The phone rang yesterday morning a little before 10. The first thing I heard on picking up the receiver was a low din of voices, so I asked, rhetorically, if this was a personal call. It was “Phyllis” calling to ask if I would renew my $40 membership to WGBY-TV in Springfield.

   I asked her if WGBY rebroadcasts the debates of candidates for statewide office that originate on WGBH-TV in Boston.

  She said that WGBH and WGBY are sister stations. She may have been calling from the Boston area because she said she didn’t know whether “you in Western Massachusetts” or “you in the Springfield area” got to see those debates.

  I mentioned that WGBH and WGBY are beneficiaries of the WGBH Educational Foundation, and she seemed to agree. But she was principally concerned with getting me to renew at the $40 level or higher with WGBY.

  I told her I didn’t think I could renew because the last time Jill Stein ran for governor as the Green-Rainbow Party’s nominee, in 2002, she was excluded by the “Consortium,” of which WGBH is a part, from participating in the gubernatorial debates. That was the year Republican Mitt Romney was elected governor, garnering 50 percent of the vote to Democrat Shannon O’Brien’s 45 percent. Stein finished third in a field of five with 76,530 votes, or about 3.5 percent.

   A few thoughts on the essay by Jason at Open Media Boston on Jill Stein’s and Grace Ross’s quite different campaigns for governor:

  It’s not a question of either going for the gold – quixotically or not – in a statewide race or letting dozens of flowers bloom in local and state legislative races. An exemplary candidate like Jill Stein (I’m biased) running as standard-bearer of the Green-Rainbow Party can inspire people to run for lesser offices throughout the Commonwealth as GRP candidates. For one thing, she can appear at their campaign functions, helping both her own candidacy and theirs. If citizens show up out of mere curiosity or out of concern for the their future, if they catch the bug and act accordingly they expand a constricted field.  

    Monday’s (1-25-10) column by New York Times op-ed regular and Nobel economics laureate Paul Krugman reminded me of something: He, like many a mainstream commentator, seems to disregard the importance of the idea that finite resources are finite. The economy is down, unemployment is way up and not showing signs of improving, and the stock market has declined yet again, and Krugman cites the danger of “a second Great Depression,” yet he writes of that potential event as if it would last only a decade or two.

   Krugman: “We have avoided a second Great Depression, but we are facing mass unemployment – unemployment that will blight the lives of millions of Americans – for years to come.”