(Madison, WI) – The Wisconsin Green Party is conducting a Presidential Primary by mail, with ballots sent to all dues paying members of the Party this week. Mailed ballots must be returned by March 2nd, the day before the WIGP State Nominating Convention and Spring Membership Meeting.
The Primary ballot includes four candidates. Roseanne Barr (CA) [...]
Green Party Watch
From the Illinois Green Party:
In conjunction with our online Presidential Primary, Greens will be hosting presidential caucuses around the state in February. These caucuses will be opportunities for people to learn more about the presidential candidates and to confer with other Greens.
This list of caucuses will continue to be updated as [...]
Green Party Watch
The Minnesota Green Party is holding caucuses on Tuesday, February 7th. The caucuses will make decisions about candidates for 2012 elections, including presidential candidates. Here is the list of caucuses from the GPMN website:
The following locations have been confirmed for Green Party caucuses. You can also call the Green Party office at 651-288-2820, [...]
Green Party Watch
On February 6th, in the afternoon, “Green Party” is trending on Yahoo.
Also, a New Jersey media outlet is reporting that in the poll of TMZ (a celebrity gossip website), Roseanne Barr for President is trailing Obama by only 3%. And, the news story also lists by name Green Party Watch, and the other nominees for Green Party President 2012 (Jill Stein, Kent Mesplay and Harley Mikkelson).
(excerpt from) newjerseynewsroom.com
Comedian Roseanne Barr seeking Green Party presidential nomination
Monday, 06 February 2012 07:16
An informal TMZ opinion poll has Roseanne trailing President Barack Obama by only three percent, 39 percent to 36 percent, with Mitt Romney coming in at 25 percent…*
*Note: Some sites are reporting the poll as Barack Obama 38% to Roseanne Barr 35%.
Obama’s State of the Union – Too Little Too Late
by Stewart Alexander, 2012 Socialist Party USA Presidential Candidate
The phrase that came to mind immediately upon hearing President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech is “too little, too late.” After spending the last few years coddling the banks and the richest 1%, Obama has the nerve to now call for “economic fairness.” To him, this means tweaking payroll taxes and making a rhetorical call to reverse the Bush tax cuts for the rich. For working people in America real fairness means the right to a job, a guarantee of healthcare for all and an end to the Military Industrial Complex. Obama won’t deliver this. That’s why I am running for President against him.
Job creation has been and will continue to be the most obvious way that Obama has sold out working people throughout America. These decisions were made early on in his administration when he made the conscious decision to pour billions of dollars into the Banks that had funded his campaign instead of using those funds to create an emergency employment program to put people back to work. The result is that Americans have experienced nearly three consecutive years of more than 9% unemployment and nearly double that when those workers who given up looking for jobs are counted. This has meant real human suffering for millions of people.
Although Obama has hailed the recent decline in these same unemployment rates, a closer look at the numbers reveal the hollowness of his claims. Economist Doug Henwood has paged through the Unemployment report and discovered that much of the reduction is due to the effects of holiday seasonal employment and, in particular, a shift to online purchasing for Christmas gifts. Of the 200,000 jobs created in December, some 42,000, or over 1/5, came from the hiring of extra couriers and messengers. Bars, restaurants and healthcare companies picked up the bulk of the rest of the new hires. Hardly the manner in which we want to grow the economy.
The jobs program that the Alexander/Mendoza 2012 campaign is proposing calls for the creation of a Full Employment economy. We have a three-pronged approach. First, we want to create an Emergency Jobs Program that will put millions of workers back to work immediately in fields like environmental cleanup, infrastructure creation and maintenance, and education. Second, we support proposals to publicly fund a worker owned and managed cooperative sector. This will serve to not only put people back to work, but to re-build the manufacturing capacity of our country. Finally, we want to fund job training programs that lead to job sharing or job splitting, where workers will work less yet retain the same amount of pay and benefits.
A serious restructuring of the tax code that allows us to take back the wealth created by our work and accumulated by the 1% is key to funding our job creation plan. We want more than Obama’s proposed payroll tax cut. We deserve more than just reversing Bush’s economically suicidal tax breaks for the rich. We need a radical restructuring of the way in which we think about wealth. The great riches of this society need to be put to use to help us all – to make life better for the 99% and create new opportunities for work, relaxation and community.
This is why we propose creating a progressive tax structure where the rich pay far more than the average working person. In a democratic socialist society neither Obama nor Romney would be allowed to pay an effective tax rate of 26% and 17% respectively. Corporate taxation, financial gains taxes and personal income taxes will be modernized – all loopholes will be closed and the rich will pay a steep tax on their income. This is what economic fairness looks like to a socialist.
If Obama’s proposals for “Economic Fairness” are hard to believe, his attempt to present his Presidency as one of peace is simply a farce. The hands of the Obama administration are dripping with blood. He has approved a brutal Drone war on the people of Pakistan that has resulted in massive civilian casualties. He has accelerated the war in Afghanistan, which has increased casualties among soldiers and terrorized the civilian population driving them into the political arms of the Taliban. And Obama has continued to take an aggressive political stance on Iran thereby moving the country closer to another war.
All this, plus a clear continuation of the Bush era security state policies. Obama’s approval of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) annihilates centuries of civil rights protections. The President now has the right to indefinitely jail any citizen in the America without having to work within the protections of habeas corpus. Added to the NDAA is the fact that, as I write this, Bradley Manning is rotting in a jail cell. Manning is Obama’s prisoner – a moral testament to the President’s commitment to continue the job of restricting civil liberties.
My campaign is staunchly anti-militarist. This means that I commit to bringing the troops home now through the elimination of all foreign occupations and the closing of all foreign military bases and I aim to dismantle the Military Industrial Complex. My campaign calls for an immediate 50% reduction in military spending. We think that democratic socialism offers the best hope for the creation of a world based on peace and solidarity. Eliminating the security state will move us a long way in that direction. America should be a model for civil liberties not a test case for how many rights can be restricted.
I am writing this also to encourage voters to take a serious look at my campaign. They will find that socialist politics are clearly distinct from the politics of the 1% peddled by politicians such as Obama, Romney, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul. Under their leadership, the State of the Union is neutered – reduced to an exercise in cheerleading for the politicians that have faithfully towed the line for their corporate benefactors. The proposals of the Alexander/Mendoza campaign are made in the interest of the 99%. We think Americans deserve a clear choice come November. We will be working hard to make that possible. Join us in making a demand for jobs, peace and freedom in 2012!
Posted at socialism.com:
In response to a rigged political system, New York City FSP Organizer Stephen Durham and feminist immigrant rights advocate Christina López are running a national write-in campaign.
Inroducing the FSP candidates:
Stephen Durham for president
Stephen Durham brings abundant experience and a generous heart to the electoral arena. Dedicated to changing conditions at their root, he is a lifelong radical in the best sense of the word.
In the 1970s and ’80s Durham, now 64, was the Freedom Socialist Party (FSP) organizer in Los Angeles; he has since guided the New York City branch.
From the party’s storefront in Central Harlem, it’s a short subway ride to the international heart of capitalism. Durham has ridden that train many a time to confront the corrupt financial elite — in recent months, often to march with Occupy Wall Street and conduct teach-ins on economics.
Durham was radicalized as a student and campus worker at the University of California at Berkeley (UCB), where he participated in the movement against the Vietnam War and became a conscientious objector. He also stood shoulder to shoulder with students of color in the historic battle for Third World Studies at UCB.
As a pioneering queer activist, he took part in the first national lesbian and gay conference in 1969. A consistent advocate of women’s rights and supporter of female leadership, Durham fights to keep feminist issues up front in all the movements.
Durham became a union militant while working as a waiter in California and then New York City. He provided rank-and-file leadership in the 1985 NYC Hotel Trades Council strike by 16,000 workers, predominantly people of color, women, and immigrants.
Durham’s long involvement in Latin America began during high school as an exchange student to Brazil during the military dictatorship. Fluent in Spanish and Portuguese, he has traveled in Mexico, Central and South America and the Caribbean, building bonds and joint work with other leftists and revolutionaries.
Running for New York State Assembly in 1998, Durham campaigned door to door in the largely Latino and African American 71st District. His campaign was endorsed by Puerto Rican activist Father Luis Barrios, longtime Harlem radical Yuri Kochiyama, former state Assemblywoman Marie Runyon, and Haitian immigrant rights advocate Ray LaForest, among others.
A thinker as well as a doer, Durham has written on topics from the AIDS crisis to the Cuban Revolution, from freeing Lynne Stewart to the environmental disaster of hydraulic fracking.
Now Durham brings his global perspective and decades of valuable political experience to a working-class campaign for president.
Christina López for vice president
Christina López is a dynamic, eloquent Chicana from the barrio in Phoenix, whose working-class family has roots in the Southwest that predate U.S. borders.
She has been an organizer since her youth. As a member of the Chicano student group MEChA, she worked against a racist English-only law in Arizona.
After moving to Seattle, López was drawn to the Freedom Socialist Party (FSP) by its emphasis on fighting for racial liberation as an essential component of building class solidarity. She has spread this message and challenged racism through extensive work defending immigrant rights, affirmative action, and freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Her deep involvement in the immigrant rights upsurge of 2006 and 2007 included opposing the profoundly flawed “guest worker” bill. She has spearheaded protests against police brutality and worked with Somali women to protest FBI raids.
In jobs ranging from production at Revlon Cosmetics to county court clerk and library associate, López has been a member of several unions including the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers.
Recently her activism in the Occupy movement has extended from Philadelphia to Seattle, where she helped pass a “cop-free zone” resolution at the general assembly.
Today, at 43, López is Seattle Radical Women (RW) president. She has been key to building RW’s Sisters Organize for Survival campaign, which has fought state budget cuts and layoffs of public workers for the past three years. Radical Women is affiliated with FSP on the basis of a shared socialist feminist program.
López battles for reproductive rights as a passionate feminist of color and led RW’s collaboration with Black feminists in Jackson, Miss., to defend the last abortion clinic in the state. She has pinpointed the special impact of war on women and children and the need for the anti-war movement to prioritize this issue.
She is the author of the forthcoming RW position paper “Estamos en la Lucha: Immigrant Women Light the Fires of Resistance,” which focuses on the impact of U.S. immigration policies on women and children and highlights the central role of immigrant women in this country and internationally.
Her passion for racial justice helps her guide the National Comrades of Color Caucus, a joint caucus of the FSP and RW.
As candidate for vice president, López will be a fierce partisan of the downtrodden.
Freedom Socialist Party launches presidential write-in campaign centered on bold working-class solutions
This election year, the Freedom Socialist Party (FSP) is running New Yorker Stephen Durham for U.S. president and Seattleite Christina López for vice president in an energetic national write-in campaign.
Says Durham, 64, “The FSP ticket is a chance for people to vote not only against something, but for something. The campaign is thrilled to be giving people a way to send a strong protest message, find new kindred souls, and strengthen our organizing together for the future we want.”Over the past three years, charges Durham, “The Democratic and Republican parties have done nothing but cooperate in forcing workers and the poor to pay the costs of the Great Recession caused by the banks and Wall Street. President Obama may play to the crowd by criticizing the ‘bad apple’ corporations, as he did in his State of the Union address. But the facts show that the program of corporate coddling, which creates austerity for the masses, is completely bipartisan.”
Vice presidential candidate López, 43, explains the campaign’s goals: “We are encouraging people to register a protest against both the unjust economic system and the rigged electoral process that keeps it in place. And we want to generate discussion and action around solutions for people’s immediate survival and for changing the system for good. We know it can be done! But it means creating a grass-roots, multiracial move- ment – one that prioritizes the issues of people who are hurting most, for example immigrants, single mothers and their children, and Black teens trying to enter a dismal job market. We have great momentum from last year’s spirit of rebellion to build on.”
The FSP campaign platform calls for taxing corporate wealth, ending all U.S. military involvement abroad, and creating full employment through a massive public jobs program and reducing the standard workweek to 30 hours with no cut in pay. The campaign also stands for bringing back and expanding social services, restoring civil liberties, and a host of other measures designed to eliminate poverty and discrimination and raise workers’ standard of living.
Durham and López are respected activists with a wealth of experience gained fighting for reforms like these while popularizing socialist ideas and the need for radical change. Durham, organizer of FSP’s New York City branch based in Harlem, is a gay rights pioneer with a strong union back- ground. A student and analyst of international affairs, he has traveled extensively in Latin America. López is an immigrant rights champion and the organizer for Seattle Radical Women. As organizer, she has helped lead a feminist campaign of women and men against budget cuts in Washington state for the last three years.
According to campaign manager Doug Barnes, the socialist feminist FSP is taking the unconventional route of a write-in campaign because corporate funding of the two major parties and restrictive ballot access laws stack the deck against minor parties so severely. These hurdles, he notes, are compounded by mainstream media dismissal of alternative candidates, resulting in presidential debates that almost entirely avoid topics like the social costs of war or increasing repression against political dissenters.
In one state, California, where the Peace and Freedom Party (PFP) electoral alliance already has ballot status, Durham will compete to be PFP’s presidential candidate.
The Durham/López campaign launches this week with a candidate Web video, position statements, Facebook at www.facebook.com/VoteSocialism2012, Twitter @VoteSocialism, and featured articles in the Freedom Socialist newspaper. With the help of volunteers, the FSP will be spreading the news and ideas of the campaign widely. The Freedom Socialist 2012 Presidential Campaign Committee is planning for college and other speaking engagements, Skype presentations, fundraisers, and more activities around the country.
Freedom Socialist 2012 Presidential Campaign Committee
4710 University Way NE, Ste. 100
Seattle, WA 98105
206-985-4621
VoteSocialism@gmail.com
From the New York Green Party:
A Green Party of NY State Committee meeting will be held Saturday, Jan. 28, in Rensselaer, NY, at the First Presbyterian Church, 34 Broadway. All enrolled Green Party members are welcome to attend and will have a chance to address the State Committee members during the [...]
Green Party Watch
From the Green Party of the United States:
WASHINGTON, DC — Green Party candidates and leaders said today that the US must avoid a military confrontation with Iran by diplomacy based on the goal of ridding the Middle East and Asia of nuclear weapons, including Israel, Pakistan, and India.
The Green Party strongly opposes [...]
Green Party Watch
From Jill Stein for President:
This just in: Organize a house party, get buttons and bumperstickers! In case you missed last week’s announcement, we’re sending an updated notice below. One update is that if you register your house party by January 18th, we’ll send you a package of buttons and bumperstickers. Read on . . . [...]
Green Party Watch
Gary Johnson has received another endorsement from a Libertarian Party state party, this time from the state of South Carolina.
South Carolina Libertarian Executive Committee Endorses Gary Johnson
January 7, 2012 COLUMBIA, SC – In the style of the Continental Congress, Members of the South Carolina Libertarian Executive Committee have endorsed Gary Johnson. A Resolution was penned as follows:
Whereas, the South Carolina Libertarian Party supports the libertarian principles demonstrated by Gary Johnson and appreciates the efforts the candidate has been making to bring the message of libertarian ideas of personal and financial freedom to the voting public.
Resolved, that the following South Carolina Libertarian Party Executive Committee members endorse Gary Johnson for his bid for the Libertarian Party’s nomination for the Office of President of the United States at the upcoming national convention in May of 2012 and we encourage our delegation to support him.
This resolution was signed by:
SC National Delegate and Charleston County Committeeman, Stewart Flood
SC National Delegate and Anderson County Committeeman, Adrian Banks
SC National Delegate and State Chairman, Victor Kocher
SC National Delegate and State Vice-Chairman, Michael Carmany
SC National Delegate and Berkeley County Committeeman, Jeffrey Dimit
Richland County Committeewoman, Jennifer Schulz
Lexington County Committeeman, Dr. David Morris
York County Committeewoman, Marge Wakefield and her husband, Arch Wakefield“The fact that Governor Johnson brings to the table his executive-level experience and a proven record of fiscal responsibility and that he left his term-limited post in New Mexico with a balance budget and a billion budget surplus, I believe that he would be the best candidate to represent the Libertarian Party on a national level”, said State Chairman, Victor Kocher.
This endorsement comes on the heels of the Nebraska Libertarian Party’s endorsement of Gary Johnson, which can be found here.