Economy, Health Care Reform, New York January 19, 2018

Universal health insurance is answer to improving NY’s business climate

syracuse.com By Howie Hawkins January 18, 2018 Your Jan. 14 editorial (“CNY economy needs workforce training“) cites a CenterState CEO survey of business leaders who said rising employee benefit costs were “the No. 1 pressure point for their businesses in 2017.” But your response seems to be call for state tax and spending cuts. That seems implied by your comment that the “state’s tax climate also matters” and adding that the state faces a $4 billion deficit, plus additional lost revenue from federal changes to health care and tax policy, which is estimated to be over $2 billion. I would…

Green Party January 17, 2018

Bondage Scandal: Looking Beneath the Surface

by Don Fitz When I shook hands with Eric Greitens following the 2016 debate for Missouri Governor, none of us on the Green team imagined that, a year before, he had tied a woman up, blindfolded her, undressed her, photographed her and warned that he would release the photo if she ever said what happened. The story made local and US news on January 11, 2018 when the now-Governor Greitens followed his “State of the State” address with an admission that he had had an affair, that he and his wife had come to terms with it, and they wanted…

Democracy, Social Justice January 12, 2018

Oops, Herod, you will miss again

myCentralJersey.com By Seth Kaper-Dale January 10, 2018 The season of Epiphany is upon us. In churches coming out of the Roman Catholic or Protestant traditions, this day is about God being made manifest to the gentiles. The focal story of Epiphany is the story of the arrival of the Magi (star-gazers from the East (“from the Moab”), who travel to Judah because they see some sort of a star configuration that suggested a royal birth. There is a lot about this story that I love. Firstly, astrology was scoffed at in the Hebrew scriptures (Isaiah 47:13) and maybe even outlawed…

Donald Trump, Green Party December 13, 2017

We need a new Christ to counter Trump’s evil

myCentralJersey.com By Rev Seth Kaper-Dale December 12, 2017 It’s Christmas time. Tis the season for Christians to remember the birth of the Christ. But it’s more than that. It’s the time of year when Christians remember that Caesar Augustus and King Herod thought they were powerful, and put the entire occupied population on the move for a census that served their needs. Instead, God had other plans. That selfish and unnecessary census, carried out for either financial purposes or possibly as a way to take a census for military recruiting purposes, led desperately poor people to travel to and fro….

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campaign reform, Democracy, Election Integrity, Green Party, political corruption November 18, 2017

Updated Report On Maine’s Initiative For Ranked Choice Voting

By Jon Olsen co-chair, Maine Green Independent Party November 16, 2017 A year ago, we in Maine, and especially we Greens who have worked to promote the issue of ranked choice voting (RCV) for at least 20 years, celebrated a huge victory after it passed with 52% approval in our citizen’s initiative that made it law. However, shortly thereafter, our opponents, for apparent personal or partisan reasons, sought the advice of the Maine Supreme Court regarding its constitutionality, a challenge relying on the distinction between “plurality” and “majority.” The public hearing where the matter was argued was packed, myself in…