The Green Vaccine

A plan for diagnosing and treating ABBS (Anybody But Bush Syndrome) 
by Ben Manski

April 05, 2004

While Bush is a problem, ABBS is not a solution.

We know of course that this is a national election year. But let's not forget that is another kind of year as well. It's a leap year. So I'll submit to you that it's up to us to insure that this year proves to be a leap year for American democracy. This year is a year for political empowerment.

Unfortunately, these days we've got a lot of progressives all around the country who are walking around downcast, looking at their shoes. Why are they looking at their shoes? It's because that they suffer from a sense of powerlessness. You know what I'm talking about, this sense of hopelessness that's out there?

Why are they looking at their shoes? Well, it's because they're not feeling too well. It's because they're feeling kind of sick. They caught a virus, the ABBS virus:

Anybody But Bush Syndrome

I must let you know what some of the symptoms are because it is contagious. You can go up and comfort these folks and hug them, don't worry it's not contagious that way. But watch out, it is contagious if you religiously read The Nation, In These Times, and a variety of other liberal publications we're not looking to too much anymore. I want to let you know some of the symptoms, so you can recognize those suffering from it.

First of all, there's a sort of cognitive disorder; there's an inability to tell the difference between a daddy's boy from Texas and a megalomaniac from Austria, and I'm not talking about Arnold here.

Another symptom is marked by outbreaks of protest against Ralph Nader, marked by public burning of seatbelts and airbags.

A third symptom is the irrational belief that politicians should be judged by their promises and not their voting records. 

Fourth, there's a delusional proclamation, and I quote, 'Kucinich can still win it.' 

And finally, it's marked by a kind of collective amnesia, as some people just seem to have forgotten everything that happened between 1992 and the 2000 election. This is eight years that have totally disappeared. 

But to be honest, the fear of Bush is not a total hallucination. I'll be straight with everybody. We know that Bush is a serious problem. That's right, he's a serious problem. But he is not the problem. That's right, Bush is not the problem.  

So, you ask, what is the problem? Well. allow me to clarify. It's not just a problem, it's a crisis, a global crisis. For the Green Party, whose four pillars are Ecology, Non-Violence, Social Justice and Grassroots Democracy, we recognize the global crisis and its four faces of global poverty, global warming, global corporatization and global war. We have a major crisis that's a lot bigger than a daddy's boy from Texas.  

Let's talk about this crisis. First, we have the crisis of global poverty. We see the faces of over two billion human beings living in poverty, primarily in the global south, places we readily associate with poverty, but there is also the crisis in the American north, in urban Illinois, and rural Wisconsin, and for that matter, rural Illinois, and urban Wisconsin. All these places, First and Third World alike, are powerless to stop the flow of social and natural resources.  

I'm reminded that the Irish potato famine never really ended. Instead, it was considered a great success: Starve the people as you export their food. That lesson has been re-taught brutally over the past two centuries as a lesson for the entire developing world. And today it is the most developed nations that are re-learning our own dark history. Hundreds of millions have lost jobs, pensions and services in the fallout from the global economic recession, which is gripping the market.  

Here are the basic facts of this inequity: The world's 200 wealthiest people have a net worth equal to that of the combined annual income of the world's 2.5 billion poorest, and three billion of our fellow human beings are living on less than $2 a day.

The Forbes 400 wealthiest Americans got richer at a rate of $1.92 million a day in the last decade. That's 46,602 times the US minimum wage. 

Conversely, if we go all the way back to 1865 we learn that African-Americans owned about .5 percent of the nation's wealth. By 1990, a hundred and twenty-five years later, it had leaped a whole half a percentage point to round it our at one percent of the nation's wealth. This of a population incarcerated at over 10 times the rate suggested by their numbers in a nation of more than two million Americans behind bars. 

In Argentina, where there is officially 27 percent unemployment, 50 percent of the population is living below the poverty line. The teen dropout rate is at 20 percent. This is a country that was a first-world nation until a couple years ago. If you want to see the combined cost of privatization and trade liberalization, look to Argentina, look to Indonesia. And folks, the USA is next. 

We also see the face of another crisis, and that is the crisis of planetary ecology. The planet is now noticeably warming, and even the US Government can no longer deny it. Their very own Pentagon is, as we speak, trying to pre-empt the issue as one of US National Security rather than global crisis. But we don't need scientists to tell us that the climate is changing. Climate change is reinforced day by day by the everyday experience of Wisconsinites without winter and Georgians without rain. It's affecting our economy and our culture and our daily lives. 

Because of the ecological crisis, our time horizon for action has been made short. We simply do not have the time that past generations struggling for liberation possessed. In Mitzrayim in Egypt, beneath the rule of the Roman Empire, in the colonies of the Americas, under the yoke of slavery, each struggle was informed by the awareness that future generations would carry on. We have no such assurances.  

We live having experienced a 1 percent worldwide temperature rise in the past 30 years. That's a disarmingly small number, until you consider the fact that last year the North Pole melted for the first time in 50 million years. That temperature rise, of course, reflects massively uneven climatic changes and fluctuations around the world.  

We live in a moment in which the problem is accelerating, not resolving. In the past 30 years, coal extraction has nearly doubled. Half of the planet's forest and half its wetlands have disappeared. And let's be clear: They haven't exactly just "disappeared." There's no invisible hand here. 

The number of cars on the road has tripled, and human carbon emissions almost doubled to 6.4 million tons annually. We live with more than 500 measurable chemicals in our bodies today that never existed in anyone's body in 1920. Many of these chemicals are cancer-causing agents, or those that disrupt the endocrine system, which in turn disrupts our reproductive systems and our immune systems with a particularly nasty impact on our intelligence and sexual function. Is it any wonder Viagra is the number one selling drug on the market? 

 We also see the first years of a war without end, the continuation of a crisis of violence that Washington tells us will continue indefinitely, on every continent, at whatever cost necessary, to uproot and destroy a hidden threat.  

Eight invasions under Clinton were followed by three under Bush, as well as three so-far-failed coup attempts. Over 3,500 American troops have been maimed or killed in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. 3,500. And it's important to recognize this is a different kind of war. We've entered a new generation of warfare. We talk about the casualty rate. People of our generation, or should I say of my generation, are not dying in the field, they're coming back as the living dead. The use of untested vaccines and depleted uranium shells created what is known as "Gulf War Syndrome" in the 1990's, and this tradition is continuing full force with the new campaign. Soldiers are being maimed and mutilated in ways heretofore unseen, so we need to confront the casualty statistics when they're thrown at us. 

There have been at least 10,000 innocent civilians killed to date by U.S. forces in both wars. Over 250,000 Americans in uniform are stationed in war zones across Asia. . When will they come home? Bring them home, right? Bring them home! 

Donald Rumsfeld told us the war in Iraq was going to cost our nation $3.9 billion a month. Well unfortunately it turned out that he was wrong. It's actually costing about twice that right now. The war is breaking the American bank, and its costing American jobs, education, health care and public services that otherwise we could easily afford. 

Add to that the massive expansion of the federal government with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the 25% increase in discretionary spending, the escalation of the Defense budget to more than $400 Billion a year, and a record trillion dollar national debt and trade deficit which has us handing over ownership of our national assets in the form of Treasury Bills to our largest trading partners. Soon China and Japan will own more of us than we do. 

And finally, we see the age of corporate power at its peak: vicious, corrupt, pervasive and destructive.  

First there's the obvious crisis of the moment, the one that's in the pages of all the newspapers, the crisis of financial confidence unleashed when the shenanigans of Enron executives began to come to light. And let's be clear, it's not what these guys did that was illegal that's criminal. It's what they did that's legal that's criminal.  

These guys not only broke the law, they did so after having gotten hip-pocket politicos to loosen the regulations that could have prevented much of this. Case in point: in November of 1999, Bill Clinton signed into law the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, thereby completing a 20-year effort to repeal legal barriers separating the ownership of banking, insurance, and securities corporations. Thank Clinton's treasury secretary, Robert Rubin, now a top Citigroup executive. 

Robert Rubin is no exception. Of the top 400 political contributors in the United States, 71 of them were security brokers or investment mangers, never mind the other CEOs. These guys were really good at cooking books. It's what they do for a living. And the point is that these guys have never paid their share. It's estimated that between $5 and $15 trillion is hidden in tax havens today. The corporate tax rate is supposed to be 35 percent, but most corporations only pay about a third of that. And they're lobbying for the elimination of the alternative minimum tax, which is based on the aim to pay nothing. So this is an ongoing fiasco. 

The point is that Enron, Harken, World Com, Halliburton, Occidental, are not Republican scandals. They are bipartisan scandals. These corporations all hedged their bets. In the summer of 2000, Enron hired Gore's old buddy, Charles Bone, to schmooze the Gore campaign for them. That same year, Enron gave almost $800,000 to the two establishment parties, over 46 percent of that to the Democrats.  

It cuts back even further in the years. Ken Lay was a regular at the Clinton White House, and this is how business is done. But for as serious as the Enron, WorldCom, and other debacles are for investors and for our politics, they're again just the tip of the iceberg.  

We see not only in our politics, but especially in our day-to-day lives, the face of global corporatization. As corporations steadily and strategically complete their colonization of education, of the media, of the military, of the government, of elections, and nature itself, our hope for reversal is lessened.  

It's bad enough that corporations are the effective agents of economic conquest and ecological destruction. It's bad enough that the U.S. military is the effective handmaiden of corporate exploitation and expansion, clearing people in government out of the way in the interests of investment. Most serious is the corporate colonization of our public life itself. Our schools, our media, our government, our medicine and now our very genes are becoming commodities. Notice at this level the question is not how greed has corrupted certain individuals in corporate America or made corporate executives into criminals. The point is that corporations are by design established to extract value from life, to commodify us, to dismember us. They're proving to be very effective at that task.  

Witness the corporate capture of the Human Genome Project, which amounts to the corporatization of our genetic code, the blueprint for life. Witness the corporatization of the U.S. military, done through Private Military Companies, or PMCs. These military corporations are supplanting basic military functions, including training and advising, without even the pretense of accountability that the Pentagon puts up. More shocking, they account for $202 billion in seven years, up from $55.6 billion in 1990.  

Just ask the Serbs of Krajina what the cost of this can be. 100,000 civilians massacred at the hands of a U.S. corporation-trained Croat army.  

Witness the corporatization of education. The corporate dictation of the basic lessons learned about what it means to be an American, to be a world citizen. The fiscal and structural priorities of our schools are being increasingly geared to the needs of business corporations. In 1996, a Canadian firm estimated that the North American education market was worth $7 trillion. What's education to us is just plain profit to the likes of the Edison project, Channel One, and the other corporate privatizers.  

We recognize the gravity of these crises, do we not? Greens recognize the serious of the global crises of corporatization, ecology, war, and poverty. And we should ask: Do the establishment parties recognize the seriousness of the moment?  

Do the Republicans? To ask that question is to answer it. 

Maybe then we should ask DNC Chairman Terry McAuliffe, "What do you make of President Bush's actions of late?"

This is a direct quote from McAuliffe: 'Every speech I give, I say we support the President in this War on Terrorism.'  

How about Al Gore, the latest discovered "left" hero. He said, 'Oh, I urged Bill to invade Iraq back in 1998, and then in early 2002 I chastised W for failing to put an end to Hussein.' Gore came out against Bush for not invading Iraq quickly enough. But you know, that was then, and this is now. 

Progressives need a strategy. We need a means to get from point A to point B. That's what strategy involves: We know where we are, we know where we've been, we know where we're going, and we've got a plan for getting there. 

To quote one of Wisconsin's great progressives: 'The underlying reason indeed why both parties have failed to take the people's side in the present crisis is that neither party can openly attack the real evils which are undermining representative government without convicting themselves of treachery to the voters during their recent tenure in office.' 

That was Fighting Bob La Follette in 1924. He knew in 1924 what we know now, that we need a strategy. And he knew that a progressive party is one of the best strategic vehicles that's available to us for getting from point A to point B. 

Let's talk about the historic role of challenging parties. What would America be like without progressive parties? Can you imagine? 

It's fitting that we're gathered here in Springfield, a home of Lincoln. Ask yourselves, what would the country be like if those communists and abolitionists meeting in Ripon, Wisconsin, 150 years ago this month, had not united to form the Republican Party? If they had not gotten their act together and put together the pieces of other third parties who had tried for decades to build an abolition party, what would this country be like today?  

What would the country be like if the suffragists had not built all their parties to advocate for and demand women's suffrage? What would the country be like if the socialists had not been successful at winning municipal elections all across the country? They left behind a residue, more than a residue, they left behind a legacy that we all take for granted today. Municipal water, sewage, fire department, public education, we had none of these before the Socialist Party. None of them. 

And how about the progressives? Social welfare, Social Security, the minimum wage, election reform. These are the things progressive parties brought us. What would America be like if it had not been for those parties?  

And today the Greens. Ask yourself seriously, what would this country be like if there was no Green Party?  

I would submit to you we've already made contributions to the debate. We're already making the steps down the road from point A to point B.  

Let's talk about some of those steps. Let's talk about the growth of the Greens. First of all, it's been three-quarters of a century since there's been a progressive party in this country that has had the success of the Green Party. We're still very small. We still have a long way to go. But we have to recognize that what we've already accomplished is historic.  

There are over 300,000 members of the Green Party in the United States today. That's nearly twice our membership just three years ago. We've also doubled the number of Greens serving in elective office. There were 87 Greens serving in elective office in 2000; 205 today: mayors, city councilmen, judges, state representatives. Today there are 43 accredited Green Parties in the United States.  

And I know that it's hard in the trenches, and all of us are in the trenches, and it's hard. But you've got to look at the overall picture. The overall picture over a very short period of time is one of incredible growth, and we're heading the right way. And you know what, not only are we Green and growing, but we've got a program. We're moving toward a multi-party democracy. Our very existence is moving this country towards a multi-party democracy. 

Greens in office are trailblazers. They're just like us, but they're in a more difficult position. And some of the things they're doing in the very difficult position that they're in . are just really inspirational. 

We look at all the work that's been done around instant runoff voting, the Green elected officials across the country building support for election reform. We can look at the introduction of local minimum wages. I know not all of you know, but there's a number of communities in the United States that now have local minimum wages that are much higher than the state and federal minimum wage. It's been Green elected officials in California who spearheaded this new effort that's being copied all over the country. In a lot of ways, Greens act as trailblazers when they get into elective office. 

In terms of the opposition of the PATRIOT Act and to the war in Iraq, it was Green elected officials in 25 municipalities that led the way in getting the Cities for Peace program going. And in Arcata, Calif., Green elected officials who have succeeded in working with the community to take a stand to say that any city official in the city of Arcata who complies with provisions of the PATRIOT Act is not doing their job. That's pretty incredible. That's more than just a resolution.  They're committing an act of civil disobedience. 

Let's talk about Greens in campaigns even when we don't win, and we're winning more and more, but even when we don't win. Let's look what's happening in San Francisco right now. It's probably occurred to other people, but Matt Gonzalez had a little bit to do with what's going on in San Francisco right now. 

We have a situation where in one of the largest cities in the country, the Green Party candidate gets 47 percent of the vote against a corporate Democrat. The corporate Democrat gets into office and he looks around and he says: 'Geez, I'm the right-winger. I have nowhere to go but left.' 

And, so it isn't any surprise that Gavin Newsom feels not only comfortable performing gay marriage ceremonies, but it's almost a political necessity for him because he's still got Matt Gonzalez and the Green Party out there to keep him honest. I think that's a credit, and we should recognize it. 

We may not win the White House this year. But there's an expression: "Green to the White House by 2020." We're going to get there eventually. 

But this year we can affect the debate in a very positive way and keep them honest - or make them honest." 

It's important to recognize, in 2000 there was no staff for the national party, there was no office, there was not even a committee that dealt with elections. Today we have those things. We also need to recognize that we're still a party that organizes in our communities, and out in the streets. Greens had one of the largest contingents at the Free Trade Area of the Americas protest in Miami. It was a very visible contingent with lots of Green flags out there that all kinds of people were just picking up and waving Green Party flag so that there were more of us than there were of us. 

That was a very positive sign. We have the movement/electoral duality to the Green Party that is part of our vibrancy and our strength. 

Also, we are a global political party. We're the only global nonviolent political party in the history of the world. Recently, a number of U.S. Greens went to witness the formation of the European Green Party, the first continental Green Party in the history of the world. And, I think it's a very exciting time. And it's a very interesting time too because the Greens in the United States have an important role to play. And this may surprise you, but in some respects we in the U.S. are one of the more politically radical Green Parties out there. 

So, there are a lot of good things going on with the Green program. We're getting people elected. We're running successful campaigns even when we don't get people elected. We're organizing in our communities, in the streets. We're working and cooperating with Green parties in over 100 nations around the world on every continent. And that's all great! 

The Green Party program is a vaccine for ABBS, and it's a vaccine for powerlessness on the left. We have a strategy to get from A to B, and leave the other BS behind. We're closer than we were last year. We're closer than we were the year before that, and the year before that, and the year before that. We're getting closer all the time. We Greens are moving forward! 

I invite and encourage all of you to participate in "Forward 2004! The Green National Convention," June 23-28, in Milwaukee. The Greens are a vaccine for ABBS. Action is the antidote to despair. 

Ben Manski is a Co-Chair of the Green Party of the United States.

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