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Proposal Details

Proposal ID	708
Proposal	Approval of International Committee Election of Mike Feinstein as 2013 FPVA alternate
Presenter	International Committee
Floor Manager	Darryl Moch
Phase	Closed
Discussion	05/20/2013 - 06/02/2013
Voting	06/03/2013 - 06/09/2013
Result	Adopted
Presens Quorum	31 0.6666
Consens Quorum	33 A Majority of Yes and No Votes

Background

GPUS National Committee (NC) confirmation of GPUS alternate to the Federation of Green Parties of the Americas (FPVA), elected by the International Committee (IC), March 8, 2013: Mike Feinstein (CA)

Fore candidate bios and details about the selection process, please read:

USGP-INT My FPVA delegate candidacy bio/resume/prospectus
Friday, February 22, 2013 11:49 AM

From: "Mike Feinstein"
To: "USGP International Committee"

Dear IC members
Thank you for considering my candidacy.

I've played an active and vigorous role in international Green Party politics around the world
since 1989 - organizing, networking, representing, reporting, policy-making, documenting and
more. I have likely attended as many or more international Green Party meetings as any U.S.
Green, and have an extensive network of personal Green Party contacts on every continent,
many going back more than 20 years.

I have travelled in over 40 countries in my life, so I am accustomed with relating to other
cultures. I also speak sufficient Spanish to do Green politics in that language.

Now I'd like to bring that experience and those skills to bear as a GPUS delegate to the
FPVA.

I believe the FPVA can be vastly improved with more transparency, planning, accountability
and an emphasis on policy-making and action-taking.

To help bring this about, I would work in a cooperative and accountable manner with the IC's
FPVA sub-committee and the IC as a whole -- and with other kindred souls in Green Parties
across the hemisphere who also want to see such positive change (many of whom with which
I have had long personal contacts going back many years.)

My experience with Greens in the Americas goes back to 1991, when I was part of the
founding of CANAMEX (the precursor organization to the FPVA). I have stayed active since,
including attending two FPVA meetings that coincided with the founding of Green Parties in
the Dominican Republic (December 2002) and Nicaragua (November 2003), both times as an
observer; once as a GPUS Delegate in Venezuela (November 2007) and once more as
observer in Canada (November 2008). I was also part of the organizing committee for both
Global Greens meetings held in the Americas (Rio de Janeiro, 1992 and São Paulo, 2008).

My observation is that the FPVA has had meaningful value in helping launch new Green
Parties throughout the Americas, but unfortunately, little more than that. FPVA meetings are
mostly ceremonial social gatherings, of mostly the same group of the usual suspects, with
little preparation beforehand or follow-through afterwards. As a result, the FPVA has grossly
failed to meet its potential to link hemispheric Green Parties in common action, and to
connect our action to green movements in the hemisphere.

How could that change? Among the steps I see as necessary:

- Take common positions and undertake coordinated actions upon hemispheric and inter-
American issues; and publicize them to a variety of peoples, movements and institutions

- Learn more about the politics of each other’s national Green Parties, and promote bi-lateral
and multi-lateral Green Party cooperation. Establish a hemispheric calendar of national and
state party meetings in each county and attend each other’s national meetings to get to know
each other better.

- Greatly expand the number of people involved on the FPVA level. The FPVA is going
nowhere if it only involves a handful of delegates and international secretaries. It must also
involve the manty Greens in each member party who are already working on issues of
interest.

- Have an up-to-date FPVA web site and use social media to promote the FPVA

- Promote multi-lingual communication within the FPVA, and about the FPVA to the outside
world

- Promote communication and cooperation among Green elected officials in different
countries within the hemisphere

- Have an FPVA organization that is open and transparent to its members, has clear goals,
and practices inclusive, long range planning

- Promote gender balance and other forms of diversity among FPVA leadership

To achieve these goals, here are some of my recommendations:

Political Relevance

As a hemispheric-wide political party, and as a political party that seeks to represent many
important, but traditionally underrepresented social movements, there is a great political
opportunity for the FPVA to take positions on a range of international and hemispheric issues.

For these positions to be meaningful and effective, they need to be based in real political
work, within and between national Green Parties. And they need to be well-publicized
afterwards.

There are obvious cross-border issues that Greens of the Americas should be coordinating

on, including trade, finance, drugs, immigration, military, democracy, human rights, labor
rights, wages and working conditions, indigenous peoples, biodiversity, sustainable
development, climate change and others. There are also multiple large-scale meetings,
events, conferences and demonstrations at which the FPVA should have a physical and
media presence.

It should not be difficult to establish FPVA working groups/sub-committees to work on various
issues that could include Greens with relevant expertise from different countries, and elected
Greens working on these issues where we have them. With modern communications
technologies, it should be easy to make this work. Then we can expand the base of Greens
involved in the FPVA, gain a common understanding of what work is going on within the
member Green Parties and kindred Green movements in each country, and plan our FPVA
positions and actions accordingly.

FPVA web site

I've already been successful helping to address the previously dysfunctional FPVA web site,
by helping to move it to www.fpva.org and become part of the Global Greens web page
project.

Since late summer 2012, the prior FPVA web site www.verdesamericagreens.org had been
hacked with only an error page showing, and before that, the site had contained inaccurate
and incomplete information for years. As part moving to www.fpva.org, I also did archival work
to provide the historical content for the new site, and now assist the current site webmaster in
his work.

Now that we've got the FPVA to join the African, Asia-Pacific and European Greens in the
Global Greens Drupal, open-source content management system, we have to use it. The
FPVA web site has long been an underdeveloped FPVA asset. People will visit the FPVA web
site if it is dynamic and features interesting, current content.

The FPVA web site should feature FPVA news and could also feature news of FPVA member
parties (elections, campaigns, policies, meetings, statements, events). I would work to
identify a multi-lingual team within the FPVA tasked with identifying and posting relevant
content to the FPVA site (and also by extension, to the Global Greens site, where relevant).

FPVA Social Media

The FPVA currently has a Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/groups/40719313951/.
Many FPVA delegates are subscribers. But the page is underutilized by the FPVA itself. Right
now there are two administrators – Fabiola Carnevale of Brazil and myself.

My suggestion is that another 5-7 people are added as administrators. (That is the practice
with the Global Greens Facebook page.) Within that group of administrators, someone should
be designated to post official FPVA announcements and press releases. It would be helpful if
there were at least one administrator from each of the four major FPVA languages. We should
also include at least one young Green, because they are more active on Facebook.

FPVA Email List

At the 2005 FPVA meeting in Buenos Aires, direction was given to Julia Willebrand to
establish a new FPVA email list. Until 2007, this list was hosted on yahoo.com. But when the
Global Greens website was upgraded, it included the capability to host new emails lists with
archives for their content. As an email list administrator for the Global Greens, I worked with
Julia to establish a new FPVA list in 2007 at http://lists.globalgreens.org/listinfo/fpva-foro and
now with the establishment of www.fpva.org, the list has been moved to
http://lists.fpva.org/listinfo/fpva-foro

Part of the rationale behind establishing the fpva-foro was to expand FPVA participation to
more than just the FPVA delegates, to include others from FPVA member parties working on
issues of the Americas. Currently there are over 60 Greens from FPVA countries subscribed
to the fpva-foro. If each FPVA member party identified a few more people in their party to
participate, we could have a list of 100 of more Greens from around the Americas, working
together

Unfortunately to this date, the fpva-foro has generally been underutilized, although there have
been some meaningful exchanges of news and positions. Despite the fact that all FPVA
delegates are subscribed to the fpva-foro, no official content of the FPVA there is directly
posted there.

In addition, because these postings are not made to an email list with an archive, there are no
commonly shared records for official FPVA correspondence. This is a problem for a party that
emphasizes accountability and transparency.

All of this is a direct result of the actions of the FPVA Secretary from México, who prefers to
keep personal control by sending off-list emails with no archive to her own list of individuals,
which often is not accurate in terms of who is a delegate. This must change and I believe a
clear FPVA policy should be established that directs FPVA business to be conducted on the
FPVA email list.

Annual FPVA Meetings

The dates for FPVA meetings are usually not set far in advance, nor are the agenda items
developed from work done in between FPVA meetings. This makes airline tickets expensive,
attendance difficult and political content less meaningful. To justify the enormous per capita
carbon emissions for delegates to attend these meetings, I would work to enact the following
practices:

- A process to develop draft agendas start earlier, involve more people and include proposals
from FPVA working groups

- Ensure that exact meeting dates are set much further in advance. Have open discussion
about costs and affordability in choosing locations and in ensuring inexpensive lodging.

- Have the official FPVA decision-making business meeting last two days, not one, to ensure
there is sufficient time to accomplish meaningful business.

- Request that member parties provide a written status report for their parties in advance of

the FPVA meetings, rather than only giving an oral report on-site.

- Explore the use of skype to include delegates and others that cannot attend in person.

- Include observers from national parties for the entirety of the business meetings, other
where certain legal and personnel matters are discussed.

- Ensure there is an official photographer and videographer to record each meeting so that
positive images and content can be used to promote the FPVA. Explore livestreaming some
portions of the FPVA meetings

- Locate meetings to coincide with major hemispheric political events at which the FPVA
wants to have an impact, both at events like UN Climate Change conferences or meetings of
the G20, as well as events convened by kindred green movement groups and organizations.

FPVA Statutes

The current FPVA statues are out of date. In some cases they are not being followed. Good
statutes which set more clarity will help us grow. Acting without clear rules can unnecessarily
politicize some decisions and lead to a lack of trust.

At the 2008 FPVA meeting (Quebec), the issue of a comprehensive revision of the statutes
was deferred to working group established at that meeting. Five years later, little of substance
has been done. I would work to revitalize that process and bring the statutes up-to-date with
the needs of the FPVA.

FPVA Co-presidents

At this year's FPVA annual meeting, all three co-president positions are up for election. Given
the current FPVA structure, several of the changes suggested above - including a move
towards accountability, transparency and advance planning - will depend upon the co-
presidents.

Currently, despite their other good acts, none of the three co-presidents is focused on the
basic administrative needs of the organization, leaving the meetings (like recently in Antigua)
to disorganized chance. At least one of the three must care about this and I would work to
identify at least one viable candidate for co-president that would take these concerns
seriously.

Global Greens

We also need to elect at least one co-president that speaks sufficient English, because our
three FPVA co-presidents are also our FPVA representatives to the Global Green
Coordination (GGC), and the GGC has found that the language barrier over the last year and
a half has greatly limited participation by FPVA members.

In addition, to ensure that the GGC more regularly involves input from representatives of
national Green Parties, I would work to strengthen the role of the Global Greens Network
(GGN). That would include the simple posting of GGC agendas to the GGN (and FPVA)

email lists, to promote more awareness of what the GGC is doing and ensure that there are
more opportunities for input. For example, in the planning for the next Global Greens
Congress, why not involve GGN reps earlier in the process? And when we get closer to the
Congress, why not post the proposed policy resolutions to the GGN list far in advance of the
Congress, so they can be debated openly and transparently, instead of the rushed and non-
inclusive process practiced at the Dakar GG Congress? These are just some of the
possibilities for the GGN. Others are developing relationships between the national parties
and suggesting common actions for the Global Greens.

Within the FPVA, I would work to ensure that all FPVA member parties appoint their GGN
representatives and that all three FPVA co-presidents would be on the list. That would be a
good start. (Currently only U.S, Canada, Brazil, Perú have GGN reps and none of the FPVA
co-presidents are on the list).

FPVA Finances

Finally as is obvious to us all, there needs to be a transparent accounting of FPVA finances,
including who has contributed what funds, where they are stored, what have they been spent
on and upon whose authority. I would work to help bring this about.

Final Thoughts

I believe there are enough Greens in leadership positions in other FPVA member parties, that
we can find kindred souls to work with on these improvements. I already have long-standing
personal relationships with many of these such individuals and would be happy to put those
relationship to work in service of the GPUS and the FPVA.

Because these improvements are so sensible, I believe it will come down to the effort we are
willing to put in to make them happen. I am willing to put in that effort, and do so in an
accountable and cooperative manner within the IC.

Mike
Dear IC members
In my previous email, I posted my general thoughts and qualifications for FPVA delegate.

In this email, I would like to provide further background on my overall international Green
Party experience, by listing the int'l Green Party meetings I've attended. (Likely this list is
incomplete, I don't even remember all of the int'l meetings I've attended. But this gives a good
sense).

I've also visited Green parliamentary groups in their offices in Austria, Sweden and the

European Parliament and the national and state party offices in numerous countries. In
addition, I've written a 674-page book on European Greens called Sixteen Weeks with
European Greens: Interviews, Impressions, Platforms and Personalities, that details some of
these experiences.

Miljöpartiet de Gröna 1990
Swedish Green Party
National Congress
Jonköping, Sweden.
June 1990
(was a plenary speaker)

EGC Brussells 1990
European Greens Coordination
Council Meeting
Brussells, Belgium
June 16th-17th, 1990
(represented International Working Group of the U.S. Greens)

Green Group in the European Parliament Strasbourg 1990
Green Parliament of Europe
Strasbourg, France
July 2nd-4th,1990

EGC Bonn 1990
European Greens Coordination
Council Meeting
Bonn, West Germany
November 1990
(represented International Working Group of the U.S. Greens)

EGC Geneva 1991
European Greens Coordination
Council Meeting
Geneva, Switzerland
June 1991

AGALEV 10 Years in Parliament Reunion
Flemmish Green Party Agalev
National Festival
Ghent, Belgium.
June 22nd, 1991
(was a plenary speaker)

European Greens Coordination
Council Meeting
Founding meeting of the European Federation of Green Parties
Majvik, Finland

June 18th-20th, 1993
(represented International Working Group of the U.S. Greens and signed founding document
on behalf of U.S. Greens)

Global Greens Majvik 1993
Global Greens Steering Committee
Majvik, Finland
June 19th, 1993

Green Group in the European Parliament
Toulouse, France
September 1993

EFGP Vienna 1994
European Federation of Green Parties
Third Council Meeting
Vienna, Austria
January 1994

Global Greens Vienna 1994
Global Greens Steering Committee
Vienna, Austria
January 1994

Green Officeholders 1996
First European Meeting of Green Local Councillors
Vienna, Austria
June 1996

EFGP Vienna 1996
European Federation of Green Parties
Second Congress
Vienna, Austria
June 21st-23rd, 1996
(was a plenary speaker)

EFGP Berlin 1997
European Federation of Green Parties
Fifth Council Meeting
Berlin, Germany
May 2nd-4th, 1997

Green Officeholders, 1998
Conference of Green Legislators
Encuentro Intercontinental de los Electores Verdes
Mexico City, Mexico
November 26th-28th, 1998

EFGP Paris 1999

European Federation of Green Parties
Fourth Congress
Paris, France
February 26th-28th,1999

Milenio Verde/Green Millenium 1999
International Green Gathering
Federation of the Green Parties of the Americas Annual Meeting
Oaxaca, México
September, 1999

Global Greens Canberra 2001
Congress/Founding of Global Greens
Canberra, Australia
April 12th-14th, 2001
(US Green delegate to Congress)

EFGP Berlin 2002
European Federation of Green Parties
Third Congress
Berlin, Germany
May 24th-25th, 2002

Global Greens Berlin 2002
Global Greens Coordination
Berlin, Germany
May 26th, 2002

Global Greens Johannesburg 2002
Global Greens Coordination
Johannesburg, South Africa
September, 2002
(held preceding United Nations World Summit on Sustainable Development)

FPVA Dominican Republic 2002
Federation of the Green Parties of the Americas
Annual Meeting
Juan Dolio & Santa Domingo, Dominican Republic
December 6th-8th, 2002

EFGP Luxembourg 2003
European Federation of Green Parties
14th Council Meeting
Luxembourg, Luxembourg
November 6th - 8th, 2003

FPVA Managua 2003
Federation of the Green Parties of the Americas
Annual Meeting

Managua, Nicaragua
November 21st-22nd, 2003

PVEN Managua 2003
Partido Verde Ecologista de Nicaragua
Founding Meeting
Managua, Nicaragua
November 23rd, 2003

Green Officeholders 2003
Second European Meeting of Green Local Councillors
Vienna, Austria
December 5th-7th, 2003

EFGP Rome 2004
European Federation of Green Parties
Fourth Congress
Founding of European Green Party
Rome, Italy
February 20th-22nd, 2004

1. EGP Dublin 2004

European Green Party

First Council Meeting

Dublin, Ireland

November 26-28, 2004

APGN Kyoto 2005
Asia-Pacific Green Network
Founding Meeting
Kyoto, Japan
February 2005
(was a plenary speaker and also invited to be the only non-AGPN member on a three-
member committee to design and conduct the APGN's first leadership elections.

Green Party of Canada Ottawa 2006
Green Party of Canada Bi-Annual Convention/Leadership Convention
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
August 2006
(was a plenary speaker on national TV)

Green Party of British Colombia 2007

Green Party of British Columbia Annual Meeting
Vancouver Island, British Colombia, Canada
October 2007
(was a plenary speaker)

FPVA Venezuela 2007
Federation of the Green Parties of the Americas
Annual Meeting
Caracas & Valencia, Venezuela
November 6-9, 2007
(GPUS delegate to FPVA)

Global Greens Bali 2007
Global Greens Networking of MPs, other Int'l Greens
Bali, Indonesia
December 2007
(held in conjunction with U.N. Conference on Climate Change)

Global Greens Sao Paolo 2008
Global Greens Congress
Sao Paolo, Brazil
May 2008
(US Green delegate to Congress; was on Global Greens organizing committee for Congress)

FPVA Quebec 2008
Federation of the Green Parties of the Americas
Annual Meeting
Quebec City, Canada
November 6-7, 2008

Green Party of Canada Pictou 2009
Green Party of Canada Convention
Pictou, Nova Scotia, Canada
February 27-March 1, 2009

Green Party of Canada Toronto 2010
Green Party of Canada Convention
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
August 2010

Global Greens Cancun 2010
Global Greens Networking of MPs, other Int'l Greens
Cancun, México
December 2010
(held in conjunction with U.N. Conference on Climate Change)

African Greens Dakar 2012
African Greens Federation Congress
Dakar, Senegal

March 29, 2012

Global Greens Dakar 2012
Global Greens Congress
Dakar, Senegal
March 29-April 1, 2012

Green Party of Canada Sidney 2012
Green Party of Canada Convention
Sidney, British Colombia, Canada
August 17-19, 2012

From: "Mike Feinstein"

To: "USGP International Committee"

Many of you know me from my time on the GPUS Int'l Committee. However before we had a
GPUS, had a Greens Committees of Correspondence (GCoC) in the 1980s and in the early
1990s, the GCoC evolved into the Greens/Green Party USA. That organization had an
International Working Group (IWG) of which I was a founding member.

Below are a few dates relevant to my early IWG experience, and specifically how it relates to
the FPVA around NAFTA.

October 1988: Attended "The Individual and the Collective: Politics as If the Whole Earth
Mattered" conference at the Findhorn Community in northern Scotland, where I heard then
U.K. Green spokesperson Jonathan Porritt and several other European Greens speak. At the
same time that I was in Scotland, I was reading the book about the early years of the German
Greens "Green Politics: the Global Promise" by Charlene Spretnak and Fritjof Capra. The
combination of these experiences led me to seek out Southern California Green contacts
(listed in Charlene's book) upon my return to the U.S. As a result of that international Green
experience, I became involved and active in the Green Party to this day.

June 1989: Attended the founding meeting of the International Working Group (IWG) of the
Green Committees of Correspondence, held at the 1989 national Greens Gathering in
Eugene, Oregon. Was an active IWG member for many years, often attended its face-to-face
meetings in San Francisco (usually held at the Earth Island Institute offices), and/or otherwise
participated by teleconference.

September 1991: Attended the first ever CANAMEX meeting (the precursor organization to
the FPVA).

CANAMEX stands for Canada, México and America (i.e. the U.S. and yes I know that
everyone from the Western Hermisphere can be considered an 'American', but this was the
acronym that was set up) and involved the Green Party of Canada, the Partido Verde

Ecologista de México (PVEM) and the Greens/Green Party USA (G/GPUSA).

My specific contribution to CANAMEX was working on opposition to impending approval of
the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the promotion of Green alternatives
to it.

During this period I had been actively participating in the Southern California Coalition against
NAFTA and was part of the active green/labor alliances that grew from it. I also had spent
time in Europe during 1990 and 1991 learning about Green alternative approaches to the
European Common Market, which was being developed at that time. (I summarized these
approaches in my 1992 book 674-page book "Sixteen Weeks with European Greens:
Interviews, Impressions, Platforms, and Personalities").

During September 1991 we did media events with the PVEM when they were in California,
which I helped organize in Southern California. I also wrote this document on Green
approaches to NAFTA, which was published in Synthesis/Regeneration, the G/GPUSA
journal.

http://www.greens.org/s-r/06/06-22.html

The Green Parties of California, Mexico, & Canada
Oppose the Proposed US-Mexican-Canadian
Free Trade Agreement (October, 1991)

by Mike Feinstein, Green Party of California, & others

Green Parties around the world stand for international trade policies that
respect the ecology of the planet, the social needs of all people, and the
political self-determination of communities, regions, and nations.

Green Parties are in fundamental opposition to economic policies
promoting unlimited material growth and consumption. Current world
trade practices reinforce these policies and have as their consequences
the ecological destruction of the planet and the concentration of wealth
and power in the hands of the few, conditions both which pit North
against South, rich against poor, and assure that injustice and inequity
will be the rule.

For these reasons, Green Parties from Canada, Mexico, and California
will actively oppose the proposed US-Mexican-Canadian North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Like existing international
economic agreements such as the General Agreements on Tariffs and
Trade (GATT), the European Economic Community (EEC), and the US-
Canadian Trade Agreement, the proposed NAFTA is not a recipe for
clean and fair trade, but rather a license for capital and specifically
transnational corporations to defy existing environmental, health, and

labor standards and laws. Particularly alarming about these trade
agreements is that they hold that the standards and laws that help
create quality of life for people are impediments to the international
competitiveness of transnational corporations; and that for this reason
these standards and laws should be lowered or eliminated.

Green Parties are in fundamental opposition to economic
policies promoting unlimited material growth and
consumption...Green trade would not place nations in
dependent situations where they...must undermine their
ecology, impoverish their citizens, and forfeit their political
sovereignty to avoid retaliatory economic actions by more
powerful nations.

International trade from a Green perspective would embody an entirely
different worldview. "Green trade" would promote ecologically
sustainable, self-reliant economies for all peoples and nations. Green
trade would be conditional upon commonly agreed upon high minimum
environmental and human rights standards. Green trade would be
conditioned upon the empowerment of peoples through democratic
conditions such as land reform, community and cooperatively-based
economics, and true political democracy. Green trade would also not
place nations in dependent situations where they are export-driven to
the extent that they must undermine their ecology, impoverish their
citizens, and forfeit their political sovereignty to avoid retaliatory
economic actions by more powerful trading nations.

A Green approach to international trade would emphasize sustainable
economies based upon ecology, social justice, and a respect for political
and economic self-determination. This last point is critical because
international trade is not between communities, regions, or nations, but
rather between individuals and transnational corporations acting in their
own self-interests.

World capital is highly mobile, and investment is governed by absolute
profitability rather than by either national affiliation, a concern to develop
mutually advantageous trading arrangements between nations or a
concern for democratically enacted environmental, health, and labor
standards and laws. Highly mobile world capital indeed seeks to avoid
such standards and laws, and has also generated serious trade
imbalances between nations that have led to even further losses of
economic and political self-determination. Therefore, without a
recognition of domestic self-determination in any trade agreement,
communities, regions, and nations will have no voice in international

trade. Therefore, if the Greens were to agree to a Trade Agreement
between the US, Canada, and Mexico, that agreement would have to
include:

• a substantial reduction of the Mexican foreign debt with the goal
of reducing it at least enough to help bring about ecologically-
sustainable and socially-just development in Mexico. Debt
reduction would reverse the current trend, where by virtue of
"austerity" measures imposed by the International Monetary Fund
(IMF), the World Bank, and the US Treasury, Mexico has been
required to devalue the quality of life of most of its citizens by
reducing the value of its currency, reducing its government
expenditures and public sector, removing price controls, and
deregulating, privatizing, and selling-off its economy.

• a gradual increase in the Mexican minimum wage, with the goal
of a common US-Canadian-Mexican minimum. This rate of
increase should be rapid enough to provide Mexican workers with
the ability to meet their basic needs and their desired quality of
life within an ecologically-sustainable context.

• an encouragement of diversified and resilient local, regional, and
national economies in the U.S, Canada, and Mexico through the
development of locally-based credit facilities and the development
of import-replacement industries. This has the advantages of
providing local employment, recirculating capital locally and
regionally, reducing transportation costs, and reducing the chain
of distribution that produces unneeded ecological costs and that
allows them to be unaccountably externalized;

• a social charter guaranteeing Mexican, Canadian, and US
workers common health and safety standards, collective-
bargaining rights, and working conditions. The standards within
this social charter should be harmonized at at least the highest
existing levels among Mexican, Canadian, and US laws;

• a social tariff for the continental market that protects against
imports from other nations that do not respect the continental
minimum-wage; such a tariff would be equal to the difference in
wages between the different trading blocks or nations;

Such a tariff should not be used to create a NAFTA trading bloc
against other countries, especially those of the Third World.
Therefore, such a tariff must be implemented in concert with debt
relief and/or financial aid to other countries in similiar or worse
situations than Mexico's so that these countries may also become
more self-reliant and trade by choice on a more level trading
playing field;

• a recognition of native peoples' land and treaty rights, a respect
for their right to determine the use of natural resources on their
land;

• an environmental charter—environmental standards and laws
should harmonized at at least the highest existing levels among
Mexican, Canadian, and US law; Debt relief and foreign aid
should accompany this charter to enable Mexico to meet high
environmental standards and thus not be penalized by the
agreement;

• a specific rejection of "Export Processing" and maquiladora zones
that are by design exempt from environmental protection laws set
forth in the continental environmental charter;

• an environmental tariff that protects against imports from nations
outside the FTA countries that do not apply at least the minimum
environmental standards agreed to within the NAFTA; such a tariff
would incorporate the environmental costs of non-compliance and
would be applied against corporations and their products that are
in non-compliance;

• significantly strengthen the border produce inspection
procedures. Currently the US Food and Drug Administration only
inspects 2% of transborder items;

• a True Cost pricing system or set of "Green taxes" that begin to
reflect the environmental and health costs of the full cycle of
resource extraction, use, and disposal involved in production and
consumption;

• a set of Green "taxes" that begin to reflect the scarcity of non-
renewable resources and raise the price so as to encourage their
more intelligent and less wasteful use;

• the establishment in each country of a job retraining "superfund"
to train or retrain workers for the transition to an ecologically-
sustainable, peace-oriented, and bioregionally-based economy.
Such funds could be drawn from the current military budgets of
each country;

• the establishment in each country of an environmental restoration
fund. Such funds will not be considered as "trade-distorting
subsidies" as they are currently in the US-Canadian Trade
Agreement;

• a removal of subsidies from fossil fuel and nuclear industries and
a commitment of some or all of these funds to reorient the

economies of Canada, Mexico, and the US to solar and other
renewable fuels;

• a reservation of the right of any community, region, or nation to
raise environmental, health, and safety standards and laws higher
than the minimum agreed to between the three nations; and have
this new standard or law not be considered illegal because it is
considered to impede trade (i.e. a non-tariff trade barrier);

• establish an international decision-making body that can reverse
the present trend and declare illegal the retaliatory economic
measures aimed at countries that try to enforce their domestic
environmental, health, and safety standards;

• a ban on the export of toxic and nuclear waste from the US,
Canada, or Mexico.

(The above is excerpted from a backround paper prepared by Mike
Feinstein, member of the International Working Group of the Green
Party of California and of the International Working Group of the
Greens/Green Party USA. It was revised in light of discussion by
members of the Green Parties of Mexico, California, British Columbia,
and Alberta at the North American Green Summit, September 27th-29th,
1991 at Earth Island Institute in San Francisco.)

Proposal

The NC confirms GPUS delegate Mike Feinstein (CA) as 2013 FPVA alternate, elected by the IC, March 8, 2013.

Resources

Timeline: Immediate implementation

References

Election procedure at:
http://www.gp.org/committees/intl/delegate_biographies.html

CONTACT: Farheen Hakeem, IC Co-chair, 612-964-9143, farheen@gp.org

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