Articles by admin

No Image

The Green Alternative to Austerity Budgets

by Howie Hawkins March 25, 2014 Austerity budgets mean a whole generation of school children bear the burden of closing budget gaps with cuts in state funding for public schools. They mean scores of towns, school districts, counties, and most upstate cities bear the burden of fiscal distress and impending insolvency because state revenue sharing has been slashed. How long must we wait for meaningful steps on progressive goals like living-wage jobs for the unemployed in public works and services, fully-funded public schools, tuition-free public colleges, health care for all, affordable housing and mass transit, and climate-safe clean energy?  …


No Image

Why the Green Party

As Greens, we are all here to save the planet. I believe that there is no lack of consensus on that. But that could also be said of the membership of the hundreds of NGO’s (Non-Governmental Organizations) which currently exist? The reason we’re are here, in the Green Party, and not in  NGO’s is that we see our particular role  as being members of a political party, and not in belonging to yet another NGO. This is not to trash the NGO’s — it is just to point out why we are the the Green Party of the United States,…


No Image

The Stone that Brings Down Goliath? Richmond and Eminent Domain

The Web of Debt  by Ellen Brown March 3, 2014 In a nearly $13 billion settlement with the US Justice Department in November 2013, JPMorganChase admitted that it, along with every other large US bank, had engaged in mortgage fraud as a routine business practice, sowing the seeds of the mortgage meltdown. JPMorgan and other megabanks have now been caught in over a dozen major frauds, including LIBOR-rigging and bid-rigging; yet no prominent banker has gone to jail. Meanwhile, nearly a quarter of all mortgages nationally remain underwater (meaning the balance owed exceeds the current value of the home), sapping…


No Image

Budget Realignment Reflects Pentagon’s Vision of Covert and Endless War

by Brian J. Trautman The Pentagon’s budget proposal for next year was announced last week by Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel. In an interview with The New York Times, Hagel argued that to meet today’s national security needs, the Department of Defense (DoD) must shift its focus and capabilities away from “fighting grinding ground conflicts” and towards “new arenas of combat.” To achieve these ends, the budget calls for a realignment of the military that would reduce the total number of ground troops to its lowest level since 1940 and discontinue some military equipment deemed obsolete or unnecessary. According to…


No Image

Celebrate World Social Justice Day – February 20

by Brian J. Trautman In one of his most famous writings, “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said of injustice, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” In other words, the very existence of injustice has implications for us all. Thus, we each have a responsibility to actively challenge unjust power structures wherever they should surface. According to the United Nations, “the immortal words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. have never…