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For Immediate Release
September, 06 2017, 11:45am EDT
Contact:
Scott McLarty, Media Director, 202-904-7614, scott@gp.org
Green Party To "Draft Bernie" Organizers Hoping To Launch A New Party: Go Green
"Why reinvent the wheel? Come home to the Green Party" say Greens as the People's Convergence conference begins in Washington, D.C.
WASHINGTON
Green Party leaders are challenging organizers and voters convening in Washington, D.C., to discuss founding a new progressive party centered around Bernie Sanders to recognize that such a party already exists and to "Go Green."
The "People's Convergence" is meeting from September 8 through 10 at American University and will present a "Draft Bernie" petition to Sen. Bernie Sanders that asks him to lead a new People's Party.
"The Draft Bernie movement is right when they say that the two ruling parties have failed the American people and that 'We the People' need an alternative party. The new party must be committed to social and economic justice, peace, and the health of our planet. It must be a working people's party that rejects corporate money and influence. Greens have already established that party," said Darryl! L.C. Moch, co-chair of the Green Party of the United States.
"We invite the People's Convergence to come home to the Green Party," said Mr. Moch.
Greens plan to attend the People's Convergence and let participants know that the Green Party has FEC recognition, ballot status in most states, a grassroots base of voters and elected officials, and a strong platform.
"48,000 signatures on the Draft Bernie petition is a great display of support. Greens gathered far more and got them notarized for ballot access in 2016. Illinois Greens collected 53,000 signatures on paper petitions within 90 days. 110,000 people signed Jill Stein's online petition for Open Debates," said Michael Dennis, co-chair of the Green Party. Dr. Stein was the Green nominee in 2016.
"Bernie has said he's unwilling to be a 'spoiler'. Deadlines are approaching for ballot status in 2018, which is essential for preparing a party for participation in the 2020 national election. Saddled with these challenges -- and with a prospective candidate who'd probably withdraw rather than interfere with the next Democratic nominee's ability to win the White House -- it might be too late for a new People's Party to compete effectively in 2020," said Mr. Dennis.
Greens urged the People's Convergence to consider the following three points:
(1) Bernie Sanders isn't interested. He has said so repeatedly.
Mr. Sanders has ignored attempts by the Green Party to communicate with him over the years, including inquiries about his interest in running for president as a Green. His continuing rebuff of both the Green Party and the Draft Bernie movement indicate that he has no interest in overturning the two-party status quo.
If Mr. Sanders changes his mind in 2018 or 2019, it'll be too late for the Draft Bernie timeline's plan for a campaign with 50-state ballot access.
(2) Why reinvent the wheel? The Green Party already exists, has a strong progressive platform and FEC recognition, has experience and expertise in party organizing, and is established in most states. Greens have won hundreds of local elected races and hold "campaign schools" to help Green candidates win elections.
"It takes years to win ballot access across the country and it's equally difficult to maintain ballot status in many states. Greens have already accomplished the hard groundwork. It's naive to believe that a new party will avoid the internal and external obstacles, including the inevitable controversies and temporary setbacks that are part of organizing, that the Green Party has already weathered," said Jody Grage, secretary of the Green Party and co-chair of the party's Ballot Access Committee.
(3) New parties centered around a single national figure are short-lived, as the history of third parties from Theodore Roosevelt's Bull Moose Party to H. Ross Perot's Reform Party has shown.
"You don't sustain a national party on charismatic leaders who run for the White House," said Adrian Boutureira, who serves as national political organizer for the Green Party. "You build a party's foundation at the grassroots level, with state and local parties that run candidates for state and local office and with local political activism. Presidential campaigns are a necessary part of that effort, but any party that makes involvement in the presidential election spectacle the measure of its success is doomed to fail."
The Green Party's presidential candidates help state Green Parties achieve and maintain ballot access, which is necessary for down-ticket candidates to compete with Democrats and Republicans. Some states require national candidates on the ballot for a party to be recognized. Green presidential candidates also promote Green ideas and solutions in front of a national audience.
Greens have won races for local office even when Green presidential contenders have drawn very small percentages on Election Day, assuring permanence for the party as it grows nationally. At least 136 Greens currently hold elected office in 18 states. In 2016, Jill Stein and running mate Ajamu Baraka were on the ballot in 45 states, with three more states giving them write-in status.
"A new party's presidential candidate will face all the same barriers that our Green nominees have dealt with, beginning with ballot access laws designed by Democratic and Republican state legislators to hinder alternative parties. The Commission on Presidential Debates, which is controlled by the two major parties, will bar Bernie Sanders from the post-convention debates," said Green Party co-chair Gloria Mattera.
"If he runs a well-organized campaign, Bernie will face the Democrats' penchant for smearing anyone who doesn't back their frontrunner. Jill Stein has been the target of evidence-free McCarthyite allegations by some Dems who want to link her campaign with Vladimir Putin. Bernie himself came under fire merely for competing with Hillary Clinton for the 2016 Democratic nomination -- which turned out to be rigged against him by the DNC," said Ms. Mattera.
"Here in Colorado, many former Sanders supporters are now enthusiastically involved in our state Green Party, holding leadership roles and building locals. They've moved beyond the need to draft Bernie," said Andrea Merida Cuellar, co-chair of the Green Party of Colorado and co-chair of the national party.
Greens are also wondering how a new Sanders-based party would handle their leader's retreats from progressivism, especially on foreign policy and military spending. Mr. Sanders has faced criticism recently for incorporating copays into his Single-Payer national health care legislation.
See also:
"Thoughts on why a stand-alone DraftBernie strategy doesn't make sense even if one really did want to DraftBernie"
Michael Dennis, Green Party steering committee member
The People's Convergence Conference
Green Party: Hurricane Harvey is the latest alarm bell on climate change
Press release: Green Party of the United States, August 31, 2017
Videos from the Green Party's 2017 Annual National Meeting in Newark, N.J., July 13-16:
Press conferences, plenary speeches, and more
The Green Party of the United States is a grassroots national party. We're the party for "We The People," the health of our planet, and future generations instead of the One Percent.
(202) 319-7191LATEST NEWS
Progressives Condemn Biden-GOP Debt Ceiling Deal as 'Cruel and Shortsighted'
"For no real reason at all, hungry people are set to lose food while tax cheats get a free pass."
May 28, 2023
Progressive economists and advocates warned that the tentative debt ceiling agreement reached Saturday by the White House and Republican leaders would needlessly gash nutrition aid, rental assistance, education programs, and more—all while making it easier for the wealthy to avoid taxes.
The deal, which now must win the support of both chambers of Congress, reportedly includes two years of caps on non-military federal spending, sparing a Pentagon budget replete with staggering waste and abuse.
The Associated Pressreported that the deal "would hold spending flat for 2024 and increase it by 1% for 2025," not keeping pace with inflation.
The agreement would also impose new work requirements on some recipients of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) while scaling back recently approved IRS funding, a gift to rich tax cheats.
In exchange for the spending cuts and work requirements, Republican leaders have agreed to raise the debt ceiling for two years—a tradeoff that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) is pitching as a victory to his caucus, which includes far-right members who have demanded more aggressive austerity.
President Joe Biden, for his part, called the deal "a compromise, which means not everyone gets what they want."
"After inflation eats its share, flat funding will result in fewer households accessing rental assistance, fewer kids in Head Start, and fewer services for seniors."
Lindsay Owens, executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative, said in a statement Saturday night that "this is a punishing deal made worse only by the fact that there was no reason for President Biden to negotiate with Speaker McCarthy over whether or not the United States government should pay its bills," alluding to the president's executive authority.
"After inflation eats its share, flat funding will result in fewer households accessing rental assistance, fewer kids in Head Start, and fewer services for seniors," said Owens. "The deal represents the worst of conservative budget ideology; it cuts investments in workers and families, adds onerous and wasteful new hurdles for families in need of support, and protects the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations from paying their fair share in taxes."
The agreement comes days before the U.S. is, according to the Treasury Department, set to run out of money to pay its obligations, imperiling Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid payments and potentially hurling the entire global economy into chaos.
House Republicans have leveraged those alarming possibilities to secure painful federal spending cuts and aid program changes that could leave more people hungry, sick, and unable to afford housing, critics said.
"For no real reason at all, hungry people are set to lose food while tax cheats get a free pass," wrote Angela Hanks, chief of programs at Demos.
While legislative text has not yet been released, the deal would reportedly impose work requirements on adult SNAP recipients without dependents up to the age of 54, increasing the current age limit of 49. Policy analysts and anti-hunger activists have long decried SNAP time limits and work requirements as cruel and ineffective.
"The SNAP changes are nominally extending work requirements to ages 50 to 54. In reality, especially as the new rule is implemented, this is just an indiscriminate cull of a bunch of 50- to 54-year-olds from SNAP who won't realize there are new forms they need to fill out," said Matt Bruenig, founder of the People's Policy Project.
Diane Yentel, president and CEO of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, wrote on Twitter that the agreement is "cruel and shortsighted," pointing to the work requirements and real-term cuts to rental assistance "during an already worsening homelessness crisis."
"House Rs held our nation's lowest-income people hostage in exchange for lifting the debt ceiling," Yentel continued. "The debt ceiling 'deal' could lead to tens of thousands of families losing rental assistance... Expanding ineffective work requirements and putting time limits on food assistance adds salt to the wound, further harming some of the lowest income and most marginalized people in our country."
The White House and Republican leaders also reportedly agreed to some permitting reforms that climate groups have slammed as a boon for the fossil fuel industry. According toThe New York Times, the agreement "includes measures meant to speed environmental reviews of certain energy projects," though the scope of the changes is not yet clear.
And while the deal doesn't appear to include a repeal of Biden's student debt cancellation plan—which is currently before the U.S. Supreme Court—it does contain a provision that would cement the end of the student loan repayment pause, drawing fury from debt relief campaigners.
\u201cResuming student debt payments will crush working families and is simply bad policy\u2014but agreeing to codify the pause\u2019s end into law before the Supreme Court decides on broad-scale relief is criminal.\u201d— The Debt Collective \ud83d\udfe5 (@The Debt Collective \ud83d\udfe5) 1685241461
The deal must now get through Congress, a difficult task given likely opposition from progressive lawmakers who oppose attacks on aid programs and Republicans who want steeper cuts.
As the Times reported, "Lawmakers in the House Freedom Caucus were privately pillorying the deal on Saturday night, and the Congressional Progressive Caucus had already begun to fume about it even before negotiators finalized the agreement."
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White House Says GOP Is Trying to 'Take Food Out of the Mouths of Hungry Americans'
"The GOP claims doing so is necessary in the interest of $11 billion in deficit reduction. But at the same time, they have doubled down on tax cuts skewed to the rich and special interests."
May 27, 2023
The Biden White House late Friday accused Republicans of attempting to "take food out of the mouths of hungry Americans" by imposing new work requirements on recipients of federal nutrition assistance, a public rebuke of the GOP that came as negotiators worked to finalize a debt ceiling agreement.
Additional work requirements appear to be among the final sticking points in the time-sensitive talks, with the GOP insisting on their inclusion in any agreement to raise the debt limit.
In a statement Friday night, White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said the GOP's proposed work requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) are "designed to tie the most vulnerable up in bureaucratic paperwork" and "have shown no benefit for bringing more people into the workforce."
"The GOP claims doing so is necessary in the interest of $11 billion in deficit reduction," said Bates. "But at the same time, they have doubled down on tax cuts skewed to the rich and special interests that would add $3.5 trillion to our debt."
House Republicans have demanded new work requirements for recipients of SNAP, Medicaid, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF)—many of whom already work.
Asked Friday whether the GOP would be willing to drop its push for work requirements, Rep. Garret Graves (R-La.)—the party's lead negotiator—said, "Hell no."
"Hell no," he repeated. "Not a chance."
The White House has spoken out against new work requirements for SNAP and Medicaid, but it's unclear whether it opposes fresh work mandates for TANF, which replaced the more generous Aid to Families With Dependent Children program under the Clinton welfare reform law that Biden supported as a senator.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, welcomed the White House's statement against SNAP work requirements, which analysts say could strip food aid from millions of people amid a worsening hunger crisis.
"The president is calling out MAGA GOP hypocrisy of refusing to raise the debt ceiling so the economy doesn't crash simply to take food from hungry people," Jayapal tweeted Saturday. "When you count admin[istrative] costs of bureaucratic red tape, this would produce ZERO savings. Isn't and has never been about saving money."
The White House issued its statement amid growing progressive concerns over the concessions the Biden administration has reportedly granted to GOP hostage-takers.
On Friday, watchdogs, Democratic lawmakers, and policy analysts responded with outrage to reports that the Biden White House is leaning toward accepting Republicans' demand for IRS funding cuts—a giveaway to rich tax cheats.
Progressives have also voiced alarm over reports that the emerging debt ceiling deal includes a two-year cap on non-military federal spending, which would result in cuts to key domestic programs.
"Any deal is a disaster since most government departments and agencies are currently severely underfunded," warned Jeff Hauser, executive director of the Revolving Door Project.
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'Enormous Policy Failure': States Throw Hundreds of Thousands—Including Many Children—Off Medicaid
"We knew this was coming," wrote one policy expert. "But we still treat these burdens like they're unavoidable natural disasters."
May 27, 2023
With a green light from the federal government, states across the U.S. have thrown hundreds of thousands of low-income people off Medicaid in recent weeks—and many have lost coverage because they failed to navigate bureaucratic mazes, not because they were no longer eligible.
More than a dozen states, including Florida and other Republican-led states that have refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, have begun removing people from Medicaid as part of the "unwinding" of a pandemic-era federal policy that temporarily barred governments from kicking people off the program.
In a bipartisan deal late last year, Congress agreed to cut off the pandemic protections, giving states 12 months to redetermine who is eligible for the healthcare program that covers tens of millions of Americans.
The process differs in each state, but Medicaid enrollees are typically required to complete paperwork verifying their income, address, disability status, and other factors used to determine eligibility for the program.
While some states have undertaken public outreach campaigns to ensure Medicaid recipients understand what they need to do to continue receiving benefits, most enrollees across the country "were not aware that states are now permitted to resume disenrolling people from the Medicaid program," according to new survey data from the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF).
As a result, The New York Timesreported Friday, "many people lost coverage for procedural reasons, such as when Medicaid recipients did not return paperwork to verify their eligibility or could not be located."
"The large number of terminations on procedural grounds suggests that many people may be losing their coverage even though they are still qualified for it," the newspaper added. "Many of those who have been dropped have been children."
Early data released by the state of Florida, for example, shows that more than 205,000 people in the state lost coverage for procedural reasons after April eligibility checks.
"We knew this was coming. But we still treat these burdens like they're unavoidable natural disasters," said Pamela Herd, a professor of public policy at Georgetown University. "We need to be much more explicit about these failures because we're making a choice to allow this."
Joan Alker, executive director of the Georgetown Center for Children and Families, said she is "very worried about Florida."
"We've heard the call center's overwhelmed, the notices are very confusing in Florida—they're very hard to understand," said Alker.
In a recent letter to Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, a 2024 presidential candidate, more than 50 advocacy groups demanded a Medicaid redetermination pause, pointing to "reports of Floridians being disenrolled from Medicaid without having received notice" from the state's Department of Children and Families (DCF).
"One of these individuals is a 7-year-old boy in remission from Leukemia who is now unable to access follow-up—and potentially lifesaving—treatments," the groups wrote. "Families with children have been erroneously terminated, and parents are having trouble reaching the DCF call center for help with this process. Additionally, unclear notices and lack of information on how to appeal contribute to more confusion."
"We are deeply concerned about those with serious, acute, and chronic conditions who will continue to lose access to their lifesaving treatments during this time, along with people who risk substantial medical debt, or even bankruptcy, as a result of coverage loss," the groups added.
\u201cWhat if instead we just gave everyone health insurance coverage??!! \nhttps://t.co/hSOQKYU7JY\u201d— Ady Barkan (@Ady Barkan) 1685130002
The Times highlighted the situation in Arkansas, which is led by Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders—a supporter of Medicaid work requirements and other attacks on the program. (Work requirements were briefly tried in Arkansas in 2018 and 2019, with disastrous consequences.)
"In Arkansas, more than 1.1 million people—over a third of the state's residents—were on Medicaid at the end of March [2023]," the Times noted Friday. "In April, the first month that states could begin removing people from the program, about 73,000 people lost coverage, including about 27,000 children 17 and under."
An Arkansas law requires the state to complete its Medicaid eligibility reviews in six months instead of 12.
In a Wall Street Journalop-ed earlier this month, Sanders wrote that her state is booting people from Medicaid at "the fastest pace in the nation" and claimed those being removed are "ineligible participants"—ignoring evidence that many being stripped of coverage were technically still eligible.
The U.S. Health and Human Services Department has estimated that upwards of 15 million people nationwide could lose Medicaid coverage during the redetermination process.
"This is such an enormous policy failure—profoundly cruel and will contribute to furthering inequities," Dr. CecÃlia Tomori, a public health scholar at Johns Hopkins University, wrote Friday.
While some who lose Medicaid will be able to access insurance through an employer or the Affordable Care Act marketplaces, KFF found that more than four in ten people with Medicaid as their only source of healthcare "say they wouldn't know where to look for other coverage or would be uninsured" if they were removed from the program.
"This is about to happen to a lot of people," warned Larry Levitt, KFF's executive vice president for health policy.
The Times pointed to the case of 54-year-old Arizona resident Debra Miller, who "lost Medicaid coverage in April after her roughly $25,000 annual salary as a Burger King cook left her ineligible."
"Ms. Miller, a single mother with diabetes and hypothyroidism, worked with an insurance counselor at North Country HealthCare, a network of federally funded health clinics, to enroll in a marketplace plan with a roughly $70 monthly premium," the Times reported.
Miller told the newspaper that the new plan is a "struggle" both because of the new monthly payment and because it doesn't include the vision coverage she needs and now may not be able to afford.
The Congressional Budget Office estimated earlier this week that states' Medicaid eligibility checks will likely leave 6.2 million people without any insurance at all.
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