Green Party Watch

From Bruce Dixon at Black Agenda Report:

Can a black president be guilty of environmental racism? President Obama’s new proposed nukes are in one of the poorest areas east of the Mississippi. Burke County Georgia is majority black, the home of existing commercial nuclear reactors and directly across the river from the Savannah River nuclear weapons facility. Its river is the 4^th most polluted in the nation, and its residents are suffering a veritable epidemic of unexplained cancers, with no local, federal, public or private funds available to test their air, soil, water or environment for its causes.  But Burke County’s residents are neither silent nor powerless. read more »

Bruce Dixon of Black Agenda Report has an intriguing article about the future plans of the Georgia Green Party to address the issue of the high rate of incarceration among African-Americans. The article is entitled “Why Democrats and Republicans won’t confront the issue of black mass incarceration, and why the Green Party will”. Some excerpts:

With less than 5% of the world’s population, the US accounts for a quarter of the world’s prisoners. While African Americans are only an eighth the population, we account for almost half the locked down… An astounding three percent of all black Americans are in prisons and jails, the majority for drug charges, although black and white rates of drug use have been virtually identical for decades…

Georgia’s Green Party, BAR has learned, will announce tomorrow that its major focus for the coming two years, including the 2010 election cycle, will be making a political issue out of black mass incarceration. The Green Party of GA intends to do this by running candidates for the state legislature and for district attorney and sheriff, not just in metro Atlanta, but in Augusta, Macon, Columbus, Savannah and elsewhere. read more »

In a statement you can either read or listen to, Black Agenda Report executive editor Glen Ford writes about the donations flowing to Barack Obama from voters sending in small donations.

The world of high finance may be traumatized and dysfunctional, but there’s still a bull market in the buying and selling of the U.S. presidency.

As Ford points out, some of these small donors are contributing in hopes of influencing a hoped for President Obama.

So, when small donors – people with $200 or less to spare – put their meager funds at the disposal of the two big business parties, the little guys’ pile of cash is dwarfed by the contributions from the big guys. Guess who really calls the shots.

I know that most all of us are stretched, and have candidates from Cynthia McKinney to your local school board to donate to, but if you have a few extra $$, Black Agenda Report is a site worth your support. Visit the site, and look to the upper right hand side and find the “donate” section.

Glen Ford’s Black Agenda Radio Commentary takes on the corporate media and their un-democratic control over what parties and candidates the “public” gets to hear about.

“Giant corporations control the political menu in the United States.”

We need to stop using the word “democracy” to describe the every two or four years exercise to fill electoral offices in the United States. The ritual is in fact a commercial enterprise utterly dominated by corporations that control not only which individuals are nominated by the two Big Business parties, but what ideas and political programs are made visible to the public. Citizens cannot possibly make free and informed choices when the only views to which they have access are those fed to them by the giant communications corporations that monopolize the American political conversation. When money and the rich man’s media are the supreme arbiters of which ideas, parties and candidates are permitted to effectively compete in the public arena, then democracy does not exist.

Read the rest here.

Is corporate media “rigging the election”, and if so, what can citizen parties do to change that?

In a radio commentary by Editor Glen Ford, Black Agenda Report endorses Cynthia McKinney for President. In the text accompanying the audio of the broadcast, BAR says

Two candidates with almost identical positions on virtually every issue fight to exhaustion over non-substantial concerns for months, and will doubtless soon celebrate having achieved “unity.” Tweedle-dum Hillary Clinton and Tweedle-dee Barack Obama may or may not emerge from the primary battles as friends – but what does that matter? “Their policies are interchangeable, as are their advisors…. All serve the same masters: the financial corporations.” The general election campaign, already begun, will see Obama and McCain draw politically closer each day, until at the end “the voters’ choice will be just a matter of personality and individual taste” – and race.

The commentary text is copied at BAR and they also supply a link to the audio.