GP ADVISORY Greens to join Oct. protests against US wars in Afghanistan, Iraq

GREEN PARTY OF THE UNITED STATES
http://www.gp.org

For Immediate Release:
Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Contacts:
Scott McLarty, Media Coordinator, 202-518-5624, cell 202-904-7614, mclarty@greens.org
Starlene Rankin, Media Coordinator, 916-995-3805, starlene@gp.org


Greens to join mid-October protests against US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq


WASHINGTON, DC -- Green Party leaders, activists, and members across the US plan to participate in mass rallies, marches, coordinated local and regional demonstrations, and other forms of protest to take place on and around Saturday, October 17 calling for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.

The National Assembly to End the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars (https://www.natassembly.org/Home_Page.html) is coordinating the nationwide mid-October protests. October 2009 marks the eighth year of the US war in Afghanistan and seven years since Congress passed a resolution authorizing an invasion of Iraq.

"While a majority of Democrats and Republicans in Congress lined up behind President Bush's call for an invasion of Iraq based on a litany of deceptions, the Green Party opposed and protested the war from the beginning. The election of Barack Obama in 2008 brought no real change -- America is still waging war against Afghanistan and Iraq, with attacks on Pakistan and threats to attack Iran," said Rosa Clemente, the Green Party's 2008 nominee for Vice President, Hip Hop activist, journalist, and community organizer (http://www.rosaclemente.com).

"The Green Party continues to challenge the monopoly on power held by the two parties of war -- the Democratic and Republican parties. We also challenge the delusion that led so many people who opposed the war to vote for Mr. Obama and other warhawk Democrats. The only hope for an end to America's policies of military aggression remains the emergence of a real peace party -- the Green Party," added Ms. Clemente, who is about to embark on a 14-state speaking tour.

October also commemorates the 40th anniversary of the Vietnam Moratorium that brought hundreds of thousands into the streets to protest the war.

Greens in New England will gather at an antiwar rally and march planned for Boston on October 17, beginning at 1:00 pm in Copley Square. The Massachusetts Green-Rainbow Party is one of the sponsors of the event.

On Monday, October 5, Greens will participate in an antiwar protest at the White House organized by members of the War Resisters League and Witness Against Torture (http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=130411491731&index=1).

"The war in Iraq was not a 'good' war, neither is the war in Afghanistan," said Green peace activist Paul 'zool' Zulkowitz.

The Green Party demands:

• Immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all US troops, military personnel, bases, contractors, and mercenaries from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

• An immediate end to all US support for the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the ongoing siege against Gaza and the Palestinian people.

• An end to sanctions, threats of war, and attacks against Iran, North Korea, Somalia, or any other nation, whose right to self-determination is under assault by Washington’s aggressive drive for hegemony. We strongly oppose interference in the internal affairs of these countries, as well as Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia and any other nation targeted by the US government for political destabilization.

• Investigation and prosecution of war crimes, including torture, with an assurance that all such crimes never happen again.

A lopsided vote by the US House of Representatives (368-60) on May 14, 2009 approved the Obama Administration's request for $97 billion for US military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. The US Senate’s follow-up vote on June 18, 2009 approved, by a 91-5 majority, $105.9 billion for the same purpose, showing bipartisan support for continuation of the wars and occupations. According to Green Party leaders, these votes underscore why an independent, unified, mass action antiwar movement is needed now more than ever.

The Green Party supports without equivocation the right of all oppressed nations and peoples to self-determination, whether in the Middle East or in other parts of the world, such as Haiti.

Greens stand in solidarity with working people, their unions and allies, and demand that the trillions spent on wars and the military be diverted to support for homeowners, the opening of plants to create new green jobs instead of seeing them shut down, and maintaining and expanding urgently needed social programs

MORE INFORMATION

Green Party of the United States http://www.gp.org
202-319-7191, 866-41GREEN
• Green candidate database and campaign information: http://www.gp.org/elections.shtml
• Green Party News Center http://www.gp.org/newscenter.shtml
• Green Party Speakers Bureau http://www.gp.org/speakers
• Green Party ballot access page http://www.gp.org/2008-elections
• Green Party Livestream Channel http://www.livestream.com/greenpartyus

Green Pages: The official publication of record of the Green Party of the United States
Summer 2009 issue now online
http://gp.org/greenpages-blog

The Green Party responds to Obama's speech: Mr. President, make health care a right for all Americans

GREEN PARTY OF THE UNITED STATES
http://www.gp.org

For Immediate Release:
Monday, September 14, 2009

Contacts:
Scott McLarty, Media Coordinator, 202-518-5624, cell 202-904-7614, mclarty@greens.org
Starlene Rankin, Media Coordinator, 916-995-3805, starlene@gp.org


* America needs Medicare For All/Single-Payer, not a life-support system for insurance companies and HMOs

* Whether Obamacare passes or the GOP blocks health care reform, insurance companies will win and American people will lose

* Attention paid to Obamacare vs. town hall hecklers eclipses the fact that most Americans want national health care, according to polls


The following is a Green Party response to President Obama's address to Congress on September 9, 2009


President Obama was correct when he said, quoting the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, that health care was fundamentally a moral issue and a matter of "social justice and the character of our country." President Obama understands that we're in a national crisis -- that's why he wants to lead on health care reform.

But the President stopped short of asserting that health care should be made a right for all Americans. He said he has "no interest in putting insurance companies out of business." He did not admit the fact that the insurance industry's very existence depends on the power to restrict coverage, deny claims to those with coverage, cancel coverage for people when they need medical care most, and reject people who are high-risk because of low income, age, and prior medical condition. (President Obama related several accounts of such outrages in his speech.) The insurance business plays a middle-man role, exacting huge fees for its profits, administrative costs, overhead, and high CEO salaries, while providing no medical services.

As long as for-profit insurance continues to exist, access to health care remains secondary to corporate middle-man profits. Replacing private insurance and HMO coverage with a plan to make Medicare universal is the only solution.

Since Medicare doesn't function to make a profit, its administrative costs are about three percent. For-profit insurance takes about a 30 percent bite out of health care spending and imposes unwieldy administrative costs and paperwork on doctors, hospitals, and other medical providers. That's why health care eats up over 15 percent of domestic spending in the US, compared to about 9 percent in Canada, which has a Single-Payer system.

What do we get for all this extra spending, under the for-profit insurance status quo? Nearly 47 million Americans have no coverage at all. Even people with coverage are at risk. Most personal bankruptcies are caused by medical costs, and 7 out of 10 Americans bankrupted by medical costs have insurance. Infant mortality rates are higher in the US than in Canada and the UK, and life expectancies are lower, according to the World Health Organization.

America already has death panels -- they're called HMOs and insurance companies. (See http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS202570+02-Sep-2009+PRN20090902 and http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/healthcare/2002-05-22-insurance-deaths.htm)

This is a terrible waste of human lives, and a waste of money, too. President Obama knows that the Medicare For All / Single-Payer plan is the best solution. He has said so in the past, admitting that if one wanted to provide health care to all Americans, the only solution was Single-Payer (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpAyan1fXCE&feature=player_embedded / http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/22/us/politics/22obama.transcript.html). But now that he is President, he won't challenge the power and profits of the insurance and pharmaceutical companies.

The President proposes a solution that would heavily regulate HMOs and insurance firms yet compensate them with huge payoffs. He would improve access to health insurance and reduce the number of uninsured, but at a cost of $1 trillion over ten years, according to preliminary estimates by the Congressional Budget Office (http://money.cnn.com/2009/06/15/news/economy/health_care_reform/index.htm). This $1 trillion includes subsidies to businesses to cover their employees. Since Obamacare would exempt 95% of small businesses from the employer insurance mandate, small business employees (many of whom are low-income) will have to be covered elsewhere -- an added expense. President Obama is simply wrong when he says he would not increase the federal deficit to pay for health care expansion.

Obamacare would also impose 'mandates.' The President made this clear when he said "under my plan, individuals will be required to carry basic health insurance -- just as most states require you to carry auto insurance." The mandate plan would subsidize people who can't afford to purchase health insurance under this new law.

The Massachusetts mandate plan, passed three years ago, has not provided universal health care. The state's individual-mandate health reform law, which President Obama seeks to replicate on a national scale, has failed to cover at least 352,000 uninsured residents (http://www.pnhp.org/news/2009/september/uninsured_figures_sh.php).

And Obamacare will protect drug company profits by maintaining the Bush ban on bulk purchasing of prescription drugs.

In his speech, President Obama urged inclusion of the public option. But he noted that the public option would not ever cover more than 5% of the American people. That's not a sufficient public option. We cannot drive down insurance premiums with a program that only covers 10 million people (a number likely to include millions of Americans who are either high-risk or suffer existing health problems). In the end, the President said that the public option is negotiable -- it might be no more than a bargaining chip in talks with Republicans and blue-dog Democrats.

In the end, Obamacare means a giant taxpayer-funded life-support system for private for-profit corporations, while Americans spend more money for less access. Is this necessary?

Insurance, pharmaceutical, and other big-business lobbies pumped millions of dollars into both Democratic and Republican campaigns in the last election to buy influence ($46,002,881 in insurance industry contributions in 2008; see http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=F09). Now they're seeing their investment pay off -- just as Goldman Sachs and other financial institutions reaped campaign contribution rewards when the White House and Congress bailed out Wall Street earlier this year.

Media commentators are asking if President Obama can succeed in his bold effort to win bipartisan support. But for those of us excluded from the national debate, including the Green Party and other advocates of universal health care, bipartisanship too often means that Democrats and Republicans alike are serving the demands of corporate lobbyists instead of the public interest.

Whether Obamacare passes or Republicans, town-hall hecklers, and radio ranters succeed in blocking health care reform, the result will be a victory for insurance companies and other powerful corporations and a defeat for the American people.

The Green Party says: We can either protect insurance and drug companies and their profits, or we can save American lives and dollars by enacting Medicare For All / Single-Payer national health care. We demand Single-Payer.

What would we get if Single-Payer legislation were passed?


1. Single-Payer covers every American regardless of employment, income, ability to pay, age, or prior medical condition. Everyone is guaranteed quality health care, including prescriptions: Everybody in, nobody out. Under Single-Payer, no American will face financial ruin because of illness or injury.


2. Single-Payer is less bureaucratic than private insurance. Health care decisions are made solely by patient and physician. Single-Payer allows us to choose our physician, health care provider, and health care facility, without needing an approval from a government or insurance company bureaucrat.


3. Single-Payer will cut health care costs by as much as a third and reduce what we pay for coverage. Health care will be funded at the federal level and administered at the state level. Working Americans will pay far less than what we now pay for private health coverage, because Single-Payer eliminates the profit-making insurance and HMO middle-men. By pooling risk among all of us, everyone would pay the same percent of their income -- replacing the current system, in which sick and poor Americans pay proportionally more.


4. Single-payer will reduce paperwork for physicians and hospitals, one reason why thousands of MDs, other health care professionals, and medical students have endorsed single-payer. Physicians, hospitals, and other health care providers will compete to serve the public in a Single-Payer system, raising the quality of health care.


5. Health care rationing? With private insurance, medical treatment is rationed according to your ability to pay for coverage. With Single-Payer, insurance company profits are abolished and health care is rationed according to need, with medical emergencies and serious illnesses receiving top priority.


6. People of color (with or without coverage) and poor Americans have suffered the worst treatment under the status quo, and thus have the most to gain from Single-Payer. (See Cynthia McKinney's article "How Did We Get From There to Here? (100,000 Unnecessary Black Deaths Per Year)." http://www.gp.org/cynthia/display.php?ID=17)


7. Single-Payer will boost our ailing economy and provide relief for businesses large and small, because it cancels the high expense and administrative burden of employer-based health benefits. Single-Payer will relieve cities, towns, and school boards from the cost of providing health insurance to employees, allowing responsible officials to reduce their budgets and lower local property taxes.


8. Single-Payer gives government and citizens a common stake in preventive, holistic medicine and sound food policies to keep costs down while promoting greater public health. Greens support reorienting health care from expensive technology and pharmaceutical-based disease management to an integrative promotion of healthy lifestyles and alternative therapies, including therapies that have been used effectively for thousands of years as well as new ones that come from our increasing understanding of mind-body interactions. And we need to look at the incentives the US government currently provides. As Dr. Andrew Weil said in a recent interview with Larry King, "You can't have the government telling us to eat more fruits and vegetables and at the same time, through its subsidy program, ensuring that fruits and vegetables are the most expensive things in grocery stores and all the unhealthy stuff is the cheapest." (Larry King Live, CNN, September 10, 2009, http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0909/10/lkl.01.html)


9. Single-Payer is not socialized medicine. It is social insurance for health care. Under Single-Payer, private physicians and hospitals remain private. After treating a patient, instead of sending a bill to one of several hundred insurers, HMOs, or agencies (each with its own different and complex requirements), they send the bill to a single agency (hence 'Single-Payer') and then get paid. Calling Single-Payer socialism is like calling the defense industry socialism because Lockheed-Martin gets 96% of its revenue from government contracts.


For all the reasons, the Green Party supports Single-Payer/Medicare For All. It has always been in our national platform -- and Green candidates and elected public officials are firmly behind the demand for passage of HR 676, Rep. John Conyers' bill to expand Medicare to cover everyone. Greens take no corporate contributions and we don't take orders from any insurance, drug, or other corporate lobby.

We demand that Democrats make good on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's pledge to bring HR 676 to the House floor for a debate and full vote up or down after Congress's August recess. Such a vote will require new studies by the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) and Congressional Budget Office on the cost of Single-Payer. Earlier GAO, CBO, and Office of Management and Budget (OMB) studies revealed that moving to a Medicare For All system would not increase federal spending but would save about $400 billion annually, or $4 trillion over ten years -- enough to cover nearly 47 million Americans uninsured and eliminate co-pays and deductibles for everyone.

We demand a televised national debate between advocates and opponents of Single-Payer, so Americans can hear the truth about universal health care.

We demand that the White House and Congress -- and the media -- acknowledge that a majority of the American people, according to numerous polls, want a plan to provide national health insurance. Recent polls show 59% in favor (http://www.healthcare-now.org/another-poll-shows-majority-support-for-single-payer/ / http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/resources/PollMemo.pdf). The majority of physicians favor such a plan (http://www.pnhp.org/news/2008/march/most_doctors_support.php), and so do America's mayors (http://www.pnhp.org/campaign/materials/MayorsResolution.pdf).

Despite these numbers, media coverage of 'Tea Party' protesters at town hall meetings has eclipsed the fact that most Americans support national health care.

In a 2004 CBC poll, citizens of Canada identified Tommy Douglas as the "greatest Canadian of all time." Tommy Douglas, a Baptist minister-turned-politician, led the effort to enact Single-Payer health care in Canada.

If Barack Obama led America as Tommy Douglas led Canada, he would leave a legacy of real change. By making health care a right for all, Mr. Obama would go down in history as one of America's greatest presidents, with the stature of Abraham Lincoln or Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Contact the White House about police riots

The following is what I submitted to the White House via Whitehouse.gov:

I would like to know what the President is going to do about the police riots in Pittsburgh last week? There were military people there, so I would think the federal government would get involved and those who were responsible for innocent people being teargassed and beaten to justice.

And exactly what were those "police" getting ready for? When has there ever been an action by protesters at any of these G meetings that has deserved the dictatorial response by our own police and military?

This is what our country is about? I encourage the White House DO something about this as opposed to frilly speeches.

Please feel free to submit your own comment.

Police Abuse Local Pittsburgh Citizens

This is acceptable?

Rosa Clemente in Rochester, October 3rd

(Rochester, NY) - Rosa Clemente, 2008 Green Party candidate for Vice President, will be speaking in Rochester on October 3rd at Rochester Institute of Technology. Ms. Clemente is the keynote speaker for RIT’s Hispanic Heritage Month celebration. The title of her talk will be A Historical Look at the Latino Civil Rights Movement in America. The talk is free and will be held at the Ingle Auditorium in the Student Alumni Union on the RIT campus from 7-9pm, with a reception immediately following. Sign language interpreting will be provided.

Rosa Alicia Clemente is a community organizer, radio journalist, and Hip-Hop activist. Born and raised in the South Bronx and Elmsford, NY she is a graduate of the University of Albany and received her Masters of Professional Africana Studies and Education at Cornell University.

On July 13th 2008, in Chicago, IL, Rosa Alicia Clemente and former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, were nominated by the Green Party of the United States, as Vice-Presidential and Presidential candidates respectively. They made up the first women of color ticket in American history and Rosa Clemente was the first Latina in the history of the U.S.A. to be on the vice-presidential ballot in over thirty states. More on Ms. Clemente’s background can be found at www.RosaClemente.com

The Green Party of Monroe County is a grassroots-based party united around key issues and values and is the only progressive electoral voice in Monroe County. Its vision for Monroe County includes a revitalized, locally based economy; ecologically smart development, economic and social justice and increased reliance on renewable energy sources.

An Editorial In Favor of Single-Payer Health Care

Yesterday, I had to take a client (teenage girl) to the Monroe County Department of Health to get her vaccinated so she could go to school. The place was packed. We sat in line for 2 hours to get our number called. After that we had to wait another half hour to get her name called to get in. To get the shot, literally took 30 seconds.

During this time, I got to watch people of all creeds and colors who just wanted a simple, health-preventative service, some of whom were migrants. If there were single-payer health care, these families could have done this in numerous places and different times. And I'm pretty sure that more people would be vaccinated as well.

You can look at this two ways. Single-payer health care is morally right. I don't care if that "right" is in the Constitution or Declaration of Independence. We are supposed to be a civilized society and basic human needs should be taken care of.

Another way to look at this is more pragmatic. If we make sure that everyone has the basic necessities of life (food, clothing, shelter, health, safety) we will have less need for other social services due to improved conditions for people who use tax-funded services. Less taxes! Think of it as trickle-up humanism.

You don't want to pay for someone else's health care? Fair enough. I don't want to pay for your war. I don't want to pay for your corporate welfare. Or your theater, or the police or fire department who are in your section of the community and not mine. See where I'm going with this?

Become a Registered Green in NYS

To become a registered Green in New York State, fill out a new registration form, check "other" and write in "Green." It's that simple. You can get forms at local libraries, county board of elections, banks and online.

Go to: http://www.elections.state.ny.us/Voting.html#RegisterVote

There's English and Spanish versions that you can print, fill out and mail.

You HAVE a choice!