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Proposal Details

Proposal ID	483
Proposal	PLATFORM: Introduction to Chapter 2
Presenter	Platform Committee presenter, Green Party of California sponsor
Floor Manager	David Strand
Phase	Closed - Failed
Discussion	07-19-2010 - 08-01-2010
Voting	08-02-2010 - 08-08-2010
Presens Quorum	Two Thirds of Active Accredited States/Caucuses
Consens Quorum	Two Thirds of Yes and No Votes

Background

The Green Party of California submits this amendment to update the 2004 platform, and to express our Green values in the more graceful style of the 1996 and 2000 platforms. We eliminated antiquated facts and references, and made the language more clear, concise, and precise.

We re-wrote the 2004 introduction to the social justice chapter, to try to present our Green vision in a more poetic and readable way. We tried to portray our nation's social injustices in a parallel and more stark fashion.

The Green Party of California's delegation to the GPUS originally voted to approve this proposal in April 2010. In our state, we require 2/3rds for passage. Then, in the spirit of seeking consensus with Greens across the country, we attended 11 platform committee conference calls and read more than 500 suggestions posted on the GPUS Platform Committee website and created at the GPUS meeting in Detroit. Based on these ideas, as well as some of our own, our delegation edited our proposals by wiki and then voted again on these edits in July.

Proposal

Substitute the following language as the new text for the introduction of Chapter II of the GPUS platform.

The United States is nation of great riches and many dreams, but we are plagued by social injustices that keep us from becoming a great nation and a beacon to the rest of the world.

We have far more billionaires than any other nation, but tens of millions of us are unemployed, impoverished or hungry.

We have many of the world's best schools and universities, but we consign millions of children to schools that lack even the most basic resources.

We are blessed with great ethnic and cultural diversity, but after more than two hundred years, we still are marred by hatred, discrimination, prejudice and racism.

We possess a tremendous expanse of beautiful land, yet much of our population lives in ghettos and polluted areas, and lacks access to clean and healthy open space.

We spend hundreds of billions on military action around the world, but our infrastructure is collapsing at home.

And despite our opulence, we are the only industrialized nation in the world without a universal health care system.

We Greens are not satisfied. We believe that the heart of social justice is the fair and equitable distribution of opportunity and resources, so that all people have the chance to grow and flourish in their lifetimes.

We celebrate our nation's diversity and are committed to equal opportunity and rights for all, regardless of race, gender, religion, age, class, ethnic or national origin, sexual orientation, disability, wealth or health.

We know that our nation can only know true social justice when all members of society have a real say in the decisions that affect them. To Greens, peace, justice and democracy go hand in hand and are inseparable.

Resources

Time line: Compilation into new 2010 GPUS Platform upon completion of the voting on all proposed amendments.

Resources: Time and effort of volunteers to compile the platform

References

Visit the Platform Committee webpage for this proposal at: http://www.gp.org/committees/platform/comments/?p=941.

On the webpage, you can see various formats of the proposal created by the GPUS Platform Committee and the amendment proposal sponsors including the 2004 and 2010 texts side-by-side. You can also read and respond to comments from Greens around the country, including many who are not on the Green National Committee.
Here is the 2004 text which is being replaced:

Historically, the United States led the world in establishing a society with democratic values such as equal opportunity and protection from discrimination. Today, however, our country is among the most extreme examples of industrialized nations that have a widening gap between the wealthy and the rest of its citizenry – the working poor, the struggling middle class, and those who increasingly cannot make ends meet.

Our public schools, from kindergarten through college, are forced to cut back countless programs and services. Fees for community colleges are up sharply, and many public universities must turn away qualified students. More than 43 million of us have no medical insurance coverage. The crisis in publicly subsidized housing is intensifying, while publicly funded “corporate welfare” continues unabated. Our tax code favors the wealthy. Our criminal justice system assigns long prison terms to hundreds of thousands of perpetrators of victimless crimes, such as selling marijuana. Our civil liberties of privacy and free speech are impaired by the excesses of the USA PATRIOT Act and kindred new laws that use a national tragedy (the attacks on September 11, 2001) as an excuse to impose ubiquitous surveillance and control over citizens. In addition, discrimination based on gender, ethnicity, or race continues to sap the potential of our society and to violate personal dignity.

Feelings of isolation and helplessness are common in our country today. Children are increasingly shaped by an “electronic childhood” with little direct experience of nature and free play. Our families are scattered, our popular culture is crassly manipulated by the profit motives of increasingly concentrated media conglomerates, and our sense of community is a pale shadow of what earlier generations in our country knew.

The Green Party strongly believes that the quality of life is determined not only by material aspects that can be measured and counted but also by elements that cannot be quantified. We firmly support the separation of church and state, but we also acknowledge the spiritual dimension of life, and we honor the cultivation of various types of spiritual experience in our diverse society.

We believe that artistic expression and a thriving structure of art institutions are key to community well-being. We believe that a deep and broad embrace of nonviolence is the only effective way to stop cycles of violence, from the home to the streets to the international level. We advocate a diverse system of education that would introduce children early to the wonders of the Great School (Nature), and would cultivate the wisdom of eco-education, eco-economics, eco-politics, and eco-culture. We seek to protect our children from the corrosive effects of mass culture that trains them to regard themselves first and foremost as consumers.

We support the shift in modern medicine to include healing through complementary therapies and engagement with the Great Hospital (Nature). We seek, in short, to facilitate the healthy unfolding of the person within the unfolding story of the family, community, bioregion, state, nation, and Earth community.

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