Candidates will seeking to be the Green Party nominees for Governor, Lt. Governor, two U.S. Senate seats, Comptroller, and Attorney General. (Candidates page.)

The convention will be streamed live on this web site beginning around 11AM Saturday morning.

The only way that the Green Party can regain ballot status in NY is to get 50,000 votes for their Governor candidate in 2010. This opportunity comes only once every four years, and it only applies to the Governor's race. Gaining ballot status will enable the Green Party to run more peace candidates, more single-payer candidates, more anti-fracking candidates, and more sustainable energy candidates. The last time that the Green Party of New York State had ballot status it set the record for running the most Green candidates of any state.

There is an after the convention social gathering planned, details to be announced at the convention.

You can enroll in the Green Party by checking the box marked “Other” on the voter registration form and writing in the word “Green” on the line next to it. More information on enrolling in the Green Party.

*This event is not under the sponsorship of The Woman's Club of Albany and doesn't necessarily reflect its mission or policies.

The basic issue in this campaign is: Will our state government be for the people, or continue to serve the super-rich and the giant corporations?

We are running because we are on the side of the people.

We are running – we, not me – because I cannot win the goals of our campaign alone. I will not have the tens of millions of dollars for media advertising that the corporate-financed Democratic and Republican candidates will have. But organized people can beat organized money. As the candidate, I am one spokesperson for this campaign. But we all need to be organizers and spokespeople for this campaign with our family, friends, co-workers, and neighborhood and internet communities.

We are running because only a grassroots movement of people reaching people by word of mouth can swell to the critical mass we need to achieve our goals. Personal contact is far more influential and persuasive than 30-second TV and radio spots. Every one of us can win over tens or hundreds or thousands of voters by consistent, persistent activity over the course of the campaign.

We are running to offer a real alternative to the two-party system of corporate rule. The Democrats have replaced the Republicans in the State House and the Governor’s Mansion, and in Congress and the White House, but little has changed. The two-party system is a very sophisticated scheme for presenting the illusion of real choice when both major parties are funded by the same corporate, financial, and real estate interests. Whether the A Team of Republicans or the B Team of Democrats are in the majority, it is still corporate power dictating policy.

The ongoing Wall Street bailout is the greatest transfer of wealth in world history. If our schools were banks, they would have been bailed out. Instead the creditor class of wealthy elites is making the borrower class of working and middle class taxpayers pay for the whole bailout for their bad investments through higher taxes, lower wages and benefits, and cuts in public services. The catastrophic destruction of our climate and oceans is accelerating, but the incumbent fossil fuel and nuclear corporations still capture far more government subsidies than clean, renewable energy. Whether it is job creation, health care, housing, or the environment, the government sides with the corporate vested interests against the broad public interest.

The progressives and independents who voted the Republicans out and the Democrats in are now taken for granted by the Democrats in power, because these voters have no where else to take their votes. We are running to give these voters a place to go.

50,000 Votes Wins a Green Party Ballot Line

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[From: Businessweek ]

By Thomas Penny

May 7 (Bloomberg) — The Green Party won its first seat in the House of Commons as leader Caroline Lucas took Brighton Pavilion on England’s south coast from Gordon Brown’s Labour Party.

Lucas, a member of the European Parliament since 1999, won 31.3 percent of the vote, compared with 28.9 percent for Labour’s Nancy Platts and 23.7 percent for Charlotte Vere of the Conservatives. The Green Party, which came third at the 2005 election, overturned a 12-point Labour majority.

“Thank you so much for putting the politics of hope above the politics of fear,” Lucas said after the results were announced.

Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral prevented the Green Party from gaining any seats in previous domestic elections. The party won 1.1 percent of the national vote in 2005 and 8.7 percent in June’s European elections, which use proportional representation.

The party, which was founded as “People” in 1973 and became the Green Party in 1985 to link it to similar movements in Europe, advocated increased taxes for the rich, tighter financial regulation and protection of public services in its manifesto, which described it as “the party of hope and radical change.”

[From Mark Fiore]

[From East Anglian Daily Times]

THE youngest member of Babergh district council has resigned from the Conservatives and joined the Green Party, criticising Tory attitudes to global environmental issues and inaction on local issues.

Dean Walton, who also serves on Sudbury town and Great Cornard parish councils, was elected in 2007 to represent Sudbury East ward. At Babergh, Cllr Walton is currently a member of the Scrutiny Committee, will continue to represent his constituents as an independent, and has applied to join the Independent group on the Council, which has no party in overall control.

He has led the fight against a mobile telephone phone mast beside Great Cornard middle school and opposed short stay car park ticket machines in the district.

He said today: “I have long been attracted by Green Party policies on issues such as climate change, energy efficiency, animal welfare, social equality and our natural environment.

“I have learnt a lot over the last three years and feel it’s time to move to a party that truly represents the way I feel and has a greater willingness to listen to and work with all other councillors.”

[Why we need more Greens in office. -RS]

[From Truthdig]

By Chris Hedges

Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s decision to vote “yes” in Sunday’s House action on the health care bill, although he had sworn to oppose the legislation unless there was a public option, is a perfect example of why I would never be a politician. I respect Kucinich. As politicians go, he is about as good as they get, but he is still a politician. He has to run for office. He has to raise money. He has to placate the Democratic machine or risk retaliation and defeat. And so he signed on to a bill that will do nothing to ameliorate the suffering of many Americans, will force tens of millions of people to fork over a lot of money for a defective product and, in the end, will add to the ranks of our uninsured.

The claims made by the proponents of the bill are the usual deceptive corporate advertising. The bill will not expand coverage to 30 million uninsured, especially since government subsidies will not take effect until 2014. Families who cannot pay the high premiums, deductibles and co-payments, estimated to be between 15 and 18 percent of most family incomes, will have to default, increasing the number of uninsured. Insurance companies can unilaterally raise prices without ceilings or caps and monopolize local markets to shut out competitors. The $1.055 trillion spent over the next decade will add new layers of bureaucratic red tape to what is an unmanageable and ultimately unsustainable system.

The mendacity of the Democratic leadership in the face of this reality is staggering. Howard Dean, who is a doctor, said recently: “This is a vote about one thing: Are you for the insurance companies or are you for the American people?” Here is a man who once championed the public option and now has sold his soul. What is the point in supporting him or any of the other Democrats? How much more craven can they get?

Take a look at the health care debacle in Massachusetts, a model for what we will get nationwide. One in six people there who have the mandated insurance say they cannot afford care, and tens of thousands of people have been evicted from the state program because of budget cuts. The 45,000 Americans who die each year because they cannot afford coverage will not be saved under the federal legislation. Half of all personal bankruptcies will still be caused by an inability to pay astronomical medical bills. The only good news is that health care stocks and bonuses for the heads of these corporations are shooting upward. Chalk this up as yet another victory for our feudal overlords and a defeat for the serfs.

The U.S. spends twice as much as other industrialized nations on health care—$7,129 per capita—although 45.7 million Americans remain without health coverage and millions more are inadequately covered, meaning that if they get seriously ill they are not covered. Fourteen thousand Americans a day are now losing their health coverage. A report in the journal Health Affairs estimates that, if the system is left unchanged, one of every five dollars spent by Americans in 2017 will go to health coverage. Private insurance bureaucracy and paperwork consume 31 cents of every health care dollar. Streamlining payment through a single nonprofit payer would save more than $400 billion per year, enough, Physicians for a National Health Plan points out, to provide comprehensive, high-quality coverage for all Americans. Check out www.healthcare-now.org. It has some of the best analysis.

This bill is not about fiscal responsibility or the common good. The bill is about increasing corporate profit at taxpayer expense. It is the health care industry’s version of the Wall Street bailout. It lavishes hundreds of billions in government subsidies on insurance and drug companies. The some 3,000 health care lobbyists in Washington, whose dirty little hands are all over the bill, have once more betrayed the American people for money. The bill is another example of why change will never come from within the Democratic Party. The party is owned and managed by corporations. The five largest private health insurers and their trade group, America’s Health Insurance Plans, spent more than $6 million on lobbying in the first quarter of 2009. Pfizer, the world’s biggest drug maker, spent more than $9 million during the last quarter of 2008 and the first three months of 2009. The Washington Post reported that up to 30 members of Congress from both parties who hold key committee memberships have major investments in health care companies totaling between $11 million and $27 million. President Barack Obama’s director of health care policy, who will not discuss single payer as an option, has served on the boards of several health care corporations. And as salaries for most Americans have stagnated or declined during the past decade, health insurance profits have risen by 480 percent.

Obama and the congressional leadership have consciously shut out advocates of single payer from the debate. The press, including papers such as The New York Times, treats single payer as a fringe movement. The television networks rarely mention it. And yet between 45 and 60 percent of doctors favor single payer. Between 40 and 62 percent of the American people, including 80 percent of registered Democrats, want universal, single-payer not-for-profit health care for all Americans. The ability of the corporations to discredit and silence voices that represent at least half of the population is another sad testament to the power of our corporate state to frame all discussions.

Change will come only by building movements that stand in fierce and uncompromising opposition to the Democrats and the Republicans. If they can herd Kucinich and John Conyers, the sponsors of House Resolution 676, a bill that would create a publicly funded National Health Program by eliminating private health insurers, onto the House floor to vote for this corporate theft, what is the point in pretending there is any room left for us in the party? And why should we waste our time with gutless liberal groups such as Moveon.org, which felt the need to collect more than $1 million to pressure House Democrats who had voted “no” on the original bill to recant? What was this purportedly anti-war group doing anyway serving as an obsequious recruiting arm of the Obama election campaign? The longer we tie ourselves to the Democrats and these bankrupt liberal organizations the more ridiculous and impotent we appear.

“I’m ready to listen to the White House, if the White House is ready to listen to the concerns about putting a public option in this bill,” the old Kucinich said on the “Democracy Now!” radio and television program before he flipped. “I mean, they can do that. You know, they’re still cutting last-minute deals. Put the public option back in. Make it a robust public option. Give the people a chance to really negotiate rates with the insurance companies … from the standpoint of having a public option. But don’t just tell the people that you’re going to call this health care reform, when you’re giving insurance companies an even more powerful monopoly status in our economy.”