Corporate politicians do not work for you and me.
The ballot access petition filing deadline is upon us. Your help is urgently needed if we are to see Green Party candidates on November’s ballot. This page will share many reasons why you might care and want to help us in this effort. But if you are already convinced, use the button provided to skip directly to the form and make your appointment to sign the petition.
In our own history, we are told, we once fought a war over being taxed without meaningful representation in our own government.
Many of us have long been mad as hell.
The questions we are now left with:
What more will it take before
we are not willing to take it anymore?
Emotional blackmail
Every four years we are warned that we must not waste our vote, that we only have two viable options, that we must ‘vote blue no matter who’, even when the blue wing of the corporate parties steals the nomination from its own primary voters at the behest of its corporate contributors.
What choice do we really have?
Both corporate political parties exploit wedge issues related to social policy as a tool for emotional blackmail, and to ensure the voting base to which they appeal, remains on the reservation.
Roughly 60% of Americans tell us we need a third party. 44% of U.S. voters identify as politically independent, a larger portion than side with either corporate party.
We are told we can’t risk allowing the political opposition to make life time appointments to the Federal bench. Yet, slim majorities account for only 14% of the opinions issued by the highest court. While the electorate remains divided on social policy, the Court remains united in protecting the interests of wealth and privilege on the economic issues which impact us all.
The 5-4 Opinion in Citizens United was devastating. But after the 1974 term when the Court had agreed in Buckley v Valeo that ‘money is speech’, it was only a matter of time before corporate campaign contributors would drop any pretense that our elections are democratic. The Buckley Court struck down multiple provisions of the Federal Elections Campaign Act. There were five dissenting opinions among the eight Justices participating in that case. But each addressed only small points of divergence. Each of those five dissenting justices otherwise concurred with all participating justices ‘as to all other Parts’ of the Court’s otherwise unanimous opinion.
Wasted votes
Those who would use this emotional blackmail lie to us as well about the nature of the election, and ignore the Constitutional and historical realities.
But those realities are vital to understanding how to judge whether our votes are being wasted, and by whom.
Only two states allocate their Electoral College votes by some method other than winner-take-all. In Georgia, we use a first-past-the-post plurality to determine which slate of Presidential Electors is seated in the College come the first Saturday of December, when the real Presidential election is held.
Georgia has consistently given its Presidential Electors to the Republican ticket. At least it has since after Adlai Stevenson out-polled Dwight Eisenhower in our state’s General Election of 1956. In the 15 Presidential elections since then, there have only been three exceptions to that rule. In 1968, George Wallace with the American Independent Party outpolled Nixon and Humphrey to win Georgia. In 1976, native son and former Governor Jimmy Carter took Georgia, but he failed to do it again in 1980, losing his home state to Reagan. In 1992, sitting Georgia Governor Zell Miller delivered the state for his DLC buddy from Arkansas, Bill Clinton. But in 1996, Miller spoke for Dole at the Republican National Convention, and Clinton was left to win the Electoral College without the help of Georgia.
In the vernacular of U.S. political science, Georgia is what is known as a safe state; safe for the Republicans. Neither the red team nor the blue team will spend any national resources here in the Fall campaign, except perhaps to help an occasional Congressional candidate in a tight race.
But don’t count on the blue team loyalists to share that history with you. It does not serve their narrative, that ‘this is the most important election ever’ (something they tell us every four years) and that ‘every vote matters’, at least as long as that vote stays on the reservation. Because if you say your are voting for what you believe in, rather than their candidate, then suddenly you are throwing your vote away.
the blue team’s donors may decide you are wasting your vote.
The Founders in crafting the Constitution framed things to ensure that most of our votes do not in fact matter. And the ruling elites have found multiple ways to suppress our votes ever since.
Understanding the Constitution and our own history is vital to understanding what a wasted vote looks like. This understanding is vital to how we can most effectively exercise our own political power.
Health care
8-in-10 democrats and 56% of all voters including 24% of republicans support medicare-for-all.
But both Trump and Biden oppose it. Biden recently promised to veto medicare-for-all if given the opportunity.
Medicare for all covers all Americans, eliminates premiums paid to the private, for-profit insurance industry, eliminates co-pays and deductibles, simplifies our access to health care and guarantees health care as a right for all Americans.
That is why Jimmy Cooper like the rest of the Green Party, including our Presidential Nominee, Howie Hawkins, supports Medicare-for-All.
The Global Pandemic
Republicans and Democrats were agreed — with hardly a dissenting vote — on the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act. An analysis by Green Party candidates has labeled this measure “q The CARES Act outpaced the theft from the public coffers and tax paying workers of the 2008 banker bailout. The 2008 transfer of wealth failed to provide relief to those impacted most directly by the still ongoing foreclosure crisis. That crisis was fueled by the sub-prime mortgage fraud perpetrated the very banks the corporate parties determined were too big to fail, their executives too wealthy to jail. The sub-prime fraud was enabled by the Clinton (D) era repeal of the Glass-Steagall regulations of the banking industry, with the support of then Senator Joe Biden (D)’s vote.
The Georgia Green Party Congressional slate outlined a Pandemic Platform including a call for a Universal Basic Income, Medicare-for-All, the continuity of public services, protection for democratic institutions and a comprehensive set of reforms to protect Georgia workers from the ravages of an economy crashing under pandemic conditions.
Our Presidential nominee, Howie Hawkins has demanded funding for medicare coverage for all covid-19 testing and treatment, enforceable PPE protections for all workers, a universal basic income, loans to help businesses cover payroll and fixed overhead costs, a moratorium on evictions and foreclosures, the cancellation of rent, mortgage and utility payments plus a universal mail-in ballots for the 2020 general election.
Campaign Finance Reform
Multiple former federal elected officials have characterized our current campaign finance system as one of legalized bribery. A University of Maryland study found that 75% of republicans and 87% of democrats would support a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United, and that 88% of Americans want to reduce the influence of large contributors on the public policy process. Seven years ago, 79% of respondents told Gallup pollsters of their support for limits on campaign fundraising; 50% said they would support publicly financed campaigns.
On this issue we actually see a rare and meaningful distinction between the corporate party candidates. While Trump apparently has no issue with the unlimited dark money impacting public election without public disclosure, Biden actually has a record of support for publicly financed elections. Of course that has not prevented him from gaining a reputation, as one headline put it years ago, as the Senator of MBNA (a Maryland based bank acquired by Bank of America years ago).
Greens have had a long record in support of publicly or democratically financed election campaigns. The demand was a signature plank of the Georgia Green Party’s first nominee for Lieutenant Governor in 1998, Hugh Esco. Greens, including David Cobb (the national Party’s 2004 nominee for President of the United States), were instrumental in efforts to build Move To Amend, a grassroots effort to amend the federal constitution with the We the People Amendment (H.J.Res. 48), to reverse the judicial perversion of corporate personhood and to explicitly empower the federal, state and local governments to regulate campaign contributions, to require that they be publicly disclosed and to reverse the Supreme Court’s finding in Buckley v Valeo that ‘money is speech’ protected under the First Amendment.
Student Debt Crisis
Last year a Quinnipac University poll reported that 57% of Americans support significant forgiveness of student debt. A Pew poll found that 90% recognize the repayment of student debt as widely difficult for most graduates, that 69% of the American public recognize the adverse impact on the U.S. economy of the student debt crisis, and that 58% agree that our government should step in to provide relief. Last Fall, the Hill reported that “58 percent of registered voters said they would support a proposal that would make public colleges, universities and trade schools tuition-free. The same group also said they would back a plan eliminating all existing student debt.” Those numbers include 72% support from Democrats, 40% support among Republicans and 58% support from Independents.
As a private citizen, and owner of Trump University, the President benefited personally from the operation of a diploma mill designed to ensnare students in debt peonage. Facing an economic collapse under pandemic conditions, his administration has toyed publicly with the idea of waiving — for the duration of the public health crisis — the interest on student debt. Biden backed and helped enact a 2005 bill which stripped bankruptcy protections for those seeking to discharge student debt. His campaign now makes noise about the forgiveness of “undergraduate tuition-related federal student debt”, under means tested eligibility rules. But federally backed student debt is only a small part of the issue.
Greens have long agreed with the Abrahamic Faiths on the oppressive nature of usury, including our call for an end to the debt-backed creation of currency which has enslaved our nation (and most others around the world) to the Central (privately owned) Banks. Our 2008 Presidential nominee Cynthia McKinney first called for the forgiveness of student debt and the extension of tuition free post-secondary education to all students who wish to pursue it. This idea became a signature plank in the 2012 and 2016 campaigns of Green Party Presidential nominee Jill Stein. Howie Hawkins has continued to hammer the point on the campaign trail.
Climate Change
Americans have wanted climate change solutions since at least 1988, when NASA’s Dr. James Hanson testified before Congress and the media reported widely on his dire warnings of global warming. Reuters reported last year that “Nearly 70 percent of Americans, including a majority of Republicans, want the United States to take ‘aggressive’ action to combat climate change”. Presidential candidate George H.W. Bush made a campaign promise to “to do something about” global warming in 1988, but his Chief of Staff John Sununu undermined any meaningful action planned for climate solutions. This “presidential” subversion of the public’s demand for climate solutions continues today, after continued inaction and subversion by Bill Clinton, Georgia W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Trump.
If you examine Joe Biden’s climate “solution” from Biden’s own website,
Biden openly states he will use “carbon capture, use, and storage (CCUS)”. CCUS is a hypothetical technology that would allow fossil fuel power power plants to continue operating, but have their CO2 emissions piped underground at enormous cost and energy usage. CCUS has been promoted since the 1990’s without a single commercial plant ever being built, and the rationale for its promotion is that it acts as a theoretical set of movable goalposts that allow polluting fossil fuel electricity plants to continue using the atmosphere as their dumping ground. CCUS technology has been considered so expensive and commercially unviable that the fossil fuel industry will continue to delay commercial testing indefinitely, but will promote CCUS deployment as being “right around the corner”. CCUS provides a loophole for continuing fossil fuel use wider than an armada of supertankers, a strategy to continue the “business as usual” energy model, that exposes Biden’s climate solution plan as a PR sham.
The Green Party has been pushing for climate change solutions since its
founding, and has promoted the win-win-win solution of the “REAL Green New Deal” since Howie Hawkins promoted the plan in his 2010 campaign for Governor of the State of New York. Howie Hawkins is now the Green Party’s Presidential Nominee for 2020, and Georgia Greens are united with Hawkins in their support for the Green New Deal.
Wars without End
Americans oppose serving as a global police force, and our nation’s endless wars that this role seems to entail.
Democrats and Republicans have consistently voted for the wars and the appropriations to fund them.
Greens have consistently opposed foreign imperial aggression against sovereign nations in the global community. Enough said.
The filing deadline for our 2020 ballot access petition drive is Friday, August 14th at 12:00 noon. This is the last weekend of our petition drive. Regardless of whether you yourself intend to vote for Greens in November, if you believe in democracy, if you believe we need more voices in the debates and more choices on our ballots, please make an appointment to sign our petition now.
Thank you.
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