This is a repost of a post in January from GP member and would-be Presidential candidate Lorna Salzman. There was no comment about this post by anyone on the mail list; there was also no comment on lbo-talk. But if you're looking for a green Green, I think Salzman's one:
[Scgp-discussion-list] Lorna Salzman GP Candidate for Pres
Fri, 23 Jan 2004 09:20:05 -0500 Lorna Salzman's Message to the Iowa Green Party on her candidacy.
Dear Iowa 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 within 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.
We need to pay attention to what our Congress and administration are doing globally, and 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 sustinable 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 East Quogue NY 11942
Lorna Salzman 718-522-0253; 631-653-3387 lsalzman at r...
"To me the question of the environment is more ominous than that of peace and war....I'm more worried about global warming than I am of any major military conflict". (Hans Blix, chief UN weapons inspector, March 2003).
"We are already fighting World War III and I am sorry to say we are winning. It is the war against the earth" (Raymond Dasmann)