Bio-Regionalism and Immigration

As someone who has been engaged in public education and water planning there is a vital need for local Greens to propose bodies and committees that integrate immigrants into decision-making process to address their needs and concerns. I know California is lagging in providing real support systems for Spanish speaking students and this is wrapped around the issues of teacher training AND budget cuts. Further, the rapid rate of increasing student populations with specific needs and the impacts of growth on water quality and supply are responsibilities that can most effectively be addressed by those directly impacted. We begin to break down the kinds of antagonisms that have been allowed to fester for so long when we work together in our communities. People who are labeled as "anti-immigrant" are often responding to the failures of current systems to address the profound demographic changes and often are unable themselves to impact on local policies.

It is fine to support immigrants. But as things stand now too many in California are denied adequate education, often end up in jail and prison (or held in virtual bondage)and they cannot get the support they need for their communities' water systems, such as in the Central Valley cities. We are disregarding that "sanctuary" as it is currently implemented remains rested in proclamations. We need to define that "sanctuary" in reality means safety, security and opportunity for a new and brighter future. The public is aware and frustrated at the failures of public schools and water systems. Getting people to interact begins to break down the walls and establishes a common and shared vision for their communities that is not exclusive to any given group of people.

In NM the Water Utility Authority (ABCWUA) had a Stakeholder Advisory Committee until it was dissolved administratively. When it was functioning it enabled users and stakeholders to engage directly with the ABCWUA and provide input and present concerns of different groups as to what things they were dealing with regarding the resource. From there, it is up to a Green Party to provide the electoral and political leadership that begins to break down the walls as they exist today. The dismantling of the Advisory Committee demonstrates how those determined to preserve the status quo have no desire to open our governing entities. It also demonstrates the real role of a Green Party in building change. We need to promote candidates who present new opportunities and the campaigns should not just focus on the debates as they are constructed today by the duopoly parties. We can make real proposals in the structure of the governing entities of our communities that begin to break down the animosities as they may exist. Our neighbors are not our enemies; they are the source of new solutions and alternatives that will improve sustainability and improve the quality of life for all.

Bruce Dixon on Atlanta - Template for L.A. Critique?

Editor's Note: Bruce A. Dixon is a distinguished journalist living in Marietta GA, where he is a principal at a strategic telephony and consulting firm, and a state committee member of the Georgia Green Party. He wrote this after Atlanta's African-American Mayor Kasim Reed ordered a violent crackdown on Occupy Atlanta. I have cross-posted the entire commentary because, in my opinion, this is a beautiful example of the critique I would like to see published about California's own "Black Misleadership Class." Where I live in Los Angeles, the 3 city council members most hostile to Occupy LA are the 3 African-Americans: Herb Wesson, my Councilman Bernard C. Parks, and mayoral candidate Jan Perry. Moreover, the overwhelming majority of L.A.'s race-obsessed presumed to be "progressive" intelligentsia has either been indifferent, lukewarm, or hostile to Occupy LA. Too many progressives cling to sentimental feelings about Democratic Party Hacks in communities of color -- bamboozled by 40-year-old myths that simply "Being Black" confers a special high-minded moral sensitivity for "the poorest of the poor" and "the most vulnerable" ... blah, blah, blah.

Do you think this is too harsh? Post a comment. I am sorry to report that we have no consensus among L.A. Greens about our relationship with Occupy LA and the "Black Misleadership Class." Nevertheless, I am determined to write a statement on this and I need your input.

Posted on The Black Commentator, October 26, 2011
Occupy Atlanta VS Kasim Reed,
the Black Misleadership Class and the One Percent
By Bruce A. Dixon

Back in January 2010, I wrote that

"...the black political elite no longer believes its mission is to fight for peace and justice. The newer, more cynical black elite are unmoored from their peace-and-justice-loving base. They are focused on their own careers, and the corporate largesse that makes those careers possible... the black politics of a previous generation, in which black candidates and public officials were expected to stand for something beside their own careers, is over..."

I pointed to Atlanta mayor Kasim Reed as poster boy for this new and cynical generation of the black misleadership class.

On Saturday afternoon, Atlanta mayor Kasim Reed screamed, shouted and threatened representatives of Occupy Atlanta, declaring that those who wanted to be arrested "would get their wish." After a mobilization of several hundred additional protesters, some barricades and a threatening display of police numbers, City Hall decided not to clear Woodruff Park that night. The mayor declared he would send a delegation of preachers to talk to occupiers, but that this would be their "last chance."

By Monday, the mayor regained his composure, and called an afternoon press conference in which he declared that Occupy Atlanta was an imminent danger to public health and safety, because of a single gas-fueled electric generator. In the park. Never mind, Occupy Atlanta's Tim Franzen pointed out, that Atlanta tailgaters at college and NFL football games deploy dozens of these in parking lots every weekend.

Atlanta police massed around the occupiers again Sunday and Monday nights, amid renewed mayoral threats, but took no further action. TV viewers were treated to the spectacle of former mayor Andrew Young advising occupiers to settle on one or two good demands and leave the park. When a couple of the mayor's preachers, who claimed they were not acting on behalf of the mayor finally showed up on Tuesday, they demanded an immediate meeting with five to seven leaders of the occupation, and one or two demands they could take back to City Hall. Spokespeople for the occupiers, who included State Senator Vincent Fort, Ron Allen, Tim Franzen, Joe Beasley and a handful of others told them the earliest meeting date that could be arranged would be Thursday, and expressed serious doubt that the mayor was able or willing to address their demands. The Thursday meeting was agreed upon, and the preachers departed.

But late Tuesday night, in a display of contempt for the occupiers and his own preachers, Mayor Kasim Reed ordered Woodruff Park surrounded by hundreds of police, who cleared the park shortly after midnight, arresting more than 50.

Atlanta's Black Mayors, The Black Misleadership Class and the One Percent

Nobody should doubt that Atlanta mayor Kasim Reed is firmly in the pocket of the one percent. It's old news. It's a choice he and leaders of the local black misleadership class made more than a generation ago. The clique of black political leaders who came to power with Atlanta mayor Maynard Jackson in 1973, and who still hold sway today have never been friends or advocates of black or white working people. Though they owed, and still owe their offices, careers and personal fortunes to the political victories won by the Freedom Movement, Atlanta's black misleadership class has rarely if ever lined up with black and working people when it came to economic justice.

Mayor Maynard Jackson in 1977 defined the relationship between the class of newly privileged black politicians and the rest of black Atlanta by deliberately provoking and then savagely breaking a strike by Atlanta sanitation workers seeking decent pay and medical benefits. Georgia's white business leaders began to understand that though the color of the city's politicians had changed, little else would. And it hasn't. By the end of the 70s, the Maynard Jackson administration boasted of leaveraging city contracts and the construction of the nation's largest airport to create two or three dozen new black millionaires, from whom wealth was to trickle down to the entire African American community. The only thing that really trickled down to black Atlanta and black communities nationwide was the self-celebrating myth of Black Mecca, where the climate was benign, the housing affordable, the jobs plentiful and the politicians enlightened. It was a myth, but a potent one.

Maynard Jackson was succeeded by Andy Young, a former confidante of Martin Luther King. Young's signature project was bringing the 1996 Olympics to Atlanta, providing the excuse to clear vast tracts in the city of poor people and abandoned industries, and replace them with richer people and more shopping. Jackson returned for a last term after Young, and was followed by Bill Campbell, who sold the city's water network to a private firm. Young cashed in his chips as a civil rights icon to found GoodWorks International, a PR and consulting firm for multinational corporations like Wal-Mart and Nike, and serve on the boards of corporations like Barrick Gold, which is heavily implicated in plunder and genocide in the Congo.

Shirley Franklin came in after Campbell with a campaign of sweeping privatizations of parks, city services, parking and more. But with Atlanta's newly privatized water works pumping rust colored mud through the taps of tens of thousands of Atlanta residents (including wealthy white ones) the drive to privatize everything in sight had to be slowed, though Franklin was able to complete demolition of nearly all Atlanta's public housing, driving tens of thousands of poor black Atlantans from the city. Like Andy Young, Franklin also cashed in after leaving Atlanta's City Hall, as a consultant for the telecom industry, and championing the privatization of schools and services of all kinds.

By 2002, after a generation of “Black Mecca” and black political leadership, the city's poverty rate was in the top five of metro areas nationwide. One in three black Atlanta children is in poverty, even with the expulsion of tens of thousands of poor Atlantans as their neighborhoods have been demolished.

The current mayor is firmly within the tradition of his predecessors. Kasim Reed is a corporate lawyer for the rich and racist, a man who has never fought for or believed in justice for ordinary people. As a state senator in 2006 he introduced vicious anti-immigrant legislation that paralleled similar racist bills passed this year in Georgia and Alabama. As a mayoral candidate, Reed called himself “a civil rights lawyer,” leaving out the key detail that his practice represented the corporations that violated civil rights, not the black, brown, elderly or disabled plaintiffs whose rights had been violated. The day before being sworn in as mayor Reed promised local business leaders to deal with downtown “panhandlers” in what he called a “very muscular” fashion. The term “panhandlers” is shorthand for homeless black males, even though any sociologist or person who works with the homeless will tell you that only white homeless men can beg on the street. Unless they are very elderly or handicapped, black men are considered inherently too inherently “threatening” to be successful street beggars. The convention and tourist industry seems to want black men, especially homeless black men out of downtown Atlanta. Hence an obsession for Kasim Reed, and if his wealthy real estate backers is closing down the large homeless shelter at Peachtree & Pine, at the edge of downtown Atlanta only a mile from the site of Occupy Atlanta where hundreds of men, many of them gainfully employed, sleep every night.

Where the Occupy Movement in Atlanta May Be Going

About half the Atlanta occupation in Woodruff Park was composed of homeless mostly black men who had been in the park on a daily basis before the occupation. When the mostly white occupiers brought tents and food in, some the homeless got tents too, and were able to use the portable toilets. The homeless men were fed along with the occupiers, and took part in daily marches to banks, the scenes of police shootings and other activities. Though significant tensions existed within and among the occupiers, homeless and not, the two were beginning to learn how to work together.

Headquarters of the occupation, according to some of its leaders, may be moving to the Peachtree-Pine shelter complex at the edge of downtown. In contrast to cities where the mostly white occupations have utterly failed to connect with the ongoing struggles of local residents, Atlanta's occupiers are being driven into the arms of the homeless community. The next version of Occupy Atlanta will be even less to the liking of city officials and business leaders.

Why are police arresting thousands and dispersing “Occupy” gatherings in dozens of cities across the nation? Because they know that the occupy movement is a clear, present and persistent danger to established authority. People are emerging from their homes --- if they still have homes --- freeing themselves from TV and shopping, if they still have anything to shop with. They are coming out on corners in hundreds of cities and towns, most of them, for their first political activity beyond the narrow vote-and-go-home model sold to them by the two corporate parties.

Neither occupations nor occupiers are perfect. People are coming as they are, bringing the baggage of racism and classism and sexism, of divergent political views, of poverty, homelessness and despair. But they are coming. They are eager to connect with each other, to connect with whatever movement exists, or to help bring one into being that can challenge and change the world they live in. They are ready to learn and do real politics. What could possibly be more subversive, and more hopeful?

Read the Original Commentary at:
http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/occupy-atlanta-vs-kasim-reed-black-misleadership-class-and-one-percent

GP: Wall Street Protest Message is not 'Vote Democrat'

Green Party to Democratic Apologists: The Message of the Wall Street Protests is Not 'Vote Democrat'

GREEN PARTY OF THE UNITED STATES
http://www.gp.org

For Immediate Release:
Sunday, October 9, 2011

Contacts:
Scott McLarty, Media Coordinator, 202-518-5624, cell 202-904-7614, mclarty@greens.org
Starlene Rankin, Media Coordinator, 916-995-3805, starlene@gp.org

WASHINGTON, DC -- Green Party leaders sharply criticized Democratic Party supporters online and in the media who have tried to turn the ongoing Occupy Wall Street, Occupy America, and October 2011 demonstrations across America into an appeal to vote Democrat and reelect President Obama in 2012.

Many of the protesters have expressed their disgust with two-party politics (http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/wall-street-protesters-disgusted-parties-14687840) and the influence of corporate money. Organizers have rejected attempts to shoehorn the movement into any party and assert that the protesters come from diverse political persuasions.

Greens, who are participating in the protests and among the organizers, have pointed to the Green Party's alternative vision for America, as expressed in the Green New Deal (http://www.greenpartywatch.org/2010/08/11/62-green-candidates-endorse-green-new-deal) and on the party's web site (http://www.gp.org).


The Green Party offers a platform for peace, economic security for working people, millions of new green jobs in conservation and clean energy development, an end to fossil fuel addiction, real steps for curbing global climate change and restoring the health of the planet, universal health care (Medicare For All), and reforms that would limit the power of corporations and restore the promise of participatory democracy and fair elections. Green candidates do not accept corporate money.

Mark Dunlea, co-founder of the Green Party of New York State: "The Democratic Party does not speak for the Occupy Wall Street, Occupy America, and October 2011 protesters. No political party speaks for the protesters, not even the Green Party. The protesters speak for themselves. The Green Party has endorsed and joined the demos because we share the same frustration and anger as the other protesters. Greens are there because we bring alternative ideas like the Green New Deal. And we're there because we encourage the 99 percent -- We The People -- to organize, end pro-corporate two-party rule, and replace the politicians in public office who enabled Wall Street's theft of America's future. This can only happen through an independent alliance with the same diversity we're seeing at the protests: labor activists, Greens, progressives, anarchists, libertarians, nonvoters, disappointed Democrats and Republicans, and all others who want real change."

Sanda Everette, co-coordinator of the Coordinating Committee of the Green Party of California: "If pro-Democrat web sites and the media believe that the message of the protests is 'Vote Democrat' and 'Reelect Obama' in 2012, they've missed the point. The current demonstrations became necessary after Election Day 2008, when too many liberal, progressive, and antiwar Democrats declared 'Mission Accomplished' with Barack Obama's election victory. The Democratic Party has proved itself as dedicated to Wall Street as the GOP. We look forward to more protests and direct action as the election season unfolds, especially during the 2012 Democratic and Republican conventions."

Farheen Hakeem, Green candidate for the Minnesota State Senate in District 61 (http://www.farheenhakeem.org) and co-chair of the Green Party of the United States: "Say no to the parties of war and corporate money! That's our message to all Americans who are worried about the dangerous direction that the two Titanic Parties have steered our country. If the field of presidential candidates is limited to incumbent Obama and the Republican nominee after the primaries, then everything the Wall Street protesters are talking about will be erased from the election season debate and from the media. Hopes for a progressive challenge in the Democratic primaries are unrealistic. The challenger will inevitably be defeated by the Obama campaign juggernaut, which is already loaded with corporate campaign checks, and the challenger's supporters will find themselves muzzled, with the expectation that they'll vote Democrat."

Terry Baum, Green candidate for Mayor of San Francisco (http://terryjoanbaum.com): "Barack Obama received more Wall Street money than any other candidate in US history. Instead of change, the Obama Administration gave us Phase 2 of the Bush-Cheney agenda: more Wall Street bailouts, more endless war, more offshore oil drilling and the dangerous Keystone XL pipeline, more mountaintop detonation mining. Instead of financial security for Americans, we got plans to slash Social Security and Medicare. We got minimal assistance for people facing home foreclosures and more crushing debt for college students. We got silence about the racist death penalty and record-high mass incarceration of young black, brown, and poor people in a greedy private prison system. We got a health care bill with mandates that are a direct public subsidy for the insurance industry (originally a Republican proposal), but no universal health care or controls for skyrocketing medical costs. We got impunity for Bush officials who authorized torture and other war crimes -- and more extraordinary rendition, more warrantless surveillance of US citizens, more erosion of due process, more persecution of whistleblowers, and even a secret presidential hit list of Americans targeted for assassination."

Cheri Honkala, Green candidate for Sheriff of Philadelphia (http://www.cherihonkala.com) running on an anti-foreclosure platform, speaking at Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC on October 6: "What I'm doing is not symbolic. It's concrete and Bill and Aida and Glenn who's here with me today, like millions of people across this country are gonna lose their homes... unless you take this seriously and not just march about it, pray about it, and sing about it but help me fill every damn poll in Philadelphia where there's a birthplace of revolution and change... We can do this again in this country and take our country back!"

MORE INFORMATION:

Green Party of the United States http://www.gp.org

Scott McLarty: "After the Wall Street Protests..."

After the Wall Street Protests? Scott McLarty, Media Coordinator at Green Party of the United States, has posted a manifesto on Firedoglake making the case for an independent party.

Posted on Firedoglake, October 4, 2011
After the Wall Street Protests: To Change America’s Political Direction, We Need a Voters’ Revolt and a Permanent Noncorporate Alternative to the Titanic Parties
By Scott McLarty

The protests against Wall Street’s criminal theft of America’s future, to be followed on October 6 by the 'October 2011' occupation of Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC, are cause for optimism. Maybe 'Arab Spring' is finally coming to the US. ('American Autumn'?) The protests, now spreading to other cities, are continuing despite the troops of police ready to club, pepperspray, and corral peaceful protesters into nets for mass arrest.

The biggest impediment to the democracy movement is not Fox News and pundits who believe that the Occupy Wall Street demos are a demand for 'big government', as if their entire understanding comes from a GOP talking points memo. It’s not the dismissive tone of journalists from the New York Times and other mainstream papers. It’s not the cable news stations who misreport the goals of the demonstrations or ignore them altogether.

The greatest danger is that many Americans sympathetic to the 'Occupy Wall Street' grievances, and maybe a small number of the protesters themselves, will soon fall into a familiar habit. In a few months we can expect to hear some of them declare "We must vote to reelect President Obama in 2012, to prevent a Republican victory."

The Republicans have already won, regardless of who takes the oath of office in January 2013. Endless wars, Wall Street pillage, and the trashing of the US Constitution are no longer the exclusive intellectual property of the GOP.

Barack Obama’s progressive supporters acknowledge that he didn’t quite fulfill their expectations as an agent of change and a bulwark against war and the predatory power of corporations. But the GOP is so much worse, they say, that we have to keep voting Democrat. This is nonsense.

The liberals, progressives, leftists, editors and columnists for The Nation and Daily Kos and other publications who insist we vote Dem in every election cycle are preaching self-defeat.

Apologists for the Democrats will say, “But there are some real differences between the two parties!” That’s true. “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” would not have been repealed by a Republican administration.

Overall, however, the differences between D and R have grown more and more insubstantial during the past few decades. In many cases, Democratic presidents used their power to fulfill the GOP agenda, often accomplishing what Republican couldn’t by themselves, for example, President Clinton’s passage of NAFTA with help from a Democratic Congress and President Obama’s willingness to carve up Social Security and Medicare.

On nearly every big issue from the wars to Wall Street’s looting of the economy to offshore drilling and oil pipelines, President Obama has shown a smooth continuity from the Bush-Cheney Administration. When he clashed with Republicans in the health care reform debate, the argument was really over which side could best accommodate for-profit insurance companies and other special interests, with Democrats offering mandates that require everyone to purchase private coverage, an idea they pilfered from Republican Congressmembers who introduced it in the 1990s. (See “Whose side are they on? An unexhaustive recent history of bipartisan convergence” below.)

The major newspapers, network and cable news shows, and other media inflate the small differences because they like to make the news as simple-minded as possible, and that means limiting the public debate to D versus R on any big issue. Other points of view, such as the one expressed by the Wall Street protesters, aren’t fit for serious coverage, or sometimes any coverage at all.

Progressives who believe that President Obama “is really one of us” are as deluded as conservatives who believe Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, and other phony populists and corporate royalists when they call President Obama a socialist, by which they mean he’s a few degrees less rabid in his devotion to corporate rule than they are.

Instead of Democrat versus Republican, we should look at US politics as D and R versus the rest of us. Elections have become a contest between Democrats ready to fulfill GOP agenda and the GOP itself. Whether we elect a Democrat or a Republican to the White House, whether Democrats or Republicans win control of Congress, the center of political gravity remains on the side of the GOP. As George Lakoff has observed in several books and numerous essays, Democrats play according to Republican rules. Even when they’re telling outright lies, Republicans deal in gut-level messages that Democrats find themselves parroting: Support our troops! End big government!

Both of the Titanic parties accept enormous sums of money from corporate PACs to do the bidding of corporate special interest lobbies, but the GOP is far more shameless about its service to corporate elites and its ideology of privatization, deregulation, and concentration of economic power.

Democrats, on the other hand, want to be perceived as the party of the people, but won’t wean themselves off corporate campaign checks. They retreat from their stated principles and traditional constituencies and ignore progressive voices within their own party on the assumption that voters on the left have “nowhere else to turn.”

The retreat of the Democrats, their confused allegiances, and embrace of so much of the GOP agenda have meant a license for Republicans to move to ever greater extremes. Now we have a ‘liberal’ party that has moved to the right of Eisenhower and Nixon and a rightwing party that has descended into irrationality. Every decade, the political paradigm drifts further and further to the right.

If we want to interrupt this drift, we have to think outside of the two-party power bloc. The Occupy Wall Street protesters and their supporters have no voice in the two-party mainstream of electoral politics. It’s assumed that –if they vote at all — they will line up behind President Obama and a Democratic machine that regards them with contempt.

Time for a Voters’ Revolt

Dropping out of the elections and refusing to vote are not an option. Until we take steps now to break down the rule of the Titanic Parties and replace them in public office, we face decades of more endless wars, more erosion of basic human rights and protections for working people, and dwindling chances of a solution to global climate change.

Activism should not be limited to electoral politics. But the movement for a change in America’s political direction must include a voters’ revolt and the emergence of a strong and permanent alternative party that rejects corporate money and influence.

Without such an insurgence in 2012, the following topics will be missing from the election season debate after April or May: the plundering of the US economy by the financial industry; multi-trillion-dollar bailouts for Wall Street; the assault on public sector unions; universal health care (Medicare For All); ending the endless wars; the death penalty (Troy Davis will be forgotten); the dangers of the Tar Sands pipeline, offshore drilling, nuclear power, mountaintop removal mining, warrantless spying on US citizens, torture, and other gross abuses of power. Neither incumbent Obama nor the GOP nominee will mention these things.

Despite the best intentions of progressives like Dennis Kucinich, John Conyers, and others, the Democratic Party will not be rehabilitated. A progressive challenge to President Obama in the primaries, as recently encouraged by Ralph Nader and others, will keep some of the complaints and ideals of the Wall Street protesters alive for a few months. By late spring, the challenger will be defeated by the Obama campaign juggernaut and the challenger’s supporters will find themselves muzzled, with the expectation that they’ll vote Dem anyway. That’s what happens in every presidential election.

The usual objection to voting third-party is that the candidate might ‘spoil’ by subtracting votes from a Democrat and enabling a Republican victory, with the role played by Green presidential nominee Ralph Nader in 2000 as the classical example. There are numerous problems with this accusation — it ignores manipulation and voter obstruction by GOP officials in Florida, a patently biased Supreme Court ruling that canceled vote recounts and delivered the White House to George W. Bush, and Al Gore’s own feeble campaign, which lost double-digit points in polls during the final months of the race (while Mr. Nader’s percentage never rose above a few percentage points) and failed to take even Tennessee, Mr. Gore’s home state. In Florida, the number of registered Dems who voted for Mr. Bush was four times the number who voted for Mr. Nader. Why don’t Democratic apologists ever apply the spoiler label to Republicans?

The assertion that Mr. Nader siphoned votes away from Mr. Gore assumes that Democratic candidates have some kind of prior claim to our votes. The subtext of the spoiler accusation, when leveled by pundits and politicians who’ve made no effort to promote reforms like Instant Runoff Voting that would eliminate the alleged spoiler effect, is that two-party rule must never face interference from alternative parties and independent candidates. It’s a notion of democracy only one step removed from single-party states like China and the Soviet Union.

The only fair and democratic elections are multi-party elections, in which every voter has the right to see more than a choice between Big Mac and Whopper on the ballot, the right to know which candidate best represents his or her own interests and ideals, and the right to vote for that candidate.

Imagine that multi-party democracy existed in the US. The election of a half-dozen noncorporate alternative-party candidates to Congress would alter the political landscape, with Ds and Rs no longer each others’ sole competition.

If such a candidate participated in the presidential debates, he or she would raise ideas that no Democratic or Republican nominee would ever touch, like Medicare For All and rapid withdrawal of all US forces from Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Commission on Presidential Debates is owned and run by the Democratic and Republican parties, who took control over it in order to bar other parties’ candidates. D and R politicians in many states have conspired to rig the ballot access rules of many states to block third-party and independent candidates from running for office. The two Titanic parties have been corrupted by their own exclusive power as much as by corporate money and clout.

These obstacles are all surmountable, but only through a concerted mass effort led by a broad alliance of those critical of the two-party status quo, the bureaucratic and political power of major corporations, and the expanding power of government. The Occupy Wall Street protests, which have drawn progressives, Greens, anarchists, libertarians, nonvoters, frustrated Democrats and Republicans, and many others, are a model for such an alliance.

Alternatives like the Green Party are waiting for their moment — the moment of mass epiphany when Americans recognize them as an imperative comparable to the anti-slavery Republican Party in the mid 19th century. The Occupy Wall Street protesters are the abolitionists of the 21st century, demanding an end to the predatory power of Wall Street and other corporate elites over our political system, our jobs, our homes, our savings, our health, nearly aspect of our lives.

Until we recognize that Democrats are as dangerous to America’s future as Republicans, until we spark a national voters’ revolt, we’ll continue to commit political suicide every Election Day.

The Occupy Wall Street participants want to push the country in a different direction, away from corporate oligarchy, military aggression, and environmental depredation. Protests and direct action must continue as the election season unfolds, especially during next year’s national Democratic and Republican conventions. We must find, build, and promote noncorporate ways to live our lives and expand participatory democracy (see Ben Manski’s essay “The Protest Wave: Why the Political Class Can’t Understand Our Demands”).

And if we want these things to have a lasting effect, the “99 percent” movement that inspired the current demonstrations must move to the next level, which must include independent electoral action in 2012 and beyond.

Sidebar: Whose side are they on? An unexhaustive recent history of bipartisan convergence

• Is President Obama a “warrior for the middle class”?

In 2008, Mr. Obama became the highest recipient of Wall Street campaign contributions in history. After he was elected, he followed in the footsteps of Republican presidents by stacking his staff with Wall Street insiders and operators — Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, economics advisor Larry Summers, Chief of Staff Bill Daley — whose deregulatory policies made the 2008 economic meltdown inevitable.

With bipartisan support in Congress, the Obama Administration bailed out the Wall Street firms that were responsible for the meltdown, while offering minimal aid to Americans facing unemployment and home foreclosures because of the Subprime Mortgage Crisis that these firms created. The White House and Congress have taken no steps to restore the Glass-Steagall Act or enact other reforms to curtail Wall Street power and prevent the next crisis.

The federal government plans to begin selling off the massive portfolio of foreclosed homes now owned by HUD, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac to private investment conglomerates (“vulture funds”), possibly the “largest transfer of wealth from the public to the private sector” in history.

Such actions were predictable by September 2008, before Mr. Obama’s election victory, when he undercut his pledge of “change we can believe in” with an endorsement of the first Wall Street bailout, in harmony with the Bush White House and his GOP competition, John McCain.

After promising to do so during his campaign, President Obama has refused to renegotiate NAFTA and other international trade pacts. These agreements, which tend to favor corporate power and profit over the rights and well-being of working people and the health of the environment, were authorized by President Clinton, who had initially opposed NAFTA while running for the White House in 1992.

Democrats have refused to repeal Taft-Hartley restrictions on union organizing. When Republican Gov. Walker want on the warpath against the organizing rights and benefits for public sector workers in Wisconsin in early 2011, Democratic Gov. Cuomo launched a similar assault against public sector workers in New York.

• Are Democrats the party of health care reform and Social Security?

The Democratic Party discarded its platform promise, since 1948, of a national health program while Bill Clinton was president. In 2009, Democratic leaders declared that universal health care (single-payer, also called Medicare For All) would be “off the table” — Senate Finance Committee chair Max Baucus’s words when he organized the health care reform round tables.

President Obama’s health care bill imposes mandates that function as a direct public subsidy to the health insurance cartel, an idea that Republicans proposed during the 1990s. Whether Democrats passed Obamacare in 2010 or the Republicans prevailed in blocking it, the insurance industry, Big Pharma, and other corporate lobbies would be the real winners.

Contrary to the current belief that the President recently compromised on Social Security and Medicare, he made his intention to slash them clear in 2010 when he appointed his National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (“Catfood Commission”) and stacked it with politicians, economists, and company heads hostile to both programs. Rather than alleviating the skyrocketing costs of health care, the highest cause of personal bankruptcies, Obama policies further threaten middle- and low-income Americans and burden retirees.

• Are Democrats the party of social justice?

President Obama has remained silent about record US incarceration rates — the world’s highest, surpassing repressive countries like China and Iran — and the fact that most of those behind bars are young, poor, and mostly black or brown. Since President Clinton, Democratic leaders have supported the growth of the private prison industry, which profits by filling up cells with more inmates.

Both Democrats and Republicans support the War on Drugs, which has ruined lives and caused endless devastation in poor neighborhoods, and the death penalty, despite racial disparities and a growing list of exonerations and errors. President Obama refused to comment on the fate of Troy Davis, who was executed by the state of Georgia despite significant doubts about his guilt (seven out of nine witnesses changed their testimony, some of them claiming police coercion).

• The environment and global warming?

President Obama has authorized more offshore oil drilling (despite the lessons of the disastrous BP spill in the Gulf); endorsed new nuclear power plants that will make money for energy companies while taxpayers assume the high cost and high liability (despite the example of Fukushima); allowed mountaintop removal mining to continue to obliterate and poison the West Virginia landscape; remained silent about the extremely dangerous technique called hydrofracking for natural gas in New York and Pennsylvania; endorsed the myth of clean coal; and is on the verge of approving the dangerous Keystone XL pipeline from the Canadian tar sands.

On September 2, 2011, President Obama killed proposed national air-quality standards for smog, overriding a plan by the Environmental Protection Agency to reduce air pollution. His administration, and Democrats in general, have supported greenhouse gas emissions trading schemes (“cap and trade”) that will allow polluting companies to trade and collect licenses to continue polluting. US obstruction remains the greatest impediment to the Kyoto Protocols.

• Peace?

Democrats pretended to be the antiwar party in recent elections, but in 2006 they boosted funding for the wars after gaining control of Congress. President Obama escalated the war on Afghanistan and expanded it into Pakistan, and launched a new invasion (Libya) without the consent of Congress. While ordering the withdrawal of some troops from Iraq, he is implementing Donald Rumsfeld’s plan to replace US armed forces, which are directly accountable to Congress, with private “mercenary” security firms, which aren’t.

In October 2002, the Democratic leadership voted for President Bush’s request for an extra-constitutional transfer of war power from Congress to the White House, effectively endorsing his plan to invade Iraq on fraudulent claims about Saddam Hussein’s WMDs, nuclear weapons acquisition, and collusion with al-Qaeda. Under the Obama Administration, Democrats have adopted the neocon doctrine of unilateral aggression and the use of military force against countries at peace with the US. There has been virtually no difference between the Bush and Obama policies on the Middle East. The Obama Administration, which continues to arm Israel, had no objection to the Israel’s invasion of Gaza and massacre of civilians and strenuously objected to Palestine’s bid for UN recognition.

• The US Constitution and international law?

The Obama Justice Department has refused to investigate Bush-Cheney officials for torture and other gross abuses of power, constitutional violations, and war crimes. The administration has continued many of the same policies: warrantless surveillance of US citizens, denial of habeas corpus, extraordinary rendition, maintenance of “black sites,” harassment and legal action against whistleblowers. President Obama has surpassed the last administration in his intention to assassinate US citizens suspected of terrorism without any semblance of due process, as in the recent case of Anwar al-Awlaki, the US-born cleric killed in Yemen, whose name was on a secret “hit list” of people the President has targeted for summary execution.

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Scott McLarty is Media Coordinator at Green Party of the United States
This article is reposted from Firedoglake.

Euroopean Greens dissed Nuclear Energy.

Some may wonder how Germany was able to spin the energy wheel around to toss nuclear off the table.  I learned today (just today... shame on me) that it was all the work of those pesky Greens.   

While waiting for the dentist to get around to extracting one of my molars, I was reading Clean Energy Nation by Jerry McNerney (my Congressman) and Marty Cheek.  It was there, I found the following: 

An analysis report title "Nuclear Power: The Energy Balance" was prepared for the Green parties of the European Parliament by Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen and Philip Smith for the United Nations Climate Conference in 2000.  Since then, they have updated their report several times and they warn that the nuclear-power industry's portrayal of nuclear energy as a solution to climate change might not be quite on the mark. The authors state in their detailed study that "the use of nuclear power causes, at the end of the road and under the most favorable conditions, approximately one--third  as much carbon dioxide (CO2) emission as gas fired electricity production."  

Those pesky Greens playing the game of tell the truth. 

McNerney and Cheek continue:

Then then warn us about the unsustainability of nuclear power.  "The rich uranium ores required to achieve this reduction are, however, so limited that if the entire present world electricity demand were to be provided by nuclear power, these ores would be exhausted within nine years.   Use of the remaining poorer ores in nuclear reaction would produce more CO2 emissions that burning fossil fuels directly.

This is the blunt statement of the truth that we need to be hearing from Green leadership in the US.

3D Politics - Die Grünen

UPDATE: GERMAN GREENS GAIN IN ANOTHER STATE ELECTION -- Parties on the German left prevailed in a regional election in the northeastern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania on Sunday... Perhaps the biggest winner of the day was the Green Party, which won 8.5 percent of the vote, more than double the 3.4 percent it received in 2006. See("State Election Adds to Gains by Social Democrats in Germany", The New York Times, September 4, 2011)

The United States may be stuck on stupid with our ridiculous permanent presidential campaign between so-called conservative Republicans and so-called liberal Democrats, but everywhere else Green Parties are on the move. The Alliance 90/The Greens party (Bündnis 90/Die Grünen) in Germany is the world's strongest Green Party. Founded in 1980 and merging in 1993 with the civil rights movement Bündnis 90 of the former German Democratic Republic (a.k.a. East Germany), Greens have been represented in the German Bundestag for nearly thirty years. In our time of global crisis, even the old gray New York Times has at last grudgingly admitted that Greens are on the move in disparate countries like Australia, Brazil, Britain, Canada, Colombia, and Sweden.


_{Screen shot from a web site for the German Greens}

I am reposting the article from the NYT because it is a perfect follow-up to my earlier post on 3D politics.

Published in The New York Times, September 1, 2011
Greens Gain in Germany, and the World Takes Notice
By Nicholas Kulish

BERLIN — A string of Green Party victories and strong electoral showings across Germany, from the conservative south to the port cities of the north, are helping to redefine politics among voters who are increasingly losing faith in the more established parties.

The Green Party is poised to extend its march into the mainstream on Sunday when voters go to the polls in the northeastern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. The Greens could, for the first time, win seats in the State Parliament and demonstrate their ability to sustain political momentum.

"Nothing in our political science books has prepared us for this kind of party," said Josef Joffe, publisher of the weekly newspaper Die Zeit, who noted that the Greens have won the culture war on the left over the rusty Social Democrats on issues like gay rights and the integration of immigrants. "I bet if you had a party like this in America, all my rich friends on both coasts would vote for it."

Although their roots are on the left, the Greens are being increasingly embraced by voters on the right, successfully tapping into a German strain of conservationist conservatism by opposing highways and the demolition of old buildings. It has benefited both from the slow collapse of European socialism and the rising awareness of renewable technologies that have brought even once-skeptical businesspeople into the fold.

With this potent coalition of voters, the Greens surprised Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party when it took control of the affluent southern state of Baden-Württemberg this spring, which is akin to capturing the Texas statehouse. In the process, the party proved it was a force to be reckoned with in German politics, where one in five voters now say they support the Greens.

The German Greens also have served as the spearhead of a global coming out for other Green parties. In Brazil’s presidential election last year, the Green Party candidate won nearly 20 million votes to place third in the first round. The Green Party in Colombia was founded just two years ago, but in 2010 saw its candidate for president place second.

Britain’s House of Commons welcomed its first Green Party member after last year’s election, and Australia’s Greens won their first seat in the lower house in 2010. More significantly, the Greens hold nine out of 76 seats in the Australian Senate, giving the party a swing vote and powerful leverage over legislation in the upper house, where no party holds a majority.

The global surge has remained under the radar in the United States, for many reasons. In a system dominated by two parties, the Greens have no representatives in Congress or, for that matter, in a single state legislature. The party’s image and electoral success in the United States has been tightly bound to the ultimately doomed presidential bids of Ralph Nader rather than depending on the grass-roots methods used to build the Greens in Germany. The German Greens even have their own local chapter in Washington, and they have served as a model for their political cousins abroad.

Gustav Fridolin, one of two leaders of the Swedish Green Party, said he kept a poster from the German Greens’ 2009 parliamentary campaign in his office as inspiration. It reads, "Jobs, jobs, jobs: Only Green helps escape the crisis."

"That important step away from the idea of threatening jobs, threatening development, has been taken in Germany," Mr. Fridolin said in a recent interview. "The party is a more interesting alternative for larger groups in society, not just for people studying environmental policy at university."

The mass killings in Norway in July riveted attention on the strength of right-wing populist parties across Europe, but particularly in Scandinavia. Yet with far fewer headlines, the Green Party in Sweden won more votes in last year’s parliamentary election than the far-right Sweden Democrats, taking 7.3 percent of the vote compared with 5.7 percent for the nationalists.

In Germany, the question is now whether the Greens sustain, or even build, on their recent advances. The party was buoyed by outrage over the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster in Japan, but it has fallen slightly in polls since. Still, the party could serve as a model for the postindustrial left in Europe and, perhaps, around the world.

It is a long way from the German party’s founding in 1980, when middle-class voters saw the Greens as radicals, heirs to the 1968 student protest movement or even the left-wing terrorists of the Red Army Faction. "People spat on my father when he went door to door," said Milena Oschmann, the daughter of leading party members in the city of Kiel, Germany. She now works for the party, splitting her time between Parliament and the local office in Berlin’s Neukölln neighborhood.

Ms. Oschmann, 27, described how the party had played host in Berlin to visiting Greens from Greece, Taiwan and Japan as well as Sweden and Australia. In her sports jacket and ballet slippers, a Sony Vaio laptop balanced on her knees during a local meeting in Neukölln, Ms. Oschmann would be right at home on Capitol Hill. She studied politics in Bremen, Germany, and in London before moving to Berlin, a representative of the new generation of Green politicians who have left the beard-and-sandals stereotype behind.

While the Fukushima disaster is often credited with helping the Greens’ surge in Germany, their initial jolt in support in Baden-Württemberg came from the party’s opposition to a multibillion-dollar rail project known as Stuttgart 21 that involved tearing down portions of an old station and downing hundreds of old trees. “They’re covering both sides of the street, serving the deep conservative instincts of Germany for no change,” said Mr. Joffe, the newspaper publisher. “Protecting nature, slowing down growth, slowing down industrialization, is actually a conservative agenda.”

In most reliable scientific opinion surveys, the Greens are polling around 20 percent of the vote, nearly twice the 10.7 percent of the votes they won in the 2009 parliamentary election.

"In former times I always said the Green Party is the party of dentists’ wives," said Reinhard Schlinkert, one of the most established political pollsters in Germany. "Now many of the dentists have started voting for them."

But polls are not votes, and opinions can be fickle. The Greens surprised the political establishment by polling ahead of the center-left Social Democrats in some surveys this past spring — and appeared poised to win the Berlin mayoral race, one of the top prizes of German politics. But as the nuclear crisis receded, attention turned to whether they had the personnel and policy credentials to govern a big state like Baden-Württemberg.

"Once you’re No. 1, you’re in charge of everything," Cem Özdemir, one of the party’s two national leaders, said in an interview recently, "and you’re held accountable."

More on Bündnis 90/Die Grünen:

A green political party in Germany, formed from the merger of the German Green Party and Alliance 90 in 1993. Its leaders are Claudia Roth and Cem Özdemir. In the 2009 federal elections, the party won 10.7% of the votes and 68 out of 622 seats in the Bundestag.

January 13, 1980 - Foundation congress

In the 1970s, environmentalists and peace activists politically organised amongst thousands of action groups. The political party The Greens (German: Die Grünen) was founded January 13, 1980 in Karlsruhe to give this movement political and parliamentary representation. Opposition to pollution, use of nuclear power, NATO military action, and certain aspects of industrialised society were principal campaign issues. The Greens originated from civil initiatives, new social movements of the protests of 1968, but also from the conservative spectrum. Important figures in the first years were – among others – Joschka Fischer, Antje Vollmer, Petra Kelly, Rudi Dutschke, Undine von Blottnitz[1] and Herbert Gruhl.


_{Milena Oschmann, right, campaigned for the party last month in Berlin. She said Greens from Greece and Japan had visited to study the Germans' success.}


Four Pillars:

• Ecological wisdom
• Grassroots democracy
• Nonviolence
• Social justice

English Language Web Site:

http://www.gruene-bundestag.de/cms/english/rubrik/12/12034.english.html

3D Politics - 'Political Compass' and Beyond

Dear Green Friends,

Scott McLarty, Green Party U.S. Media Coordinator, posted a Facebook link to an interactive web site known as Political Compass. According to Scott, the site returned these scores based on his reply to a battery of multiple choice questions: "Economic Left/Right: -7.12; Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -8.05, which places me in the lower left corner of the chart (slightly more libertarian than left)."

I was not surprised Scott's results were similar to mine. People at Political Compass strongly believe the old one-dimensional "Left vs Right" model for describing political parties is obsolete. They believe the model should include a "Libertarian vs. Authoritarian" dimension with four quarants for "Libertarian Left", "Libertarian Right", "Authoritarian Left", and "Authoritarian Right." Hence, the depiction of the 2008 presidential candidates posted on the TrèsSugar Web Site.



I agree. Indeed, I'd go further for two reasons.

First, the conflict between so-called conservative Republicans and so-called liberal Democrats in the U.S. doesn't even make sense along the old "Left-Right" dimension, since both are clustered in the "Authoritarian Right" quadrant. The only difference is demagoguery. Republicans use Big Government authoritarianism supposedly to serve hard-working, taxpaying, Christian "Whites" in "middle-class" neighborhoods. Democrats use Big Government authoritarianism supposedly to serve that 70% of Californians labeled "minorities" including, allegedly lazy, welfare-dependent, savage "Blacks" like my family and me in the "ghetto."

Second, I am convinced the growing conflict between stand patters for "Gray" industry and innovators for "Green" industry constitutes a third dimension. And it's along this third dimension where the great 21st Century political struggles are forming.



Read more to see the Political Compass test prologue. Check it out, then post a comment.

The irrelevance and divisiveness of the phony debate between so-called conservative Republicans and so-called liberal Democrats is why I plead for Greens, Libertarians, and all other serious independents to quit propping up the One-Party-With-2-Names by framing our dissent with old clichés, slogans, and stereotypes.

Posted on The Political Compass


There's abundant evidence for the need of it. The old one-dimensional categories of 'right' and 'left', established for the seating arrangement of the French National Assembly of 1789, are overly simplistic for today's complex political landscape. For example, who are the 'conservatives' in today's Russia? Are they the unreconstructed Stalinists, or the reformers who have adopted the right-wing views of conservatives like Margaret Thatcher?

On the standard left-right scale, how do you distinguish leftists like Stalin and Gandhi? It's not sufficient to say that Stalin was simply more left than Gandhi. There are fundamental political differences between them that the old categories on their own can't explain. Similarly, we generally describe social reactionaries as 'right-wingers', yet that leaves left-wing reactionaries like Robert Mugabe and Pol Pot off the hook.

That's about as much as we should tell you for now. After you've responded to the following propositions during the next 3-5 minutes, all will be explained. In each instance, you're asked to choose the response that best describes your feeling: Strongly Disagree, Disagree, Agree or Strongly Agree. At the end of the test, you'll be given the compass, with your own special position on it.

. . .

Click here to start.

Check it out, dear friends. Then post a comment here.

Scott McLarty: New Language for a New Paradigm

Editor's Note:  See reposted below an important article on the Common Dreams Web Site by Scott McLarty, media coordinator for the Green Party of the United States,on the need for new language in political discourse in the U.S.

Editor's Update: Scott McLarty's article is Number 20 in this week's list of most viewed articles on Common Dreams.

Posted on Common Dreams, Thursday, May 19, 2011


Which Side Are You On? New Language for a New Political Reality
by Scott McLarty

"Everybody pulled his weight, Didn't need no welfare state... Those were the days!"

Those are some of the lyrics from the theme song to the popular 1970s TV sitcom 'All in the Family', considered controversial in its day, about a working-class bigot named Archie Bunker, who sang it at the top of the show with his wife Edith. Archie's nostalgia for pre-1960s America informed much of the show, which satirized small-minded conservativism, paranoid patriotism, contempt for youth culture, and racism.

One of the ironies of Archie Bunker's worldview is that the 1930s, 40s, and 50s weren't nearly as conservative as he remembered them. The same faulty nostalgia drives the so-called conservatives of today's Republican Party and the Tea Party movement, who imagine those decades as a time when hard-working Americans pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps.

It's true that Americans worked hard during these years. But the bootstraps stuff is nonsense. The 30s through 50s were the time of the New Deal, low-cost loans from the Federal Housing Administration, the GI Bill, huge subsidies for defense contractors during the Cold War and other industries that employed millions of people, massive transfer of funding from cities to the burgeoning suburbs, federal projects like interstate highway construction and the space program, generous investment in public schools, record union membership, high tax rates for corporations and the wealthy, good job benefits, and Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, which ensured financial stability in old age and medical crises.

These things softened the trauma of the Great Depression and gave us the greatest period of prosperity in US history. Middle-aged Tea Partiers and Republicans, born in the 1940s through the 1970s, reaped the benefits of the kind of progressive 'big government' and 'socialist' ideas they now condemn. By their own standards, Tea Partiers are practically red diaper babies.

The irony of the Cold War's capitalism vs. communism paradigm is that capitalism in the US and other western countries required generous helpings of socialism to make it work. Conservative politicians like Eisenhower and Nixon seemed to understand this and generally supported the social programs listed above.

Since the Reagan Administration, Republicans, with help from Democrats, have worked to dismantle such programs and policies. Since 2008, the conservative movement has been galvanized by President Barack Obama's victory (although Mr. Obama's actions in office hardly place him on the left), leading to the formation of the Tea Party and igniting the conflict in Wisconsin over Gov. Scott Walker's plan to cut benefits for public-sector employees and abolish collective bargaining rights.

The economic principles of today's GOP and the Tea Party don't come from any period of time within their own memory, so it's difficult to identify what kind of values they're trying to preserve or restore. But if we look further back in American history, to the late 19th century, we can find a match in the Robber Baron Era.

The Robber Baron Era was a period of misery for the millions of Americans who worked in factories before child labor laws, the eight-hour day and 40-hour work week, workplace safety laws (think of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire), or recognition of collective bargaining rights. It was a time of widespread political corruption, with officeholders in cahoots with the chiefs of monopolies and near-monopolies. Laissez-faire capitalism was mostly unchecked by the power of unions or by government regulation. It ended with a period of widespread labor unrest and the reforms of the Progressive Era (1890s through the 1920s).

William Cronon recounted some further history in a recent New York Times column:

"Republicans in Wisconsin are seeking to reverse civic traditions that for more than a century have been among the most celebrated achievements not just of their state, but of their own party as well.... [W]hile Americans are aware of this progressive tradition, they probably don't know that many of the innovations on behalf of working people were at least as much the work of Republicans as of Democrats.... When Gov. Gaylord A. Nelson, a Democrat, sought to extend collective bargaining rights to municipal workers in 1959, he did so in partnership with a Legislature in which one house was controlled by the Republicans. Both sides believed the normalization of labor-management relations would increase efficiency and avoid crippling strikes like those of the Milwaukee garbage collectors during the 1950s. Later, in 1967, when collective bargaining was extended to state workers for the same reasons, the reform was promoted by a Republican governor, Warren P. Knowles, with a Republican Legislature. The policies that the current governor, Scott Walker, has sought to overturn, in other words, are legacies of his own party."

("Wisconsin's Radical Break," March 21, 2011)

On the evidence of history, calling today's Republican Party and their Tea Party supporters 'conservative' is as absurd as calling supporters of civil rights and racial justice 'reactionary' because they invoke the values of the Reconstruction Era.

Radical Ideology for a New Century

"I like to say I'm more conservative than Goldwater. He just wanted to turn the clock back to when there was no income tax. I want to turn the clock back to when people lived in small villages and took care of each other." -- Pete Seeger

Gov. Scott Walker is not a conservative, nor is Gov. John Kasich of Ohio. Neither are Fox News, Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, or any of their fellow corporate royalists and faux populists.

They are radicals. The GOP and the Tea Party are inspired by a vision that's partly reactionary (revival of Robber Baron Era economics) and partly innovative, with world-changing ideas that would have astounded JP Morgan and John D Rockefeller.

The innovative parts of their agenda include the embrace of globalization and the international power of major corporations through pacts like NAFTA and bodies like the World Bank and IMF; the neocon doctrine of preemptive military aggression; 'public-private partnerships' such as cash-cow contracts for the homeland security industry; huge taxpayer-funded handouts for favored corporate elites, the most obvious of example of which is the TARP bailout that funneled hundreds of billions of dollars to reckless Wall Street firms after the 2008 economic collapse that the latter caused. (Many Tea Partiers, to their credit, opposed the Wall Street bailouts.)

It's worth noting here that such agenda are bipartisan, supported by mainstream Democrats.

One of the top claims of 'conservative' activists is their devotion to the US Constitution and the ideals of our Founding Fathers, which motivated the reading aloud of the Constitution in the US House of Representatives in January when Republicans took over as the majority.

For Republicans and Tea Partiers, the Constitution might as well be written in hieroglyphs. Except for the Second Amendment's right to bear arms, they decline to apply the Constitution to the denial of habeas corpus, warrantless surveillance of US citizens, torture, disregard for international treaties signed by the US, and other abuses that are clearly outlawed.

On the other hand, they enthusiastically defend the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United ruling, which upheld 'corporate personhood' and exacerbated the widespread corruption of our election system, even though the Constitution grants no rights to corporations and the Founding Fathers warned against the excessive power of the monied interests. Corporate personhood was enshrined by a series of Supreme Court rulings, beginning with Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad in 1886, which extended the 14th Amendment's equal protect clause to cover corporations. The rulings coincided with the post-Reconstruction passage of the first Jim Crow laws in the South and the beginning of the Robber Baron Era. In effect, legal rights and protections were transferred from black people to corporations.

All of this gives us a clue about the real ideology motivating today's conservative (and many liberal) politicians, media pundits, and activists: corporate power, profit, and privilege.

All other principles are subservient to corporatism. The GOP isn't opposed to socialism when it satisfies corporate lobbies, as the Wall Street bailouts prove.

Consider Gov. Rick Scott of Florida, currently on a mission to overturn the Democrats' health care reform bill. Does Gov. Scott really oppose public spending for health care? In 1997, he was forced to resign as CEO of Columbia/HCA after the company pleaded guilty to 14 felonies and agreed to a $600-plus million fine in the largest fraud settlement in US history, for fraud involving Medicare and other public health programs. For bilking taxpayers out of hundreds of millions, Rick Scott was paid $9.88 million and allowed to keep 10 million shares of stock worth over $350 million.

Republican politicians might be gunning for Medicare and Medicaid, but they're not above making a killing from such programs, on behalf of themselves and the corporations they're connected with via the public service/private business revolving door. The same ideology informs the granting of no-bid contracts, tax breaks and loopholes, and other forms of subsidies to favored firms.

George Lakoff notes that "The wealthy have, to a large extent, amassed that wealth through indirect contributions to them by governments -- governments build roads corporations use, fund schools that train their workers, subsidize their energy costs, do research they capitalize on, subsidize their access to resources, promote trade for them, and on and on."

Dedication to corporate interests overwhelms all other concerns. It turns the conflict between free-market capitalism and socialism into a quaint relic from another century, rather like the conflict between the German princes and the Roman Catholic Church during the Reformation. It makes the free market into a myth for the gullible who believe that locally owned Main Street shops can compete with WalMart or Old McDonald's family farm has a chance against Monsanto.

Conservatism means, or should mean, emphasis on entrepreneurialism (as opposed to corporate capitalism), self-reliant local economies (small businesses and farms, rather than big chain stores and agriconglomerates), economic security for Americans (freedom from destitution because of unemployment, old age, or the cost of medical emergencies), democratic sovereignty (rather than subordination to international trade cabals), observance of the US Constitution and international laws and treaties that the US has signed (Article VI), and deployment of the US armed forces solely for immediate self-defense.

Today's conservative leaders have abandoned these ideas and replaced them with a scheme to manipulate government for a radical redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top. For these politicians, government is only a threat to America when it benefits working people or the poor or public health or the environment. Big government for big business is perfectly acceptable.

The amassing of wealth and power for the corporate sector has become the major project of the GOP in the 21st century, with the Democratic Party's cooperation.

New Language for a New Paradigm

We need terminology that more accurately describes political tendencies in the US and world in the 21st century, placing the rule of corporate elites and militarism on one side and democracy, human rights and freedoms, and the health of the planet on the other.

The evolution of two-party politics in the US, with politicians from both parties under the influence of corporate lobbies and campaign checks, made it inevitable that both Democrats and Republicans would veer away from their stated principles. Such influence has always been evident, but began to push politicians into extremist territory with the beginning of the Reagan Revolution. (And even Reagan left Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security alone.)

Progressives are as deluded in hoping for a progressive rehabilitation of the Democratic Party as true conservatives are in believing the GOP upholds their values:

"Money's conquest of American politics has therefore rendered impotent the well-worn prescriptions of the left and the right, which now deliver only scapegoats rather than solutions... Today, government can be 'big' in terms of spending while handing all its work over to contractors. In the twentieth century, business and government were adversaries. Today, the wall between the two that may have once existed has become a revolving door and both share common interests."

('One Nation Under Contract: The Outsourcing of American Power and the Future of Foreign Policy' by Allison Stanger, quoted in Harper's)

The traditional spectrum of Republican-conservative on the right and Democrat-liberal at the left, with a gray area for moderates in the middle, belongs in the trash. The 'centrist' gap between the two parties is really an overlap where Republican and Democrat politicians are most enthusiastically loyal to corporate lobbies, with euphemisms like "Republican moderate," "Democratic Leadership Council," "blue dog," and "triangulation" to describe them.

A more accurate spectrum would find most Republicans at the furthest extreme and most of the Democratic Party next to them. This is the side that serves corporate power, profit, and privilege. It embraces the ideology that underpins state capitalism, a condition in which major corporations have grown so powerful that government's chief purpose is to take marching orders from them.

Think of government as a wholly owned subsidiary of General Electric, Exxon Mobil, Halliburton, Monsanto, Wall Street, the insurance and pharmaceutical cartels, and other top industries. (China, which now provides cheap labor for corporations, has shown us that both communism and capitalism can be subsumed into the state capitalist system.)

What's on the other side of the new spectrum? In the US, not much, if we're talking about political clout. Some Democrats like Dennis Kucinich, Greens, environmental and community activists, socialists, unions that haven't placed allegiance to Democratic politicians ahead of their members' needs, even some libertarians and traditional conservatives who recognize that unrestrained corporate power is as much a menace as state power.

The retreat of the Democratic Party from its traditional constituencies has enabled Republicans to move towards even greater fanaticism. When Democrats co-opted the health care mandate idea from Republicans, who had introduced it in the 1990s, they drove the GOP into a frenzy of opposition to reform, further marginalizing single-payer (Medicare For All), the one proposal that would have provided universal medical care and dramatically lowered costs. The health care reform debate turned out to be a factional dispute over which party best served insurance and other medical industries. (For a more thorough description of "liberal disintegration," see Sam Smith's "The death of liberalism and what to do about it" in The Progressive Review, May 9, 2011.)

Progressivism has nearly collapsed as a political force, even though progressives still exist and sometimes get elected. We can begin digging ourselves out of this hole by adopting a new model to replace the Republic/conservative/right vs. Democrat/liberal/left paradigm. We can declare our independence from the bipartisan consensus. We can reject the "active propaganda machinery controlled by the world's largest corporations [that] constantly reassures us that consumerism is the path to happiness, governmental restraint of market excess is the cause of our distress, and economic globalization is both a historical inevitability and a boon to the human species" (David C. Korten, 'When Corporations Rule the World'). .

Doing so will bust open the narrow political debate offered daily in the mainstream media. It will give us a revolutionary chance to reverse the dangerous direction of the US in the 21st century, which now promises decades of perpetual war, undiminished fossil fuel consumption as the climate heats up, privatization of dwindling resources like fresh water, an ever-widening gap between rich and poor, the collapse of financial security for working Americans, concentration of power and wealth among a small number of 'too big to fail' firms, and growing government and corporate intrusion into our private lives.

Call it Corporate America vs. We the People. Globalization vs. Mother Earth. Privatization vs. the Public Good. Wall Street vs. Main Street. Plutocracy vs. Democracy. Which side are you on?



Scott McLarty serves as media coordinator for the Green Party of the United States and for the DC Statehood Green Party. He can be reached at mclarty@greens.org.

Cornel West on The 'Brokeness' of the 2-Party System

I have annoyed friends and family many times with my opinions about the urgency of the Green Party as an alternative to the feckless Democrats for communities of color in cities like Los Angeles. Don't take my word for it. See below a brief video and my unofficial transcription of Prof. Cornel West's reply to a taunt by journalist Tavis Smiley on CSPAN that "we ain't got nowhere to go." West speaks in his unique blend of Ivy-League scholar and country preacher on the "brokenness" of the two-party system much more eloquently than I.

TAVIS SMILEY:  "We ain't got nowhere to go. What you gonna do, Doc?"

CORNEL WEST:  "Bear witness, brother. That's all you can do in your life: tell the truth and fight for justice."

TAVIS SMILEY:  "How would you know who to vote for?"

CORNEL WEST:  "Well ... it depends ... we got two years now. You see, the thing is now is this. It is very clear that the two-party system is part of the brokenness that we're talking about. We've got both parties that are dominated by the same interests -- corporate big banking. You've got ordinary citizens -- different political, ideological, racial groups feeling relatively powerless. Relatively impotent. Now, that can be the makings of a crypto-fascism if we don't begin to come to terms with it.

But on the other hand it also means ... the Tea Party, brothers and sisters, they're going to become more and more upset with the Establishment in the Republican Party because the business interests and their populist interests will begin to be more and more in tension.

And at the same time, Barack Obama, masterful, eloquent, charismatic ... in his language. In his policies ... you can't bring in Geithner and Summers and claim that you're building on the legacy of Martin King.

Martin died for sanitation workers. He died because he sided with poor babies in Vietnam against American occupation. He was anti-militarism. He was anti-imperialism. He was against the American empire in terms of its presence around the world undercutting what he thought to be certain principles. But all Martin could do was bear witness. That's why when he died 75% of Americans were against him. 55% of Black people were against him. 'Cause he was too ... loving. When you love poor people that much, when you love working people that much, that makes you the freest man in the country or the freest woman in the country. But you are also the biggest threat to both the Republican and Democratic parties.

Ecology before Earth Day

Before there was an Earth Day, even before Rachel Carson described the possible Silent Spring, Aldo Leopold had a Wisconsin farm from which he wrote A Sand County Almanac. Writing in 1949, he challenged his own time.

Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land. Despite nearly a century of propaganda, conservation will proceeds at a snail's pace:ogress still consists largely of letterhead pieties and convention oratory. On the back forty, we still slip two steps backward for each forward stride.

The usual answer to this dilemma is "more conservation education." No one will debate this, but is it certain that only the volume of education needs stepping up? Is something lacking in the content as well?

I would urge Greens to find a copy (I found mine at the public library) and read it because it still challenges the way that we have gone about changing our future.

It is time to tell the climate story like it really is

Yesterday, I received a reference to two recent book, sort of capsule reviews written by Lorna Salzman. I want to re-print these today for the simple reason that there is nothing more important to be working on that the resolution of climate change.

Carl Safina's latest book, View from Lazy Point, is reviewed - actually, raved about - in this Sunday's NY Times Book Review. If you have not yet read anything of Carl's, shame on you....so get this book. Carl heads the Blue Ocean Institute, among his long list of credits, and is a superlative writer. 
 
The other book is World on the Edge, by Lester Brown, head of the Earth Policy Institute. This book is the culmination of a long list of his books on the deterioration of the planet and what needs to be done. Let me warn you that this one is possibly the most apocalyptic, but were it not, it would be dishonest. Let me give you some short quotes. Then you should order a copy from EPI (epi@earth-policy.org) or download it from their web site free, www.earth-policy.org  

Brown predicts "the perfect storm" of food emergencies and loss of fresh water supplies (which are linked), all stemming from the kind of severe climate events we are now experiencing regularly (heat wave in Russia, floods in Pakistan), compounded by overpopulation and loss of ecosystems and their services. We are already in overshoot mode and have been so since 1980, i.e. humanity's collective demands  have surpassed the earth's regenerative capacity. Brown says that today, global demands exceed sustainable yields by 50%; it would thus take 1.5 earths to maintain our current consumption.

Brown: "No previous civilization has survived the ongoing destruction of its natural supports. Nor will ours. Yet economists look at the future through a different lens...annual growth..is measured in the trillions. In the eyes of mainstream economists, the world has not only an illustrious economic past but also a promising future. Mainstream economists see the 2008=09 global economic recession and near-collapse of the international financial system as a bump in the road..before a return to growth as usual. Projections of economic growth..typically show the global economy expanding by roughly 3 % a year. At this rate the 2010 economy would easily double in size by 2035".

"But as the economy expanded some 20-fold over the last century, it has revealed a flaw- a flaw so serious that if it is not corrected it will spell the end of civilization as we know it"...The market..is not telling us the truth...Modern economic thinking and policymaking have created an economy that is so out of sync with the ecosystem on which it depends that it is approaching collapse. How can we assume that the growth of an economic system that is shrinking the earth's forests, eroding its soils, depleting its aquifers, collapsing its fisheries, elevating its temperature, and melting its ice sheets can simply be projected into the long-term future? "

"If we continue with business as usual, civilization collapse is no longer a matter of whether but when. We now have an economy that is destroying its natural support systems, on that has put us on a decline and collapse path. We are dangerously close to the edge. Peter Goldmark, former Rockefeller Foundation president, puts it well: 'The death of our civilization is no longer a theory or an academic possibility; it is the road we're on'"

This book lays out the evidence. Apart from Brown and EPI, the rest of the environmental community is in denial mode, believing that wind turbines and solar power will rescue us. This book makes it quite clear that they will not. It says what needs to be done...and fast, including a CO2 reduction of 80% not by 2050, the date arbitrarily chosen by those who do not understand the emergency including our fearless leaders like NRDC, EDF and 350.org,  but by the year 2020. Nine years from now. 

It isn't just capitalism that will collapse. It is human civilization, and our history has shown how earlier civilizations collapsed from environmental causes (Sumer in Mesopotamia, Maya). We ignore Brown at our own peril. Have the courage to read this book.  

LS

For those of you in denial about overpopulation, here is what Brown says about Pakistan, which lost thousands of people to floods last year and where the temperature in south central Pakistan reached 128 degrees F. in May, a record for Pakistan:

"The Indus River, the lifeline of Pakistan, and its tributaries were overflowing. Levees that had confined the river to a narrow channel so the fertile floodplains could be farmed had failed. Eventually the raging waters covered 1/5 of the country. ...Some 2 million homes were damaged or destroyed. More than 20 million people were affected by the flooding. Nearly 2,000 Pakistanis died. Some 6 million acres of crops were damaged or destroyed. Over a million livestock drowned. Roads and bridges were washed away."

"Pakistan's 185 million people are squeezed into an area 8% that of the United States. 90% of the forests in the Indus Basin are gone, leaving little to absorb the rainfall and reduce runoff. Beyond this, Pakistan has a livestock population of cattle, water buffalo, sheep and goats of 149 million, well above the 103 million grazing livestock in the United Stats. The result is a country stripped of vegetation. When it rains, rapid runoff erodes the soil, silting up reservoirs and reducing their capacity to store flood water. Twenty or more years ago, Pakistan chose to define security largely in military terms. When it should have been investing in reforestation, soil conservation, education, and family planning, it was shortchanging these activities to bolster its military capacity. In 1990, the military budget was 15 times that of education and a staggering 44 times that of health and family planning. As a result, Pakistan is now a poor, overpopulated, environmentally devastated nuclear power where 60%  of women cannot read and write".

Some might think of the climate issues as yet one more piece of evidence of the tree hugger tendency among Greens. Nothing could be further from the truth. Concern about the effects of climate change is evidence of the concern of Greens for social justice and the plight of millions. Read carefully the comments regarding last summer's flood in Pakistan. Then think about the more recent floods in Nashville, Columbia, Brazli (April and again now), Australia, Sri Lanka, Benin, Burkina Faso. Nature does not select according to the ability of land to cope.


We should be ashamed to have taken on the mantle of being Green, to have proclaimed our devotion to the issues of social justice and to have done so little.

LATimes: 'Brown May Find It's Not Easy Being Green'

PRINCE EDMUND GERALD BROWN, JR has been elected the next Democratic governor of the great state of California. The long, expensive, insipid, 2010 election is over and so what's the first order of business? Screw the "tree-huggers" on green jobs for green energy. In a front page story the Los Angeles Times reports the Sacramento crowd is already nervous about green energy.

Published in the Los Angeles Times, December 2, 2010
Brown May Find It's Not Easy Being Green
By Anthony York

Jerry Brown ran for governor promising to revive the economy through an aggressive expansion of California's green-energy industry — but that agenda could prove costly to consumers.

Brown wants the state to make major new investments in solar and wind power: building large-scale power plants that run on renewable resources and placing solar panels on parking-lot roofs, school buildings and along the banks of state highways. Although advocates of renewable energy tout the long-term savings of going green, billions of dollars would be required to reach the governor-elect's green-energy goals.

Nobody knows if the program would produce the "more than half a million green jobs" Brown promised during the campaign, but many experts agree that it could lead to sharply higher utility rates.

How much higher is unclear, because the eventual cost of Brown's plan would depend in part on the mix of wind, solar and other renewable energy used. Other factors may lower that estimate, said Brown spokesman Sterling Clifford. It depends on "what kind of cost savings can be realized through reducing the regulatory hurdles, it depends on how quickly we can ramp up job creation…. All of this is somewhat speculative at the moment."

But state regulators have already crunched some numbers associated with the linchpin of Brown's plan: to generate one-third of the state's power from renewable sources by 2020. That could require rate hikes of as much as 14.5%, in addition to billions of dollars in private investment, according to an analysis by the state's Public Utilities Commission.

Staff at the commission, which regulates Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison, San Diego Gas & Electric and a handful of smaller utilities and sets rates for most Californians, estimates the cost of the plan at roughly $60 billion over the next decade. That is more than state taxpayers will spend on the University of California and California State University systems combined over the same period.

Clifford said the PUC analysis is not complete.

"One of the things that estimate does not take into account is the thinning of the regulatory thicket when it comes to renewable energy," he said. "We want to simplify the process by which renewable projects can be approved."
. . .
Clifford said the jobs plan is a priority for the incoming administration but promised that Brown would be "methodical" in setting its course.

"We want to do it, but that means doing it right — studying potential effects of legislation and regulation, figuring out which rules can be streamlined and which can't, ensuring an effective oversight process that allows for reasonable progress on construction projects," said Clifford.

Notice how defensive, even apologetic Brown's spokesman is about the Green energy agenda. There is no self doubt on the part of business interests adamantly opposed to the plan:

Meanwhile, a coalition of business groups that has fought Schwarzenegger's renewable energy proposal also opposes Brown's. "There is a lot of pure cost anxiety on our side," said Dorothy Rothrock, vice president of the California Manufacturers & Technology Assn.

Schwarzenegger vetoed a 2009 bill that would have required utilities to buy a third of their electricity from renewable sources in the next decade, saying the measure relied too heavily on creating expensive new power sources within California. In his veto message, he cited the "negative impact it would have had on California's energy markets and ratepayers."

So far, big labor is supporting Brown, but only so long as Brown delivers on high-paying power plant contruction jobs:

Schwarzenegger's plan opted for more power produced outside California, which he says is cheaper. That angered labor unions eager for power-plant construction jobs as well as environmentalists who say there's no way to prove that electricity generated outside California comes from renewable energy plants.
. . .
During the gubernatorial campaign, Brown called for developing 20,000 megawatts of new, renewable energy in California. Each megawatt of power would be enough to serve up to 1,000 Southern California homes. Brown said this new green power would be at the heart of his plan to create hundreds of thousands of jobs in the state.
. . .
"We totally support Jerry Brown's initiative … but you simply can't get there without" in-state renewable energy, said Scott Wetch, a lobbyist for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, which supported Brown's campaign for governor.

This is a beautiful example of why California needs a green political force independent of both the Republican and Democratic parties. Our friends in the labor movement, God bless 'em, have come a long way since the "bad old days" when labor was routinely trotted out by big business to say environmentalism was bad for jobs. Unfortunately, the Democrats and their labor supporters, no less than the Republicans and their business supporters, are still organized around the old paradigmwhere "progress" is the work of big industry and big labor for the sake of short term profit. They cannot yet get their brains around the idea of building a green future with decentralized sustainable, local industry with green jobs for all, including chronically underemployed folks in inner-city neighborhoods like mine in Los Angeles.

One result of the 2010 election is that California stands out like a "green thumb" against the retro Republican wave. Greens must seize this unprecedented opportunity to go way beyond the Brown Democratic agenda and go all the way to making California a model for a new paradigmfor America and the world.