Julian Assange's Political Party Implodes

[brooklynite]

Source: Daily Beast

Julian Assange may have blown his best chance to leave the Ecuadorean Embassy and return home to Australia as a free man.

The founder of WikiLeaks, who has been holed up in the Ecuador's diplomatic mission in London for over a year, is now facing another obstacle to freedom. Assange had founded the WikiLeaks Party in his native Australia in an attempt to win election to the Australian Senate; which he believes would make it more difficult for him to be extradited to Sweden where he faces sexual-assault charges. However, the party just split up in turmoil earlier this week after members of its national council discovered that Assange and his inner circle had been ignoring them and making major decisions on their own.
Britian Australia Senator Assange

Under the system of proportional representation used for the Australian Senate, voters in each state can either rank specific candidates or let their first choice party do so. Considering that there are often over 50 people on the ballot, voters to tend just defer to their party. The result is frenzied negotiations between small parties and large parties to maximize their representation and avoid wasted votes.

The Wikileaks Party's national council thought it had agreed to a plan where the party would be making deals to work closely with the Australian Green Party and other left-of-center groups. Then they discovered that Assange instead had made deals with a far-right party as well as one that is militantly pro-gun. The result was a number of party members quit, including Leslie Cannold, Assange’s No. 2 in the party, and Daniel Mathews, one of his close friends from college, leaving the party divided two weeks before the election.

In an article published in the Guardian on Wednesday, Mathews uses tough language to describe the personality of Assange, who he still admires, will vote for, and considers a friend. He describes Assange as “not ... suited to a party with democratic national-council oversight” and someone who “really ought not to have set up a party with internal democracy.”

Read more: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/08/23/julian-assange-s-political-party-implodes0.html

[Swagman]

1. Assange can still get elected to the Senate but not sure how that

would get him out of the Ecuador embassy.

I doubt the UK would recognise diplomatic immunity. They tried to trash the concept many times.

[onehandle]

2. Shucks. nt

[kelliekat44]

3. A betrayer is a betrayer...always. nt

[ucrdem]

4. Don't cry for me Oceania . . .

[flamingdem]

8. tee hee

good one!

[Tarheel_Dem]

10. +1

[JI7]

16. hahahahah

[FSogol]

25. DUzy!

[Drunken Irishman]

26. LMFAO

[silvershadow]

29. Ok, now that was

, I have to admit.

[Luschnig]

5. People have been fooled by Assange for a long time

but there has always been something manipulative and anti-democratic about his attitudes.

[struggle4progress]

6. ... The chairman of Australia First, Jim Saleam, is a former neo-Nazi who was convicted

in the late 1980s of organising a shotgun attack on the home of an Australian representative of the African National Congress ...
WikiLeaks attacked for directing preferences to right-wing parties
August 19, 2013
Heath Aston

[struggle4progress]

7. "... the WikiLeaks Party ... allied itself with the far-right Australia First Party ... It’s also

thrown its lot in with The Nationals, another right-wing party ..."
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/08/23/julian-assange-s-political-party-implodes0.html

[Tarheel_Dem]

13. Apparently, this is why Leslie Cannold is pissed. I don't think they ran this...

"alliance" by her.

[struggle4progress]

15. Why I resigned from the WikiLeaks party (Daniel Mathews)

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/22/wikileaks-julian-assange

[joshcryer]

17. Wow, Daniel really struggled not to come out and say the obvious.

Unbelievable.

[snot]

9. The anti-Assange forces are, as usual, all over this.

Have they missed any possible interpretation than might distract from the info revealed? Wait a moment.

[struggle4progress]

14. Well, let's look it over carefully. Assange's Wikileaks party was founded with

a reasonably democratic structure involving a governing council, but when the views of Assange and his father Shipton did not prevail regarding preferences, Assange sent an email to the governing council indicating he thought he should have veto power over the council's preference decisions. Assange's father meanwhile contacted several of the council members to propose going around the council. At about the same time, some Greens were informed that, contrary to the council's decision, Wikileaks preferences would not go to the Greens, though the council seems not to have been informed. The council only learned of the results when the preferences were posted -- and differed from those the council had chosen. Efforts to convene an emergency meeting of the council were unsuccesful. At this point there was a ruckus: a number of party members resigned, including Cannold, who would have filled Assange's seat if he had been elected and unable to serve: she cited lack of transparency and problems with democratic process in the party. The official party explanation was that the wrong preferences had somehow been submitted through administrative error, but Cannold doubted this, and at least one non-resigning candidate meanwhile announced that the actual preferences had been chosen to punish the Greens. When the "administrative error" explanation failed, the party tried promising to review the matter after the election, it being too late now to change the preferences with the election commission

The unhappiness results in part from the fact that some parties preferenced above the Greens are marginal parties of rightwing extremists: Australia First, for example, is led by a neo-Nazi who at the height of the anti-apartheid movement attempted to kill an ANC representative in Australia. The Greens feel betrayed because one of the Green candidates give low preference was one of Wikileaks main Australian supporters, in response to which the Wikileaks party has retorted that it is not "a front for the Greens" and that is has both leftwing and rightwing goals

[geek tragedy]

18. Who's left to be pro-Assanjge, given that he's a rightwing narcissistic jackhole? nt

[Tarheel_Dem]

11. Did they figure out that Julian's first & only interest is ASSange?

[msanthrope]

12. Assange is his own worst enemy. nt

[Sunlei]

19. why won't Australia take him back?

[grantcart]

20. And this gets to the real core of the question

Is Assange and Snowden against bad things that a government does

or

Are they against the modern state (ala FDR) because they perceive it as bad.


It is, I believe, quite clearly the second and many liberals have assumed it was the first.

[Peace Patriot]

27. Interesting analysis--far more interesting than the kneejerk anti-Assange/Snowden crapola...

...above (in this thread). Please say more about your reference to FDR, i.e., "the modern state." I would like to understand what you mean, and what you think that Assange and Snowden avow. I've seen "the modern state" that I've had loyalty to throughout my life--that I guess you could say was created by FDR (or by the New Deal generation--my parents' generation)--twisted into a monstrous war machine that no longer even resembles a democracy, by anti-democratic forces that now want to dismantle--are dismantling--every beneficial aspect of the New Deal, including Social Security, the public education system, labor rights, the Post Office, vote counting in the public venue, reverence for the rule of law, regulation of "organized money," you name it--"the Commons" is being dismantled. The New Deal was about our common responsibilities to each other--now all being thrown overboard by transglobal banksters, corporations and war profiteers.

I agree that "the modern state" that the FDR generation created HAS CHANGED--drastically, horribly, beyond recognition. And those of us who believe in our common responsibilities to each other can get very torn up seeing our Democratic Party--the New Deal party--hijacked into the echo anti-New Deal party, me-too-ing all this destruction of the Commons.

I would like to know what Assange and Snowden think about this--or what you think they think. It is an important topic.

I'm sure that CIA dirty ops players are hard at work on these two--Assange and Snowden--so I'm VERY WARY of negative stories about them. I think they're being done in--sabotaged, dirty tricked, smeared--in a concerted disinformation campaign--including, for instance, outright, set up lies, such as the "sex charges" against Assange. (There are, in fact, NO SEX CHARGES against Assange, though this vile 'meme' is repeated time and again). So it's very difficult to know what's true and what isn't about them. But whatever they may believe about "the modern state," they sure have stirred up a viper's nest of enemies in the U.S. corporate/war machine.

[bread_and_roses]

21. And exactly how does this matter to the issues?

It's news, sure. It's interesting, sure. But the Wikileaks revelations and the issues raised by them are not about Assange. The Snowdon leaks are not about Snowdon.

Assange may or may not be a megalomaniac. Snowdon may or may not be a Libertarian. It doesn't matter.

What matters is what was revealed.

[wildbilln864]

22. say it again b&r!

[struggle4progress]

24. Perhaps it depends on what you think the issues are. Wikileaks

a few years back, for example, provided the emails that rightwing climate-change deniers used to engineer the big phony climategate scandal that scuttled the Copenhagen climate summit. More recently, Assange's rightwing antisemitic friend "Israel Shamir" (whatever his real name is) carted a chunk of Manning's diplomatic cable release to Belarus where the documents were used to help the government there identify dissidents. So Assange's group has some history of serving rightwing causes. The fact that a handful of Assange confidants in the Wikileaks party ignored the governing council vote and instead handed party preferences to extreme rightwing parties may be quite informative

Assange around the 1:10 mark: "We released over ten years of emails from the CRU and those climate scientists"

[pnwmom]

28. It goes to Assange's motive and exposes his whole theory of "transparency"

as the fraud that it is. As his co-workers acknowledge, he doesn't believe in democracy. His worldwide fan club is worshipping someone whose only wish is to empower himself.

"This was mild criticism compared to Cannold, who proclaimed in a statement 'to keep being a candidate feels like I'm breaking faith with the Australian people.' Although she didn’t mention Assange by name, she denigrated the party, stating that its backroom maneuverings were an 'unacceptable mode of operation for any organization but even more so for an organization explicitly committed to democracy, transparency, and accountability.'"

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/08/23/julian-assange-s-political-party-implodes0.html

Influenced by Assange, Manning and Snowden released not just documents related to whistle-blowing (for Manning, the helicopter video; and for Snowden, documents related to US internal surveillance) -- but thousands or even hundreds of thousands of documents that they stole simply because they could.

These people are paying the penalty for buying into the self-aggrandizing scheme of Assange, whose feeling of power grows along with his pile of stolen documents.

[Hissyspit]

23. Wikileaks Party membership continues to rise:

http://twitpic.com/da0p1a

[Swagman]

30. wow some wacky replies here. Bizarre-people guffawing and celebrating

about the travails of those who have exposed how their government did murderous deeds.

Still let's lynch the "egotists"...the new word for whiste blowers.