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| By David Cobb with Blair Bobier |
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| Imagine being the U.S. presidential candidate of one of our country’s largest political parties, a party organized in over ninety nations around the world. You would expect that any prominent presidential debate would include such a candidate, right? |
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Wrong. |
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| During the 2004 presidential campaign, the so-called debates, sponsored by the corporately-funded Commission on Presidential Debates—created by the Republican and Democratic parties to promote their own candidates—purposefully excluded all independent and third party candidates. |
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Now imagine that as the presidential candidate of this internationally renowned political party you staged a protest at the site of a debate from which you were excluded and were arrested and beaten by police for this non-violent act of civil disobedience. You would expect this to generate widespread coverage in the news media, right?
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| Wrong again. |
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| On Friday, October 8 at 8:32 p.m., I was arrested in St. Louis, Missouri at the second of two corporate sponsored presidential debates. Though I was the presidential candidate of the Green Party, the fastest growing political party in the U.S., I was not invited to participate in the debate and even my request to the Commission for a ticket to attend as an observer was ignored. |
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Throughout my campaign for the Green Party’s presidential nomination I had expressed my willingness to use non-violent civil disobedience, if necessary, to either gain entry to the restricted debates or be arrested in the process. Many of the greatest struggles of our time have been achieved through non-violent civil disobedience. It is a distinguished form of protest and dissent which had been used successfully by patriots during the American Revolution, Rosa Parks, Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., among others. Right now, we are engaged in another epic struggle; a battle for the heart and soul of our democracy. The sham, staged and scripted deb! ates were an insult to the democratic process and to the American people and, as a representative of the Green Party, I had an obligation to try and open them up to more voices.
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| I joined a great crowd of hundreds of protesters in St. Louis. They were spirited, peaceful, joyous and yet insistent that the system must change to embrace more choices and more voices. The protesters weren’t only Green; they came from across the political spectrum and I was proud to be a part of them. I was also honored that Michael Badnarik, the Libertarian presidential candidate, decided to join our planned civil disobedience. |
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| Though a number of people from our campaign and other Green Party members had worked diligently to ensure a “smooth arrest”—if ever such a thing exists—events did not turn out as we planned. Although my staff had consulted with the County police, it turned out that the City police, and not the County, wound up guarding the debate entrance. When I showed up and demanded entry, they had never heard of me. I had to push my way through a line of police in riot gear to gain entry. I was promptly arrested but not before a number of police converged on me with their shields which they used as offensive weapons. ! Some of the police seemed to enjoy hitting me; others seemed to be mortified. |
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| At this time, Badnarik and I were surrounded by over a dozen members of the media—cameras, photographers and reporters. Although AP and a number of papers carried a very brief report on the protest and arrest, the national media was silent. |
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| The national media manufactures consent in a variety of ways. When reading the corporate daily newspapers or watching “the news” on TV, it is important to consider what isn’t being reported and why. Why do the media report on the death tolls of American soldiers in Iraq but not the far greater number of Iraqi civilian deaths? Why do the media constantly barrage us with warnings of terrorist threats and activities but never warnings about the assaults on our civil rights and liberties? Why did the national media dissect every bland and focus-group-tested comment of two presidential candi! dates and ignore the serious dissertations of all others? |
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| If you relied on the national press and your local TV news, you might become an expert on the weather or Hollywood celebrities, but you wouldn’t know that the United States has one of the lowest voter participation rates of any democracy or that we are the only industrialized nation without universal health care for its citizens; you wouldn’t know that this country is the world’s largest arms dealer or that a shocking percentage of our children live in poverty. If you did know all this, you might start to piece together how they are all related. And you would be compelled to do something about it. |
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| Although local media outlets did a very admirable job of covering our campaign events, the national media largely treated us as invisible—until we put the Ohio recount and the flawed and fraudulent presidential vote center stage. |
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| The Green Party took the lead in demanding a recount of the presidential vote in Ohio and in setting the stage for the historic challenge to Ohio’s tainted presidential electors. The day after we forced Congress to hold an historic debate on the sorry shape of our democracy, the New York Times wrote: “In many ways, the debate came about because of a small group of third party activists, liberal lawyers, Internet muckrakers and civil rights groups….” |
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| For once, they got it right. |
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| Our www.votecobb.org website, internet journalists and bloggers played an important role in informing the public about problems with the Ohio presidential vote and the illegally conducted recount, proving that independent, non-corporate journalists are essential to the democratic process and for protecting and defending our rights and civil liberties. |
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