The Green Party and the neighborhood assembly: You govern the way you win

Miyamoto Musashi, the legendary 16th century Japanese swordsman and author of The Book of Five Rings wrote, “You can only fight the way you practice”. This aphorism has been adopted by the United States Army in the following form:

“Remember, you will fight as you train!”

The Musashi statement is both a reminder and a warning for the radical Left: You will govern a city exactly the same way you win the election to govern it.

I was reminded of it when I read this criticism of one of my posts by a redditor with the rather odd nickname, “BecomingTesla”. In answer to my observation that the Harris campaign says nothing about the Green Party’s bold promise to replace the existing government with neighborhood assemblies, the redditor writes:

Can Joshua Harris and the Greens fix Baltimore?

I have been boning up on the Green Party’s 2016 campaign, because it is the largest single radical Left party in the United States. Its fate will be a big influence on the radical Left going forward.

As part of that effort, I have been looking at what is for me the most promising Green Party election campaign this season: Joshua Harris, a former Democrat, who is now running for mayor of Baltimore on the Green Party ticket. Harris’s campaign brings together a number of threads I have been thinking about this year and last in the wake of the SYRIZA disaster in Greece.

The Green Party public banking initiative

The centerpiece of the Harris campaign is his proposal to set up a public bank in Baltimore using the rainy day fund as initial capital. He wants to use these funds to invest beyond the inner harbor. The centerpiece of his proposal for radical change is a public bank, modeled on a bank that has already been established in North Dakota. According to Harris, “[public] banking, essentially, takes the concept of traditional banks and brings it into the government sector.”