A Call to Action

The Green Platform presents an eco-social analysis and vision for our country. In contrast to the way in which major political parties create their platforms, through the back-room deals of insiders and powerbrokers, we have created a grassroots process that invites submissions from every local Green Party and every Green individual. Through democratic process over a year and a half, we arrive at a final draft to present to our national convention for approval. The Green Platform is an evolving document, a living workin-progress that expresses our commitment to creating wise and enduring change in specific policies and in the political process itself. The Green Party is committed to values-based politics, as expressed in our Ten Key Values. These values guide us in countering and changing a system that extols exploitation, unsustainable consumption, and destructive competition.

THE GREEN PARTY OF THE UNITED STATES

The national Green Party is a federation of State Green Parties. Greens are dedicated to social, environmental, economic and political justice. The four principles that underpin our policies are grassroots democracy, social justice, ecology and non-violence.

The Green Party is distinguished from other political parties by its independence from corporate control. We accept no contributions from Corporations and are not beholden to the corporate paymasters.

The Green Party of the United States is a partner with the European Federation of Green Parties and the Federation of Green Parties of the Americas. Green parties are the first parties to recognize that our role in the world is stewardship of Earth’s natural resources rather than domination and unrestrained consumption of the goods of the Earth. Greens recognize that human survival depends on our understanding and commitment to the role of stewardship. .

The US Green Party began as the Association of State Green Parties (1996) and was transformed to its present status in 2001.

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Never has our country faced as many challenges and crises as we do in 2004 and the near future. Levels of federal revenue are the lowest they have been since 1950 because of tax cuts and breaks for the very rich and for corporations. Government agencies charged with safeguarding public health and safety are operating with slashed budgets that paralyze their efforts. Jobs are being permanently relocated outside the country, while social and educational programs are being gutted. Our food, water, air, and soil are increasingly found to bear toxins and debilitating pollution. Every single level of government—local, county, state, and federal—is operating in the red, running up crushing amounts of debt. Many of our allies and former friends around the world are disgusted with our imperial foreign policy, militarism, and arrogant corporate behavior. Realizing that our actions will be judged by future generations, we ask how we can draw on the best of our traditions, calling forth a spirit of ingenuity and citizen participation to achieve a free, democratic, just, and responsible society, one that actively responds to the crucial ecological challenges of our time, rather than denying them.

We submit a bold vision of our country’s future, a Platform on which we stand:

• Our Ten Key Values as a guide to a politics of vision and action,
• A creative, pragmatic plan for a prospering sustainable economy, and
• A call to restore and protect a healthy, diverse environment and to cultivate a sense of community at all levels, from the local to the planetary.

We propose a vision of our common good that is advanced through an independent politics free from the control of corporations and big money, and through a democratic structure and process that empowers and reaches across lines of division to bring together our combined strengths as a people.

We, the Green Party, see our political and economic progress, and our individual lives, within the context of an evolving, dynamic world.

As in nature, where adaptation and diversity provide key strategies through which life flourishes, a successful political strategy is one that is diverse, adaptable to changing needs, and strong and resilient in its core values:

• Participatory Democracy, rooted in community practice at the grassroots level and informing every level, from the local to the international.
• Social Justice and Equal Opportunity emphasizing personal and social responsibility, accountability, and an informing ethic of Nonviolence.
• Ecological and Economic Sustainability, balancing the interests of a regulated market economy and community-based economics with effective care for the Great Economy in which we are embedded: the ecosystems of the Earth.

The Green Party Platform seeks to identify the most crucial problems facing our country and offers ideas for responsible action to solve them. Looking to the future with hope and optimism, we believe we can truly correct the course of reckless, destructive governance that has allowed and encouraged the degradation of our ecological life-support systems, gutted our economy, and strained the social fabric to the point of causing material hardship for millions of Americans. Our common destiny brings us together across our nation and around the globe. We act in service to our children and the future generations of all our relations in the Earth community. We act in service to the future we are creating today.

We believe that humankind is threatened by two crises

• The survival of the human species, indeed, the survival of all living things on Planet Earth are endangered by over use, abuse and drain of nature’s resources which are our life-support system. Pollution of the land, the sea and the air call into question our acceptance of our obligation to ourselves and following generations.

• The drift away from the rule of law by our government and the erosion of our Constitution. Government of, by and for the people depends on an educated public who do not surrender their citizen oversight when they elect candidates to office. Government accountability for its performance is a permanent obligation to retain the public trust. In contemporary times, our government has deliberately cut off access and shown indifference to the public will. It has made the rule of law a hollow promise. Furthermore our government’s defiance of international law and the UN Charter has undermined the willingness of other nations to accept the rule of law embodied in the Charter and international law.

The compass that guides our Green policies is embodied in the 10 Key Values defined below.

1. Grassroots Democracy

Every human being deserves a say in the decisions that affect his or her life and should not be subject to the will of another. Therefore, we will work to increase public participation at every level of government and to ensure that our public representatives are fully accountable to the people who elect them. We will also work to create new types of political organizations which expand the process of participatory democracy by directly including citizens in the decisionmaking process.

1. Grassroots Democracy

Government of, by and for the people translates into participation by all those under its rule and guarantees equal rights, equal treatment and equal opportunity to all. The interaction between citizens and government must be an open, ever-flowing channel.

All persons should have the rights and opportunity to benefit equally from the resources afforded us by society and the environment. We must consciously confront in ourselves, our organizations, and society at large, barriers such as racism and class oppression, sexism and homophobia, ageism and disability, which act to deny fair treatment and equal justice under the law.

Everyone must have equal opportunity to enjoy the benefits of our society’s productivity. Government creates the setting in which all can thrive and guarantees that the rewards from the labor and invention will be distributed fairly to all persons.

Human societies must operate with the understanding that we are part of nature, not separate from nature.

We must maintain an ecological balance and live within the ecological and resource limits of our communities and our planet. We support a sustainable society which utilizes resources in such a way that future generations will benefit and not suffer from the practices of our generation. To this end we must practice agriculture which replenishes the soil; move to an energy efficient economy; and live in ways that respect the integrity of natural systems.

We recognize that we live within a natural framework and we must protect the balance between what we derive from nature and how we replenish it. We are stewards not owners of the Earth and must pass on to the next generation the same richness of Nature that sustains us.

It is essential that we develop effective alternatives to society's current patterns of violence. We will work to demilitarize, and eliminate weapons of mass destruction, without being naïve about the intentions of other governments.

We recognize the need for self-defense and the defense of others who are in helpless situations. We promote non-violent methods to oppose practices and policies with which we disagree, and will guide our actions toward lasting personal, community and global peace.

A functional and enduring society aims at peace among its citizens and abjures war to solve international disputes. Preparing for war is the preliminary to declaring war. We recognize that conflict resolution in a forum of equality and cooperation is the only viable alternative to the rule of force.

Centralization of wealth and power contributes to social and economic injustice, environmental destruction, and militarization. Therefore, we support a restructuring of social, political and economic institutions away from a system which is controlled by and mostly benefits the powerful few, to a democratic, less bureaucratic system. Decision-making should, as much as possible, remain at the individual and local level, while assuring that civil rights are protected for all citizens.

In the affairs of man, power draws more power towards itself. It requires constant vigilance by local government and citizen groups to practice and retain their power to make decisions that guide their lives. Citizens who relinquish their responsibility will lose their citizen rights to the power layer above them.

Redesign our work structures to encourage employee ownership and workplace democracy. Develop new economic activities and institutions that will allow us to use our new technologies in ways that are humane, freeing, ecological and accountable, and responsive to communities.

Establish some form of basic economic security, open to all.

Move beyond the narrow “job ethic” to new definitions of “work,” jobs” and “income” that reflect the changing economy.

Restructure our patterns of income distribution to reflect the wealth created by those outside the formal monetary economy: those who take responsibility for parenting, housekeeping, home gardens, community volunteer work, etc.

Restrict the size and concentrated power of corporations without discouraging superior efficiency or technological innovation.

We support employee ownership as the best model for our productive enterprises. Workplace democracy must be practiced wherever people are employed by others. The size and reach of the corporate structure is antithetic to community-based economics.

We have inherited a social system based on male domination of politics and economics. We call for the replacement of the cultural ethics of domination and control with more cooperative ways of interacting that respect differences of opinion and gender. Human values such as equity between the sexes, interpersonal responsibility, and honesty must be developed with moral conscience. We should remember that the process that determines our decisions and actions is just as important as achieving the outcome we want.

We have inherited a social system based on male domination of our mode of life. Although we have come a long way toward equality of the sexes, that equality is not yet secure from relapse. Equity between the sexes and interpersonal responsibility must become part of our moral code. Cooperation is the watchword that allows differences without submission of one to the other.

We believe it is important to value cultural, ethnic, racial, sexual, religious and spiritual diversity, and to promote the development of respectful relationships across these lines.

We believe that the many diverse elements of society should be reflected in our organizations and decision-making bodies, and we support the leadership of people who have been traditionally closed out of leadership roles. We acknowledge and encourage respect for other life forms than our own and the preservation of biodiversity.

A healthy society cannot breathe and thrive as a lock-step model. It needs to recognize and include ethnic, racial, sexual, religious and spiritual diversity. There is no such thing as “one size fits all” in the human family.

We encourage individuals to act to improve their personal well-being and, at the same time, to enhance ecological balance and social harmony. We seek to join with people and organizations around the world to foster peace, economic justice, and the health of the planet.

Each of us is responsible to ourselves and to those around us. The well-being of our society depends on our recognition that what we do or fail to do is part of building the good will that glues society together.

Our actions and policies should be motivated by long-term goals. We seek to protect valuable natural resources, safely disposing of or “unmaking” all waste we create, while developing a sustainable economics that does not depend on continual expansion for survival. We must counterbalance the drive for short-term profits by assuring that economic development, new technologies, and fiscal policies are responsible to future generations who will inherit the results of our actions.

Make the quality of life, rather than open-ended economic growth, the focus of future thinking.

We must direct our investment of time, energy and attention toward sustaining and enriching the life around us. We may not treat all that we use as waste to be disposed of as though there were no tomorrow. Reduce, re-use, recycle, repair are the 4 tenets of a sustaining lifestyle.

Our nation was born as the first great experiment in modern democracy. We seek to rescue that heritage from the erosion of citizen participation. Moreover, we seek to dissolve the grip of the ideology, intoned by big-money interests for more than twenty years, that government is intrinsically undesirable and destructive of liberty and that elected officials should rightly “starve the beast” by slashing all spending on social program, in the name of freedom. We challenge that tactic by calling on all Americans to think deeply about the meaning of government of the people, by the people, and for the people. In a democracy, individuals come together to form structures of governance that protect and advance the common good. We the citizens are the government, and we the citizens can direct it to fulfill its finest goals and purposes. Our citizens must not permit usurpation of their authority by acts of individuals and government agencies that isolate or insulate government from their oversight and control. We, the People, have a responsibility to participate in self-government through all the means that our Constitution provides.

Citizens of a democracy must have the information and ability to determine the actions of their government. Vast concentrations of wealth and power that have occurred in recent years are inherently undemocratic. The deregulation of corporate activity and the decentralization and underfunding of the regulatory structures that remain—accompanied by the centralizing of big money—has been a disaster for our country. The true owners of the public lands, pension funds, and the public airwaves are the American people, who today have little or no control over their pooled assets or their commonwealth.

The power of civic action is an antidote to the corporate control of so much of our law-making and regulating. The pervasive abuse imposed by corporate power increasingly undermines our democracy, but the Green Party seeks to rekindle the democratic flame. As voting citizens, taxpayers, workers, consumers, and stakeholders, we unite to exercise our rights and, as Thomas Jefferson urged, to counteract the “excesses of the monied interests.” Toward this end, we consider serious reform of campaign funding to be essential, as well as curbs on the influence of corporations on lawmakers and regulatory agencies.

The Green Party considers American democracy to be an ongoing, unfolding project that is dynamic and creative in nature. We are committed to the strengthening of our civil society, including the many mediating institutions at the community level that have always characterized our democracy. We seek to heal the alienation and apathy that has been cultivated in the citizenry by the power-brokers of the status quo. Righteous anger about the crippling of our democracy is rising in the land, and the Greens offer constructive alternatives. In addition, we seek to repair the plummeting opinion of the United States in the international community resulting from our arrogant, narcissistic foreign policy of recent years. A growing and grave imbalance between the citizens of this country and the interests which extract power from the citizens is an imminent danger to our security and national and global social stability. We strongly feel that our country should view itself as a member of the community of nations… not above it. The United States could well play a leadership role in that community but only if we become committed to an eco-social vision of peace, national selfdetermination, and international cooperation.

Our goal is to become an important political force in this country, and to present candidates for election at every level of government.

Our nation was born as the first great experiment in modern democracy. To sustain our democracy as defined by our Constitution, we must revive citizen participation and regain citizen control of our politics and our economy. The barriers to entering the electoral arena must be removed and alternatives to the two parties must be introduced. The present narrow spectrum of parties results in a narrow spectrum of issues debated and the same narrow spectrum carried by the media. Consequently, a bare 50% of the voters actually vote.

Democracy depends on participation of all parties and debate of all points of view in the public forum.

Citizens and citizen groups must demand a widening of the range of candidate choice while they demand the restraint and encirclement of corporate power in the market place and in the legislatures.

Our government has an obligation to secure a level playing field for all groups to advocate their interests. A balance of power is something we cannot do without. In effect, government regulation is the necessary instrument to prevent exploitation by the rich and powerful who have sidelined the less wealthy into an observer status.

Control of government through financial contributions to candidates, followed by unlimited access to the elected officials has resulted in government by the wealthy with little accountability to the people. To compound the moneyed influence, the Supreme Court ruling in 1975 that equated money with speech secured the unhindered flow of money to influence politics on every level.

The Green Platform that follows offers a formula for the restoration of democracy in our fragmented and misguided nation.