Ecological Wisdom * Social Justice * Grassroots Democracy * Non-Violence
>> Green Party of Michigan <<
http://www.migreens.org
>>> ---------------- <<<
>>> News Release <<<
>>> ---------------- <<<
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
---------------------
July 2, 2004
For More Information Contact:
----------------------------
Marc Reichardt -- Chair/GPMI
chair@migreens.org
John Anthony La Pietra -- Elections Coördinator/GPMI
elections@migreens.org
>> Home from Nominating Cobb-LaMarche Ticket at Milwaukee Convention, <<
>> Michigan Greens Get Back to Focusing on State Candidates, Issues <<
>> ================================================================ <<
> Kalamazoo Kicks Off a Month of County Caucuses at 4th Coast Café <
> <
> Will Campaign for Stronger Water Protections; IRV, Open Debates, <
> Election Reforms; Universal Health Care; Affirmative Action; Peace <
Delegates of the Green Party of Michigan (GPMI) are home from last
week's lively national nominating convention in Milwaukee -- and ready
to take on state issues and campaigns from now to November 2.
The convention nominated home-grown party organizer David Cobb of
Texas and California for President, and single mother turned radio host
and Maine gubernatorial candidate Patricia LaMarche, on the second ballot.
The Cobb-LaMarche ticket has been certified for November -- and now
Michigan Greens will turn to their home counties, and attend a dozen
local caucuses in the month of July to nominate more candidates to serve
those counties. The first county caucus took place at the 4th Coast Café
in Kalamazoo Thursday night, and yielded nominations for county clerk and
sheriff.
Also, following in the footsteps of the national Green Party of the
United States (GPUS), which adopted a new platform in Milwaukee, Michigan
Greens will update their platform to reflect recent activity on issues
ranging from fighting the privatization of water to instant-runoff voting
and opening political debates to all ballot-qualified candidates, from
pushing for universal health care to holding onto affirmative action and
threatened civil rights to protecting peace.
Cobb-LaMarche Nominated . . . But Nader-Camejo Would Be Welcomed, Too
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Cobb and LaMarche won with 53% of the delegates on the second ballot,
to 40% for supporters of a national endorsement (not a nomination) of
Ralph Nader and his running mate, progressive financier and two-time Green
candidate for California governor Peter Camejo.
Turtle Island Institute founder Kent Mesplay was third with 5-1/2%,
and Michigan favorite-daughter candidate JoAnne Bier Beemon fourth at 1%.
Nader, Camejo, and three other candidates who had run largely as
Nader stand-ins were eliminated after the first ballot because they did
not agree to run as the Green Presidential candidate on all state ballots
across the country if nominated.
Beemon's strong convention speech drew support from inside and
outside her home state's delegation. She got one of her 14 first-ballot
votes from Tennessee, and two votes of her second-ballot total of eight
from New York.
Still, as she told a reporter from home, "The real thrill for me was
to be able to stand up in front of 1,000 people and talk about the beauty
of the Jordan River Valley and the hard-working, grassroots environmental
movements that are working to protect the natural resources of northern
Michigan."
Michigan Greens backed Beemon strongly on the first ballot, giving her
13 of their 32 delegate votes to 10 for the Nader/Camejo ticket, 8 for
Cobb, and 1 for Mesplay. On the second ballot, the Nader position of "No
Nominee got 14 votes from Michigan, Cobb 11, Beemon 6, and Mesplay 1.
The competition for delegates was fierce, with new informational and
tactical literature from the two biggest campaigns coming out hour after
hour. However, notes GPMI elections coördinator John La Pietra, it was
easy to tell that the rivalry was friendly at bottom.
"Whenever a state delegation would announce its vote totals, it told
everyone else about the good things Greens in the state were working to
protect -- and the bad things they were working to prevent. And everyone
was cheering and booing right with them -- in unison and in harmony. It
shows how united we really are -- in the Green values David Cobb has so
rightly described as the better instincts of our country."
When his turn came to report the GPMI delegation's first-round votes,
Mount Pleasant city commissioner Jim Moreno reminded the convention that
Michigan was (among other things) the home of the 1937 sitdown strike that
founded the UAW -- and the home of Rosa Parks, who sat down on the bus for
freedom.
The Nader-Camejo ticket has been offered a Reform Party nomination in
Michigan, which is currently being verified by the Bureau of Elections.
Greens of all shades would welcome Nader's joining Cobb on the ballot.
GPMI national representative David Spitzley commented, "If there's room on
our ballot for the two big pro-war candidates, there must be room enough
for more than one peace candidate."
Party on Pace for Record Slate, Has 14 County Caucuses Set for July
===================================================================
Between now and the August 3 primary, Greens can hold county caucuses
to nominate candidates for any offices serving areas entirely in the
counties they cover. In Wayne and Oakland Counties, that can reach all
the way up to US House seats -- for the 9th, 13th, and 15th Congressional
Districts. Many counties also contain one or more Michigan state House
districts, and all have county-level or local offices up for election
this November.
The first caucus, for Kalamazoo County, was held upstairs at 4th
Coast Café (816 S. Westnedge) Thursday, July 1 starting at 7pm. Green
Party of Kalamazoo co-chair James Wilber won his local's nomination for
county clerk -- and will have company on the ballot from sheriff candidate
Stephanie Frizzell.
Wilber is "proud to be representing the Green Party. This is what
Grassroots Democracy is all about -- concerned citizens taking an active
role in their government on all levels.
"I feel that the position of County Clerk is the perfect way to have
Green issues heard, and have a highly visible and active role in our
community," he adds.
Greens in thirteen more counties are expected to follow Kalamazoo's
lead and nominate candidates in coming weeks. Next up are two "Bi-County
Caucuses" for Oakland and Wayne County Greens, who will gather on Saturday,
July 10 from 1pm to 5pm at the First Unitarian Universalist Church at 4605
Cass Avenue in Detroit (just south of the Wayne State University campus).
Bay County Greens will be holding their caucus at Bay City Coffee & Tea
on Sunday, July 11 starting at 1:00. They plan to nominate candidates for
several county and township offices and the 96th District State House seat.
Genesee, Lapeer, and Tuscola County Greens will meet noon to 3 pm on
the following Saturday, July 17, at 510 S. Saginaw St. in Flint. Tuesday
the 20th will see a joint Charlevoix-Emmet County caucus session in the
Boyne City Library (Park and Ray) starting at 7pm -- kicking off Beemon's
bid for re-election as Charlevoix County Drain Commissioner, among other
campaigns.
Other counties where Greens are planning nominating caucuses include
Grand Traverse, Hillsdale, Jackson, Lenawee, and Washtenaw. And more
caucuses may yet be arranged -- as long as members in each affected county
are mailed or e-mailed notice of their caucus at least 14 days in advance.
If each scheduled county caucus nominates two candidates, Greens will
have 41 people on the Michigan ballot this year -- topping the party's
biggest previous slate of 33 in 2002.
State laws currently bar Green Party candidates from the August primary
election. Instead, all Green Party members in a county must be invited to
that county's caucus to nominate candidates -- though each county may have
its own rules for how to caucus and with whom.
GPMI caucuses can also endorse individual Greens running for election
to non-partisan offices. At the state convention in May, to which Greens
across the state were all invited, GPMI endorsed Moreno in his bid for re-
election to the Mount Pleasant City Commission, and newcomer Jason Glover
as a candidate for Northwest Michigan College's Board of Trustees.
Shared Values Draw Various States' Attention to Similar Issues
==============================================================
At the national convention, Michigan Greens took part in the final
discussions of the new national platform -- and compared policy notes with
fellow Greens from other states. And when they came home, they found that
many of the same issues are facing Michigan voters as well.
For example, in announcing its first-ballot votes, the Washington state
delegation spoke proudly of a petition drive to give voters there a chance
to choose to use instant-runoff voting (IRV) to elect state and Federal
officials. Earlier, Beemon had led the chorus of candidates in calling
for IRV -- which may be on the ballot in Ferndale as well this fall.
Other campaign/election reforms were also on the minds of many Greens.
There were many calls for including Cobb and Nader in Presidential debates,
an idea close to the heart of Michigan observer Jason Seagraves. Though a
candidate for the 7th District U.S. House seat, Seagraves has already been
excluded from a debate with his fellow Congressional candidates . . . in
his own home town of Adrian.
Other Green-supported reforms include Clean Money/Clean Elections pub-
lic financing of campaigns, in the style used from Arizona to VP candidate
LaMarche's home state of Maine; verified voting; and other technical and
procedural improvements to make sure everyone eligible to votes gets to
vote -- and has a reason to vote, and to trust that her/his vote will
stand up . . . and be counted.
Another issue Greens found on the front burner when they came home
to Michigan was Governor Granholm's effort at dam-building to hold back
a flood tide of private assaults on the public's rights to water: the
Michigan Water Legacy Act (HB5634 and SB1087). GPMI candidates and party
leaders will be holding their fingers in the dike, and urging Granholm and
the Legislature to help plug the holes.
As Greens heard at their state convention from Jim Olson, the attorney
who won Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation's case against the Néstlé
Ice Mountain extraction/bottling plant in Mecosta County, Granholm's plan
sometimes says the right things but doesn't follow through on them. For
example, the bills mention water as a "public trust", but they don't truly
recognize the common-law principles that make water a public trust --
principles, says Olson, that stem from Michigan's statehood and cannot be
overturned without overthrowing statehood as well.
Another egregious example is a weak definition of "diversion" of water
(the very action the bills are supposed to control) to mean only moving
water from one watershed to another *outside* the Great Lakes basin. That
would do nothing to regulate operations like Néstlé's.
And the proposed act as it now stands would only block "significant
impacts" -- language parallelling an argument Néstlé lost in District Judge
Lawrence Root's court, and ignoring the need Olson sees for all parties to
join together and "give water a voice."
Greens are also speaking up for water across the state in Highland
Park -- where they are part of the citizens' coalition which told the City
Council and city manager to reject a corporate bid to take over the
municipal water system.
And Michigan Greens will continue to address many other state issues:
* Universal health care. Greens supported a lawsuit filed earlier this
year seeking to have Governor Granholm and the Legislature plan for
statewide universal health care, in accordance with Michigan law
and the state Constitution.
* Protecting Affirmative Action from back-door efforts to deny funding
to state universities that practice it -- and from the rebirth of
the misnamed "Michigan Civil Rights Initiative".
* Supporting other threatened human and civil rights, from reproductive
choice and same-sex marriage to the right to read or worship free
from snooping or censorship.
* Opposing the death penalty (on the grounds that it violates social
justice) and dove-hunting (because it targets the bird of peace).
As the nation heads into a patriotic holiday weekend, La Pietra thinks
of a button he brought back from the national convention in Milwaukee. It
reads: "Patriotism is making sure your country is worth defending."
"That's what Greens are doing," he says. "For the next four months --
and for years to come after that."
]-------------------------------------------[
For more information on the national GPUS nominating convention in
Milwaukee June 23-28, please visit:
http://gp.org/convention/
To see some photographs of the Michigan delegation from the national
convention, please visit:
http://migreens.org/forward2004/
For more information on progress toward instant-runoff voting in
Ferndale, please visit:
http://www.firv.org
For more information on Washington state's Initiative 318, visit:
http://www.irvwa.org
For more information on HB5634 and SB1087, the "Michigan Water Legacy
Act", please visit:
http://www.michiganlegislature.org
The definition of "diversion" is in Section 32701(d). For five proposals
from attorney James Olson to strengthen the plan, please visit:
http://www.mlui.org/landwater/fullarticle.asp?fileid=16620
For more information on water issues in Michigan, please visit:
http://www.waterissweet.org
For more information about GPMI, its platform and public positions
on issues, the 15 Green candidates already nominated for the November 2004
Michigan ballot, and the county caucuses where local Greens are nominating
more candidates, please visit our Web site:
http://www.migreens.org
# # #
Green Party of Michigan * 548 S. Main Street *
* Ann Arbor, MI 48104 * 734-663-3555
--------------------------------------------------------------------
The Green Party of Michigan was formed in 1987 to address environmental
issues in Michigan politics. Greens are organized in all 50 states and
the District of Columbia. Each state Green Party sets its own goals
and creates its own structure, but US Greens agree on Ten Key Values:
Ecological Wisdom * Grassroots Democracy
Social Justice * Nonviolence
Community Economics * Decentralization
Feminism * Respect for Diversity
Personal and Global * Future Focus/
Responsibility Sustainability
created/distributed using donated labor
================================== * ==================================
Voting at GPUS nominating convention
------------------------------------
1st ballot
=======================
convention Michigan
as a whole delegation
---------- ----------
David Cobb 308 8
Peter Camejo 119
Ralph Nader 117.5 10
no nominee 74.5
Lorna Salzman 40
None Of The Above 35.5
Kent Mesplay 24 1
JoAnne Bier Beemon 14 13
Carol Miller 9.5
Dennis Kucinich 9
uncommitted 6.5
Paul Glover 5.5
Dr. Jonathan Farley 3
Sheila Bilyeu 2
Eugene V. Debs 1
------------------- ----- ----
totals 769 32
2nd ballot
=======================
convention Michigan
as a whole delegation
---------- ----------
David Cobb 408 11
no nominee 308 14
Kent Mesplay 43 1
JoAnne Bier Beemon 8 6
abstentions & votes 4
for ineligible
candidates
------------------- ----- ----
totals 771 32
Other Contacts:
Green Party of Michigan
548 S Main St
Ann Arbor, MI 48104
734-663-3555
info@migreens.org
posted to web 2 July 2004