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Candidate Pages:
| Peter Camejo | David
Cobb | Paul Glover |
| Kent Mesplay |Carol
Miller | Lorna Salzman |
Message from Presidential Candidate Lorna Salzman
Dear Ohio Green
Party members:
Thanks to you
all for allowing me to send you some of my thoughts about the Green
Party and its political future.
I decided to
seek the GP nomination for President for one reason: to promote
an ecological vision and and environmental program with in the Green
Party, and by so doing to help bring environmental activists and
the broader environmental community into our party. This constituency
has been prominently absent, as several Greens have observed, and
I believe that the Green Party has been remiss in its public statements
and actions. This needs to be redressed and my campaign is intended
to do this.
But our party
needs more and different constituencies. It will not be enough for
us to grow or even strengthen our public credibility if we limit
our preaching to the converted or to those we consider "natural
allies": minorities, gays, workers, immigrants, the poor, the
disenfranchised. While we need to address the genuine concerns of
these groups, there are millions of ordinary middle Americans -
farmers, ranchers, small businesspeople, professionals, artists,
artisans, laborers – whose livelihoods, freedoms and security
are just as threatened by the frightening turn of events in Washington
and the abandonment of social, economic and political justice by
our government and president as we are. The challenge to the Green
Party is to articulate how the Green Party values and principles
apply not just to the poor and disempowered but to all Americans.
In Washington
DC the predominantly male congress are promulgating laws, regulations
and policies that affect the whole world, not just the US. They
are doing this with the help of unaccountable undemocratic institutions
and treaties like NAFTA, WTO, IMF and the World Bank, which are
funneling wealth upwards from all of us into the pockets of international
financial and corporate interests. All this is happening quietly,
while the rest of us pay little attention, having been sidelined
by illegal immoral wars and invasions.
Above all we
need a new Green slogan: Think globally, Act globally. The time
to stop the onslaught against the undeveloped world and against
the planet is long overdue. We must focus our efforts on getting
Greens into the US Congress, where these policies can be reversed
and where our issues can be publicly presented without the funnel
of a corrupt press squeezing us into nothingness. All this must
be done with the understanding that the same things that threaten
our freedom threaten our survival: corporate-directed economic growth
and political domination. These forces are destroying both democracy
and the planet.
Many Greens
have, unthinkingly, not fully understood the political threat that
an ecological paradigm and environmental activism pose to the American
way of life and way of conducting business. They think that such
activism is relatively unimportant compared to the dire needs of
the poor, the homeless, the disenfranchised and the disempowered.
They think that saving the earth is something that can be postponed
or sidelined until we achieve radical political change in this country.
This is a fatal delusion.
What they do
not realize is that environmentalism properly defined is the most
effective way of achieving all the social and economic changes that
we seek. Environmentalism IS a social justice movement because it
questions - and ultimately subverts - the doctrines and credos that
underly corporate industrial capitalism, namely the need for continued
economic growth and the unquestioned hegemony of corporations and
industry. Environmentalism clarifies the fact that all of us are
victims to one extent or another, and that the capitalist growth
model is neither sustainable nor equitable but necessarily involves
the exploitation and subjugation of workers, communities and the
natural world. Without this control, it will collapse. Greens need
to be ready with an alternative model to pick up the pieces and
create a new system.
The proof of
the radical character of environmentalism can be readily discovered
by looking at the neo-conservatives, traditional economists, corporate
flacks and the business community. These groups are near coronary
arrest from ranting against environmentalism. Listen to them, read
their journals, and you quickly see that environmental activism
is their frantic obsession, their bete noire, the Devil Incarnate,
the supreme enemy, hence their attempts, overt and covert, to either
destroy the credibility of environmental groups, or to try and co-opt
them. The latter effort has succeeded with respect to the large
national organizations such as the Natural Resources Defense Council
and, even more so, Environmental Defense, which should really be
considered as an appendage to the corporate sector, so complete
has been their willing appeasement of corporations and abject deference
to corporate wishes.
What is discouraging
is the failure of the Green Party, and much of the left in the US,
to fully understand the radical character of environmentalism and
its threat to the American way of existence. What is equally discouraging
is that many Greens still do not fully understand the urgency of
the ecological crisis of the planet, namely global warming and the
loss of biodiversity. Without a 70% reduction in fossil fuel consumption
(and this country consumes one quarter of the world's oil supplies
everyday), we will face catastrophic social and economic consequences
from floods, droughts, desertification, loss of species, diminution
of freshwater supplies, rampant infectious disease, and the inundation
of whole island countries and regions, by the end of this century
if we do not reverse direction in the next 30 years. And this is
WITHOUT the disintegration of the west Antarctic ice sheet, which
could bring disaster far sooner if it occurs, as is entirely possible.
The US Green
Party seems to be the only GP in the world that has not taken these
things seriously enough to place them at the center of its program
and activism. It is time to ask ourselves just what purpose there
is to fighting for social justice while the earth's systems collapse
around us. What kind of earth will our grandchildren and their children
inherit? The concept of social justice will melt like the ice sheet
if and when the world has to deal with the dire consequences of
global warming. And surely the industrial world, primarily the US
and western Europe, are going to make darn sure that the protection
of THEIR resources and people will come before that of remote places
like Somalia or Burkina Faso. The scramble for economic control
and resources will be one-sided and the outcome predictable.
What should
we do? We should, within our state parties, take up the challenge
and demand that the national Green Party become the voice, advocate
and warrior for an ecological sanity and sustainability, by taking
on the key environmental issues of our day and informing the public
and decision makers that this must be our top priority, immediately,
not tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. Unless we Greens do this
within our own party, there is hardly any reason for a Green Party
at all.
Thank you for
your attention and I wish you all a better future than the one being
planned for us in Washington DC.
Lorna Salzman
lsalzman@rcn.com
http://www.lornasalzman.com/
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