Peter Camejo
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Peter Miguel Camejo (born December 31, 1939) is an American financier, businessman, political activist, author, and one of the founders of the socially responsible investment movement. In 2004, he was selected by independent candidate Ralph Nader as his vice-presidential running mate. Camejo was a candidate in the 2006 California gubernatorial election on the Green Party ticket. Camejo also ran in the 2003 California recall election where he placed 4th in a field of 135 candidates with 2.4 percent of the vote. In January 2007, Camejo announced that he has been diagnosed with early-stage lymphoma, a cancer that is usually treatable.[1]
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[edit] Early life
Camejo is a first generation American of Venezuelan descent. Although he spent his earliest years in Venezuela, he was born in the Queens borough of New York City where his mother lived when she moved to America, giving him American birthright. His parents, Elvia Guanche and Dr. Daniel Camejo Octavio,[1] divorced when he was seven, and he came with his mother to reside in the United States — although on summer holidays he would return to Venezuela to visit relatives. He competed for Venezuela in yachting in the 1960 Summer Olympics.
He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he played soccer and began his involvement in left-wing politics, and the University of California, Berkeley where he studied history. In 1967, after winning a student council election at Berkeley, he was suspended for "using an unauthorized microphone" in a protest against the Vietnam War; as a result of these activities, he was deemed to be one of California's ten most dangerous citizens by then-governor Ronald Reagan.
[edit] Political evolution
Initially, Camejo was a member of the Socialist Workers Party, a Trotskyist party. As a branch organizer, he sought to reorient the SWP towards the student movement[2]. He was the SWP's nominee for President in 1976 and won 90,986 votes or 0.1 percent.
The SWP's policy was to turn its members into "proletarians" by having them take jobs in factories and advocate for a worker-based class struggle. By 1980, Camejo came to disagree with this policy in favor of democratic socialism, and the SWP expelled him from its party.
Camejo joined the Green Party after it gained ballot status in 1992, and at a number of state conventions encouraged the party to run more candidates for statewide office, including its first gubernatorial candidate in 1998, former Congressman Dan Hamburg.
[edit] Early Gubernatorial campaigns
In 2002, Camejo ran uncontested in the California Green Party governatorial primary. In the general election, he ran as part of the first full slate of Green candidates for all seven of California's partisan constitutional offices. Camejo los the election to Governor Gray Davis, but he polled 393,036 votes, for 5.3 percent of the vote[3], the largest vote total for a third party in the California governor's race in more than fifty years. Camejo earned more votes in San Francisco than Republican gubernatorial nominee Bill Simon, a rarity in third-party politics.
In 2003, he was the endorsed Green Party candidate for governor (although several other Greens appeared on the ballot) in an unprecedented California recall election, in which he polled 242,247 votes, or 2.8 percent, coming in fourth in a field of 135 certified candidates. In a strange preview of the divisions about to erupt on the left in the following year, Camejo at first cooperated with, then competed with fellow recall candidate Arianna Huffington due to her flip-flopping from support of the recall to her last-minute campaigning on behalf of Davis.(During a press conference in support of Peter Camejo for California Governor, pranksters hit Nader in the face with a pie as Camejo looked on.)[2]
[edit] 2004 Vice-Presidential campaign
In January 2004, Camejo initiated the Avocado Education Project that issued a statement known as the Avocado Declaration. The Avocado Declaration described actions by the Democratic Party and the Republican Party as hindering social progress by working together to largely benefit a small, wealthy constituency. It further advocated for a fiercely independent Green Party that would be capable of attracting nonvoters and disillusioned mainstream party supporters.
"The Green Party is at a crossroads," the Declaration began. Indeed, the central debate within the national Green Party prior to its 2004 presidential nomination was whether to follow Camejo's advice of pursuing a confrontational campaign strategy promulgated in The Avocado Declaration, or to abandon an independent voice on the national scene. Camejo supporters perceived the "safe-states" strategy of avoiding campaign activity in swing states as playing favorites within the two-party system by avoiding competition detrimental to the Democratic Party nominee, while many supporters of David Cobb preferred to cast their efforts in terms of conserving party resources for local and state races. While Camejo and his allies advocated attracting new party members by sharply defining campaign issues, others -- remembering the party's experiences in the 2000 presidential election -- feared a backlash against the Green Party if it was accused of helping to return George W. Bush to the White House.
Camejo was submitted as a candidate in the Green Party of California's March 2, 2004 Presidential Preference Primary. Before the primary, he made it known (though not in the state's official voter guide) that he was not planning to run for president and that any delegates pledged to him would not be committed to vote for him after the first round. The popular former gubernatorial candidate received 33,753 votes or 75.9 percent of the Green Party membership's support in California[4], and 72.7% of the votes in all Green Party primary elections[5].
In June 2004, Camejo accepted the vice-presidential spot in the independent campaign of former two-time Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader. With votes for Nader added in, the Nader/Camejo ticket had what appeared to be an insurmountable 83% of Green voters behind their candidacies going into the Green Party National Convention[6].
However, events took a surprising turn at the Green Party convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on June 26, 2004. Many delegates declined to represent the votes cast by Greens in their home states, "flipping" their votes in the first and/or second rounds of voting in favor of Texas native and ex-attorney David Cobb amid allegations of delegate-stacking[7]. Cobb had received only 12.2 percent support from Green Party primary voters, including a humiliating fourth-place finish of 10.1 percent in his recently adopted home of Humboldt County, trailing not only Camejo, but write-in votes for Nader and votes cast for New York environmental activist Lorna Salzman (even though she had never visited that county)[8]. The controversy surrounding the 2004 convention has since been significant to supporters of both Camejo and Cobb, and to those involved in Green Party politics in general. It has been documented in the book Green Party Tempest by long-time Rhode Island Green Party activist and candidate Greg Gerritt. Camejo supporters feel that the convention was completely unfair, by giving votes to states out of proportion to their Green Party membership and due to coercion by those in the Cobb camp as well as those who did not want a candidacy that could be seen as threatening to the Democratic Party.
Nader and Camejo continued their campaign as independent and Green candidates, having also been endorsed by the Reform Party on May 11, 2004.
Both Nader and Camejo said the main reason they ran in the 2004 election was because there were no other national candidates demanding an immediate withdrawal of American troops from what they believe is an immoral and unconstitutionally pursued War in Iraq (though Cobb, Libertarian candidate Michael Badnarik, Constitution Party candidate Michael Peroutka, Socialist Party USA candidate Walt Brown and Socialist Workers Party candidate Róger Calero also opposed the war to varying degrees). However, unlike all of these candidates, because Ralph Nader was regularly invited to appear on mainstream news, the Nader and Camejo team were the only candidates which had a regular voice in the mainstream media arguing to bring the troops home.
The Nader/Camejo ticket came in third in the election, polling approximately 460,000 votes or 0.4 percent as the pair were somewhat crippled by the denial of ballot access in California and other states due to Cobb's occupation of the Green Party ballot line (and in some cases to Democrat-inspired lawsuits to disqualify ballot access drives)[9]. Camejo's supporters claimed vindication of their assertion that Nader/Camejo had four-to-one support within the party, as Cobb and running mate Pat LaMarche received scarcely a fifth of their support at 119,859 votes or 0.1 percent, a drop of 95% compared to the Green Party's 2000 national ticket.
[edit] 2006 governor campaign
Camejo made his third bid for Governor against incumbent Arnold Schwarznegger and Democratic Party nominee Phil Angelides. Camejo received 193,553 votes, or 2.3 percent, part of a general trend of declining support for Green candidates across the state.
[edit] Future political campaign(s)
Just over a month after the 2004 election, Camejo was elected as one of California's delegates to the National Committee of the Green Party. At the 2005 Green Party National Convention, Camejo stated he would not be a candidate for President in 2008.
Camejo has written a number of articles concerning the divisions evident in the Green Party in the aftermath of the contested 2004 national convention, continuing the themes of the Avocado Declaration in opposing attempts to "cozy up" to the newly-formed Progressive Democrats of America.
[edit] Family life
Camejo is married and has two children. He lives in Folsom, California. He is currently Chief Executive Officer of Progressive Asset Management, a financial investment firm that encourages socially responsible projects. He is the author of "The SRI Advantage- Why Socially Responsible Investing Has Outperformed Financially", and other books. His newest book is "California: Under Corporate Rule," written with Green Party members Todd Chretien, Sarah Knopp, Rachel Odes, Don Bechler, Mehul Thakker, Forrest Hill, and Donna Warren, and is available at Vote Camejo.
[edit] Conflict with the Green Party
Camejo has been criticized by some Greens for his 2004 Presidential election to run as an independent with Ralph Nader. During that campaign, Camejo described Greens who supported David Cobb as more Democratic than Green, labelling them "Demogreens." In 2004, Camejo established the group Greens for Democracy and Independence (GDI), ostensibly as a declaration of independence from the Democratic Party. Some Greens preferred None of the Above (NOTA) and chose David Cobb as a compromise to avoid association with Ralph Nader.
In the run-up to the June 6, 2006 primary elections in his home state, Camejo created a California political action committee, Green IDEA (Independence, Democracy, Empowerment, Accountability), to run candidates for California Green County Councils, the local leadership bodies of the California Green Party[10]. Some Greens consider outside intervention in local elections to be a contravention of the Green Ten Key Values of Decentralization and Grassroots Democracy, although these same principle-motivated Greens were silent when former presidential rival David Cobb formed his own Go Green campaign committee to engineer the capture of a majority of seats on the County Council of the Green Party of Humboldt County -- in opposition was a slate of three incumbent candidates supportive of GDI and critical of Cobb's leadership within the party.
Some have criticized Camejo for entering the recall effort to depose Gray Davis. According to critic Peter Daniels, Camejo "moved quickly to lend his support to the right-wing effort to depose Davis."
Many other Greens dispute this assessment, noting that Camejo's objections to Davis were entirely consistent with his previous attempt to unseat him the year before[11]. In the end the Green Party state convention easily voted to endorse Camejo as a recall replacement candidate, while the delegates could not find consensus on whether to support or oppose the recall question itself.
Critics from Camejo's former socialist circles, as could be expected, are disdainful of Camejo's abandonment of the doctrinaire socialism of his youth, accusing him of abandoning a substantive critique of capitalism and its connection to war, inequality and attacks on democracy. For his part, Camejo unequivocally stated that the Green Party was not and never would be socialist, repeating his commitment to providing solutions to practical issues above and beyond the need for ideological purity.
[edit] Publications
While a member of the Socialist Workers Party, Camejo wrote the book Racism, Revolution, Reaction, 1861-1877. The Rise and Fall of Radical Reconstruction, published by Pathfinder Press. [12]
As a candidate for California Governor, Camejo, along with other Green Party candidates and activists, wrote California Under Corporate Rule, which he self-published. [13]
[edit] Footnotes
- ^ http://www.wargs.com/political/camejo.html
- ^ Editors (August 13, 2003 ) "Nader Takes Pie For Green Party As He Endorses Recall Candidate." CommonDreams.org.
[edit] External links
- Camejo 2006 campaign website
- Official VoteCircle Profile
- Rigged Convention, Divided Party by Carol Miller and Forest Hill
- 'Is green the color of protest?' SFGate.com, August 2006
- Radio Interview with Jo Chamberlain, Indybay, June 2006
- CNN Factsheet On Peter Camejo, 2004
- San Francisco Chronicle campaign profile, 2002
- California election results
- The Avocado Declaration
- To Nader or Not to Nader? democracynow.org debate between Peter Camejo and David Cobb
- sf-frontlines.com article about the 2004 Green Party candidate selection (pro-Nader/Camejo)
- sf-frontlines.com article about the Nader/Camejo campaign rally in July 2004
- Peter Camejo speech at the Nader/Camejo 2004 campaign rally in San Francisco
- Progressive Asset Management website
- Mentions of Camejo during Berkeley Free Speech events
- November 17, 2006 Post-Election Interview at Electric Politics
| Preceded by Linda Jenness and Evelyn Reed |
Socialist Workers Party Presidential candidate 1976 (lost) |
Succeeded by Andrew Pulley |
| Preceded by Ezola B. Foster |
Reform Party Vice Presidential candidate 2004 (a) (lost) |
Succeeded by — |
Ralph Nader presidential campaign, 2004
