Every time I hear complaints that there are no decent candidates for president, I want to blurt out that there was such a candidate, who filed with the FEC as a Green Party candidate, and who delivered a series of powerful speeches that promoted thoughtful proposals to address the most serious issues head-on, from finance to the environment, from employment to the drive for war.
But that candidate, Emanuel Pastreich, ended up withdrawing from the presidential race after just seventeen days because he was unable to raise even the most basic funds within the Green Party, and he was blocked out of even the so-called “alternative” media.
The total silence concerning the emergence of a serious competitor to Cornel West in the Green Party US (at the time) suggests the presence of institutional corruption, as laid out in the “Petition to remove corrupt leadership of Green Party.”
There was real excitement at the start when Emanuel delivered the first of a series of talks for the Green Liberty Caucus that addressed serious issues like the COVID-19 operation, the September 11th attacks, and the takeover of the economy by global finance, which he did so in a calm and rational manner, proposing concrete solutions.
But when Pastreich reached out to six alternative media sources about his candidacy for president, the only one was willing to interview this challenger to Cornel West was “The Hrvoje Morić Show” on TNT Radio.
While members of Green Liberty struggled for months to get the basics in place for Pastreich to run in the Green Party, Professor Cornel West, a Democratic Party insider who did not dare criticize the COVID regime (and is famous for praising Fauci), was crowned as the nominee from day one and treated like the presumed nominee by all the media sources that interviewed him.
In fact, when I first suggested that the Green Party might consider Pastreich, then running as an independent, or Robert Kennedy, I was punished by being moderated on the Green Party internal delegates discussion list. Never mind that West had declared he was a candidate for the People’s Party first on June 5, and then suddenly declared himself the nominee of the Green Party on June 15 without ever meeting with rank-and-file Greens. Never mind that former Green Party nominee Jill Stein ran around begging the Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders to run in her place as a Green in 2016.
West did manage to set himself apart from other candidates by addressing the threat of imperialism in an articulate manner in his numerous interviews. But he went down in flames on the Jimmy Dore show on September 7 when he refused to acknowledge the dangers of COVID-19 vaccines and then suggested that the “pandemic” was not one of his priorities.
But rather than take COVID fraud seriously thereafter, West’s team decided to trim back on the “truth and justice” content, replacing Jill Stein with the Democratic Party insider Peter Daou who served previously Hillary Clinton loyally as a hatchet man.
Although there remains a strong truth politics faction in the Green Party, those controlling the avenues of communication pretended that candidate Pastreich, demanding 9/11 truth, COVID truth and Federal Reserve truth, did not exist.
Even though the Green Party US has a platform plank calling for 9.11 investigations (because the official report is not factual), Green Party leadership goes mum on calling out state crimes. The reality is that inside the “leftist” Green Party, raising questions about the September 11th attacks is slurred as a conspiracy theory that suppresses serious discussion on a critical issue.
The efforts of the Green Party, and West specifically, to ignore Pastreich seem a bit ironic if one considers what West said to Steve Clemons on “The Bottom Line” (June 22, 2023): "It is fascinating to me that those who are on the one hand supposed to be committed to democracy are so interested in excluding a variety of different voices, especially when those voices are highly critical of unjust status quos."
Unable to raise money in the Green Party, and completely ignored by the party elite, and the alternative media, Pastreich decided to pull out on September 28.
In his public statement concerning the termination of his run in the Green Party, Pastreich wrote,
“I call on the Green Party to revive the tradition of progressive politics in the United States, to realize the full potential of our Constitution, and to pass on the torch of liberty and equality. I imagine, no I demand, a Green Party that will call out the big lies, fight for justice and transparency without exception, and give real opportunities to those who have been so long oppressed...We need a Green Party that will take up the banner of truth and justice dropped in the mud during the horrific political killings of the 1960s. In other words, we need a Green Party that will win by standing for our moral principles, not by bending down to collect dark money.”
I find in Pastreich a champion for political truth. He stands for restoring integrity to our democracy and republic, and for demanding accountability from the power elite who have led the country into ecological ruin and a severe class divide.
I led the push in the Green Party to draft Pastreich as a presidential candidate, knowing he would take up the truth politics banner that Cynthia McKinney carried in 2008.
However, this perspective is not shared by the majority in the Green Party. The Party seems determined to take the safer, and less ambitious, approach of following the path laid out by the Democratic Party towards higher wages, Medicare for all, and the guarantee of rights for minorities while remaining silent on the criminal mismanagement of the government and the empowerment of the plutocracy.
The Green Party establishment does not want to open the cabinet that holds deep state secrets about the 1960s assassinations, the September 11th attacks on the Trade Center and Pentagon, and the Federal Covid program that introduced the SARS Cov2, lockdowns, vaccines, and persecution of doctors who didn’t follow the narrative.
In effect, West’s campaign was a limited hangout “think left; live right” Starbucks progressive campaign.
By contrast, the two major political endorsements for Pastreich were from Richard Gage, a leader in the 9.11 truth movement, and Michel Chossudovsky, the editor of Global Research.
Just two days after Pastreich’s announcement, Robert F. Kennedy announced that he will make an important statement concerning a possible run as an independent and he openly criticized the oppressive structure of the Democratic Party.
And then the bombshell: Cornel West, the candidate the party elites had presumed would take the nomination, announced he would leave the Green Party on October 5 to run as an independent—one week after Pastreich’s withdrawal.
The bottom line is that the leadership of the Green Party was satisfied with an off-the-shelf candidate like Cornel West who was already famous and did not challenge anyone to move beyond their comfort zone. Too bad West abandoned the Greens as soon as the going got tough.
Regarding his future plans, Pastreich told me,
“I am working with the Green Liberty Bloc to set up a Green Liberty PAC which will build local communities to support our national “Fear No Evil” movement and encourage intellectual, spiritual, and economic independence among citizens. Any campaign that is chasing after money is cutting its own throat. Sure, we need some money to get off the ground, but we are going to win with our moral commitment and raise money on that basis.”
He explained further,
“Some people who helped our campaign had nothing, but they were willing to work hard to get the truth out there. Willing activists sharing their time and energy are far more valuable to us than lawyers who might chip in 5,000 dollars to assuage their consciousness, but who do not have a taste for too much truth and justice.”
Pastreich wants to help Green Liberty grow into a nationwide political project that will structure future political activities so that they build a movement that acts on the demands of ordinary citizens for political truth and justice, going into the 2026 and 2028 electoral seasons.
Pastreich said, “I feel that if we do not control the means by which opinions are formed, if we cannot challenge the control of the production and distribution by multinational corporations, the domination of money and credit by global finance, if we cannot create institutions that will take back control of ‘safety’ policy from private security firms and intelligence firms, military contractors and political consultants, then entering the Oval Office will be about the same as entering a prison cell. Before electoral politics can make a difference, we need a substantial movement to support any electoral gains we may achieve.”
Makes sense to me.
