In this day and age it can be very difficult to be progressive. We live in a time where global warming and polluting energy consumption make the planet more and more unlivable. Global warming and Peak Oil threaten not only our lives but the upcoming generations on this planet. The result is that it is becoming ever more difficult to maintain our level of civilization. Our economy is controlled by corporations who disrupt local economies and have legal rights that make them unaccountable. The entire culture is filtered through the process of commodification, and we are at the point where seeds, water, and basic resources are privatized and copyrighted for those who have money. We are engaged in a war based on false premises that endanger lives while our rights are being taken away at home. Anyone who even begins to talk about the lack of a connection between Iraq and terrorism is dismissed as anti-American and unsupportive of the troops. In terms of our government, we have an administration that has a clear agenda for expanding power and hegemony, while the opposition party either agrees or acquiesces to the president’s demands. The only conclusion that one can draw is that the two major parties collude together to maintain power and do nothing to address these conditions.
This is not to say that there are not good individual Democrats, such as Dennis Kucinich, Russell Feingold, John Conyers, and the late Paul Wellstone. But corporate money and the ability to win an election by plurality maintains a two-party system. And a two-party system results in the parties becoming more and more similar with a limitation on new ideas and what can be done to improve the nation. This has degraded to the point where the two parties differentiate themselves on cultural characteristics that have nothing to do with public policy. The best example of this is the comparison of “Nascar Dads” and “brie-eating volvo-driving elitist liberals”. There is also the case that many congressional races have unopposed candidates, and voter turnout as well as registration in the two major parties is plummeting. Those in power therefore become less representative of our issues and end up supporting the status quo regardless of whether they are Democrat or Republican.
Progressives should be distinct from this shift in the culture war, in that progressives look at the deep structure of the underlying system rather than the symptoms. We know that if the public discussion is about Hollywood and cultural elites, then there will be no debate about corporate elites and Halliburton. In this time of urgency on many fronts, it is the Green Party that fulfills a gap in the political dialogue for progressives. With 10 Key Values of environmentalism, grassroots democracy, nonviolence, social and economic justice, community economics, decentralization, feminism, local and global responsibility, respect for diversity, and future focus, the Green Party addresses the issues that have been marginalized by those in power. Beginning with the peace, civil rights, and ecology movements of the 1960’s, the first Green parties formed in the early 1970’s in New Zealand and Switzerland. Soon other Green parties began to form in Europe and win elections. For example, the German Greens were the first to win seats in a national parliament in the early 1980's and formed part of the coalition government in the 1990’s. Greens first met in the United States in 1984 in St. Paul, Minnesota. These efforts fueled the growth in Green chapters with many hundreds in existence by the late 1980's. Alaska was the first state to achieve a recognized ballot line for the Green Party in 1990. After the 1996 elections, state Greens formed the Association of State Green Parties. Four years later the ASGP became the Green Party of the United States.
The Green Party is unique in that it incorporates both electoral politics as well as activism. This is a recognition that in order to offer new ideas one must be active within a full spectrum, both at the ballot box and in the streets speaking truth to power. One aspect does not overshadow the other, however. We are also distinct in that we do not receive corporate or overly large campaign donations and we put forth candidates from all walks of life to reflect citizen empowerment. This year the Green Party of New York has nominated five statewide candidates as our Peace Slate: Malachy McCourt for Governor, Alison Duncan for Lieutenant Governor, Rachel Treichler for Attorney General, Julia Willebrand for Comptroller, and Howie Hawkins for U.S. Senate. As fellow progressives and people committed to peace and justice, we hope that you will vote for these candidates as the best reflection of your interests and values. For if you vote your hopes, rather than any strategic voting against particular candidates, then you best address your fears about the future of the nation.
Malachy McCourt was born in Brooklyn, and from the age of three was raised in Limerick, Ireland. Necessity caused him to start life as a laborer at 13. He returned to America at 20 and worked as a longshoreman, truck loader, and dishwasher until he became an actor. He worked in Broadway and Off-Broadway plays such as “Mass Appeal”, “The Hostage”, “Inherit the Wind”, “Carousel”, and “Translations”. He also appeared in soap operas such as Ryan's Hope, One Life to Live, and All My Children and the movies “Molly Maguires”, “She's the One”, “The Devil's Own”, “Green Card”, and “Ash Wednesday”. In the early seventies he was one of the first radio talk show hosts on WMCA and also worked at WOR, WNYC, and WABC. Malachy has written his own New York Times bestseller memoir, “A Monk Swimming” and his memoir, “Singing My Him Song”. Along with 7 other books, he writes a column called “Sez I to Myself” that appears in the Manhattan Spirit, The Westsider, and Our Town in New York City. He is also the brother of Frank McCourt, author of “Angela’s Ashes”.
Alison Duncan moved to Schenectady when she was 4 years old. She came into political awareness early, and in high school she had her first elected office as the Secretary/Historian of the Student Political Interest Forum (SPIF). She also served as an opinion editor of the school’s ESSPA-award winning newspaper. She was able to use these roles in her school to increase the visibility of and tolerance towards lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) students several years before she came out of the closet herself. In 1993, she worked one summer for Green Corps in Boston as a field manager for the summer campaign in support of the Chlorine Zero Discharge Act. After graduation from college, she moved to New York City and became a member and a board member of the Women’s One World (WOW) Café Theater where she wrote, directed, and produced work that addressed transgender issues, racism, immigration, and domestic violence. Alison also works as an audiovisual technician in the Crowne Plaza Manhattan hotel. She joined the hotel union, the local of the NYC Hotel Trades Council in 1998 and was immediately elected to serve as the union delegate in her shop from 1998 to the present. During the Republican National Convention in New York City in 2004, Alison also became involved with the Medical Activists of New York organizing a network of crisis counselors to be on call for activists and protestors suffering trauma during the convention. She continues to work as a street medic during demonstrations.
Rachel Treichler is someone many of you already know, so many of her accomplishments speak for themselves. Rachel is a graduate of Harvard University (AB 1973) and the University of Texas School of Law (JD 1981). She has practiced law in New York since 1982, being an associate with two large New York City law firms for eight years before setting up her own practice in 1989. In 1996, Rachel founded Eco Books, selling environmental books online at www.ecobooks.com. In 2002, she ran for Congress as the Green Party candidate for the 29th congressional district. She has been a member of the Green Party since 1995, and has been active on the national, state, and local levels. She co-founded the Park Slope Greens in Brooklyn in 1997 and the Steuben Greens in 2002, and is currently secretary of the Steuben County Green Party. Rachel is active in the Sierra Club, the Bath Peace and Justice Group, the Finger Lakes Progressive Coalition, the Steuben League of Women Voters, and Southern Tier Farm to You. She is a member of the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York. Rachel serves as an at-large member of the executive committee of the Atlantic Chapter of the Sierra Club and is a member of the corporate accountability committee and the confronting corporate power task force of the national Sierra Club. What can be noted is that she is a highly proficient lawyer and activist, a combination greatly suited to the position of Attorney General. Her campaign is unique in that she will fight for the basic democratic rights of citizens in order to ensure that all other rights are protected, for citizen participation can be the best safeguard for social and economic justice.
Julia Willebrand is a third generation Brooklyn native, one of 10 children of a roofer who died at 50 of asbestos-related lung cancer. Her mother supported the family by working as an attendant at Creedmoor State Hospital. Julia started school at Ss. Cyril and Methodius (a bilingual Polish Catholic school) in Greenpoint, and graduated from St. Jean Baptiste High School. After working as a waitress in a coffeehouse in Greenwich Village in the 50s, she graduated from City College in February 1966. Julia was selected for an intensive Teacher Training program that June, started teaching at PS 84 in September, and was elected UFT delegate in October. As a United Federation of Teachers (UFT) delegate, she was part of a caucus that succeeded in withdrawing UFT support for the war in Vietnam. During the Vietnam War, she and her husband were draft counselors helping young minority men in the South Bronx navigate the Selective Service system to avoid service in the Vietnam War. During this time, she walked a picket in support of more effective schools and elected school boards, and organized a local Freedom School. As a newly minted college instructor at Jersey City State College, Julia also walked a picket line within a week of her hiring. A career in Adult Education included teaching, teacher training, and curriculum development for mothers on welfare. Ultimately this interest led to college teaching which culminated in a Fulbright professorship to Hungary. During the 1970's and early 1980's, in addition to teaching and activism related to public education, Julia completed three advanced degrees. In 1988, Julia began environmental activism, which eventually lead to her membership in the Green Party in the 1990’s. She has been active on both the state and national level.
Howie Hawkins is a founding member of the Green Party in the United States and a life-long activist for social and economic justice. After attending Dartmouth College in the early 1970s, Howie worked as a carpenter in New England and helped start a construction workers cooperative that specialized in solar and wind energy installations. A former Marine who organized opposition to the Vietnam war, he was a co-founder of the anti-nuclear Clamshell Alliance in 1976. Throughout the 1980’s he has participated in various independent campaigns, including Barry Commoner’s presidential campaign and Bernie Sanders’ mayoral campaign in Burlington, Vermont. In 1991 he became Director of CommonWorks, a federation of cooperatives working for an economy that is cooperatively owned, democratically controlled, and ecologically sustainable. He is a member of the Teamster’s Union, active in the national Teamster rank-and-file reform caucus Teamsters for a Democratic Union, and unloads trucks for UPS in Syracuse. Howie has written extensive articles on social theory, cooperative economics, and independent politics in many publications. These include Against the Current, Green Politics, International Socialist Review, New Politics, Peace and Democracy News, Peaceworks, Resist, Society and Nature, and Z Magazine. He is the editor of Independent Politics: The Green Party Strategy Debate (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2006).
The Peace Slate is united in its goal of promoting progressive ideas and to strengthen the Green Party as a viable alternative to business as usual from the two major parties. This year the Greens need to get 50,000 votes for Governor in order to gain ballot status. What this means is that with ballot status, local candidates would only need to get 5% of registered Greens within a district to sign a petition in order to have their name on the ballot for their campaign. Right now Green candidates need to get 5% of all registered voters in a district, much more than the Democrats and Republicans. Ballot status also means that the Green Party will be listed on voter registration forms, instead of having to be filled in by the voter under “Other”. In other words, getting 50,000 votes for Governor is vital for the survival of the party within New York state. Without the Green party, it can be far easier for the established parties to take advantage of independent-minded progressives, ignoring their concerns because they would have no other place to go. The Green Party is needed as both a new field of possible political action and as an outside force for those who wish to reform their own party. Everyone wins in a system that has multiple political parties. For those who say we take votes away from good candidates and allow the worst candidate to win, it is best to look at how different the supposed “good candidate” really is. With two parties dominant, the ability of real reformers or progressives to actually get nominated is very small. The primaries usually see a well-intentioned progressive running, only to be in last place while a homogenized choice that is unable or unwilling to break outside of the box is nominated. Rather than these progressives disappearing after the primary, forced to support the lesser candidate out of party loyalty or hidden coercion, the Green Party offers progressives all the time in the general election. If people voted for the candidate that best reflects their concerns, then the idea of “spoiling” an election is revealed to be the myth that it is, used by the major parties to forestall a third party candidate from having a chance to demonstrate that they are the better choice.
The platform for the Peace Slate can best be summarized by: Bring The Troops Home, Health Insurance Coverage For All, Living Wage Jobs, Equal Rights For All Regardless Of Sexual Orientation, Protecting Our Youth And Caring For Our Seniors, An Alternative Energy Plan, Free And Fair Elections, Protecting Civil Liberties, A Just And Humane Legal System, and A Fair And Sustainable Economy. Each candidate has their own issues they are advocating, which can be found on their campaign websites (www.votemalachymccourt.org, www.alisonduncan.org, www.voterachel.org, www.juliaforcomptroller.org, www.hawkinsforsenate.org) along with their biographies. Now is the time for people to stand up for what they believe in, for frankly we are running out of time as a democracy and as a planet. The people of New York can choose to use their imaginations and envision a better alternative for our state, and to act on their imagination in the present moment. This is an opportunity and part of a larger movement that includes such diverse elements as Cindy Sheehan and the peace movement, what is referred to as the anti-globalization movement but can be best called the global justice movement, various efforts for the rights of small businesses and labor, and the struggle for civil liberties and government reform. It is something that anyone as a citizen can do, but can contribute to helping humanity overall. With this one step, quite simple in its appearance, we can all be proud of our actions and secure that in the far future we will be remembered for doing the right thing. That is all we can hope for in the world if we have the courage to think really different. On November 7th, please vote for the Peace Slate of the Green Party in New York.
