by Mark A. Dunlea
Green Party NY

The Green Party doesn’t have a monopoly on the truth. They just state and campaign for what is common sense, an agenda that reflects the positions and interests of the 99%.

• The Green agenda.
• A single payer Medicare for All health system.
• A minimum wage that is a living wage not a sub poverty wage.
• Taking action on climate change with a Green New Deal – cut the military by at least half and tax the rich (including a stock transfer tax) to pay for a full employment public jobs program and $300 billion annual investment in clean, renewable energy.
• Stop extreme extraction like fracking of natural gas, offshore oil drilling and mountain removal. Cancel student student debt.
• Affordable housing.
• Rights for immigrants.
• Reproductive freedom.
• Full LGBT rights.
• Worker cooperatives and rights.
• Economic democracy, not capitalism.
• A non-interventionist, pro-democracy foreign and military policy.
• An end to various wars: on terror, people of color, and American’s civil liberties.
• Legalize it – an end to the war on drugs.

The gap between the rich and the poor is greater than it is been in a century. The last 30 years has seen a steady increase in the transfer of wealth and income to the rich. Tens of millions of Americans are out of work. 50 million Americans are so poor that they qualify for food stamps. The Pentagon budget is out of control, a corporate welfare pork barrel that spends tens of billions of tax dollars to build planes and tanks that are immediately mothballed in the desert since there is no need for them. And the heating of the planet under climate change accelerates beyond the worst case scenarios.

Congress’ response is to shutdown the federal government ostensibly over a non-existing debt crisis and a flawed Obamacare program that was primarily a victory for the health insurance industry. The country blames the Republicans and Tea Party fanatics for costing the economy tens of billions of dollars.

The Democrats declare victory and begin to negotiate a budget deal on the Republican terms. In mid-December Congress will craft together another “grand bargain” around the budget. While they will argue over the details, the broad outline will be protect the rich from tax hikes, weaken / cut Social Security, Medicare, food stamps, restore some funding to the Pentagon from the sequestration cuts and continue to divest from Americans. Oh, and perhaps some more corporate welfare in the guise of a meager “job stimulus” effort to repair whatever infrastructure is most important to the 1%. The organized liberal community will wage their fingers at the Democrats (more in private than in public) while publicly continuing to blame the Republicans for the mess and thunder that the solution is to elect more Democrats (e.g., let’s repeat 2008).

 

The rise of the Tea Party is just another example of the increasing control of corporate power and the 1%. Fascist parties are also on the rise in Europe, often pulling 20% of the vote while scapegoating immigrants and promoting “austerity” budgets.

The auctioning of the Democratic Party to corporate interests under Clinton continues to accelerate, with the 1% buying both major parties. It was the Democrats that provided the votes needed to bail out Wall Street from the criminal housing bubble manipulation while Main Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. were shuttered. Corporate owned media repeats the untruths of government and corporate America as objective reporting, while critics are dismissed as fringe crackpots.

The corporate owned media ignores the Green Party. The public interest groups tied at the hip to the Democrats argue that voting Green would be “wasting your vote.” “Vote for peace by voting for the Democrats, who go to war not because they want to but because that is what the Republicans force them to do. If we just elect more Democrats, things will change. Ok, the Democrats have enough seats but there are too many Blue dog Democrats still, we have to elect more Democrats before things can change. Oh, the Republicans are the evil ones, vote for the lesser as of the two evil as the only path to the change we need. ” Orwellian doublespeak. The 1% win. The way to change is to change. Stop voting for the lesser of two evils. Vote for what you believe in. Vote Green Party. Tuesday November 5,