Your Northwest Indiana Greens (NWI) worked hard in the lead up to the November elections last month. When the results came in that night we were disappointed. However, we are proud that the Northwest Indiana Green Party was able to field two professional and impactful campaigns in Lake and Porter counties. The dedication and commitment that was put in for well over a year by our candidates and their volunteers increased the recognition and clout of Greens in the politics of the region. As a small grassroots environmental and justice focused movement we were shapers of conversations in debates, forums and the press.

In Hobart Joseph Conn was running for City-council, At-large in a vote-for-two citywide race. Joseph received 1,175 votes and ran a campaign as part of a multi-party group focused on the environment and a non-rezone issue in Hobart. Rev. Michael Cooper, over in Portage, was on the ballot for Mayor with a very ambitious campaign for environmental justice and healthy communities. The final vote in that race was 64. Both our challengers to the establishment ran excellent campaigns and started to show we can do as in the grassroots to change the discourse and highlight progressive values.

This January your local Greens are regrouping. Regrouping because we were too exhausted after the elections to make our November meeting and too busy with the holidays to schedule one in December. Now, the NWI Greens are rested and ready for 2024.

This is your time to get involved as we look to new opportunities around the region and to build on the key gains we have made this past year. Let us make even a bigger impact for our climate and our communities in the new year.

The Northwest Indiana Green Party will be meeting at Sips Coffeehouse in Hobart for our first monthly meeting of 2024 on Sunday, January 14th at 2pm. Sips is located at 310 Main Street in downtown Hobart, IN and you can find us at one of the tables. We will be decompressing after the general election and looking at our next steps. Join your local Greens for this time to socialize and strategize for our environment and our democracy. Any updates to the meeting will be posted on Facebook.

Message from the NWI Green Party Chair, Joseph Conn

I want to take a quick look back on the Nov. 7 municipal general elections and we’ll move on.  

One of the reasons both Rev. Michael Cooper and I, Joseph Conn, ran for Mayor of Portage and Hobart City Council At-Large, respectively, was to a larger purpose than winning local public office.

Our national politics is totally corrupted by corporations and the oligarchs who own them.  

That’s BOTH the Republicans and Democrats. 

No further evidence need be given than the woeful choice of candidates that are likely to be foisted the two-party system on the voters in next year’s presidential elections.  

On the one hand, there’s Republican and former President Donald Trump, the most vulgar president in U.S. history, who’s 77 and 1/2 years old.  If elected and he lives through his full term, he will be 81 and six months when he leaves office.  

Worse, Biden is 81 now, if elected, will be 82 on Inauguration Day, and if he lives through his second term, will be 86.  He’s already evidencing mental decline.  

Trump brought his penchant for scandal-plagued business dealings to a White House tenure that was an international embarrassment.  

Under Biden’s neo-conservative-influenced foreign policy, the U.S. is embroiled in costly wars with Russia in Ukraine and in Palestine, retains U.S. troops in the oil fields of northeastern Syria and seems itching for fights with Iran and China.  Then there’s the Hunter Biden scandals.

And yet, these two yahoos are who the Democratic and Republican parties are most likely to foist upon us in the 2024 elections.  See the clip below on how the Dems are corruptly rigging the party primaries and caucuses for Biden, deemed “arrogant and wrong,” by the Florida Sun-Sentinel editorial board. 

Had enough?

We can’t change our government’s corrupt policies with these two corrupt parties – the Democrats and the Republicans – providing the only choices of candidates for members of Congress and POTUS.  

Neither can be reformed from within.  They must be swept away into the dustbin of history, like the Whigs.  

But to do that, we have to create new parties, like the Green Party, that can attract capable, honest, uncorrupted local candidates, like Michael and I, who are not dependent on corporate campaign contributions. We need to keep running them for local office until they win. Then they need to govern well once in office, and demonstrate there are viable alternatives to higher office than the “lesser of two evils” choices offered by the Democrats and Republicans today.  

We didn’t win this year, but for the first time in history a Green candidate won a precinct in a city-wide election in Hobart.  That’s progress.  We need to prepare do better next time.

Once we have a bench of incorruptible, local Green and alternative party candidates, we can run them for state and even national office and break the Dems’ and GOPer’s – and the oligarch’s -- stranglehold on our government.

Come join us and help make that possible.