It is with a sad heart that the Green Party of Florida shares the loss of a tireless advocate for working people. Jeff Roby passed yesterday.

Jeff was a brilliant writer who devoted himself to Green Party efforts. Our collective loss is great. Losing Jeff to COVID from contracting the virus while a longterm hospital inpatient being treated for an unrelated condition reminds us of how broken our systems are, dysfunctioning systems that have, in effect, broken the heart of our dear Rose Roby, 25 year spouse to Jeff, also a dedicated worker for the Green Party of Florida and the Green Party of the United States.

Florida’s Palm Beach County braces for its annual “burn season,” which begins each year in October and runs for six months at least through March to as late as May.  The Florida sugar industry begins its harvest season for 400,000 acres (625 square miles) of sugarcane fields.  Assuming a six-month burn season, this means there were approximately 43 fires per day in 2019.  During the burning, walls of fire rise from 30 to 40 feet in the air, and then create smoke plumes reaching over a half-mile high, stretching as much as 26 miles from the actual burn sites, around four small Black and Latino communities in Palm Beach south of Lake Okeechobee — Belle Glade, Pahokee, South Bay and Canal Point.  Hendry, Glade and Martin counties are also targets.  This is all designated as part of the “Hazard Zone.”

Congressional Candidate Kim O’Connor at the first Annual Juneteenth Celebration in Panama City, Florida

BOYNTON BEACH, Fl – When I wrote "Florida under Siege" published May 14, the official Florida Covid-19 death count stood at 1,898 (among 42,402 confirmed cases). Today the death score is 3,546 dead out of 146,341 cases. On May 14th, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis had just appointed his Re-Open Florida Task Force. Now we reap the harvest.

And when political movements overflow the channels they normally flow through, they interact with entire societies in ways they don’t normally. That’s the good news. The bad news is that it’s already too late. It’s actually ...  many days late and a few trillion dollars short.

The cries for action to prevent or reverse Climate Change are urgent and powerful. We face catastrophe if we don’t [fill in the blanks] in the next [number of years]. The problem is that we are already in the midst of catastrophe as we speak and [still] breathe. A hard look makes plain that — while the U.S. is frozen in a deadly downward spiral of austerity and war, while even essential services have been cut and many, many more are on the chopping block — what is required is a total social transformation.

You may have thought 2016 was bad. It wasn't just that the country elected Donald Trump to the Oval Office, though that was pretty bad to be sure. Rather, it was that American liberalism — always a treacherous force — took a sharp turn to the right, due to a confluence of two factors.

First, when the "out of touch" campaign of Hillary Clinton went down in flames, the ace mathematicians of the Democratic Party figured out that in several key states, the Green Party slate of Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka had scored enough votes to either have cost Hillary the election, or enough votes to be within a hoot and a holler of costing Hillary those states. The Green Party may be small, but it is no longer a joking matter.

In reporting on the Green Party of Florida (GPFL) election results for the August 28, 2018 primary, we reported that Elijah Manley got 43,000 votes (18.49%) for Broward County at-large School District 8 and Robin Harris netted 4,720 votes (24.8%) for Orange County Commission District 6. We remarked:

"To put it simply, this year's numbers show that where Greens run and run hard, they now represent an identifiable voting bloc that duopoly candidates can only ignore at their peril. They call that power."

Ho hum. Another racist murder. Another Trayvon Martin. This time in Clearwater, Florida. Raving racist Michael Drejka deliberately provoked a fight with a Black woman over a convenience store parking spot, got shoved by Markeis McGlockton, her boyfriend, and then took careful aim and drilled the Black man in cold blood.

Act two, as tragedy turns into farce. "He had to shoot to defend himself," said Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri. "Those are the facts and that's the law."