The latest Suffolk University poll on the MA gubernatorial contest shows GRP candidate Jill Stein at 8%, a five point surge despite the media largely shutting her out. The winner of one or both (depending on how you look at it) of the 2002 gubernatorial debates the establishment press allowed her into, this is a very significant indication that Jill is positioned to break the governor’s race wide open.

Tim Cahill’s plummeting numbers show that the Republican Governors Association ad campaign has destroyed his support. Their pick, Charlie Baker, will have a very hard time getting out from under his ownership of two of the most rage-inducing plights facing ordinary Massachusetts voters — skyrocketing healthcare costs at the hands of greedy private insurance companies and the short-sighted debt restructuring of Big Dig finances. Meanwhile Governor Patrick’s unfavorable ratings are higher than his favorable ratings (46% to 45%), by 52% to 36%, MA voters think the state is heading in the wrong direction, and by 55% to 33%, they don’t think he deserves reelection and would like to give someone else a chance.

All bets are off, folks. The voters are screaming for a revolt, and they don’t like the choices they’ve been given. Stein’s 7% favorable, 7% unfavorable, and 60% never-heard-of numbers show that as she gains more exposure, her poll numbers will surge even higher.

She’s the right candidate with the right message at the right moment.

Read on for the Stein campaign’s press release!

US Greens congratulate Caroline Lucas, the UK’s first Green Party member of Parliament, on her election victory

Colombian Green presidential candidate Antanas Mockus holds a strong lead in polls, may become the first Green Party head of a national government

GREEN PARTY OF THE UNITED STATES

http://www.gp.org

WASHINGTON, DC — The Green Party of the United States congratulates Caroline Lucas and British Greens on Ms. Lucas’ election to the House of Commons on May 6. Ms. Lucas, the first Green member of Parliament, will represent Brighton Pavilion.

“The election of the first Green to the British House of Commons is cause for celebration among Greens in the US and for everyone who wants to see a new direction in politics and an end to the stranglehold of the pro-war pro-corporate old parties,” said Cynthia McKinney, the Green Party’s 2008 nominee for President of the United States and former member of the US House of Representatives from Georgia. “If Greens can win a seat in the UK, we can win one or more seats in Congress here in America.”

Despicable stances of our elected leaders, in crisis after crisis and policy after policy, is becoming nauseatingly dependable. The voters who elect people like Deval Patrick, a corporate lawyer for Texaco who relentlessly fought the people of Ecuador who were struggling for justice and relief (see the trailer for Crude, a documentary about this legal battle, below), play a role in making these abuses an accepted part of our system. Likewise, voters who got lost in the hype of Barack Obama’s heavily funded grassroots campaign chose to ignore the corporate agenda he was mobilizing them for, and failed to hold their favored candidate to any sort of truly progressive standards. Both corporate parties have demonstrated nothing but the desire to put corporate profits ahead of the public interest, yet delusions of something otherwise continue to dominate the day.

The latest travesty, in a long, steady stream of them, is the little-reported fact that Obama’s administration granted 27 exemptions from environmental review to oil companies in the Gulf of Mexico — the very same categorical exclusions from environmental review granted to BP’s disastrous Deepwater Horizon project. Once again, McClatchy newspapers find themselves at the vanguard of real journalism, with the mainstream media ignoring the story:

Since Spill, Feds Have Given 27 Waivers to Oil Companies in Gulf

Published on Saturday, May 8, 2010 by McClatchy Newspapers

by Marisa Taylor

This exciting array of candidates means the GRP will be taking it to the next level this year. 2010 is the year of the Green-Rainbow Party!

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: April 27, 2010

CONTACT: Daryl Sprague, 617-459-0784

GREEN-RAINBOW CANDIDATES TO CHALLENGE INCUMBENTS IN 2010: FIELD REPORTS SAY VOTERS ARE READY FOR CHANGE

Voters are in the mood for change, according to the Green-Rainbow Party candidates nominated at the weekend meeting of the Party’s State Committee in Northampton. Nominated were: health and environmental advocate Jill Stein for Governor, Holyoke veterans’ activist Rick Purcell for Lieutenant Governor, Nat Fortune, a physicist at Smith College, for State Auditor. Scott Laugenour was nominated as a candidate for state representative in the 4th Berkshire District. The Party also endorsed independent candidate Peter White who is running for Congress in the 10th Congressional District (being vacated by Rep. William Delahunt).

An Open Letter to the FireDogLake Community

{Cross posted at FireDogLake}

Dear friends at FDL,

I come to you with open arms, an open mind, and an open heart. I read your analysis and commentary and reporting and informed discussions, and I am grateful for all of it. It is heads and tails more open-minded and thoughtful than other similar progressive blogs, even those on your blogroll. FDL gives me hope. But then I take a look at your blog family, and your affiliation with the Blue America / Act Blue fundraising PAC, and my heart sinks. Ultimately I yearn to know the answer… how open-minded is the FDL community?

I write this as a Green activist, an active member of the Green-Rainbow Party — the Massachusetts affiliate of the Green Party of the U.S. I like to think that my allegiance to the Green Party is not rigid, or dogmatic, or permanent, or tunnel-based – the types of things that made Ralph Nader promise his father on his deathbed (as the story goes) that he wouldn’t ever join a political party. I myself am brimming with criticism of the Green Party. But it’s constructive criticism, because I think we desperately need to make the Green Party viable in the United States and around the world. Any global ecology-based movement will do, so long as it does not shy away from the difficult, frightening, and often-nauseating terrain of modern-day politics.  

[A note from the Stein campaign]

Dear friends and supporters,

Despite 40 years of successful Earth days, our environment is at greater risk today than ever before. We face an increasingly threatened climate, unabated oil addiction, expansion of polluting coal and biomass plants, degradation of forests and fisheries, shrinking open space, ongoing toxic threats and senseless wars that are as harmful to the climate as they are to global security. On this Earth Day, let us make a new commitment to the vision of a whole and healthy planet – to a revitalized grassroots democracy, new leadership, and green economic transformation. Each of these are critical if we are to stop the ongoing destruction and achieve the healthy, just, secure green future we deserve.

This article was written in response to this post at GreenChange.org

“We are neither left nor right; we are in front.”

-a Green slogan

I learned more about the Green Party from two old books* and two old white dudes** in my local chapter than anywhere else. I joined the party in 2001 and voted for its presidential candidate in 1996 and 2000, but it took me over ten years to even begin to get a sense of what it’s really all about.

There are some major things that distinguish the Greens from simply being more progressive than, or to the left of, the Democrats. I’d say the single-most important point is that the Green Party is an ecological political party, trying to establish an “ecological politics” in a country whose politics — left and right — has a fundamental disconnect with reality.

I hope to develop a better understanding of what ecological politics means in practice and theory both, but my simplistic version is that Greens view our economic, social, and political structures as complex systems of interrelated parts, all of which are ultimately woven into a greater fabric of natural systems — the environment our human-constructed systems are fully dependent upon, the solar system, and beyond.