The Georgia Green Party

Author: Bruce Dixon

  • Democrats and the Left; Dead Pundits Interview W Adam Hilton p2

    https://soundcloud.com/deadpundits/ep34b-unlocked-b-side-democrats-and-the-left-w-adam-hilton

  • Red Cycle Tasking: Ethnic Cleansing

    https://soundcloud.com/hellofawaytodie/red-cycle-tasking-ethnic-cleansing

  • To Sen. Sanders: We Cannot Begin From A Position Of Compromise

    At the start of the August congressional recess, Senator Bernie Sanders announced that he will introduce a senate bill this September “to expand Medicare to cover all Americans.” Since the election, the movement for improved Medicare for all, has been urging Sanders to introduce a companion to John Conyers’ HR 676: The Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act, which currently has a record 117 co-sponsors in the House and is considered the gold standard by the movement.

    Recent reports are that Sanders’ bill falls far short of HR 676 in fundamental ways. In fact, Sanders’ bill is a multi-payer system not a single payer system. His bill reportedly would allow private insurers to compete with the public system, allow the wealthy to buy their way out of the public system and allow investor-owned health facilities to continue to profit while providing more expensive and lower quality health care.

    As a leader in the Democratic Party in the Senate, Sanders is trying to walk the line between listening to the concerns of his constituency, which overwhelmingly favors single payer health care, and protecting his fellow Democrats, whose campaigns are financed by the medical industrial complex. Sanders needs to side with the movement not those who profit from overly expensive US health care.

    Today, August 30, Health Over Profit for Everyone steering committee members and supporters sent the letter at the end of this article to Senator Sanders raising specific concerns and urging Senator Sanders to amend his bill before it is introduced.

    CLICK HERE TO SEND AN EMAIL TO SENATOR SANDERS.

    There are two realities

    It has become the practice in Washington, DC to offer weak bills, which fail to address the roots of the crises we face, to make them ‘politically feasible’. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is an example of this. It was a compromise with the health insurance, pharmaceutical and private hospital industries from the start – an attempt to appease them with public dollars in exchange for greater access to care. The ACA was built on a foundation of private industry even though the priorities of those industries are profit for a few, not health for everyone. That faulty foundation has perpetuated the healthcare crisis – tens of millions without health insurance, tens of millions more who have health insurance but can’t afford health care and poor health outcomes including tens of thousands of deaths each year.

    There are two realities that must be considered. The healthcare crisis will not end until a system is put in place that guarantees universal comprehensive and affordable healthcare coverage through National Improved Medicare for All or another form of single payer system such as a national health service. That is what we call the ‘real reality’, and it simply won’t change until there are real changes in policy that solve it. The political reality of what is ‘politically feasible’ is the other reality. This reality will change as people organize and mobilize to demand what they need. Politicians change their positions when they believe it is necessary to maintain their position of power. It is the task of movements to change what is politically feasible.

    The movement for National Improved Medicare for All has been working for decades to educate, organize and mobilize the public to change the political reality. And it is working. There is broad public support for Improved Medicare for All and legislation in the House that articulates the demands of the movement. What is needed now is a companion bill in the Senate that is as strong as HR 676. Once that is introduced, activists will work to secure support for it.

    Sanders has it backwards. Rather than starting from a position of strong legislation and building support for it, he is starting from a position of weak legislation that he considers to be more politically feasible. By doing so, he is losing the support of the movement that he needs to pass expanded and improved Medicare for all.

    Activists versus legislators

    This is where it is important to recognize the difference between activists and legislators. Activists and legislators have different priorities. Activists work to solve crises. Their dedication is to an issue. Legislators work to maintain their position, whether it is re-election, seats on committees, good standing with other legislators or continued funding from Wall Street or other wealthy interests. Legislators compromise when they believe it is in their personal best interest. Activists can only compromise when it is in the interest of solving the crisis they face.

    To win National Improved Medicare for All, activists need to follow the principles outlined in I.C.U.:

    The “I” stands for independence. Activists must keep their allegiance to their issue independent of the agenda of legislators and political parties. The goal is to solve the healthcare crisis, and politicians from both major parties will need to be pressured to support Improved Medicare for All. Remember, the movement is going against the interests of the big money industries that finance members of Congress.

    The “C” stands for clarity. Legislators will attempt to throw the movement off track by claiming that there are ‘back doors’ to our goal or smaller incremental steps that are more ‘politically feasible’. They will use language that sounds like it is in alignment with the goals of the movement even though the policies they promote are insufficient or opposed to the goals of the movement. This is happening right now in the movement for Improved Medicare for All. Numerous people, who consider themselves to be progressive but who are connected to the Democratic Party, are writing articles to convince single payer supporters to ask for less.

    And the “U” stands for uncompromising. Gandhi is quoted as saying that one cannot compromise on fundamentals because it is all give and no take. When it comes to the healthcare crisis, the smallest incremental step is National Improved Medicare for All. That will create the system and the cost savings needed to provide universal comprehensive coverage. Throughout history, every movement for social transformation has been told that it is asking for too much. When the single payer movement is told that it must compromise, that is no different. The movement is demanding a proven solution to the healthcare crisis, and anything less will not work.

    The momentum is on the side of the movement for National Improved Medicare for All. Act now to push Sanders to amend his bill so that it matches HR 676. Sign and share the petition tool, and read the letter below to understand the concerns about Sanders’ bill.

    CLICK HERE TO SEND AN EMAIL TO SENATOR SANDERS.

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    Dear Senator Sanders,

    For almost fifteen years the movement for National Improved Medicare for All has organized around HR 676: The Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act, introduced each session since 2003 by Congressman John Conyers. As you know, HR 676 has 117 co-sponsors so far this year. This legislation is considered by the movement to be the gold standard framework for a universal healthcare system in the United States.

    We appreciate your support for Improved Medicare for All and the work that you have done to elevate the national dialogue on Improved Medicare for All. We hope to continue to work with you to make this a reality in the near future.

    To that end, we are writing to share our concerns about the legislation that you are planning to introduce. These concerns are based on what we have learned about your legislation without having the benefit of reading a draft of it.

    In order to maintain the cohesion and strength of the movement for Improved Medicare for All, the legislation in the senate must be in alignment with HR 676. This is important so that the movement is unified and so that the process begins from a position of asking for what we want and need, rather than starting from a position of compromise. It is the task of the movement to build political support for the legislation in Congress.

    Here is a list of our concerns:

    1. We oppose the inclusion of copayments and deductibles in an Improved Medicare for All bill.

    As outlined in the recent letter to you from Physicians for a National Health Program, including copayments adds administrative complexity and creates a barrier to care, which leads to delay or avoidance of necessary care. Economic analyses indicate that the administrative and other savings inherent in a well-planned single payer system offset the added expense of eliminating copayments and deductibles. HR 676 does not include copayments. The movement for Improved Medicare for All has coalesced around the elimination of these financial barriers to care.

    1. We support a rapid transition to National Improved Medicare for All. The Medicare system was implemented within a year of passage without using computers. Unlike when Medicare became law, the United States now has basic infrastructure in place for a national health insurance based on Medicare. We urge you to utilize the timeline in HR 676, which would start the universal system in less than two years, rather than delaying or phasing it in by age group over time. Beginning with a universal system allows savings and cost controls that can be used to provide comprehensive benefits without cost sharing.
    2. We support a single payer healthcare system. We understand that your legislation will allow employers to continue to provide employee health insurance that duplicates what the national health insurance covers to avoid conflict with the Employee Retirement and Income Security Act (ERISA). We urge you to include a carve out of ERISA for national health insurance so that the new system is a single payer system. Without doing so, your bill will be a multi-payer system. This is required to achieve administrative simplicity and significant cost savings. HR 676 allows private insurance that does not duplicate the benefits of the system. Employers and unions would be able to provide extra benefits beyond what the system covers.
    3. We support a universal system. We understand that your legislation will allow health providers to opt out of the national health insurance system. This would create a parallel health system for the wealthy and undermine the quality of the public system. Universal systems are of higher quality than tiered systems because they create a social solidarity in which everyone has an interest in making the system the best it can be. We urge you to reject a tiered healthcare system as healthcare is a human right and should not be based on wealth.
    4. We oppose inclusion of investor-owned health facilities. Investor-owned health facilities treat health care, which is a necessary public service, as a commodity for profit. These facilities have an incentive to cut corners, under and over treat and charge higher prices. The result is higher cost and lower quality. We urge you to reject profiteering in the healthcare system so that the bottom line is improving the health of our population, not profits for Wall Street.

    The above concerns are based on what we know about your legislation at present. We do not know if they are warranted because we have not read the text. Upon reading it, there may be additional concerns.

    We hope that you will share the draft text of your legislation with us and address the above concerns before it is introduced. Our support for your Improved Medicare for All legislation will depend upon whether or not it will serve as a companion to HR 676. If it is, we are ready to work in our states to build political support for it. If the above concerns are not addressed, then your bill will not be a single payer Improved Medicare for All bill and we believe it will undermine the movement for HR 676.

    We recognize that legislators tend to compromise from the start to build political support for legislation. This has served as a failed strategy because the final legislation is too weak to accomplish its goals. We suggest a different approach of beginning from a position of what is required to solve the healthcare crisis. We have organized for too long to concede from the start on these fundamental principles.

    Signed,

    Seth Armstrong, board member, Western Washington Physicians for a National Health Program*

    Vanessa Beck, Health Over Profit for Everyone Steering Committee

    Claudia Chaufan, MD, California Physicians for a National Health Program*

    Andy Coates, MD, past president, Physicians for a National Health Program*

    Mary L. De Luca, MD , Child, Adolescent, and Adult Psychiatrist

    Dena Draskovich, Leader of Indivisible Omaha and disabled citizen*

    Margaret Flowers, MD, director of Health Over Profit for Everyone

    Leslie Hartley Gise MD, Clinical Professor Psychiatry, University of Hawai’i*

    James S. Goodman, MD, Psychiatrist

    Leigh Haynes, People’s Health Movement-USA*

    Paul Hochfeld MD, Board Member, Physicians for a National Health Program*

    Dana Iorio, ARNP, Board Member, PNHP Western Washington, Board Member, Health Care For All-Washington*

    Joseph Q Jarvis MD MSPH, Utah*

    Tim Jordan, MD, member, Physicians for a National Health Program*

    Stephen B. Kemble, MD, Physicians for a National Health Program advisory board, past president of Hawaii Medical Association*

    Edgar A Lopez MD, FACS, member, Physicians for a National Health Program, Kentuckians for Single Payer*

    Ethel Long-Scott, Women’s Economic Agenda Project (WEAP)*

    Eric Naumburg, MD, co-chair Maryland chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program*

    Carol Paris, MD, president, Physicians for a National Health Program*

    George Pauk, MD

    Julie Keller Pease, MD, Topsham, Maine

    Julia Robinson, MD, People’s Health Movement-USA*

    Anne Scheetz, MD, Illinois Single-Payer Coalition, Physicians for a National Health Program and steering committee of Health Over Profit for Everyone*

    Mariel Scheinberg, OMS 4, Rowan University School of Osteopathic Medicine*

    James Squire, MD Physicians for a National Health Program Western Washington*

    Lee Stanfield, Health Over Profit for Everyone Steering Committee and Single Payer Tucson NOW*

    James P. Thompson, Ph.D.

    Bruce Trigg, MD, Public Health and Addiction Consultant

    John V. Walsh, MD, California Physicians for a National Health Program*

    Robert Zarr, MD, past president, Physicians for a National Health Program*

    Kevin Zeese, co-director of Popular Resistance

    *For identification purposes only.

  • US Provides Military Assistance to 73 Percent of World’s Dictatorships

    For decades, the American people have been repeatedly told by their government and corporate-run media that acts of war ordered by their president have been largely motivated by the need to counter acts of aggression or oppression by “evil dictators.” We were told we had to invade Iraq because Saddam Hussein was an evil dictator. We had to bomb Libya because Muammar Gaddafi was an evil dictator, bent on unleashing a “bloodbath” on his own people. Today, of course, we are told that we should support insurgents in Syria because Bashar al-Assad is an evil dictator, and we must repeatedly rattle our sabers at North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and Russia’s Vladimir Putin because they, too, are evil dictators.

    This is part of the larger, usually unquestioned mainstream corporate media narrative that the US leads the “Western democracies” in a global struggle to combat terrorism and totalitarianism and promote democracy.

    I set out to answer a simple question: Is it true? Does the US government actually oppose dictatorships and champion democracy around the world, as we are repeatedly told?

    The truth is not easy to find, but federal sources do provide an answer: No. According to Freedom House‘s rating system of political rights around the world, there were 49 nations in the world, as of 2015, that can be fairly categorized as “dictatorships.” As of fiscal year 2015, the last year for which we have publicly available data, the federal government of the United States had been providing military assistance to 36 of them, courtesy of your tax dollars. The United States currently supports over 73 percent of the world’s dictatorships!

    Most politically aware people know of some of the more highly publicized instances of this, such as the tens of billions of dollars’ worth of US military assistance provided to the beheading capital of the world, the misogynistic monarchy of Saudi Arabia, and the repressive military dictatorship now in power in Egypt. But apologists for our nation’s imperialistic foreign policy may try to rationalize such support, arguing that Saudi Arabia and Egypt are exceptions to the rule. They may argue that our broader national interests in the Middle East require temporarily overlooking the oppressive nature of those particular states, in order to serve a broader, pro-democratic endgame.

    Such hogwash could be critiqued on many counts, of course, beginning with its class-biased presumptions about what constitutes US “national interests.” But my survey of US support for dictatorships around the world demonstrates that our government’s support for Saudi Arabia and Egypt are not exceptions to the rule at all. They are the rule.

    Sources and Methods

    It was not easy to find out how many of the world’s dictatorships are being supported by the United States. No one else seems to be compiling or maintaining a list, so I had to go at it by myself. Here is how I came up with my answer.

    Step 1: Determine how many of the world’s governments may be fairly characterized as dictatorships. A commonly accepted definition of a “dictatorship” is a system of government in which one person or a small group possesses absolute state power, thereby directing all national policies and major acts — leaving the people powerless to alter those decisions or replace those in power by any method short of revolution or coup. I examined a number of websites and organizations that claimed to maintain lists of the world’s dictatorships, but most of them were either dated, listed only the world’s “worst dictators” or had similar limitations, and/or failed to describe their methodology. I ultimately was left with the annual Freedom in the World reports published by Freedom House as the best source for providing a comprehensive list.

    This was not entirely satisfactory, as Freedom House has a decidedly pro-US-ruling-class bias. For example, it categorizes Russia as a dictatorship. In the introduction to its 2017 Freedom In the World report, it opines that “Russia, in stunning displays of hubris and hostility, interfered in the political processes of the United States and other democracies, escalated its military support for the Assad dictatorship in Syria, and solidified its illegal occupation of Ukrainian territory.” A more objective view would note that claims of interference in the US election by the Russian government have not been proven (unless one is inclined to take certain US intelligence agencies at their word); that Russia was asked by the UN-recognized Syrian government for assistance, in compliance with international law (unlike US acts of aggression and support for insurrection there); and would at least acknowledge that any Russian intervention in Ukraine occurred in the context of the United States’ brazen support for a coup in that nation.

    Nonetheless, the Freedom House reports appear to be the best (if not the only) comprehensive gauge of political rights and freedoms covering every nation in the world. It utilizes a team of about 130 in-house and external analysts and expert advisers from the academic, think tank and human rights communities who purportedly use a broad range of sources, including news articles, academic analyses, reports from nongovernmental organizations and individual professional contacts. The analysts’ proposed scores are discussed and defended at annual review meetings, organized by region and attended by Freedom House staff and a panel of expert advisers. The final scores represent the consensus of the analysts, advisers and staff, and are intended to be comparable from year to year and across countries and regions. Freedom House concedes that, “although an element of subjectivity is unavoidable in such an enterprise, the ratings process emphasizes methodological consistency, intellectual rigor, and balanced and unbiased judgments.”

    One can remain skeptical, but a key consideration is that Freedom House’s pronounced pro-US bias is actually a plus for purposes of this project. If its team of experts tilts toward a pro-US-government perspective, this means that it would indulge every presumption in favor of not categorizing nations supported by the United States as dictatorships. In other words, if even Freedom House categorizes a government backed by the United States as a dictatorship, one can be fairly confident that its assessment, in that instance, is accurate.

    For purposes of the present assessment, I used Freedom House’s 2016 Freedom in the World report, even though its 2017 report is now available. I did so because the 2016 report reflects its assessment of political rights and civil liberties as they existed in 2015, which would roughly correspond with the military assistance and arms sales data that I had available for federal fiscal year 2015 (October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015) and calendar year 2015. (I will work on a new report when such data for fiscal year 2016 becomes available.)

    Freedom House uses a scoring system to gauge a nation’s “political rights” and “civil liberties,” in order to rate each country as “free,” “partly free” or “not free,” with a range of scores for each category. It describes its scoring system as follows: “A country or territory is assigned two ratings (7 to 1) — one for political rights and one for civil liberties — based on its total scores for the political rights and civil liberties questions. Each rating of 1 through 7, with 1 representing the greatest degree of freedom and 7 the smallest degree of freedom, corresponds to a specific range of total scores.”

    For purposes of deciding whether a nation could be categorized as a “dictatorship,” however, I focused only on the “political rights” scores, classifying nations with a political rights score of 6 or 7 as a dictatorship. This does not mean that civil liberties are unimportant, of course, but the objective here is to assess the degree of absolutism of the political leadership, not freedom of expression, press, etc. Of course, in the overwhelming majority of cases, nations with low political rights scores also have low civil liberties scores. However, a political rights score of 6 or 7 corresponds most closely with our definition of dictatorship, based on Freedom House’s characterization:

    6 — Countries and territories with a rating of 6 have very restricted political rights. They are ruled by one-party or military dictatorships, religious hierarchies, or autocrats. They may allow a few political rights, such as some representation or autonomy for minority groups, and a few are traditional monarchies that tolerate political discussion and accept public petitions.

    7 — Countries and territories with a rating of 7 have few or no political rights because of severe government oppression, sometimes in combination with civil war. They may also lack an authoritative and functioning central government and suffer from extreme violence or rule by regional warlords.

    While it may be debatable whether it is appropriate to consider a country with no “functioning central government” as a dictatorship, I would submit that the label is appropriate if that nation is ruled de facto by warlords or rival armies or militias. In effect, that simply means that it is ruled by two or more dictators instead of one.

    By Freedom House’s measure, then, there were 49 nation-states that could be fairly characterized as dictatorships in 2015, as follows:

    Afghanistan, Algeria, Angola, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Belarus, Brunei, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, China, Democratic Republic of the Congo (Congo-Kinshasa), Republic of the Congo (Congo-Brazzaville), Cuba, Djibouti, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Gambia, Iran, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Laos, Libya, Mauritania, Myanmar, North Korea, Oman, Qatar, Russia, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Swaziland, Syria, Tajikistan, Thailand, Turkmenistan, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, Vietnam and Yemen.

    It should be noted that Freedom House included in its ratings several other entities with a political rights score of 6 or 7 whose status as an independent state was itself disputed: Crimea, the Gaza Strip, Pakistani Kashmir, South Ossetia, Tibet, Transnistria, the West Bank and Western Sahara. My count of 49 dictatorships in the world in 2015 excludes these subordinated or disputed state territories.

    Step 2: Determine which of the world’s dictatorships received US-funded military or weapons training, military arms financing or authorized sales of military weapons from the United States in 2015.

    For this step, I relied on four sources, the first two of which took considerable digging to locate:

    A. “Foreign Military Training in Fiscal Years 2015 and 2016 Volume I and Volume II (Country Training Activities),” US Department of Defense and US Department of State Joint Report to Congress.

    This is the most recent annual report, required by section 656 of the Foreign Assistance Act (FAA) of 1961, as amended (22 U.S.C. § 2416), and section 652 of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2008 (P.L. 110-161), which requires “a report on all military training provided to foreign military personnel by the Department of Defense and the Department of State during the previous fiscal year and all such training proposed for the current fiscal year,” excluding NATO countries, Australia, New Zealand and Japan.

    This report provides data on US expenditures for military training programs under the Foreign Military Sales (FMS) program, Foreign Military Financing (FMF) grants, the International Military Education and Training (IMET) program, the Section 2282 Global Train and Equip (GT&E) program, the Aviation Leadership Program to provide pilot training (ALP), and the Foreign Assistance Act (FAA) drawdown program, which authorizes the president to direct the drawdown of defense articles, services and training if an “unforeseen emergency exists that requires immediate military assistance to a foreign country” that cannot be met by other means. Such expenditures are listed by recipient country, in some detail. For purposes of this study, I include expenditures under these programs as US-funded military training.

    The report also provides data on US expenditures for narcotics and law enforcement, global peace operations, centers for security studies, drug interdiction and counter-drug activities, mine removal assistance, disaster response, non-lethal anti-terrorism training and other programs that I did not count as military assistance or training for purposes of this survey. It is certainly more than possible that US assistance under these programs could play a role in providing de facto military assistance to recipient countries, but I err on the side of caution.

    The report describes the IMET program as including civilian participants, and including training on “elements of U.S. democracy such as the judicial system, legislative oversight, free speech, equality issues, and commitment to human rights.” One could conceivably criticize my inclusion of IMET training, therefore, on the ground that it actually trains foreign civilians and soldiers in democratic, anti-dictatorial values. However, the IMET program is presumably called “military” training and education for a reason. It trains students in “increased understanding of security issues and the means to address them,” and provides “training that augments the capabilities of participant nations’ military forces to support combined operations and interoperability with U.S. forces.” Accordingly, I think it is fair to count IMET as a form of military assistance, while acknowledging that it arguably might, at times, play a pro-democracy role.

    B. US Department of State, “Congressional Budget Justification FOREIGN ASSISTANCE SUMMARY TABLES, Fiscal Year 2017.”

    Table 3a of this publication provides the actual fiscal year allocations for foreign assistance programs, by country and by account, including the two programs that interest us here, Foreign Military Financing and IMET. In that regard, it is somewhat duplicative of the previous source, but I reviewed it as a check.

    C. Department of Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA), Financial Policy And Analysis Business Operations, “Foreign Military Sales, Foreign Military Construction Sales And Other Security Cooperation Historical Facts As of September 30, 2015.”

    This source provides the total dollar value of military articles and services sold to foreign governments for FY 2015, including the value of agreements for future deliveries and the value of actual deliveries, which I have provided in the table below. It also includes other data on foreign military financing (credit or grants) extended to foreign governments and provides yet another source on IMET training.

    D. Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), “Transfer of major conventional weapons: sorted by recipient. Deals with deliveries or orders made for year range 2015 to 2016.”

    SIPRI provides an interactive tool by which the user can generate a list of major weapons transfers by supplier, all or some recipients, and the year. Although it only counts “major” conventional weapons transfers, I reviewed it as an additional check on the accuracy of the chart. It essentially affirmed the accuracy of the DSCA report but there were some possible anomalies. For example, the DSCA reports only $8,000 worth of military sales to Uganda in FY 2015 but SIPRI reports the transfer of 10 RG-33 armored vehicles, two Cessna-208 Caravan light transport planes, and 15 Cougar armored vehicles in 2015. The discrepancy may be due to the three-month difference between fiscal year 2015 and calendar year 2105, different methods of dating the transfer, differences in valuation or some unknown factor.

    Step 3: Generate the Chart

    The first column in the chart below lists the 49 countries classified by Freedom House as dictatorial in nature. The second column shows those nations that received some US military training in FY 2015, relying primarily on source B, but also checking source C. The third column shows those nations that received an agreement for future military sales or transfers from the United States in FY 2015, with the dollar value of the military articles listed, based on source C, but also checking source D. The fourth column shows those nations that received an actual delivery of military articles from the United States in FY 2015, with the dollar value of the military articles listed, based on source C, but also checking source D.

    US Support for the World’s Dictatorships, Fiscal Year 2015

    2017 0923 Whitney chart 2

    US Support for the World’s Dictatorships, Fiscal Year 2015. (Chart: Rich Whitney)

    I plan on providing similar reports on US support for dictatorships around the world on an annual basis. I will begin work on a report covering Fiscal Year 2016 as soon as the relevant data becomes available.

    Rich Whitney is an attorney, actor, radio commentator and disk jockey, Illinois Green Party activist and former Green Party candidate for governor. He was one of the attorneys who worked on the ballot access case for the Georgia Green Party as well.

  • Grassroots Pressure is Responsible For Bernie Sanders Single Payer Bill

    Dr. Margaret Flowers, the Maryland Green Party’s 2016 candidate for US Senate says that Medicare For All is coming. She explains some areas where the Sanders Medicare For All bill falls short compared to the House version, HR 676. The fact that there finally IS a Senate version, against the wishers of the leaders of both parties is purely because the majority of the US people demand it. That demand needs to be louder, consistent and persistent. The US is the only advanced nation where hundreds of thousands go bankrupt every year because of medical expenses. It doesn’t have to be this way, and things will only change if we keep the heat on.

  • Where Are the Brave Military Voices Against Forever War?

    Today, my peers are silent.

    By Maj. Danny Sjursen

    Iraq War veteran Mike Prysner is arrested by U.S. Capitol Police during a 2007 protest. Credit:/CreativeCommons/DannyHammontree

    But they’ve been taught the way to do it

    Like Christian soldiers; not with haste

    And shuddering groans; but passing through it

    With due regard for decent taste

     —Siegfried Sassoon, How to Die (1918)

    September 20, 2017 “Information Clearing House” – It is my favorite moment. Of World War I, that is. The one that stays with me.

    Christmas, 1914: Nearly a million men are already dead, and the war is barely four months old.  Suddenly, and ultimately in unison, the opposing German and British troops begin singing Christmas carols. At first light, German troops emerge unarmed from their trenches, and walk out into “no-man’s land.” Despite fearing a ruse, the Brits eventually joined their sworn enemies in the churned earth between the trench lines. Carols were sung, gifts of cigarettes exchanged—one man even brought out a decorative tree. It only happened once. Though the bloody, senseless war raged across three more Christmases, the officers on each side quashed future attempts at a holiday truce. And yet, for that brief moment, in the ugliest of circumstances, the common humanity of Brits and Germans triumphed. It must have been beautiful.

    Ultimately, nearly ten million men would die in battle. For all that, little was settled. It rarely is.  The ruling classes still ruled, the profiteers profited, and Europe went to war again not twenty years later. So it went, and so it goes.

    Nonetheless, World War I boasted countless skeptics and anti-war activists both in and out of uniform. Their poetry and prose was dark, but oh was it ever powerful. Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen from the Brits; Erich Maria Remarque for the stoic Germans; and our own Ernest Hemingway. A lost generation, which sacrificed so much more than youth: their innocence. They call to us, these long dead dissenters, from the grave.

    They might ask: Where are today’s skeptical veterans? Tragically, silence is our only ready response.

    It was not always so in America. During the brutal Seminole Indian Wars, 17 percent of army officers resigned in disgust rather than continue burning villages and hunting natives down like dogs in Florida’s Everglades’ swamps. Mark Twain’s cheeky prose demolished the Philippine-American colonial war at the turn of the century (some 30 years after he briefly served in the Missouri state militia during the Civil War). Hemingway, laid the truth bare after being wounded in the First Great War while serving as a Red Cross ambulance driver. And Major General Smedley Butler—two-time Medal of Honor recipient though he was—emerged from the Caribbean “Banana Wars” to admit he’d been naught but a “high class muscle man for Big Business,” a “gangster for capitalism.”  

    For all the celebration (and mythologizing) over World War II, at least we had Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller to burst our comfortable, patriotic bubble. And, though it likely lost him the presidency, Senator John Kerry (and his Vietnam Vets against the War mates) showed the courage to testify to the truth in the Winter Soldier Hearings.

    Today, despite a few brave attempts, we are treated to nothing of the sort. Why, you ask?

    To begin with, most of the above mentioned wars were fought by draftees, militiamen, and short-term volunteers: in other words, citizen-soldiers. Even now, the identity of “citizen-soldier” ought to emphasize the former term: citizen. It doesn’t. Now, as we veterans are constantly reminded, we are warriors. Professionals. Hail Sparta!

    In 2017, it’s near impossible to remember that today’s professional, volunteer army is less than half a century old, a product of epic failure in Vietnam. Most of America’s Founding Fathers, after all, scorned standing armies and favored a body of august, able citizen-soldiers. Something more akin to our National Guard. Deploy these men to faraway lands, so the thinking went, and each town would lose its blacksmith, carpenter, and cobbler too. Only vital interests warranted such sacrifice. Alas, it is no longer so.

    In truth, the “citizen-soldier” is dead, replaced—to the sound of cheers—by self-righteous subalterns hiding beneath the sly veil of that ubiquitous corporate idiom: professionalism.  Discipline, motivation, teamwork—these are all sleek, bureaucratic terms certain to mold terrific middle managers, but they remain morally bare. And, ultimately, futile.

    So today, my peers are silent. Professional officers are volunteers; dissenters are seen as little more than petulant whiners, or oddball nuts. It is hard to know why, exactly, but the increasing cognitive and spatial distance of contemporary soldiers from society at large seems a likely culprit. Combine that with the Republican Party’s veritable monopoly on the political loyalties of the officer corps and you have yourself a lethal combination.

    Only don’t rule out cowardice. Who isn’t fearful for their career, income, and family stability? It is only natural.  After all, this business—despite protestations to the contrary—does not tend to value intellectualism or creative thinking. Trust me. Besides, in this struggling transitory economy, the military “welfare state” is a tempting option for America’s declining middle class. Ironic, isn’t it, that the heavily conservative officer corps loves their socialized medicine and guaranteed pensions?

    Under the circumstances, perhaps silence is understandable. But it is also complicity.

    By now, the wars are lost, if ever they were winnable. Iraq will fracture, Syria collapse, and Afghanistan wallow in perpetual chaos. It will be so. The people will forget. Our professional, corporate regiments will, undoubtedly, add banners to their battle flags—sober reminders of a job well done in yet another lost cause. Soldiers will toast to lost comrades, add verses to their ballads, and precious few will ask why.

    Perhaps a good officer suppresses such doubt, maintains a stoic, if dour, dignity, and silently soldiers on. As for me, I am not made of such stuff, and more’s the pity. I buried seven men in the fields of the Forever War, casualties of combat and the muted sufferings of suicide.

    Their banal sacrifice demands explanation. They deserve as much.

    For those lonely few, we who publicly dissent, the audience is scant, interest meagre, and our existence: solitary.

    Major Danny Sjursen, a TomDispatch regular, is a U.S. Army strategist and former history instructor at West Point. He served tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan, and wrote a memoir, Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge. Follow him on Twitter @SkepticalVet.

    (The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.)

    *** This article has been edited to reflect Mark Twain’s brief stint in the Missouri state militia, not the regular Confederate army; and the fact that Ernest Hemingway served the Red Cross during World War I.

    This article was first published by The American Conservative –

  • Universal Basic Income: A Good Idea? Or a Right Wing Trojan Horse?

    Adam Proctor, host of the Dead Pundit Society podcast examines the real calculations behind the Silicon valley billionaires and libertarians pushing a Universal Basic Income. Turns out that some of them want to substitute a meager UBI for actual wage increases, and for programs which deliver food, child care, housing, medical care and other necessities.

  • Dekalb County GP Meeting Features Presentation on Universal Basic Income

    What about a guaranteed income floor for everybody, with no work requirement tied to it?  If this sounds like pie in the sky when you die, think again. The Canadian province of Ontario already has a guaranteed basic income pilot project, and the national Green Party and most recently the Dekalb County Green Party hosted a presentation on the idea at their monthly meeting.

    Here’s what you need to know about Universal Basic Income in Georgia (UBIG)

     

    At a time when jobs are disappearing both through automation, outsourcing and worker exploitation (demanding one worker do the work of two), it is necessary to look for alternatives to “business as usual”.

    The concept of “Basic Income” is centuries old, however it’s opponents continue to use old arguments that have been disproven to keep it from catching on.  UBIG INC.ORG is taking on that problem by organizing Basic Income Activists to spread their fresh approach to getting the word out.

    The idea is, that all individuals receive a cash payment which does not require means-testing or have a work requirement. The benefits are numerous and significant. It provides an economic floor that supports people in transition, retirees as well as newly graduated worker.

    It relieves social tension within families due to illness, job loss or other life changing circumstances.

    It would provide relief and the possibility that a person could go to school, develop their talents, care for someone, or start a business.

    Income security can contribute to less violence, crime and drug use. Improved relationships, improve working lives and a more creative and happy society.

    There are many proposed ways for paying for Basic Income, for example cutting corporate welfare or taxing corporations that outsource or replace workers with automation. The possibilities are many.  Elon Musk has stated that Basic Income will become inevitable in the future, because of automation.

    Recently countries like Finland, and Netherlands. Ontario, Canada’s largest province plans to soon launch a basic income pilot program in Hamilton.

    First nations people in the United States already receive Basic Income from state revenues from the sale of natural resources, as do citizens in other countries.

    In Georgia, UBIG has a very precise approach, providing Basic Income but also counseling for recipients to help them manage their money and realize their dreams.

    But the process of educating an over-worked, insecure population is not easy.

    UBIG has solved that problem by conducting a social experiment in Georgia.

    UBIG will provide $1000 a month for a year, for 100 individuals chosen by the public.

    To enter Georgia resident need fill out a survey which asks, what would you do if you had an extra $1000 per month?

    The genius of this is that everyone who enters has a chance to win – why wouldn’t you want to share this with your friends and family.

    Once the public is made aware of what Basic Income is, and is not, the chances go up significantly that it will be passed into law in the State of Georgia.

    There is precedence for this in Georgia. Medical marijuana was once totally written off in the state, yet became law within only four years.

    For all these reasons the Dekalb County Greens have begun educating their members about UBIG. Think about it.  Better yet, do something.

    For more information go to WWW.UBIGINC.ORG.

    The Green Party is the only US political party that stands for a Universal Basic Income.  Consider joining the Georgia Green Party, the only party that fights for you, at our minimum dues level of only $10 per month. Click here to make that happen.

    The Platform of the Green Party of the United States includes:

    IV. Economic Justice & Sustainability

    D. Livable Income

    We affirm the importance of access to a livable income.

    1.  We call for a universal basic income (sometimes called a guaranteed income, negative income tax, citizen’s income, or citizen dividend). This would go to every adult regardless of health, employment, or marital status, in order to minimize government bureaucracy and intrusiveness into people’s lives. The amount should be sufficient so that anyone who is unemployed can afford basic food and shelter. State or local governments should supplement that amount from local revenues where the cost of living is high.

     

     

  • A Lot of What You Know About Korea is Racist Nonsense

    Pyongyang is not crazy

    by ANDREW DOBBS

    Check out our follow up piece here.

    Less than three months into Pres. Donald Trump’s reign we can already say that there is a non-trivial chance that the United States will soon be engaged in a nuclear war.

    The threat is still remote, but all the pieces are in place. An aircraft carrier group en route to North Korea, anonymous sources threatening a preemptive strike against them, a recent unilateral attack on the Syrian government and the dropping of a 21,000 pound conventional bomb in Afghanistan — interpreted by many as a message for North Korea.

    Any misjudgments or mistakes could easily spark a shooting war in which the North Koreans will face an existential threat they can only resist with their nuclear weapons. The United States would be likely to respond in kind.

    The main thing standing between us and this scenario? The cooler heads and good judgement of Trump and Kim Jong-Un.

    This is deeply concerning, but to hear the U.S. media tell it all of the irrationality and risk in this is on the North Korean side. NBC News, in the very article announcing the United States’ threat of unauthorized aggression against North Korea, called it “volatile and unpredictable.”

    Australia’s defense industry minister called North Korea “the world’s greatest threat” less than a week after the United States escalated the major power conflict in Syria with little warning. And The New York Times spoke of China’s need to “rein in” the childish North Koreans, even if the United States is the one that’s killed at least 1,000 civilians in combat since the beginning of 2017.

    Western propaganda draws from a deep well of racist “yellow peril” prejudice to stoke irrational fears against this tiny, poor, isolated country, and it amplifies this paranoia with long-standing stereotypes of East Asian “oddity” to dehumanize North Koreans and justify U.S. aggression against them.

    In the hands of a war-horny bigot like Trump, this well-established, bipartisan narrative poses a fearsome threat of making nuclear war inevitable. It’s imperative that we answer these lies immediately if we are to minimize this risk.

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    There are three basic pieces to the West’s slander of North Korea — that the whole country is “crazy” and especially dangerous, and that North Koreans are treacherous and untrustworthy. They can’t be reasoned with, they won’t honor any diplomatic agreements, and any moment they could fly off the handle and kill millions of people for no reason whatsoever.

    This demands extraordinary military pressure from the United States and allies and may, alas, require us to destroy them.

    Each of these is a perverse misrepresentation. The claim that they are insane in particular is a terrific example of gaslighting — an abuse tactic where the perpetrator takes steps to make their victim act or feel crazy and then uses those responses as proof of the victim’s irrationality, a justification for further abuse.

    North Korea, by way of context, is bordered on the north by China and the south by South Korea. South Korea hosts 28,500 U.S. soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen, many of them literally amassed at the border with the North. On their east is the Sea of Japan (known to Koreans as the East Sea), and across that is a nation which brutally occupied Korea for decades.

    The North Koreans are surrounded on all sides by countries that have invaded or occupied them in living memory, and the world’s most powerful military is still technically at war with them and poised to invade at moment’s notice.

    This is the sort of scenario that would make any country not merely paranoid, but legitimately insecure. In light of U.S. military aggression against countries that choose to resist our global order — see Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc. — North Korea can choose to capitulate or focus tremendous resources on building up their defensive capabilities.

    USS ‘Carl Vinson’ heads toward South Korea in March 2017. U.S. Navy photo

    Also in living memory there is the time the United States killed a quarter of the North Korean population and leveled the country’s urban centers, leaving almost no structures standing in Pyongyang. The North Koreans didn’t capitulate then and it isn’t on the table now — defense and defiance it is, and this is hardly “crazy” in context.

    The U.S. media, however, never provide this context and instead they present North Korean military propaganda as being unhinged and aggressive. They never compare this, of course, to U.S. military flyovers at sporting events or the ceremonial induction of new soldiers at halftime, or even to our National Anthem with its celebration of bombings and rockets and warfare.

    If North Korea is “crazy” for its militarism, then the United States is downright certifiable.

    U.S. propaganda can dismiss North Korea’s legitimate concerns so easily because of the underlying racist assumption that these are a bizarre and simple-minded people that believe in things like unicorns. This feeds off of and into orientalist logic that sees East Asians as a nearly subhuman “other” that can’t be reasoned with and so must be handled with force.

    It worked when we needed to justify violence against immigrant laborers in the 19th century and it works to justify our imperialist expansion today.

    North Korea’s Government Is Terrible — And That’s Beside the Point
    America doesn’t choose its enemies for their moral qualitiesmedium.com

    As for claims about North Korea’s unique danger to the world, this too is divorced from reality. The country has no meaningful power projection capability — its naval surface vessels can’t operate more than about 50 kilometers off the coast — and the U.S. military has them contained to the south. China is still North Korea’s ally and does not view it as a significant military threat. North Korea is contained.

    But what about those missiles and nukes? The North Koreans could maybe lob a missile at Japan — or maybe not, a missile test on April 15, 2017 failed — and they could level Seoul with artillery alone. But why would they ever do this?

    The only way to explain such a unilateral assault on any of their neighbors — which would prompt either U.S. or Chinese military assets to overwhelm and destroy them — is to go back to that same baseless “crazy” claim. They could miscalculate of course, but claims that they are especially dangerous almost always rely upon the assumption that they might just wig out and bomb everybody for no reason at all at any moment.

    Again, this is rooted in an infantilizing, dehumanizing, racist logic.

    And any claims of a direct North Korean threat to the United States is ludicrous bullshit. They have no weapons capable of reaching anywhere within thousands of miles of the United States, and are years away from developing it, at best. Even if they reach that goal — which their very uneven history of missile tests indicates will be very difficult — they would still have thousands of fewer weapons than we do.

    U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson visits South Korea in March 2017. U.S. State Department photo

    Any launch of that sort would represent an act of mortal desperation — again, it would be totally delusional to launch it offensively. Cable news is a much bigger threat to U.S. security than North Korea ever will be.

    So if North Korea’s military threat is totally derived from their desire to preclude a US attack why not negotiate a peace between our country and theirs? If they had that sort of assurance we could both back away from the brink and perhaps even provide space for an opening in North Korean society.

    Conventional wisdom answers that the North Koreans have reneged on every agreement ever made with them. But if the “crazy” claims are an example of gaslighting, this answer is a textbook case of projection. It’s not the North Koreans who have betrayed past agreements, but the United States. To cover this up we repeat the same racist logic we used against Native Americans — we broke the treaties, but they were the “Indian givers.”

    The main incident here has to do with the “Agreed Framework between the United States of America and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” signed between the two countries in 1994. The Agreed Framework — as it is usually called — basically traded the end of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program for normalized economic and diplomatic relations with the United States.

    As a good faith step to spur the negotiations North Korea submitted to limited weapons inspections while the United States cancelled military exercises with South Korea. North Korea also used its plutonium production plants for energy, so the United States agreed to work with allies to provide them with fuel oil until two light water nuclear reactors — nuclear power plants that cannot be weaponized — could be built.

    Donald Trump Is Beating the Drum of War
    Get ready to resistmedium.com

    The United States failed to uphold its end of the agreement almost immediately. Two weeks after it was signed, Republicans took back Congress and labeled the agreement “appeasement.” They never provided sufficient funds for providing the fuel oil and the United States never met the obligations set in the Agreed Framework.

    The Americans also failed to take even the first preliminary steps in building the light water reactors for over four years, and then moved at such a slow pace that there was no chance of meeting the timelines set in the Framework.

    Finally, and most significantly, Congress blocked any attempts to begin normalizing relations between North Korea and the United States and Pres. Bill Clinton never pressed it to do so.

    North Korea played along for at least four years and even warned us that it was going to restart its nuclear program a year before it actually began a pilot program. According to Leon Sigal, author of Disarming Strangers: Nuclear Diplomacy with North Korea, the North Koreans did not shift from this pilot effort to a full-scale weapons program until Pres. George W. Bush refused new negotiations in 2001.

    North Korea “was playing tit for tat — cooperating whenever Washington cooperated and retaliating when Washington reneged, in an effort to end enmity,” Sigal wrote in 2007. This extended to the later Six Party Talks between North and South Korea, the United States, China, Japan and Russia which almost brought North Korea back into the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

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    Talks broke down when the United States refused to release $24 million frozen in a Macau bank account, and North Korea tested its first nuclear weapon six months later. But for that $24 million there might be no nuclear threat from North Korea today.

    The fact is that America set such a low priority on disarming North Korea because it isn’t dangerous to the United States because it have nukes. The North Koreans are dangerous because they refuse to submit to our imperial authority and play ball with our global order.

    Notice how much less hand-wringing you hear about Pakistan, even though it does have a nuclear arsenal probably 15 times the size of North Korea’s, while also actively collaborating with jihadists. The Pakistanis are subject to the U.S. empire, however, and they buy their weapons from the U.S. military-industrial complex, so they are no big deal.

    North Korea dares to not only maintain its independence, but to defend it by any means necessary. It can’t be rewarded with negotiation. America has to destroy North Korea to teach the rest of the world a lesson, and this means preparing the U.S. public for nuclear war, painting the country as a bunch of war-crazed military aggressors whose word can’t be trusted.

    Again, this is the definition of projection, taking advantage of racist assumptions baked into U.S. politics and culture.

    The good news is that it appears that North Korea is acting both rationally and politically — not militarily — right now. The country is playing the present crisis in such a way as to encourage a favorable outcome in South Korea’s upcoming snap presidential election.

    A friendlier government there could mean new economic and political opportunities as well as new diplomatic backup that could help shift the balance in any future negotiations with the United States.

    Unfortunately the North Koreans are lined up against the regime of an insulated, ignorant, white supremacist warmonger who has learned in the last few weeks that the same forces lying about North Korea kiss his ass when he escalates military conflicts around the world.

    It’s our responsibility to push back against our government and against the institutions lying their way into nuclear war.

    It’s our responsibility to speak the truth about North Korea — even if it challenges our most deep-seated political assumptions — and it’s our responsibility, always, to stay defiant.

    Writing is hard. Money is short. Support this reporter. Follow DEFIANT on Facebook and Twitter.

    Democrats and Republicans alike are howling for war with Korea.  Big up the fight for peace.  Join the Georgia Green Party at our minimum dues level of only $10 per month.

  • Building the Greens Into A Sustainable Mass-Based Party of the Left

    An open letter to members and friend of the GA Green Party about our present status and the tasks before us from Bruce Dixon, co-chair GA Greens.

    Saturday, April 22

    Members and friends of the GA Green Party,

    We‘ve got a project. The project is to transform the Green Party from a marginal factor to a sustainable mass based party, able to compete with existing political parties and struggle for power over how our lives are lived and whether we have a planet to pass on to our children.

    Right now the Greens are not that party. For the last 20 years the Green organizing model has depended upon donors and volunteer energies, which ebb and flow. It hasn’t worked well. Our presidential candidate raised just got one percent of the vote. She wasn’t even allowed on the ballot in Georgia and several other states. The state and national Green parties are unable to raise money for needed staff and services, and in states likie Georgia we have failed to grow our Green parties beyond a few dozen or couple hundred activists scattered around a state. And other states are in a similar place. This is the Green Party we have inherited.

    Our project, our plan is to transform. We are going to build he Green Party in this state and around the country into something not seen in the US since the Socialist Party of a century ago….

    • a mass based,
    • sustainable
    • internally democratic
    • party of the left.

    Each of those terms are important, so let’s take them one at a time.

    WHY A PARTY OF THE LEFT?

    Politics is how we humans conduct our collective affairs. Political parties are how we come together to make that happen.

    The political terms right and left originated back during the French Revolution of the 1790s.  There was a moment called the Constituent Assembly when on the right side of the room there sat the blood-stained representatives of France’s overseas slave empire in Martinique, South America and Saint Domingue, which would soon become Haiti.  Alongside them was the Catholic Church which owned a great fraction of the country’s land, and France’s ancient greedy aristocracy which aimed to restore the monarchy by any means necessary.  On the left side of the room sat the landless peasants, and small farmers, urban workers, small business people, traders and shopkeepers, artisans and the unemployed. 

    Ever since then those who stand for the rule of unearned wealth and privilege, for aristocrats, oligarchs and the one percent have been called the right while those who fight for the poor and the oppressed, for workers, for the unemployed – for the 99% have been called the left.

    Remember that when people try to tell you somebody or something is or ought to be above or beyond “left and right” or that those are not real or relevant distinctions. They’re kidding you, and maybe themselves too. So we need a party of the left.

    Our aim is to build a mass party in Georgia, with tens of thousands of dues paying members over the next two or three years. Can such a thing really be done? Given that the Socialists were able to achieve numbers very much like that a hundred years ago in states like Michigan, the answer seems to be yes, it’s entirely possible.

    HOW DO WE MAKE A PARTY SUSTAINABLE, INTERNALLY DEMOCRATIC AND SCALABLE UP TO LEVELS WHERE IT CAN COMPETE FOR POWER WITH OTHER PARTIES AND WITH SOME OF THE NONPROFITS WHO VIRTUALLY OWN THE SOCIAL MOVEMENT?

    The answer is we organize Green parties as dues based membership bodies with officers directly accountable to members, who are defined by whether they’ve paid the monthly dues. Party building experiences almost everywhere outside the US confirms the viability of this model. It’s been used to sustain mass parties of the left on five continents, just not here in the last hundred years.

    Only a dues based membership assures our party’s efforts scalability, the resources to hire staff, to do mailings, to call meetings across the state and to create events and processes which engage its members in the activities, the direction and the governance of a statewide party. Georgia is not a small place. A statewide Georgia party should have events and spaces to hold them in Atlanta, Athens, Savannah, Augusta, Rome and a few other places.

    Party dues provide the only sound basis for internal democracy in a left party. Paid up party dues establish membership, and only party members in good standing can serve as or elect party officers, some of whom should be elected at frequent intervals, like every six months. Without this chain of responsibility between the party’s officers and the dues paying members, our party’s leaders are in practice accountable to nobody. With it they can act as a peoples party in ways that Democrats, Republicans and Libertarians, all beholden to one percenter donors cannot.

    SO THE STATE COMMITTEE HAS SET THE MONTHLY DUES FLOOR AT $10 PER MONTH, AND ENCOURAGES COUNTY LOCALS TO SET THEIR OWN DUES LEVELS.

    Why $10 a month?

    The answer is why not? At $10 a month a base of 300 members nets an income of $3000 per month, enough to hire a part time staffer or a space where we can have frequent, even weekly events, a necessity if we are to grow into a mass party. At 500-600 members we should look for some office and event space in a second city, Savannah or Augusta or Columbus or Rome, and at a thousand dues paying members we can hire another staff person and look for event/office space in a third Georgia city.

    $10 a month is the floor not the ceiling. We think those who have more will choose to give more if they know that many are pitching in at the minimum level of $10 per month. Of course the party has to maintain a month-to-month list of its dues paying members, something a small committee working with the treasurer can do.

    Won’t there be some people who can’t pay $10 a month? Shouldn’t Greens waive the membership dues for people of limited income, in the name of inclusivity?

    I think the answer should be no. If someone cannot pay $10 a month they don’t have to be a member of this party. We still love them, but party members should have some skin in the game. That which we pay nothing for we value little or not at all. $10 a month isn’t much, poor people juggle amounts like all the time, and they choose to spend their money on what they decide matters most. If we cannot make Green Party membership worth that $10 even for people of limited means, as left parties do everywhere else in the world we are probably in the wrong business.

    Critically, “including” free and discounted memberships breaks the chain of accountability between party officers and the dues paying members. It creates another class of members with no skin in the game, members for whom party membership isn’t worth a mere $10 a month. Are these the “members” we want deciding party policy and electing its officers?

    Green Parties in Chicago and Baltimore have just adopted the all dues model. Colorado, Ohio and some other states are walking this way as well. Richmond California has repeatedly elected a Green mayor and several Green city council people. The core organization that does this is called the Richmond Progressive Alliance, and it has about 300 dues paying members.

    Basing our party on membership dues will allow the Green Party to compete with the nonprofits for leadership in the social movement.

    Right now, nonprofit organizations pretty much own the movement because they are the only ones who can throw staff hours and resources at a problem. That means that donors and officers hand picked by donors set the priorities for the movement. That can’t be right. Even the most righteous nonprofits are accustomed to enforcing an artificial barrier between what they do and “politics”, as though hunger, housing, and the rest could somehow be separate from the political.

    Last year the Georgia Green Party tried to buy table space at the national conference of BDS, the movement to boycott, divest and sanction the apartheid regime of Israel. Amazingly we were turned down because the Green Party is “political.” As it is, the nonprofits and churches are the only organizations which can hire staff and the only ones that have guaranteed meeting spaces. That will only change when the party has its own offices and spaces.

    WHAT WE NEED TO DO BETWEEN NOW AND OUR JUNE 17 ANNUAL MEETING, AND BEYOND

    We need to begin emailing to our lists at least weekly, and we need to secure some additional lists as well. This Sunday April 23 should be the first of these. Every Sunday between now and June 17 is possible.

    We need to produce a variety of leaflets and handouts for use at public sites of all kinds. We need the first of these available for next weekend, April 28. This sounds like a job for the communications committee.

    We’ll want local committees to be responsible for tabling, being present at events, gathering names to add to our lists, using volunteers gathered by our phone banking efforts. We should supply the individuals and teams out doing personal encounters at street festivals, concerts, outside courthouses, in public parks or other locations with leaflets and forms people can fill out on tablets or cell phones to include themselves in our mailing lists.

    We’ll need another committee to work on the coordination an aggressive phone banking effort, not just of the roughly 4,000 names we have of people who took part in the Stein campaign, but of the people who give us their phone numbers in personal encounters. We need something like 12 thousand phone calls made over the next eight weeks.

    We need to identify and reach out to friendly existing formations and their leaders throughout the state, to explain to them how and why we are re-imagining Georgia’s Green Party, how we intend to build it into a mass based sustainable party of the left that will soon compete for offices and struggle for power.

    PHONE BANKING BUILDS OUR PARTY

    We need to call every number in our database.

    1. Every call informs people of the annual meeting, and invite them to it.
    2. Every call pitches party membership at $10 per month
    3. We should use the calls to target counties and refer people to local formation meetings in the fifteen or so counties where we have 50 or more names, and to virtual events we do on Facebook or other devices.
    4. We must also use the calls to recruit more phone bankers, and more people tabling and doing personal encounters with people using our printed materials and gathering names on forms for our database. This is how we grow our lists, and eventually our membership.
    5. The committee should establish an estimate of how many person hours it would take to make what might be 15 thousand calls by the end of June, a not unreasonable number if we expect to contact every one in that dataset who will talk to us two or three times between now and June 17.

    If we do not call and email these people, then for them the Green Party does not exist. Once we grow to a certain point, we will have to make a phonebank capability a permanent feature of our party, perhaps even a virtual one like the Stein campaign used. Meanwhile we can distribute sections of our database to callers as MS Excel spreadsheet attachments which will be sent via email, twenty names at a time, along with the script. Callers will be asked to fill out the fields after the names and numbers with appropriate data.

    We should have two or three online checkins available for those having problems on the calls. These can occur on the party’s ZOOM account, the meeting and phone numbers for which will be posted on the web site and included in the phone bankers’ email with the script and list segments.

    I can have phone scripts ready late Sunday of April 23.

     

    LIST BUILDING IS VITAL TO THE GROWTH OF OUR PARTY

    We’re not marketers, we’re a political party. Our approach to and use of these corporate social media platforms, which are really marketing platforms, must be a bit different from the approach of marketers. We’re seeking a very different sort of engagement than the marketer, who only has to convey the essence of her proposition in 140 characters.

    We have to tell some of the news. We can’tn always tell all people need to know about Medicare For All in 140 characters. We have to do quite a bit of what most marketers claim is impossible, to get folks to read, not merely to scan, to engage living breathing people to take part in their own liberation instead of just clicking an online petition. We’ll be trying to get people into meetings and encounters both in cyberspace and in their own cities and towns, and to build sustainable Green Party locals there.

    It’s critical that we build our current email list of 6,700 up to 20,000, to 60,000 or 100,000 or more. No list like that as ever been amassed by any state Green party, but it’s NOT impossible and it IS necessary. At 6,700 names our list only reaches one tenth of one percent of Georgia voters. A list of 60,000 hits only one percent of Georgia voters. Can we get our mailing list up to 20 or 30 thousand by this fall?

    Capitalist media oligopolies virtually ban our party’s messages from the air. Green candidates are rarely allowed in debates, and often denied ballot access. So email, social media, in-person encounters and the phone are what we have to build our Party’s reach right now. .

     

    EFFECTIVE TABLING, LEAFLETTING, CIRCULATING AT OTHER PEOPLE’S EVENTS

    EVERY LEAFLET MUST BE A LIST BUILDER

    Let’s say you hand somebody a leaflet about the Green Party, and they glance at it. The person says sure, I’ll read it later and if I am interested I will join your email list. To facilitate that every leaflet should have a URL or SMS where they can do that.

    We should – we MUST have MANY DIFFERENT Green party leaflets. Some on environmental issues, some on gentrification, some on mass incarceration, some on foreign policy issues, you name it. Folks who want to work on communications should be all over this.

    EVERY CELL PHONE MUST BE A LIST BUILDER

    Everybody’s got a cell phone. We must provide online forms accessible via cell phone so that a Green at a table or event can hand her cell phone to some interested person and have the person enter their own email address and digits on our list enrollment form directly. This is better than a printed page because inputting written entries takes time and some entries are list because writing cannot be deciphered.

    EVERY EVENT OUR PEOPLE ATTEND SHOULD BE EXAMINED FOR EFFECTIVENESS, FOR HOW MANY LIST ADDITIONS IT GENERATES

    Suppose we buy a table in downtown Marietta, for one of their Saturday morning things, or somewhere in Gwinnett or Dekalb or Atlanta or Savannah. This is what being a dues supported organization lets us do. I’ve been threatened with arrest for circulating a Jill Stein petition on a Saturday morning in Marietta because our party did not buy a table. Suppose stock it with leaflets and a couple people. We should examine how many list additions this kind of event gets us, so that we understand what kinds of events are most productive, and what kinds of approaches to people yield the best results.

    VIRTUAL EVENTS

    Between now and the end of the summer we should aim to conduct some vitual events, most likely Facebook video, though there may be other options along the line of briefings on key issues, like the end of the state legislative session and what atrocities have been committed there, reports on mass incarceration, and related issues, and others.

    WHAT ABOUT RUNNING FOR OFFICE THIS NOVEMBER?

    November of odd numbered years is election time for many cities and towns. Most of the offices up for grabs in an odd numbered November are so-called “non-paritsan” contests. Greens might consider backing some candidates for local office, but November 2017 is mighty close. We have to build a party before we can do effective campaigns – we have already tried to do campaigns without much of a party to back them or be accountable to.

    Focusing mainly upon the building of a scalable, dues based mass party in in 2017 will put us in good position to consider originating competitive campaigns for office in 2018.

    There’s a lot to do, enough for everyone who wants to build a party in this state to take hold of and play a part in. Thanks for all that many of you have contributed up to this time. We should look forward to finding ways to work with each other on the project of re-imagining and building the Green Party in the weeks and months to come.

    Thanks.

    Bruce A. Dixon

    co-chair, GA Green Party