Tea Partier, Action Figure, Green Partier

Will Jim Demint, Alvin Greene or Tom Clements Win the SC Senate Seat?

South Carolina’s US Senate race is a media extravaganza. Jim DeMint, the radical right
Republican incumbent and tea partier and Alvin Greene, a mysterious, unknown Democrat and action figure enthusiast who has been indicted on a felony obscenity charge are joined by Tom Clements, a peace and environmental activist. Newcomer Clements is the Green Party nominee and a life-long activist involved with vital public interest issues affecting South Carolina, the United States and the world. Clements excels in political research and advocacy.

DeMint, a former paper salesman and ad executive, is the hero of the far right. Media is drawn to the enigmatic Greene, giving him more coverage than any candidate in America according to the Pew Research Center. DeMint is the most ultra-conservative Senator in Congress. Greene would stimulate the economy by selling action figures of himself, which could include a jailbird, considering his indictment for showing pornography to a teenage student. But Clements’ record of public service and activism gives him the credibility to be a Senator for all the people.

I don’t know Jim DeMint or Alvin Greene personally. I do know Tom Clements. The candidates should have debates on critical issues such as war and peace, jobs with a living wage, economic and social justice, climate change, clean green energy, conservation of natural resources, health care, education, immigration reform, regulation of the finance industry and the national debt. The media has let us know plenty about DeMint and Greene. South Carolinians need to see and hear Tom Clements on these issues and understand why he will be a great senator.

The State in Columbia, SC reported that Clements has worked for Greenpeace International for 13 years. He has challenged leaders on nuclear issues in Russia, Japan, South Korea, and Europe. In South Carolina Clements led the environmental organization’s nuclear weapons watchdog efforts on operations at the Savannah River Site (SRS).

South Carolina has the most nuclear industry activity per capita of any state. This includes making nuclear weapons and electric power generation. Clements has led efforts to clean up deadly radioactive waste at the “bomb plant” aka SRS. He led the organizing of our demonstrations there which drew positive media coverage. Tom opposes bringing more nuclear waste to South Carolina and advocates a clean energy park at SRS that would help develop offshore wind, solar, geothermal and other renewable technologies and would create new jobs in our economy.

Clements led the fight in South Carolina against rate increases for utilities whose plans for costly nuclear reactor projects will force consumers to pay a decade in advance, and divert resources from developing energy efficiency and sustainable, non-polluting alternatives.

Clements has been recognized for his work as the Southeastern Nuclear Campaign Coordinator for Friends of the Earth, and received the Grassroots Activist of the Year award from the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability.

Working with Greenpeace International and as Director of the Nuclear Control Institute, Clements interacted with official representatives of other countries, at the United Nations in New York and Geneva, and at embassies in Washington, D.C. and abroad. He was a human rights activist in Central and South America, is fluent in Spanish and served in the Peace Corps in Costa Rica. He also worked for Peace Brigades International in Colombia, verifying human rights violations by the army, and paramilitary and guerrilla forces.

Clements says DeMint works for corporate interests rather than the people of South Carolina. “Jim DeMint is obviously more concerned about raising money for questionable radical candidates in other states than he is about listening to the people of South Carolina,” said Clements. “DeMint is AWOL and needs to come home and join in the discussion about who the people will choose to represent them.”

Clements contends that “military madness is killing our people, undermining our economy, and threatening our security. Costly and misguided military adventurism in Iraq and Afghanistan and expensive military bases around the globe continue to severely undermine our economy and threaten to bankrupt us financially and spiritually.” “The military budget for the Pentagon and other agencies comes close to $900 billion. Including costs for expenses incurred by past military spending, the tab comes to a whopping $1.4 trillion, or 48% of the budget. We now see the highest military spending in the past 60 years with over $1 trillion having been spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001.”

South Carolina can do better than Jim DeMint and his radical right agenda. It is time to turn away from our legacy of militarism, racism and fundamentalism.

We have the highest ratio of military personnel and civilians working for the military to non military related people of any state. The military brings big bucks to our economy. Much of our media glorifies and romanticizes war even more than the national media. The Christian Coalition was founded in South Carolina and Lee Atwater brought fundamentalists from their revival tents into the "big tent" of the Republican Party.

The three bumper stickers on my car say "War is Terrorism, With a Bigger Budget" and "Peace on Earth" with “Tom Clements for US Senate” in the middle.

Tom Clements wants to end war and make peace. Find out more about him. I support Tom, a green partier who works for peace and social justice.

Ragheads, Rednecks and Greene Machines

Peculiar politics in South Carolina is a never ending
saga. On June 15, South Carolina Republican State Senator Jake Knotts of Lexington told the South Carolina Senate he is proud to be a redneck and would not resign from the Senate for having called Nikki Haley and President Obama ragheads. Haley is a former Sikh of Indian ancestry and front-runner for the Republican nomination for Governor in the June 22^nd run-off.

On June 17, Democrat Alvin Greene’s stunning landslide victory in the Democratic Primary for the US Senate seat held by Jim De Mint was upheld by the SC’s Democratic Executive Committee’s 38.5 to 7.5 vote after hearing a protest by his opponent Vic Rawl. Rawl’s witnesses argued that voting machines malfunctioned to provide a landslide victory for Greene. Greene, a Forrest Gump figure, is an unknown, unemployed, African-American veteran, who also faces a felony obscenity charge. In a brief phone interview Greene said. "They did the right thing," "I am the best candidate for the United States Senate in the state of South Carolina." Rawl is a former judge, and legislator whose 59 to 41% loss shocked the political establishment. Rawl said he didn’t have enough time to prepare his case before the hearing.

Jake Knotts said the Lexington Republicans who asked him to resign for his raghead comments were hypocrites because he had been called a redneck and no one came to his defense. He said he is a true redneck if that means a farmer who works from dawn to dusk and whose neck is red from the sun. When Knotts said, “If all of us rednecks leave the Republican Party, the party is going to have one hell of a void,” he was telling it like it is.

In 1968, the party of Lincoln devised a Republican Southern strategy to co-opt George Wallace’s appeal to white bigotry which has been the building block for Republicanism in the South ever since. I was a Wallace staffer from 1967-71 and became Executive Director of the Wallace Presidential campaign. I witnessed Wallace’s clever appeal to the prejudices of working class white folks.

In 1970, Wallace spoke to a crowd of textile workers in Alabama railing against the "Northern, liberal media who want the Federal Government to control every phase and aspect of our daily lives.”

I mean, the long-haired, pointy-headed, pseudo-intellectuals writers at the New York Times, who don't have enough sense to park their bicycles straight. They look down their noses at us and call us pea pickers and pecker-woods, lint-heads and red-necks. If they call us red-necks because our necks might be red from an honest day's toil in the Summer sun, then call us rednecks because there's two things about them; they wouldn't do an honest day's work in the summer sun and

their hair's so long their necks wouldn't get red anyway.

When Fidel Castro was launching his offensive in the hills of Cuba, the New York Times called him the Robin Hood of the Caribbean and we all know he is a Communist.

But if you had asked any cab driver in the streets of New York City or Montgomery, Alabama what they thought about Castro when the New York Times was singing his praises, the cab driver would have told you that he was a Communist. The cab drivers know this by instinct. They are everyday people like us who have fierce contact with life.

We had fierce contact with some contentiously contested election protests when I served on the Democratic Executive Committee of South Carolina in the 1980s and ‘90s, but never one as interesting as when Vic Rawl made his case for a new primary election for the Senate race. Rawl’s attorney argued that they did not have to prove corruption, but only that because the machines were unreliable, the outcome was not correct.

Rawl’s protest focused on the voting machines that leave no paper trail to substantiate their reliability. The Election Systems & Software (ES&S) machines use software whose reliability was criticized in the 2008 Presidential election race in Ohio. Dr. Duncan Buell, a mathematician and computer science professor from the University of South Carolina testified that” “We should treat these machines with an enormous amount of skepticism.”

Rawl’s protest claimed that: the machines are susceptible to accidental or intentional modification, alteration or tampering; numerous voters experienced difficulty in trying to cast votes for Rawl; that the results cannot be verified; and that inherent unreliability of the machines constitutes evidence that the election is invalid.

Big money controls politics. The US Supreme Court has just ruled in the Citizens United case that money counts as free speech. Money talks in America. If the votes were accurately counted, and the candidate who spent no money on media ads, signs, or a web site won, it would be a good thing for our democracy.

When South Carolina seceded from the Union in 1860, James L. Petigru, a former South Carolina legislator and Attorney General said, "South Carolina is too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum.” Considering our ragheads, rednecks and the Greene machines, Petigru’s description still applies.