YangGanging from the third-party world

I have been following Laura Palmer on Twitter for some time.

And, on two counts, I simply don't get her YangGang enthusiasm.

First, she as a former state co-chair of the Texas Greens, thinking that Yang is, overall, closer to Green Party positions than Bernie Sanders is itself a head-scratcher. She's not former, because she was re-elected to that position in mid-April, so she couldn't have been former.

Second, although she's never run for elective office, and therefore this isn't QUITE as bad as Jill Stein endorsing Bernie Sanders in the 2016 California Democratic primary, she IS a former state party official. This is a lot closer to Stein's action than to Green/Democrat stool straddler Brains, who's never held a GP position, calling himself A Bernie or Green Buster or something.

I think she's doing it primarily for Basic Income issues.

To me, that's way down the list, WAY down the list, of political priorities after national health care (which Yang wasn't even close to supporting), followed by real action on climate change, then other things. And that link on Yang's national health care head-fakery is why I said above that Palmer's enthusiasm for Yang over Sanders is a head-scratcher.

Yang strikes me as being at the left edge of tech-neoliberalism and nothing more.

Beyond that, he proved himself to be Just.Another.Politician.™ on Israel-Palestine issues.

That said, he dropped out as of New Hampshire primary night. Will he endorse any other Dem already? So far, none of the dropout Dems have endorsed anybody else. And, I'm curious to see what Palmer will do.

And, I didn't have to wait.

Tulsi Gabbard, despite, as far as I remember, never before talking up Basic Income (a Googling claims she has supported it), has all of a sudden made it a key talking point, along with an explicit pitch to the Yang Gang. And Palmer is retweeting away.

I have hit my following limit but still want to network with #AlohaGang & #YangGangForever - so please give me a follow if that is also your objective. Thank you!

— Laura Palmer ☔🌺🧢 🌻#UBI #HumanityFirst✌ (@LoreleiLadily) February 14, 2020

That's despite the many issues, like voted for more nukes, to opposing BDS, to her general Kool-Aid, and to her not clearly and explicitly supporting single-payer (on her campaign website, she tried to have her cake of Medicare for All while eating the public option), that should make her anathema to a good Green. (I know not all Greens are ecosocialist lefties, but I think the party's moving that way.

There's also the issue of what version of BI Gabbard supports — the lefty or the libertarian conservative version. PplsWar, who is "interesting" a absolute dickhead on Twitter, says it's the latter. I'm on record as strongly against that version, and against BI "guru" Scott Santens' version of it. Santens does a call-out of him. That said, per Politico, and contra what a Yang staffer told me on Twitter, it seems Yang himself supports at least a semi-libertarian version. I have a separate post looking at Yang and Gabbard's BI issues here.

Palmer seems to actually have some animosity toward Sanders, and I'm guessing that it's in part due to his non-embrace of BI. Among her retweets, when Yang dropped out, was one claiming that Bloomberg made a better appeal to the YangGang than Sanders.

Back to the first longer paragraph, though. There's another complication with her having been an ardent YangGanger. She's a plaintiff to the suit against HB 2504 and related third-party ballot access issues; she's listed individually on plaintiffs but the details of the complaint make clear it's on behalf of the party. The Texas Secretary of State's lawyers could theoretically submit her Twitter feed as evidence to try to claim lack of standing, or at a minimum, that she doesn't actually have that serious of interest. The first argument would almost surely be rejected; the second, if accepted, wouldn't hurt other plaintiffs. But it still wouldn't be good optics. Arguably, it's not good optics for the party, either.

As for me? Yes, in the past month or two, I've tweeted or mainly retweeted more pro-Bernie stuff. But, I've also retweeted anti-Bernie stuff, like old blog posts about him and F-35s, or him and BDS. In other words, I don't support Sanders uncritically. Also, in November, I plan to vote Howie Hawkins or Dario Hunter, assuming one or the other is the Green nominee. Had Yang somehow gotten the Democratic nod, I honestly don't know what Palmer would have done, off the top of my head.

In any case, Hawkins has his own proposal for income security, which is based on expanding the current Earned Income Tax Credit into a negative income tax.

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On the big ticket behind this all, I haven't done in-depth blogging about either BI or issues behind it — or the person behind much of the push for it on US social media, Scott Santens — for some time. I have new posts on both coming up.