Many Greens know me; I’ve been a PGP member since Clinton was president, over 30 years, and an SCC member for at least half of that. I’m most concerned about the extreme division and abandonment of party values I see. Recent actions by a one-vote majority of the SCC have been violating both the decentralization and democracy Key Values, as well as party governance principles.
Until this year’s January convention, the worst example was the SCC pretending to override votes of a convention. I say “pretending” because they have no such power under our constitution and bylaws. They have now done this twice, whenever there was a vote they didn’t like. That is a violation of the “democracy” value; the convention is the larger body, representing the membership assembled, and is the governing body. The SCC is just an executive committee. Their override amounts to a coup.
At the same time, they have repeatedly taken actions that centralize power, arrogating it to themselves. The first was the attempted seizure of the Lane County Facebook page, with the intention of censoring it.
When they failed, it turned into a years-long vendetta against a long-standing chapter. It doesn’t matter whether you agree with Lane; censorship is one of our strictest taboos. They can be wrong if they want to. The vendetta, still going on, is a threat to ALL chapters – not that there are many, anymore. Apparently this SCC thinks there are too many.
They further refuse to do things required of them by the bylaws, like making party resources, such as they are, available to organizers and chapters. Not if they don’t like the people involved.
The SCC is authorized to “interpret” the bylaws, because you can’t administer them without knowing what they mean. But this is being used as a pretext to completely rewrite party governance. They “interpret”
the rules to mean whatever they feel like doing, which is grabbing more control for themselves. This is not Green governance.
That has had real consequences: for instance, after Lori Burton caught Nathalie falsifying the notes from a previous convention, the majority on the SCC made false accusations against Lori, an original member we count on for facilitation, and then spent $3000 on an outside facilitator who was clearly out of her depth. That’s an irresponsible use of the party’s money on petty revenge.
Now they have gone a disastrous step further by openly stealing the vote in January’s convention. They attracted 75 votes, then discarded 39 of them to get the result they wanted. This is an extraordinary level of corruption. the kind we associate with petty dictatorships. Consequently, the people who were actually elected to the SCC by that vote, constituting a majority and quorum, are convening a nominating convention and have established this website, which is not controlled by the false SCC.