentacop can exclude a bona fide candidate from participating in a debate because of a ticket snafu? Was there no one who could verify her claim and let her in? This was not about R's and D's, just knuckle-headedness and a misguided perception of power by the 'security personnel'.
In Massachusetts Jill Stein was at first not invited to participate in Gubernatorial debates. After loud protests from her supporters, she was invited to take part. Keep on screamin' Greens. An' don't stop till you win.