Ron Forthofer, Ph.D, was the 2002 Green Party candidate for Governor of Colorado and 2000 candidate for Congress. Since he retired near the end of 1991, he has been a volunteer for peace and social justice issues primarily with the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center. He has also been involved with the single-payer health care finance reform issue in Colorado and is one of the founders and the first president of Health Care for All Colorado. In addition, he has been a reservist with the Christian Peacemaker Teams and has gone on several delegations, including two to Palestine/Israel.
Forthofer was also a writer and on the editorial committee of the Main Street Free Press, an all-volunteer monthly free paper along the Northern Front Range of Colorado. They published and distributed about 4000 papers a month (at first a bimonthly paper) for over three years, ending with their December 2006 issue. He has also worked on trade issues and was one of the founding members of the Front Range Fair Trade Coalition.
Forthofer is a retired professor of biostatistics from the University of Texas School of Public Health in Houston. He also spent a sabbatical year with the National Center for Health Statistics (1980-81) and as a consultant for Hoechst in Germany from late 1984 to late 1986.
Asa Gordon is a member of the DC Statehood Green Party and has served as chair of the party’s Electoral College Task Force. He has also served on the Delegate Apportionment Committee of the Green Party of the United States. Gordon is founder and executive director of the Douglass Institute of Government (DIG). DIG is an educational think tank based in Washington, DC. Gordon is a noted writer and speaker on the Supreme Court, particularly the philosophy of “Neo-Confederate Redemptionist Federalism” adopted by some justices of the court.
On Dec. 29, 2000, DIG filed a civil action, Gordon v. Gore, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, contesting the constitutionality of Florida’s Presidential Electors and to enjoin Al Gore, President of the Senate, from “Counting the full slate of Florida’s presidential electoral votes in Congress” on Jan. 6, 2001, subject to the mal-apportionment penalty as specified in section 2 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.
Gordon is the Secretary-General of the Sons & Daughters of the United States Color Troops (S&D.USCT). The S&D USCT is charted by the African American Civil War Memorial Freedom Foundation to augment the Foundation’s mission to use the National Monument “The Spirit of Freedom” to honor the historical legacy of those who served in the United States Colored Troops during the American Civil War. Gordon has been active in nationwide efforts to commemorate black Civil War soldiers.
Gordon’s expose’ in Kissimmee, Florida of the Afro-confederate myths being propagandized by neo-Confederates was featured in an editorial in the July 5, issue of the Osceola Sentinel. Editor Mark Pino stated “As for those who try to promote the idea that blacks were willing soldiers for the South, Gordon’s research disproves it. In a lecture that was close to three hours long, [He] left no doubt about the fantasies and historical myths of Afro-Confederates.” The Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) condemned Gordon’s speech in Florida on their Internet homepage. It is mentioned as a Heritage Violation on their Heritage Issues page.
Gordon, along with Alex Gross, a Holocaust survivor of the Buchenwald death camp in World War II, and Dr. Leon Bass, one of the camp’s African-American liberators, were the honored speakers in a special memorial program on April 11th, 1995, the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Buchenwald at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Mr. Gordon’s remarks were published in the April 11-12, 1996 edition of the Atlanta Daily World.
As a NASA Astrodynamicist (retired), Gordon is published in international scientific journals. His research has been employed by private industry, domestic and foreign, for tracking satellites in space. He served two terms as President of the Goddard Engineers Scientists and Technicians Association (GESTA). His work in science is referenced in Ivan Van Sertima’s “Blacks in Science: Ancient and Modern.”
Howie Hawkins has been active in movements for peace, justice, the environment, and independent progressive politics since the late 1960s when he was in high school in the San Francisco Bay Area. A former Marine, he helped organize opposition to the Vietnam War and was a co-founder of the anti-nuclear Clamshell Alliance in 1976. He was a co-founder of the Green Party in the United States in 1984 and currently serves on the Green National Committee. Hawkins is the 2007 Green Party candidate for Syracuse Common Councilor-At-Large, and was 2006 GP candidate for US Senate from NY and 2005 GP candidate for Mayor of Syracuse.
After attending Dartmouth College in the early 1970s, Hawkins worked as a carpenter in New England and helped start up a construction workers cooperative that specialized in solar and wind energy installations. He moved to Syracuse in 1991 to be Director of CommonWorks, a federation of cooperatives working for an economy that is cooperatively owned, democratically controlled, and ecologically sustainable. He presently works unloading trucks and rail cars at UPS where he is a member of Teamsters Local 317 and active in US Labor Against the War and the national Teamster rank-and-file reform caucus, Teamsters for a Democratic Union.
Hawkins’s articles on social theory, cooperative economics, and independent politics have appeared in many publications, including Against the Current, Green Politics, International Socialist Review, Left Turn, New Politics, Peace and Democracy News, Society and Nature, and Z Magazine. He is the editor of Independent Politics: The Green Party Strategy Debate (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2006).
Scott McLarty has been the media coordinator for the Green Party of the United States since April 2000. He writes press releases and official media responses for the party, speaks at political events, hosts press conferences at national party meetings and conventions, and co-chairs the national Media Committee.
McLarty has had articles, guest columns, and book reviews published in Roll Call, Z Magazine, Green Horizon, The Progressive Review, In These Times, and several local and community publications and small press. In November 2006, he was interviewed on C-SPAN’s ‘Washington Journal’ on the role of the Green Party in the 2006 election, and has spoken on numerous radio shows and panels on progressive third party politics and the emergence of the Green Party.
McLarty grew up in Long Island, New York, and now lives in Washington, DC. He joined the Green Party in 1996 after joining the Nader campaign that year, and in 1998 he ran for the Ward 1 seat on the Washington, D.C. City Council. In 1999, he helped negotiate the merger of the DC Green Party and the DC Statehood Party, which was founded in 1970 by local civil rights leaders in Washington, DC. After the merger, he became media coordinator for the DC Statehood Green Party.
Lynne Williams was born in Brooklyn, New York, where she was raised in a third generation New York family. In 1967 Lynne left New York to attend college in Massachusetts. After attending Bradford Junior College in Haverhill, Mass., she graduated in 1972 from Merrimack College in North Andover, Mass., with a B.A. in psychology. She returned to New York City and attended Brooklyn College, where she received an M.A. in Experimental Psychology in 1975. After getting her degree from Brooklyn College, Lynne attended the University of Southern California and worked towards a Ph.D. in Social Psychology, which she received in 1981.
After receiving her Ph.D., Lynne became a community and political organizer, working with tenant groups in California and as a fundraiser for the 1982 successful state legislative campaign of Tom Hayden. She also worked against the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant as a member of the Abalone Alliance.
In 1983, Lynne moved to New Hampshire to work on the presidential campaign of Democrat Gary Hart, subsequently working for Hart in Massachusetts, Michigan, Tennessee and California.
In 1988, Lynne’s son, Brendan, was born with multiple physical birth defects and Lynne became very involved with groups advocating for the rights of those with disabilities. During this time she owned and managed a bookstore in San Francisco as well as a medical and legal transcription business in Marin County, California. She enrolled full-time in the Golden Gate University School of Law, receiving her law degree in 1998. A Dean’s List student, she graduated with a certificate in public interest law and an American Jurisprudence award in corporate law.
Later that year, Lynne and Brendan moved to Maine, where she worked for Medical Care Development in Augusta for a year, designing training protocol for home-care providers. She worked for six years as an independent special education hearing officer, and she now represents families with special needs children.
Lynne also represents community groups that are resisting inappropriate development in their communities. In support of her clients, Lynne continues to fight against Plum Creek, TransCanada, FirstWind, Nestle and other corporate interlopers who seek to colonize Maine. Given her personal history of protest and resistance, Lynne values her current representation of community and environmental activists.
Lynne lives in Bar Harbor, is currently a visiting professor at the College of the Atlantic, and runs a solo law practice. Her son, Brendan, attends the Academy of Art University in San Francisco.
A member of the Bar Harbor Planning Board, she served previously on the Bar Harbor Conservation Commission. She has served on the Family Advisory Committee of the Maine Department of Health and Human Service’s Children with Special Health Care Needs program, as well as on the board of directors of Different Abilities, an program assisting people with disabilities.
Speakers Bureau
Information about he Green Party Speakers Bureau can be found here.