Open Letter to KPFA's Sunday Show Host Philip Maldari

The argument that Bernie Sanders supporters or Green voters will cost Democrats the election has been shrill ever since Ralph Nader ran as a Green in 2000. You should at least acknowledge that there's nothing new about it, and invite someone on who has a different "strategy" than that of Bill Fletcher and John Nichols.

We hear a lot from any-blue-will-boogaloo evangelists Nichols and Fletcher on the Sunday Show. It seems like each is on at least once a month. Can't you bring in another perspective that you disagree with? One that many of your callers may disagree with as well? KPFA is supposed to be committed to diversity, including diversity of opinion.

Maybe invite Glen Ford? Laura Wells? Jill Stein? Max Blumenthal? Chris Hedges? Lee Camp? Glenn Greenwald? Jimmy Dore? Or Cheri Honkala, founder of the Poor People's Campaign for Economic Human Rights, who ran as Jill Stein's vice presidential candidate in 2008? Cheri is not, as Fletcher said, "privileged," not by a long shot. She's been homeless. She organizes poor and homeless communities in Kensington, a desperate, post-industrial neighborhood in Philadelphia. And she's a Green.

And why aren't you talking about voter suppression and the gap between exit polls and computerized vote tabulations that favored Hillary Clinton in 2016 and now favor Joe Biden in the Democratic primaries? Or the majority of votes for Bernie Sanders in primaries with paper balloting, and the much larger majority for Hillary Clinton in primaries with electronic balloting in 2016?

Today Bill Fletcher said that the election is not being rigged and no one should use that argument to justify not voting for Joe Biden. Why not ask Bill Fletcher how he knows that? The honesty of these Democratic primaries and the 2016 primaries is contested by many leading left intellectuals. Last week CodePink and the Grayzone Project confronted Luis Almagro, Secretary General of the Organization of American States, to ask why he sends election observers to states the US wants to overthrow, but not to the highly suspect US Democratic primaries. Almagro was quickly whisked away in a big black limo with his security detail.
https://thegrayzone.com/2020/03/13/watch-grayzone-codepink-oas-monitor-democratic-primary/

I myself re-registered from Green to Democrat to vote for Bernie Sanders, but there's no chance in hell I will vote for Joe Biden. I understand why others will, and I won't castigate them for choosing to, but I won't.

Refusing the any-blue-will-boogaloo strategy is not an emotional expression. It's a different strategy, one that looks beyond the 2020 election. Any-blue-will-boogaloo, no matter how hawkish and right wing, has got us to the state we're in now, with Trump in the White House and US wars in more countries than most of us can keep track of, far more than 7 if you include hybrid warfare. Obama started two new aerial bombing wars, Libya in 2011 and Syria in 2014.

And do you really want to install someone who shouldn't even be driving—Joe Biden—as commander-in-chief?