Reflections On Biden’s Inauguration Anniversary It is not surprising that President Biden is failing on his Build Back Better and voting rights agendas. It is not surprising because Biden campaigned as the candidate who could work with the ultra-conservative, Trump-infatuated Republicans to build unity and “restore the soul of America.” Biden continued to pursue bipartisanship even after the anti-democratic Republicans tried to overthrow his election. Continue reading

We need an Ecosocialist Green New Deal, not another Biden capitulation The Build Back Better Framework released this morning by President Biden is a total capitulation to conservative Democratic Senators Manchin and Sinema. The $6.1 trillion program Biden announced in his American Jobs and American Families plan has been cut to less than a third of what he proposed. Proposals that are overwhelmingly popular with the public like repealing the Trump tax cuts, paid leave, and Medicare negotiating lower drug prices with Big Pharma have been eliminated. What remains are social programs with lower benefits, privatized administration, and means testing that complicates administration and adds administrative costs. The climate spending that remains makes no mandates for greenhouse gas emission reductions and are mostly corporate welfare subsidies for the big fossil fuel and manufacturing corporations that dominate the solar and wind markets. These subsidies will continue the pattern of the past decade where renewables have only added to total energy production while fossil fuel energy has increased. Continue reading

(SYRACUSE, NY – October 3, 2021) Howie Hawkins, the Green Party's 2020 presidential candidate, blasted Democrats today for accepting token climate measures in the shrinking Build Back Better reconciliation bill. "Biden's original climate proposals in his $2.3 trillion American Jobs Plan last March were inadequate to begin with. Only about $100 billion a year in that proposal were climate-and energy-related spending. Its policies included counter-productive measures like further natural gas development," said Hawkins who made a detailed critique of the plan's climate provisions at the time. Continue reading

Over 300,000 immigrants were deported in Biden’s first 100 days — a rate of deportations higher than any period under the openly anti-immigrant Donald Trump or under the “Deporter-in-Chief,” Barack Obama. The deportation machine of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) continues unabated. ICE and CBP defied Biden’s 100-day moratorium on deportations. Predictably, these agencies targeted Black and Latino immigrants for deportation. Continue reading

There's a lot of noise in our world… And I'm not even going to touch on the mainstream media. There are so many opinions and so many people who were mobilizing for the change that we need in this country but they got complacent after the 2020 election. But that's why we need to cut through the noise to wake people up to a very important fact that lies at the heart of so many issues: Continue reading

Back in September 2019, Howie Hawkins and Angela Walker released a statement titled, "Time for the Internet to be Controlled by the Public, not Corporate Interests." They said: First Amendment protections including Freedom of the Press and Freedom of Speech should apply on the Internet, including on social media platforms. There needs to be enhanced protections on platforms for political speech to prevent the use of modern censorship, i.e. using search engines, algorithms and de-programing on platforms to suppress speech. Continue reading

The “For the People Act” (H.R.1/S.1) is voting rights legislation now pending in Congress. Civil rights organizations are urgently supporting this bill in order to secure voting rights against over 250 voter suppression bills introduced by Republicans this year in 43 state legislatures. As a GOP lawyer bluntly told the U.S. Supreme Court on March 2 in an Arizona voting rights case when asked why the Republican Party opposed removing a voting restriction, “Because it puts us at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats.” The voting rights sections of H.R.1 are important federal measures to enact at a time when the Republican Party seeks to restrict voting rights at the state level. Continue reading

Greens knew from the start that 2020 would be a tough year for their presidential ticket. The election would be a referendum on Trump. For most progressives, Anybody But Trump would do. Our campaign believed that an ecosocialist program is needed for real solutions to the life-or-death issues of climate, inequality, racism, and war. We believed that the way to defeat the Trump Republicans was for the left to put forward its own program and not rely on the Democrats’ pallid centrism, which would not speak to the economic and social anxieties that the Trump far-right has been mobilizing around with racist and conspiracy scapegoating.  Continue reading

The disruption of the Electoral College vote by Congress today by an invasion of the US capitol by a far-right authoritarians deserves total condemnation. This incident raises questions about how the security details for the US capitol allowed this disruption of Congress to occur. How could they not have been prepared to secure the Capitol perimeter? The contrast with the overwhelming policy presence and use of force against antiwar and anti police brutality demonstrations is striking. An investigation is called for to answer these questions. Continue reading