Green Party presidential favoritism

And, yes it is favoritism when the official Green Party US Twitter account announces Howie Hawkins' candidacy after having officially announced nobody's before that.

And now, via Independent Political Report, we see that Green candidate Ian Schlakman (announced some time before Hawkins) has called out Hawkins and his campaign staff, in part based on a joint letter by him and four other candidates announced before Hawkins.

So, expanding greatly on brief comments on Twitter last week?

First, beyond personality reputations that Kevin Zeese has (and I've heard them too), I'm leery of him for other reasons.

First, most his ideas that are Green-ish are also Libertarian; note his co-nomination in the 2006 Maryland US Senate race (which Schlakman refers to in his letter). Second, I don't know about Occupy in DC, but, in New York, I've pointed out its many wrongs, starting from the fact that Adbusters launched the Occupy movement in general through its being actually quite "leadered," contra myths of leaderlessness, and having lots of grifting associated with that. Click the tags below.

Beyond that, I've never really heard of him as being "green" to a huge degree, and certainly not an ecosocialist type.

Second, per Schlakman, is the association of Andrea Mérida Cuéllar with Hawkins. I am not as ready to throw her under the bus as he is, but I've heard enough elsewhere, from the likes of Bruce Dixon.

Third are the actual or possible conflicts of interest that Schlakman mentioned otherwise.

And, speaking of Dr. Margaret Flowers, does she support me and Jon Walker and others who say a good single-payer system must reign in payments to doctors and hospitals? She's very good at knowing the nuts and bolts on single payer vs the health insurance industry, but ... as a doctor ... is she ready to take less money, to fully, fully, abandon fee for service models and more?

And, so far, she has failed to respond to me! Shock. American fee-for-service medicine and everything connected to it — overdiagnosing, backscratching consulting arrangements and more, is almost as big a problems as AHIP in first and #BigPharma (plus medical device manufacturing) in second.

Back to the IPR post.

Site owner (I think) Paulie, who is (I think) Libertarian, doesn't outrightly call this a "nothingburger," but gives indication he thinks it's not much more than that.

Well, in a follow-up comment, I noted that DBC down in Houston was upset when he saw the Tweet. Saw favoritism in it. It's drawn comment and emotion from people in the unofficially Green Effbook group to which I belong, from people at least as Green-active as I am.

And Ian has that letter signed by the other candidates.

So, Ian may be making a Rocky out of Appalachia, but making a mountain out of a molehill? I don't think so.

==

Side note: Other than Howie himself, most the big players here are from Maryland. Ian, Kevin, Margaret, Brandy. Must be some fun state party meetings.

==

Both Hawkins and Hunter spoke at the Texas state meeting.

==

Update, Aug. 31: The state party, in emailing me about Hawkins' Sept. 7 visit to Dallas (which I doubt I can make but wish I could) included Hawkins money solicitations. I'm kind of not liking that, either, as this was a Texas Greens email and not one from Hawkins, and I've let the state folks know that on Twitter. I don't recall getting a separate, specific email just about his attendance when Dario Hunter spoke at the state convention this summer, let alone one with "donate" buttons embedded in the email. This all also makes me curious who the current state PR person is.

And, nemmind. On the Texas GP Facebook page, Alfred Molson explains that the Executive Committee has an "invite" open to all candidates to "tag along" with a mass blast via the state if they want to.

The flip side of the flip side is that other Green candidates may be piling on to Howie for believing that Russiagate, in terms of Russia meddling in US elections, is real. (AFAIK, Howie doesn't believe in Trump-Putin collusion; if he did, I'd drop him like a rock.) And Brains and DBC believing conspiracy theorists on this is disconcerting but not surprising.