Green Party Watch

Jill Stein, the Massachusetts Green-Rainbow Party’s 2010 candidate for governor, published an article on the Green-Rainbow Party website on Labor Day entitled “Jobs for All with a Green New Deal: We can eliminate unemployment while saving the planet”. Here is the article, which is well worth reading:

President Obama’s new job proposals are intended to send a political message that the President cares about the dismal state of the economy. But America needs a decisive and immediate solution, not a limited gesture for the unemployment emergency facing 25 million workers in need of full time jobs that aren’t there. read more »

David Korten, co-founder of YES Magazine and co-chair of the New Economy Working Group, was one of the featured speakers at the 2011 Green Party National Meeting in Alfred, New York. The complete text of his presentation is online at Green Papers. An excerpt:

America’s political future belongs to the party or movement that can provide a credible positive vision and program for America’s future. Among America’s political parties, only the Green Party is positioned to frame and build support for the missing vision and agenda. We desperately need a strong Green Party voice to help define the upcoming 2012 cycle political debates.

Most of the essential elements of a New Economy based on living system principles are already included in the Green US party platform. It remains only to pull it all together into a coherent, credible, compelling, and easily understood vision for America’s future.

And we are fortunate to have within our ranks a number of strong, politically and emotionally mature leaders with the potential to function as a strong politically savvy and publicly credible leadership team. America needs the Green Party and it is time to step up to the challenge of building a broad political base and mobilizing the funding required to make this party a coherent and effective national political force.

Read the full text of David Korten’s presentation “Agenda for a Green Economy” at Green Papers.

From the Weekly Press (Philadelphia) comes this piece from Chris Robinson, a Green Party organizer in Philadelphia:

Greens Oppose Philly’s Stop-and-Frisk
Weekly Press
• Wed, Aug 10, 2011

By Chris Robinson

“My father said if you are ever stopped by the police, you say, “Yes, Sir – No Sir.” Tell the officer what’s in your wallet. Don’t, don’t make no sudden moves and don’t run. Just get through whatever the situation is,’ Nutter said. ‘Those lessons stuck with me.’” [See, Philadelphia Daily News, June 22, 2011, page 3.]

During 2005, Philadelphia’s police made 102,319 pedestrian stops. When Michael Nutter became Mayor of Philadelphia in 2008, he ordered an increase in pedestrian stops under a policy commonly called “Stop-and-Frisk.” By 2009, pedestrian stops by police had increased 148 percent to 253,333. Of that total, 72 percent of the victims were African Americans, but only 8 percent of those pedestrian stops resulted in an arrest.

I, for one, would like to know what we should call the other 92 percent of those pedestrian stops. Were those 233,066 citizens “harassed by the police?” Were they “intimidated by the police?” Or should we say, “Their rights under the U.S. Constitution were violated?”

The Green Party has a history of opposition to stop-and-frisk. Under the heading “Racial Discrimination,” the Green Party national platform says, “We condemn the practice of racial profiling by law enforcement agencies, which are guilty of stopping motorists, harassing individuals, or using unwarranted violence against suspects with no other justification than race or ethnic background.”

At a Philadelphia City Council hearing on December 14, 2010, Green Party leader Hugh Giordano, who had run for PA House of Representatives, made it clear that stop-and-frisk targets, urban, minority and young citizens. “This law is a form of Jim Crow law,” said Giordano, referring to discriminatory laws used to maintain segregation of the races. “It attacks a certain group of people, and the numbers and testimony shows it.” Giordano also criticized Philadelphia’s City Council for allowing stop-and-frisk to continue unabated.
read more »

The debt deal is a good reason for voters to give up on the Democratic and Republican parties in 2012, say Green leaders at the party’s 2011 Annual National Meeting in Alfred, NY

• Video: Laura Wells, former Green candidate for the Governor of California, on the deficit fiasco http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRfIcz6s-OY

• Press conferences, forums, and other events at the Green Party’s national meeting, broadcast and archived on the Green Party’s Livestream Channel http://www.livestream.com/greenpartyus / More information on the meeting and Green Fest: http://nygreenfest.org

WASHINGTON, DC — Green Party candidates, officeholders, leaders, and state delegates meeting at the party’s 2011 Annual National Meeting in Alfred, New York, said that the Budget Control Act of 2011 should be the final straw for many voters, and encouraged Democrats and Republicans angry at their parties to vote Green in the 2012 election.

Greens attending the meeting called the budget deal a surrender by Democratic and Republican Party leaders to the most extreme elements of the GOP. read more »

Jason West, Mayor of New Paltz, New York, speaks with Rachel Maddow on the topic of same sex marriage. Jason West became one of the most popular Green Mayors several years ago when he defied state law and chose to marry dozens of gay couples from the steps of city hall under threat of arrest. (Sorry but you have to wade through 2 minutes of Obama Propaganda to get to the West interview):

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

-Mckinney to speak in Los Angeles on Saturday June 18th!!

EYEWITNESS LIBYA: CYNTHIA MCKINNEY REPORTS BACK ON THE MASSIVE BOMBIMG OF TRIPOLI
-Mckinney to speak in Los Angeles on Saturday June 18th!!

-Cynthia Mckinney was the 2008 Green Party Presidential candidate along with Vice Presidential Candidate Rosa Clemente.

The ANSWER Coalition is sponsoring a nationwide speaking tour featuring former Congressional representative and presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney, who is currently in Libya on her second fact-finding mission. McKinney will offer an eyewitness report exposing the truth that has been concealed by the western corporate media.

Also speaking on the tour will be Akbar Muhammad of the Nation of Islam, former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark and Brian Becker, National Coordinator of the ANSWER Coalition.

McKinney and the other speakers will shed light on the devastating impact of the U.S./NATO bombing of Libya and the extensive civilian casualties that the White House, Pentagon and the media have persistently denied. McKinney is currently on her second trip to Libya during the NATO bombing. During her time there, she has visited several hospitals, and has conducted video interviews with doctors and the wounded.

Under the guise of humanitarian intervention and protecting civilians, NATO has carried out a massive bombing of Africa’s largest oil producer. McKinney’s report shows how devastating the bombing has been for civilians in Tripoli and elsewhere.

When Harry Kelber, the 96 year old relentless labor advocate and editor of The Labor Educator speaks, the leadership of the AFL-CIO should listen. A vigorous champion for the rights of rank-and-file workers vis-a-vis their corporate employers and their labor union leaders, Kelber has recently completed a series of five articles titled
The reaction: Silence from union leaders, their union publications and at union gatherings.

Kelber, operating out of a tiny New York City office, knows more firsthand about unions, their historical triumphs, their contemporary deficiencies and their potential for tens of millions of working families than almost anyone in the country. Over the decades, no one has written more widely distributed pamphlets that cogently and concisely explain unions, the labor movement and anti-worker restrictive laws like the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, than this honest, sensitive worker campaigner.

At a perilous period for both working and unemployed Americans, facing deep recession, corporate abandonment to China and other repressive regimes, and the Republicans’ virulent assault on livelihoods and labor rights, Kelber believes that AFL-CIO should be on the ramparts. Instead, he sees it as moribund, hunkering down, with control of the power and purse concentrated in the hands of the silent and Sphinx-like Federation officers and the tiny clique of bureaucrats who run the show.

“In the AFL-CIO, the rank-and-file have no voice in electing their officials, because only the candidates of the Old Guard can be on the ballot,” he writes.

Certainly, the AFL-CIO is not reflecting the old adage that when “the going gets tough, the tough get going.” They recoil from any public criticism of Barack Obama, who disregards or and humiliates them by his actions.

Mr. Obama promised labor in 2008 to press for a $9.50 federal minimum wage by 2011, and the Employee Free Choice Act, especially “card check,” and then forgot about both commitments. He has not spoken out and vigorously fought for an adequate OSHA inspection and enforcement budget to diminish the tens of thousands of workplace related fatalities every year. He’s been too busy managing drones, Kandahar and outlying regions of the quagmire of our undeclared wars.

Nothing Obama does seems to publically rile the AFL-CIO. In February, he crossed Lafayette Square from the White House with great fanfare to visit his pro-Republican opponents at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce yet declined to go around the corner and visit the AFL-CIO headquarters. Where was the public objection from the House of Labor?

He prevents his vice-president from responding to the Wisconsin state federation of Labor’s invitation to address the biggest rally in Madison, Wisconsin protesting labor’s arch enemy, Republican Governor Scott Walker. Biden, a self-styled “union guy”, wanted to go but the political operatives in the White House said NO. Still no public objection from Labor’s leaders.

Kelber describes the lack of a strong, funded national and international strategy to deal with the growing gap between rich and poor and the expanding shipment of both blue and white collar jobs abroad. He laments AFL-CIO’s failure to develop a “working relation with the new global unions that are challenging transnational corporations and winning some agreements.” He also notes that the AFL’s top leaders “have minimal influence at world labor conferences. They rarely attend them, even when they are invited.”

Pushing for higher wages and worker rights in the poorer developing countries, including the adoption of International Labor Organization (ILO) standards has great merit and is also a constructive way to also protect American workers.

What is restraining AFL-CIO’s President Richard Trumka? A former coal miner, then a coal miners’ lawyer, and president of the United Mine Workers, Mr. Trumka has been at the Federation for over a decade. He knows the politics of the AFL-CIO, makes great speeches about callous corporatism around the country, and has a useful website detailing corporate greed.

Read the whole entry here:http://www.nader.org/index.php?/archives/2278-Revitalizing-the-AFL-CIO.html

Earlier this year, a group of environmental organization leaders sent a letter to both President Obama and China’s President Hu. It highlighted the current state of climate change inaction and concluded with the following:
Nature tells us time is running out, but we can’t see the clock. As we blindly reach critical climate “tipping points,” things promise to get worse, much worse. Central to the solution is a wartime-like mobilization by the governments of the United States and China to cut carbon emissions 80 percent (based on 2006 levels) by 2020. This is required if we are to reduce carbon emissions to 350 parts per million in the atmosphere, the level top climate scientists say is safe for humanity.

There is no more important measure of presidential leadership than living up to the expectations of our children to protect their future. Every day our respective governments fail to act, their future grows more perilous. We await your response.

I firmly believe that the same criteria of leadership needs to be applied to the selection of a Green Party presidential candidate. I will not vote for any candidate who does not make this the central issue. For the sake of our our children, we must find a voice who will speak for the future.

Taken from:http://cagreening.blogspot.com/

The San Fernando Valley Green Party has seen a recent surge of outreach, networking, and coalition building; this is how a grassroots movement is built. Our principles of social justice, environmental responsibility, grassroots democracy, and non-violence will prove to be the way of the future if we are to build the party in the next few years, and I am confident people will not give up to reach an attainable goal of informing our fellow citizens about the importance of the Green Party and the voting power we all hold. So with that, here are some of the thing that we have been working on…

-The San Fernando Valley Green Party held a successful candidates forum on February 21st on the eve of the Los Angeles city elections. SFV Green Party leader Michael Mccue hosted the forum and led the proceedings throughout the event. The real winners here were the people who attended, who became informed about issues and their candidate’s stances concerning how the city of Los Angeles is being managed and (mis)managed.

-Green Party activist Eugene Hernandez gives pep talks to local Mission college students, informing them about the Green Party and encouraging students to consider the Green Party as their alternative for the future. Eugene was allowed to speak inside various classrooms, which allowed him to reach a minimum of 200 students who heard his Green Party war-cry. Students, being open to this new and vibrant party, gave him their email in order to become volunteers for the party. Constant tabling every week, in addition, gave him the chance to register people as Greens.

-San Fernando Valley Green Party table 3 booths around the valley on St. Patrick’s Day, with all participating members commencing at a St.Paddy’s day-centered event in Canoga Park.

- 22 year old Green Party activist Edy Alvarez begins campaign on mutiple fronts. The campaign to have Green Party chapters rename their Facebook pages to include “Partido Verde” in their title. Networking at Los Angeles Valley college with tabling, registering, fundraising, and speaking to students about the Green Party. The campaign to have longtime Greens re-consider running this election cycle, as the only way to build the movement as the German and Canadian Greens have is to have people running for all districts. This includes encouraging independents who like Green Party politics but have never considered running. The creation of 3 new facebook pages, with the goals of informing Democrats, Republicans, and Independents as to why they should consider the Green Party as their new party. Encouraging new changes to be made at GreenPartyWatch.

-San Fernando Valley Green Party activist Robin Gilbert leads local petitioning on the “Yes on H” campaign for clean and honest Los Angeles city elections. With Los Angeles voters on board, the measure is approved, leading the way for cleaner and honest elections.

-San Fernando Valley Green Party members and California Libertarians take part of mutual softball game in hopes of working together in the future on key issues of agreement. The way forward is to work with activists, third party activists, who wish to see the elelctions open up to third parties. The first step is to hold our own debates and hold the Democrats and Republicans accountable. The process has already begun to hold our own debates at CSUN.

-Tia Chucha’s-sponsored event at Mission college gives SFV Greens tabling booth, increasing awareness for the Green Party.

-San Fernando Valley Green Party sets up booth at Worldfest on May 22nd, with Green Party California Gubernatorial candidate Laura Wells, former Green Party Santa Monica Mayor Mike Feinstein, and Green Party activists speaking to event goers about the future and how the Green Party is the imperative if we are to have a sustainable world to hand off to our future generations. With people genuinely wanting a better world, they changed their registration and were welcomed into the Green Party.

-Talks for systemic networking and participation from Valley registered Green Party members who perhaps have never participated in local membership-building, but might be willing to become active. This includes fundraising, tabling, merchandise, internet, and running in local races.

Well, to all those that managed to read through, I could have written more, but I could go on and on. I hope this inspires you to stay active in the Green Party as we have seen the Green Party grow immensely around the world in the last ten years, and the change we want to see will begin if we become active. Let’s do it, together! Here’s for the Green Party in 2012!

If you or someone you know is interested in the Los Angeles Green Party, leave a message here with your email and I will gladly add you to our Facebook and email list.

The Green Party has not been able to appeal to Americans at large, plain and simple. The spoiler argument, wasting your vote, The Green Party who, What the hell is the Green Party, are the Green Party environmental freaks, does the Green Party have elected members, can I purchase any Green Party merchandise, what is their platform, etc. etc. You guys get the idea. That’s why I propose the following: the creation of 3 brand new Facebook pages to be headed by Green Party members who happen to have a little extra time on their hands. This is what I would ideally like to name the pages…

“Democrats for the Green Party”
“Republicans for the Green Party”
“Independents for the Green Party”

I really believe this idea could take off because we could present the Green Party platform to up to 500 million facebook users. Just think of all the exposure and possibilities. The Democrats and Republicans have been ripping apart the Green Party for too long, so we are going to push back with the power of the written word! Now is the time guys! Don’t wait. How much longer are we going to sit around and do nothing?

From a commentator – I would love to see Bernie Sanders get the nomination with Jesse Ventura as his running mate. They are two prominent names that would bring recognition to the Green Party. They both have served in public office, are independents having no ties to either Dems or GOP. Bernie’s policies would help erase our huge deficit and Jesse’s military background would help with foreign affairs.

More Info
TOMORROW WE NEED YOU. SPREAD THE WORD.

The Green Party of CA will hold a news conference tomorrow, Tuesday, 10:30 a.m. at PG&E, 1 Market Plaza in San Francisco.

We will unveil our resolution and new campaign calling for the ” immediate closure and decommissioning of the state’s nuclear power plants at Diablo Canyon and San Onofre… to promote the safety of all Californians and our fellow living beings, and to protect our natural environment.”

Show up. Bring your signs, Green t-shirts, friends and family.

Contact:
Marnie Glickman
marnie.glickman@gmail.com
415.259.7121

Facebook event page:http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=112566668828712&notif_t=event_invite