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'Two Party Politics... Is Dead' in UK Says Green Party Leader After Labour Thrashed
"People have made it clear that they are desperate for an alternative to this failing Labour government," said Zoë Garbett, the victorious Green Party Hackney mayoral candidate.
May 08, 2026
The UK's Labour Party got a political thrashing from both the progressive left and the reactionary far right in local elections on Thursday, with BBC reporting that the center-left party of Prime Minister Keir Starmer has lost at least 490 council seats so far.
The biggest winner from Labour's collapse was the far-right Reform Party, led by Nigel Farage, which has gained over 650 seats as of this writing.
However, the triumph of Reform was not the only notable development, as the left-wing Green Party, with a focus on uplifting the working class by challenging corporate power, gained at least 96 seats.The centrist Liberal Democrats, meanwhile, also took a bite out of Labour's share of the vote by securing 36 seats and possibly more.
Green Party leader Zach Polanski said the elections marked a turning point in UK politics as both Labour and the Conservative Party, traditionally the two largest parties in the country, collectively lost more than 700 seats.
"This is an historic victory," Polanski said in the wake of the results. "It's the first time the Green Party has ever won a directly elected mayor. Two-party politics is not just dying, it is dead, and it is buried."
Polanski suggested that the real coming fight for the future of the country would be between his party and Reform, which has positioned itself as anti-immigration and anti-European Union.
In a social media post, Polanski boasted his party had "gained seats across the country and an increase in our vote share almost everywhere we've stood."
"All over the UK people are voting to end Rip Off Britain," Polanski added.
Zoë Garbett, the Green Party candidate who won the mayoral race in the longtime Labour stronghold of Hackney, told The Guardian that her victory shows "people have made it clear that they are desperate for an alternative to this failing Labour government."
"It’s not old politics... versus new parties," Garbett said. "This is about a system of fear versus a movement of hope."
Writing in The Times, UK political analyst John Curtice said the evidence was clear the Greens had helped inflict severe damage on Labour, even though Reform was the chief beneficiary of Labour's collapse.
"Both Reform and the Greens have been able to inflict significant damage on Labour," wrote Curtice. "It appears that around half of Labour’s losses have been to Reform. This reflects the fact that, at 26 per cent, Reform’s average share of the vote in the BBC’s sample is well above the 16% recorded by the Greens. Nevertheless, Labour’s vote has tended to suffer more when the Greens have recorded a strong vote than when Reform have done."
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Green Party Scores Upset Win in UK Election in Blow to Labour, Far-Right Reform
"Instead of working for a nice life, we’re working to line the pockets of billionaires," victorious Green Party candidate Hannah Spencer said during her victory speech. "We’re being bled dry."
Feb 27, 2026
Green Party candidate Hannah Spencer on Thursday won an upset victory in a byelection in the Gorton and Denton constituency, delivering a blow to both Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer and the far-right Reform Party led by Nigel Farage.
As reported by the Guardian, Spencer, a local plumber, won by overturning a 13,000-vote majority that the Labour Party achieved in the 2024 general election.
In fact, Labour fell to third place in the Thursday election, winning 9,364 votes, compared to 14,980 votes for the Greens and 10,578 votes for Reform.
In her victory speech, Spencer emphasized major class divides in the UK, where she said people are working increasingly harder for fewer benefits.
"Working hard used to get you something," she said. "It got you a house. A nice life. Holidays. It got you somewhere. But now—working hard? What does that get you?... Instead of working for a nice life, we’re working to line the pockets of billionaires. We’re being bled dry."
The Green Party said Spencer's victory showed it was now a viable force in national elections, projecting that it is "on track to win over a hundred seats at the next general election, if the historic swing achieved to win Gorton and Denton is replicated nationwide."
Green Party leader Zack Polanski hailed the election result and predicted "a tidal wave of new Green MPs" in future elections should current trends continue.
"When I was elected Leader of the Greens I said we were here to replace Labour and I meant it," Polanski said. "Hannah was a fantastic candidate and I know she’ll make a brilliant MP."
Starmer, who has pushed the Labour Party to the right on issues such as immigration and transgender rights during his tenure, reacted bitterly to the defeat in a letter he sent to other Labour MPs.
"The result in Gorton and Denton is deeply disappointing," Starmer wrote. "Instead of a Labour MP who can be a local champion delivering for Gorton and Denton alongside a Labour Government and a Labour mayor, the people of Gorton and Denton now have a representative who is more interested in dividing people than uniting them."
Starmer, whose job approval rating in polls is consistently under 20%, also predicted that "over the coming months, people will feel the benefit of the long-term decisions this government is taking."
Socialist commentator Owen Jones, a longtime Starmer critic, gloated over the result in a social media post in which he reminded followers of Starmer's past statement that left-wing voters could "leave" if they didn't like the changes he was making to Labour.
"OK, Keir Starmer, we did as you asked us!" he wrote. "Happy now?"
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It Isn’t ‘The System’ That’s Holding Visionary Activists Back From the World We Want
A new book by Mark Satin—Up From Socialism: My 60-Year Search for a Healing New Radical Politics—makes a powerful case that the real answer lies within.
Nov 10, 2024
As administrator of the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, I have spent decades trying to usher visionary, regenerative, and decentralist ideas into the American body politic. So have many of my counterparts in organizations across the country. But sometimes I think we’re no closer to making a difference on a national scale now than we were in the 1970s. What is holding us back?
The usual answers are “capitalism” and the two-party system. But the more experience I’ve gained, the more I’ve come to believe that those are just excuses, and the real answer lies elsewhere.
Mark Satin’s new book—Up From Socialism: My 60-Year Search for a Healing New Radical Politics—makes a powerful case that the real answer lies within: We visionary activists have been so internally divided, and so driven by ego and unexamined personal pain, that we’ve never been able to harness the life-giving ideas of people like Jane Jacobs, Ivan Illich, Hazel Henderson, David Korten, Kate Raworth, and E.F. Schumacher himself (all of whom turn up in Satin’s book) to a viable national political organization.
The last page reveals the “moral” of the book: “Only by becoming kind people can we create a kind world.”
Satin’s book reads like a novel, and it is admirably, some may say shockingly, specific. It spends a lot of time on activists’ parental, collegial, and love relationships, not just on their political organizing. And Satin finds all of it wanting. (He is as tough on himself as he is on anyone, which gives the book a feeling of heartache rather than blame. And there is redemption at the end!)
To stick to the political organizing—the first part of the book tries to demonstrate that the New Left of the 60s was an inadequate vehicle for us. Satin shows in devastating detail that the leading members of his Mississippi Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee group were more interested in Black nationalism than in integrating the local schools. He shows that the older student leaders of his campus Students for a Democratic Society group were more interested in promoting socialism than in listening to the emerging ecological, decentralist, and humanistic-psychology ideas of younger students. And he shows that the leaders of the Toronto Anti-Draft Program (North America’s largest draft-resister assistance organization) were more interested in fomenting a Marxist revolution than in providing practical help to the resisters.
According to Satin, these and similar experiences led to the collapse of the New Left—and to the rise of thousands of independent feminist, ecological, spiritual, appropriate-technology, etc. organizations. In addition, two visionary organizations arose that aimed to synthesize such ideas and bring them into national politics.
The first of these, the New World Alliance, drew its Governing Council from a wide range of professionals, educators, businesspeople, and activists. It included three future Schumacher Society participants, Alanna Hartzok, John McClaughry, and Kirkpatrick Sale. But it fell apart after four years of constant bickering over policies, processes, and fundraising, often caused (Satin seeks to show) largely by personal jealousies and rivalries. At one point, spiritually oriented Planetary Citizens president Donald Keys accused McClaughry of being in league with the Devil! Some of the scenes in this chapter are so tragicomic that they’d work as skits on Saturday Night Live.
The chapter on the U.S. Green Party movement, though, is pure tragedy. By the mid-1980s, America was yearning for a major third party. Amazingly well-connected people were waiting in the wings to help the Greens get off the ground. But, instead, the principal organizers of the Greens—a spiritual feminist, an anarchist, a socialist, and two bioregionalists—created an organization in their own narrow image. As Satin sees it, this was a classic case of the organizers and their cohorts preferring to be big fish in a small pond. The resulting Green “movement” then engaged in phenomenally ugly infighting over the next decade—what happened to three Green women is truly sickening to read—and the Greens emerged in the end not as a major beyond-left-and-right political party capable of spearheading a regenerative economy and culture, but as a minor far-left protest party.
In more recent years, Satin found hope in what he calls the “radical centrist” or “trasnspartisan” movement—people and groups that are more interested in fostering cross-partisan political dialogue than in providing Correct Answers. He felt this would be an excellent way to insert the views of visionary thinkers into the national dialogue—and to win support for all kinds of local and regional experimentation. But he notes that the track record of radical-centrist groups like New America and No Labels has so far been disappointing. They’re as internally divided as the Greens and a lot snootier. What Satin really wants, he confides to us, is a new political movement of committed listeners, bold beyond-left-and-right synthesizers, and savvy organizers.
A powerful conclusion urges visionary activists to live more like ordinary Americans, in order to decrease arrogance and deepen understanding. The last page reveals the “moral” of the book: “Only by becoming kind people can we create a kind world.”
When E.F. Schumacher wrote his famous book Small Is Beautiful, he entitled his chapter about political economy “Buddhist Economics.” Later he must have had second thoughts about characterizing his ideas in such an oppositional way, for his later book, A Guide for the Perplexed, makes it clear that his ideas are consistent with the beliefs of all the great religions, including of course Christianity. When Satin argues that we visionary activists cannot move forward unless we (a). learn to be kind to self and others, and (b). listen to and learn from all engaged Americans, he is following in Schumacher’s footsteps. We should listen to him.
Mark Satin, Up From Socialism: My 60-Year Search for a Healing New Radical Politics (New York: Bombardier Books, distributed by Simon & Schuster, 2023), 380 pages, $21.95 pbk, $12.95 eBook.
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Why I Regret My Antiwar Protest Vote in 1968
While I see many parallels with the choice we faced back then, I now think differently about how to register my opposition to war.
Nov 02, 2024
In 1968, I was a full-time anti-Vietnam War organizer and voted for a third-party candidate. I now regret that protest vote, which has led me to think differently this time around.
I certainly sympathize with many progressives who intend to either sit out this election or vote for the Green Party’s Jill Stein or Cornel West. Kamala Harris’s continuing support for Israel’s war on Gaza and now Lebanon is abhorrent to anyone opposing war. For the past year the Biden-Harris administration has functioned as a willing ally and enabler of Israel’s genocide. Though not a self-proclaimed Zionist like the president, Harris parrots Israel’s talking points and lies about the war on Gaza. At the Democratic convention, she didn’t even permit a Palestinian representative to speak for five minutes from the platform.
But come election day, I won’t be casting a protest vote as I did in 1968 — even though I see so many parallels with the choice we faced then.
Like Harris, that year’s Democratic candidate, Hubert Humphrey, served as vice president, standing loyally by as Lyndon Johnson sent more than a half-million U.S. troops to Vietnam, hundreds of whom were dying every week in 1968. Far from distinguishing himself from the war hawks, Humphrey made speeches supporting the U.S. and its South Vietnamese allies as thousands of American soldiers were killed and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese were slaughtered.
When it comes to radically transforming the two major political parties it’s going to take a lot more than one election cycle.
Adding to this outrage, Humphrey was nominated at the infamous Democratic convention in Chicago where the local cops brutally assaulted antiwar demonstrators in what was later described as a “police riot.” I was one of those protesters and was jailed for my efforts. Many antiwarriors demonstrated against Humphrey during the subsequent campaign, often chanting “Dump the Hump.” So, when election day came, I just couldn’t bring myself to vote for someone I considered a war criminal and cast my ballot for comedian Dick Gregory, who was running on a third-party ticket.
What I did not consider, however, was Humphrey’s opponent — Richard Nixon. At the time, I considered the parties as Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Both seemed indistinguishable on Vietnam. And both reflected the same Cold War anticommunist mentality that underlay the American imperialist project and the growing military-industrial state.
I ignored, however, the profound differences between the two candidates on a host of other issues. For example, Nixon’s campaign revolved around what he called a Southern strategy. By using thinly disguised racist “law-and-order” rhetoric, he hoped to peel away white Southern and Northern white working-class voters from the Democrats. Ronald Reagan and later Republican administrations have solidified their appeal to white voters to effectively roll back the hard-won gains of the civil rights movement, especially on voting rights.
Today, the differences between the two parties are even more stark on a wide variety of issues – from women’s and LGBTQ+ rights to the climate and consumer protections to electoral integrity. The evidence can be found in Project 2025, the Republican blueprint for a new Trump presidency. Or in what Trump proclaims at his rallies. Earlier this month, he declared that he intends to use the military against protesters whom he considers “the enemy within.”
This kind of authoritarian rule is happening around the world, including Erdogan’s Turkey, Orban’s Hungary and Putin’s Russia. There is very little to protect it from happening here. We certainly can’t rely on the current Supreme Court.
In the face of such a prospect, shouldn’t we do whatever is possible to forestall an autocratic regime? I no longer see casting a symbolic protest ballot — or sitting on the sidelines — as an act of conscience. Real acts of conscience imply taking a risk and being willing to accept the consequences.
Still, some might argue that it’s worth voting for the Green Party’s Jill Stein to send a message to the Democrats that they can’t literally get away with murder in Gaza. But would it convey that message?
In 2016, when Stein last ran for president, she received more votes than Trump’s margin of victory in three key states: Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. In this election, that could be enough to help him retake the White House. Trump’s solution to the Gaza war: Netanyahu should “finish the job.” Is that something that would help the Palestinians?
More than anything, they need us to continue challenging the U.S.-Israeli genocide by street actions, by supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, or BDS, and by educating our fellow citizens about the reality of the Zionist settler-colonial project. When it comes to radically transforming the two major political parties it’s going to take a lot more than one election cycle. It will require building powerful movements that address systemic issues like racism, poverty, ecological devastation, and war and militarism.
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Warning Stakes 'Could Not Be Higher,' European Greens Call On Jill Stein to Drop Out
"We are clear that Kamala Harris is the only candidate who can block Donald Trump and his anti-democratic, authoritarian policies from the White House," the left bloc of parties from across Europe said.
Nov 01, 2024
Noting that the U.S. Green Party and its presidential nominee, Jill Stein, have strayed far from the values held by Green parties in countries across the globe, a coalition of European lawmakers representing the organization called on Stein to drop out of the U.S. presidential race to help prevent a victory by Republican nominee Donald Trump.
"The stakes of these elections could not be higher," reads an open letter from politicians and parties from countries including Norway, Belgium, France, Ireland. "We are clear that [Democratic Vice President] Kamala Harris is the only candidate who can block Donald Trump and his anti-democratic, authoritarian policies from the White House."
Stein, who has run for president in the last four elections and won 1.4 million votes in 2016, is now polling between 1.1% and 1.4% and is on the ballot in a majority of states, including almost every battleground state.
The European Greens noted that they advocate "for a politics that prioritizes the planet, people, and peace above corporate greed, systemic injustice, and violence."
"The U.S. Greens are no longer a member of the global organization of Green parties," reads the letter, spearheaded by European Greens co-chairs Mélanie Vogel, a French senator, and Thomas Waitz, an Austrian member of European Parliament. "In part this fissure resulted from their relationship with parties with authoritarian leaders, and serious policy differences on key issues including Russia's full-scale assault on Ukraine."
Stein attended a dinner in Russia in 2015 with Russian President Vladimir Putin and has been critical of U.S. support for Ukraine's defense against the Russian invasion that began in 2022.
In mid-October, Stein joined former Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant at a rally where Sawant acknowledged that Stein has no chance of winning. At an event in Michigan, Sawant said the state was "ground zero to punish Kamala Harris and defeat her" for Harris' support for the Biden administration's policy in Israel and Palestine. The comment suggested to critics that Stein and her supporters view a Trump presidency as preferable to a Harris victory on November 5.
"The U.S. Green Party is attempting to go after the subset of voters on the left who don't like the Democrats," Carl Roberts, a spokesperson for Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, a political foundation affiliated with the German Green Party, told The Guardian in September. "I think this is quite out of step with other Green parties, who always center environmental concerns in their messaging and campaigns as one of their highest priorities."
Oras Tynkkynen, a member of Finnish Parliament representing the country's Green Party, which signed Friday's letter, said supporting Harris is "the obvious choice" for voters and politicians with "Greens values."
On Friday, the European Greens wrote that the U.S. election is taking place "at a watershed moment in the history of our planet."
"We face a climate crisis that is worsening every year, with heatwaves, floods, and a loss of biodiversity at a rate never seen before. Climate policies require democratic institutions, which we fear would be dismantled if Trump is elected," they wrote. "Right now, the race for the White House is too close for comfort. We call on Jill Stein to withdraw from the race, and endorse Kamala Harris for the presidency of the United States."
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On the Voting Dilemma for Those Who Want Peace and an End to Genocide
Whomever each of us votes for in the presidential election, the campaign to end the genocide in Gaza will continue, and we must grow stronger and smarter and more inclusive until politicians cannot ignore us.
Oct 31, 2024
On October 24th, a U.S. presidential candidate told an interviewer, “Our day one agenda… also includes picking up the phone and telling Bibi Netanyahu that the war is over, because it’s basically our proxy war. We control the armaments, the funding, the diplomatic cover, the intelligence, etc., so we can end this in the blink of an eye with a single phone call, which is what Ronald Reagan did when Israel had gone into Lebanon and was massacring thousands of people. So we can do that right now. That’s day one.”
Tragically, the candidate who said that was not Donald Trump or Kamala Harris, but Green Party candidate Jill Stein. Most Americans have been persuaded that Stein cannot win the election, and many believe that voting for her in swing states will help elect Trump by siphoning voters from Harris.
There are many other “third-party” candidates for president, and many of them have good policy proposals for ending the genocidal U.S.-Israeli massacre in Gaza. As the website for Claudia de la Cruz, the presidential candidate for the Party of Socialism and Liberation, explains, “Our tax dollars should be used to meet people's needs -- not pay for the bullets, bombs and missiles used in the massacre in Gaza.”
Whoever wins this election, we must find a way to put peace back on this country’s national agenda, and to make our collective voices heard
Many of the principles and policy proposals of “third-party” and independent candidates are more in line with the views of most Americans than those of Harris or Trump. This is hardly surprising given the widely recognized corruption of the U.S. political system. While Trump cynically flip-flops to appeal to both sides on many questions, and Harris generally avoids committing to policy specifics at all, especially regarding foreign policy, most Americans understand that they are both more beholden to the billionaires and corporate interests who fund their campaigns than to the well-being of working Americans or the future of the planet.
Michael Moore has published a flier titled “This Is America,” which shows that large majorities of Americans support “liberal” positions on 18 different issues, from a ceasefire in Gaza to Medicare For All to getting money out of politics.
Moore implies that this should be reassuring to Democrats and Harris supporters, and it would be if she was running on those positions. But, for the most part, she isn’t. On the other hand, many third party and independent candidates for president are running on those positions, but the anti-democratic U.S. political system ensures that they can’t win, even when most Americans agree with them.
War and militarism are the most deadly and destructive forces in human society, with real world, everyday, physical impacts that kill or maim people and destroy their homes, communities and entire countries. So it is deeply disturbing that the political system in the United States has been corrupted into bipartisan subservience to a military-industrial complex (or MICIMATT, to use a contemporary term) that wields precisely the “unwarranted influence” that President Eisenhower warned us against 64 years ago, and uses its influence to drag us into wars that wreak death and destruction in country after country.
Apart from brief wars to recover small neocolonial outposts in Grenada, Panama and Kuwait, all now many decades ago, the U.S. military has not won a war since 1945. It systematically fails on its own terms, while its nakedly lethal and destructive power only fills graveyards and leaves countries in ruins. Far from being an effective vehicle to project American power, unleashing the brutality of the U.S. war machine has become the fastest, surest way to further undermine America’s international standing in the eyes of our neighbors.
After so many wars under so many administrations of both parties, neither Republicans nor Democrats can claim to be a “lesser evil” on questions of war and peace, let alone a “peace party.”
As with so many of America’s problems, from the expansion of corporate and oligarchic power to the generational decline in living standards, the combined impact of decades of Democratic and Republican government is more dangerous, more lasting and more intractable than the policies of any single administration. On no question is this more obvious than on questions of war and peace.
For decades, there was a small but growing progressive wing in the Democratic Party that voted against record military spending and opposed U.S. wars, occupations and coups. But when Bernie Sanders ran for president and millions of grassroots Democrats rallied around his progressive agenda, the Party leaders and their corporate, plutocratic backers fought back more aggressively to defeat Bernie and the progressives than they ever fought to win elections against the Republicans, or to oppose the war on Iraq or tax cuts for the wealthy.
This year, flush with blood money from the Israel lobby, pro-Israel Democrats defeated two of the most progressive, public-spirited Democratic members of Congress, Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman.
On the Republican side, in response to the U.S. wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, the libertarian Republican member of Congress Ron Paul led a small group of Republicans to join progressive Democrats in an informal bipartisan peace caucus in Congress. In recent years though, the number of members of either party willing to take any kind of stand for peace has shrunk dramatically. So while there are now over 100 Congressional caucuses, from the Candy Caucus to the Pickleball Caucus, there is still not one for peace.
After the neocons who provided the ideological fuel for Bush’s catastrophic wars reconvened around Hillary Clinton in 2016, President Trump tried to “make America’s military great again” by appointing retired generals to his cabinet and characteristically staking out positions all over the map, from a call to kill the families of “terrorists” to a National Defense Strategy naming Russia and China as the “central challenge to U.S. prosperity and security,” to casting himself as a peacemaker by trying to negotiate a peace treaty with North Korea.
Trump is now running against Biden’s war in Ukraine and trying to have it both ways on Gaza, with undying support for Israel and a promise to end the war immediately. Some Palestinian-Americans are supporting Trump for not being the VP for Genocide Joe, just as other people support Harris for not being Trump.
But most Americans know little about Trump’s actual war policy as president. The unique value of a leader like Trump to the military-industrial complex is that he draws attention to himself and diverts attention away from U.S. atrocities overseas.
In 2017, Trump’s first year in office, he oversaw the climax of Obama’s war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, which probably killed as many civilians as Israel has massacred in Gaza. In that year alone, the U.S. and its allies dropped over 60,000 bombs and missiles on Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan,Yemen, Libya, Pakistan and Somalia. That was the heaviest bombing since the first Gulf War in 1991, and double the destruction of the “Shock & Awe” bombing of Iraq in 2003.
Most chillingly, the Iraqi forces who defeated the last remnants of ISIS in Mosul’s Old City were ordered to kill all the survivors, fulfilling Trump’s threat to “take out their families.” "We killed them all," an Iraqi soldier told Middle East Eye. "Daesh, men, women and children. We killed everyone." If anyone is counting on Trump to save the people of Gaza from Netanyahu and Biden’s genocide, that should be a reality check.
In other areas, Trump’s back-pedaling on Obama’s diplomatic achievements with Iran and Cuba have led to new crises for both those countries on the eve of this election. By moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem, bribing Arab despots with ‘Abraham’ deals, and encouraging Netanyahu’s Greater Israel ambitions, Trump primed the powder-keg for the genocide in Gaza and the new crisis in the Middle East under Biden.
On the other side, Harris shares responsibility for genocide, arguably the most serious international crime in the book. To make matters worse, she has connived in a grotesque scheme to provide cover for the genocide by pretending to be working for a ceasefire that, as Jill Stein and many others have said, the U.S. could enforce “in the blink of an eye, with a single phone call” if it really wanted to. As for the future, Harris has only committed to making the U.S. military even more “lethal.”
The movement for a Free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza has failed to win the support of the Republican or Democratic presidential campaigns. But this is not a failure on the part of the Palestinian-Americans we have listened to and worked with, who have engaged in brilliant organizing, gradually raised public awareness and won over more Americans to their cause. They are leading the most successful anti-war organizing campaign in America since the Iraq War.
The refusal of Trump or Harris to listen to the calls of Americans whose families are being massacred in Gaza, and now in Lebanon too, is a failure on the part of the corrupt, anti-democratic political system of which Trump and Harris are figureheads, not a failure of activism or organizing.
Whomever each of us votes for in the presidential election, the campaign to end the genocide in Gaza will continue, and we must grow stronger and smarter and more inclusive until politicians cannot ignore us, no matter how much money the Israel lobby and other corrupt interests throw at them, or at their political opponents.
Whomever we vote for, the elephant in the room will still be U.S. militarism and the violence and chaos it inflicts on the world. Whether Trump or Harris is president, the result will be more of the same, unless we do something to change it. As legendary Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu famously said, “If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.”
No American should be condemned for voting for a candidate of their choice, however successfully the Democrats and Republicans have marginalized the very concept of multi-party democracy that the U.S. claims to support in other countries. Whoever wins this election, we must find a way to put peace back on this country’s national agenda, and to make our collective voices heard in ways that cannot be drowned out by oligarchs with big bags of cash.
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In the 2024 Election, the Green Party Is Not the Green Choice
If you deeply care about the fight for a more healthy and just planet, and if you deeply care about building power, then I believe—regardless of our policy disagreements with VP Harris—that we must support her in this election.
Oct 30, 2024
Former U.S. President Donald Trump must be defeated in November. Under his leadership, the country saw some of our darkest days of climate denialism, antidemocratic authoritarianism, and planet destruction. As the leader of a national environmental organization, Friends of the Earth Action, I am certain that the Democratic candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, is the only one who can defeat Trump.
While I have been dissatisfied with many policies of the Biden-Harris administration, I recognize that there are no other candidates with viable experience and platforms. Jill Stein and the Green Party may seem to be an obvious choice for environmental advocates, yet they have failed to demonstrate that they are a real national party or can build a real national party.
This election comes down to a choice between a catastrophic dictator and a livable future for our planet.
Out of more than 519,000 elected offices in the United States, the Green Party currently holds 142 offices, none of which are statewide or federal offices. Even in California and New York, where there is rank-choice balloting and fusion battling, the Green Party has failed to make headway in electing candidates. The mayor of Oakland, California remains the party’s greatest electoral victory. Clearly this is not a political party worthy of a national ballot.
In contrast, Vice President Kamala Harris is a strong candidate with a climate record. As California attorney general, Kamala Harris stood up to corporate polluters and worked to further environmental justice. In California she vigorously defended multiple state-level consumer, public health, and animal welfare laws. And as vice president, she cast the deciding vote to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, one of the most important federal climate actions to date.
This election comes down to a choice between a catastrophic dictator and a livable future for our planet. Trump did irreparable damage under his first administration, handing favors to Big Oil billionaires and rolling back over 100 environmental rules and protections. Trump has repeatedly proven his presidential bid is solely for selfish gain, and that he will always put his own interests and his rich buddies above the American people.
If you deeply care about the fight for a more healthy and just planet, and if you deeply care about building power, then I believe—regardless of our policy disagreements with Vice President Harris—that we must support her in this election. Third-party candidates threaten to take votes away from Harris by painting themselves as an alternative to Democrats, but they will only spoil votes in Trump’s favor. I urge those who care about climate, democracy, and social justice to reject the Stein smokescreen and instead support Vice President Harris for President of the United States. Vote like the future of our planet depends on it, because it does.
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Climate Groups Warn Third-Party Vote 'Could Hand Our Planet's Future Over to Trump'
"Every vote for Dr. Jill Stein or Cornel West instead of Kamala Harris makes it more likely that Donald Trump will win," wrote a coalition of leading environmental groups.
Oct 25, 2024
A coalition of leading U.S. environmental groups warned Thursday that a third-party vote in next month's election could help usher in climate disaster by improving Republican nominee Donald Trump's chances of victory, a risk they said the planet can't afford as time runs out to avert catastrophic warming.
Voting for Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, in the November 5 election is imperative because they represent "our best chance at making more progress over the next four years," 350 Action, the Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund, Climate Emergency Action, Earthjustice Action, Food and Water Action, Friends of the Earth Action, and other climate groups wrote in an open letter addressed to "potential supporters of Jill Stein or Cornel West."
While the letter thanks Stein, the Green Party candidate, and West, who is running as an Independent, "for raising important issues in this election," the groups argued that Harris "is the only candidate with a record of success addressing climate change," pointing to her tie-breaking vote in support of the Inflation Reduction Act and legal action against oil companies during her tenure as California's attorney general.
Trump, by contrast, "waged the worst White House attack ever against the environment and public health while in office," the groups wrote.
One analysis estimates that a second Trump presidency could result in an additional 4 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions by 2030, negating recent progress in renewable energy development and inflicting large-scale climate damage. Fossil fuel industry attorneys and lobbyists are already drawing up executive orders for Trump to sign should he prevail on November 5.
"He has made clear that his second term will be even more extreme, drawing from the detailed anti-environment proposals and plans contained in Project 2025," the climate coalition wrote in the open letter. "Every vote for Dr. Jill Stein or Cornel West instead of Kamala Harris makes it more likely that Donald Trump will win."
In a separate social media thread on Thursday, the youth-led Sunrise Movement—a signatory of the new open letter—wrote that "this election will decide the temperature on our planet for thousands of years."
"It will decide if we have a fighting chance to stop the climate crisis or not," the group added. "Voting alone or voting third party won't save us. Let's be honest—financing a genocide, competing on who can be crueler to immigrants, or thumbs-upping fracking is fucked. A Harris presidency won't stop violence. No president ever will."
"But neither will disengaging or throwing away our votes. This election might not save the world but it will set the scene," said Sunrise, which has been working to mobilize young voters in swing states to back Harris. "We have six years to stop the climate crisis and we can't afford to give four of them away to Trump. What your summers look like in 2047, where your family might live in 2063, whether tens of millions of more people become climate refugees or not will be deeply impacted by the election results."
And we have to vote like it because since 1968, no 3rd party candidate has won a single state, let alone the presidency.
So yes—we must vote, and we have to do so much more if we truly plan to win.
— Sunrise Movement 🌅 (@sunrisemvmt) October 24, 2024
Tens of millions of ballots have already been cast in dozens of states across the U.S. ahead of Election Day, with officials reporting record turnout in battlegrounds such as Michigan and Georgia.
Stein and West are among several third-party candidates on the ballot in critical states that could decide the presidential contest. Recent polling has shown that Stein and West are both polling around 1% in the key state of Michigan, where Harris and Trump are in a dead heat.
Michigan has received significant attention this election cycle given that it was the birthplace of the Uncommitted National Movement, which began as a primary campaign effort to push President Joe Biden to halt U.S. support for Israel's assault on the Gaza Strip.
The movement has since shifted its focus to pressuring Harris to back an arms embargo against Israel, something she has declined to do. While Uncommitted opted against endorsing Harris last month, it said it opposes the Republican nominee and warned that "third-party votes in key swing states could help inadvertently deliver a Trump presidency given our country's broken Electoral College system."
"We are going to be voting for the world's climate future even if we are reluctant to admit it."
Stein has dismissed the notion that she's a potential "spoiler" candidate, arguing her supporters would likely opt to stay home instead of vote for Harris or Trump if there was no third-party choice.
But speaking in Michigan earlier this month, Stein supporter Kshama Sawant—a former member of the Seattle City Council—acknowledged that "we are not in a position to win the White House" and said she views the Green Party candidacy as an opportunity to "deny Kamala Harris the state of Michigan."
"And the polls show that most likely Harris cannot win the election without Michigan," Sawant added.
That approach could be devastating for the planet, progressive lawmakers and climate advocates have argued.
"If Donald Trump is elected, the struggle against climate change is over," Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote in a social media post on Thursday. "The United States will withdraw from the movement toward sustainable energy."
Kumar Venkat, a carbon footprint analyst, wrote in an op-ed for Common Dreams on Friday that "if elected, it is reasonable to expect that Harris will build on the Biden administration's work and keep the U.S. on the net-zero path."
"Donald Trump has made it exceedingly clear that he does not believe climate change is even a problem," Venkat wrote. "Between Project 2025 pushing for a 'whole-of-government unwinding' of U.S. climate policy and the fossil fuel industry drafting detailed plans to dismantle the Biden administration's climate rules, it is a safe bet that we will no longer be on a trajectory to net-zero emissions if Trump is back in the White House."
"We are going to be voting for the world's climate future," he added, "even if we are reluctant to admit it."
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Jill Stein's Dangerous Game Could Put Fascist Trump Back in the White House
Running for president and keeping an iron grip on the once-noble Green Party has become Stein’s singular mission. And she’s killing the Party — and its once-sterling reputation — in the process.
Oct 10, 2024
Jill Stein doesn’t give, as the old saying goes, a flying f*ck about democracy. Instead, she’s all about how famous she can become and how much money she can grift off her repeated presidential campaigns. It’s a damn dangerous game.
Fresh off her 2016 political quacksalvery, in which she handed that year’s election to Donald Trump, this professional grifter — who’s been doing real damage to the Green Party for over a decade — is trying to get Trump back into the White House.
As her Wisconsin campaign manager, Pete Karas, told Politico:
“We need to teach Democrats a lesson.”
Arguably, Democrats have already learned that lesson.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton lost Wisconsin to Trump by 22,748 votes; Stein carried 31,072 votes. In Michigan the story was similar: Clinton lost to Trump by 10,704 votes while Stein carried 51,463. Ditto for Pennsylvania, where Trump won by 44,292 votes and Stein pulled in 49,941 votes.
Had Clinton carried those three states she would have become president.
The Green Party — that I safely voted for in 2000 when I lived in non-swing-state Vermont — deserves a candidate who’ll work to produce real change rather than simply run repeated vanity campaigns that cripple our admittedly flawed electoral system.
Those slim margins may be a distant memory, however, given how hard Stein is pounding on Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania Democrats against President Biden’s unfortunate support of Israel’s brutal bombing campaign in Gaza. As Newsweek reported last week:
“In Michigan, a battleground state where the Greens are campaigning hard, and which has a large Arab American community, 40 percent of Muslim voters backed Stein versus just 12 percent for Harris and 18 percent for Trump, according to a late August poll by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).
“Michigan has more than 200,000 Muslim voters and 300,000 with Middle Eastern or North African ancestry. Biden won there in 2020 by 154,000 votes, while Trump carried the state with a victory margin of just 10,700—or 0.23 percent—in 2016.
“In Wisconsin, the CAIR poll showed Stein on 44 percent and Harris on 29 percent, while she also leads the Democrat candidate among Muslims voters in Arizona.”
I moderated the 2012 presidential debate between Stein and Libertarian Gary Johnson; she and Johnson both had the smell of cheap political hustlers to me then, a feeling that’s only been reinforced in the years since.
Stein certainly hasn’t done much to advance the stated goals of the Green Party. Back in the day, it was the Greens leading the charge against climate change and in favor of instant runoff voting, having considerable success with the latter.
David Cobb, a Texas environmental attorney, ran on the Green ticket in 2004 and was a regular on my radio program that year. He explicitly told people listening to my show in swing states to vote for John Kerry instead of him, calling it his “safe states” strategy.
He refused to campaign or even appear in battleground states, a statement of both high integrity and real patriotism.
Stein has neither. This is her third run for president (Howie Hawkins was the Green candidate in 2020 and was not on the ballot in most swing states.)
Instead, she’s bragging about how she’s going to hand the 2024 election to Donald Trump. Presumably she’ll be spared the imprisonment that Trump says he’s preparing for the rest of us in politics and the media. As Stein boasted to Newsweek:
“Third Way found that, based on polling averages in battleground states, the 2020 margin of victory for Democrats would be lost in four states — Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina and Wisconsin — because of third party support.
“So they can’t win. There’s a fair amount of data now that suggests the Democrats have lost. Unless they give up their genocide.
“We’re doing outreach all the time to a lot of different groups, but it’s really been the Muslim Americans and Arab Americans who have really taken this campaign on like it’s theirs — like they have enormous ownership over this.”
Running for president and keeping an iron grip on the once-noble Green Party has become Stein’s singular mission. And she’s killing the Party — and its once-sterling reputation — in the process. As Alexandria Ocasio Cortez said:
“If you run for years in a row, and your party has not grown, has not added city council seats, down ballot seats and state electives, that’s bad leadership. And that to me is what’s upsetting.”
As Peter Rothpletz wrote for The New Republic in an article titled Jill Stein Is Killing the Green Party:
“As of July 2024, a mere 143 officeholders in the United States are affiliated with the Green Party. None of them are in statewide or federal offices. In fact, no Green Party candidate has ever won federal office. And Stein’s reign has been a period of indisputable decline, during which time the party’s membership—which peaked in 2004 at 319,000 registered members—has fallen to 234,000 today.”
Stein brought along a Fox “News” film crew when she crashed the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, cementing her reputation as a hustler who’ll hook up with anybody who’ll provide her with fame or fortune.
There are, apparently, no Democrats in America clean or pure or virginal enough for Stein; as Rothpletz reports, she even attacked Bernie Sanders for being a “DC insider” and “corrupted” by corporate money.
Meanwhile, her campaign, theoretically opposed to giant monopolies and defense contractors, has taken money from Google, Lockheed Martin, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and McKinsey.
Stein is working hard to win the votes of disaffected Muslims in Michigan and Wisconsin, among other swing states, and could well deny Harris the White House this year just like she so proudly did to Clinton in 2016.
The unfortunate reality is that our system of democracy — created way back in 1789 — essentially requires a two-party system because we have first-past-the-post, winner-take-all elections. The result is that third parties always tear votes away from the major party with which they are most closely philosophically aligned.
And the Electoral College, by creating swing states, amplifies the problem.
Until America adopts proportional representation nationwide (which would require a constitutional amendment) or instant runoff voting (which could be done by law), a vote for a third-party candidate will always damage the party most closely aligned with it. Jill Stein understands this well, but chooses to ignore (or to intentionally exploit) its consequences.
Most other advanced democracies use a parliamentary or proportional representation system where the party that gets, for example, 12 percent of the votes gets 12 percent of the seats in Parliament. This allows for multiple parties and a more vibrant democracy.
However, it wasn’t until the year the Civil War started, 1861, that British philosopher John Stuart Mill published a how-to manual for multi-party parliamentary democracies in his book Considerations On Representative Government.
It was so widely distributed and read that nearly all of the world’s democracies today — all of them countries that became democracies after the late 1860s — use variations on Mill’s proportional representation parliamentary system.
The result for those nations is a plethora of parties representing a broad range of perspectives and priorities, all able to participate in the daily governance of their nation. Nobody gets shut out.
Governing becomes an exercise in coalition building, and nobody is excluded. If you want to get something done politically, you have to pull together a coalition of parties to agree with your policy.
Most European countries, for example, have political parties represented in their parliaments that range from the far left to the extreme right, with many across the spectrum of the middle. There’s even room for single issue parties; for example, several in Europe focus almost exclusively on the environment or immigration.
The result is typically an honest and wide-ranging discussion across society about the topics of the day, rather than a stilted debate among only two parties.
It’s how the Greens became part of today’s governing coalition in Germany, for example, and are able to influence the energy future of that nation. And because of that political diversity in the debates, the decisions made tend to be reasonably progressive: look at the politics and lifestyles in most European nations.
But until America adopts proportional representation nationwide (which would require a constitutional amendment) or instant runoff voting (which could be done by law), a vote for a third-party candidate will always damage the party most closely aligned with it. Jill Stein understands this well, but chooses to ignore (or to intentionally exploit) its consequences.
The Green Party — that I safely voted for in 2000 when I lived in non-swing-state Vermont — deserves a candidate who’ll work to produce real change rather than simply run repeated vanity campaigns that cripple our admittedly flawed electoral system.
It’s time to say “good bye” to Jill Stein and rescue — and then improve — our democratic republic.
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It Shouldn't Even Be Close: Harris Must Ditch Genocide and Embrace Working-Class Politics
Winning should be a breeze for Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, and the other Democratic candidates. What's going on?
Oct 05, 2024
With little more than four weeks to go before the November elections, polls show the Trump/Harris race as “too close to call.” Winning should be a breeze for Harris and the other Democratic candidates. The GOP’s Congressional votes and policies are bad for women, children, and workers. The GOP doesn’t recognize and act against climate violence, it protects the corporate-favorable tax code, it is soft on corporate crooks, it scuttles regulatory protections for the peoples’ health, safety, and economic wellbeing and mocks the dire necessity of preparedness for future pandemics. (The military Empire with its violent war crimes and runaway budget-busting drain on our domestic necessities is supported by both Parties and not in electoral contention.)
Why so close, then? Because for years, the Democratic Party has abandoned the blue collar, New Deal roots of the Roosevelt era and ferociously dialed for the same commercial dollars as does the GOP. It has hired corporate-conflicted political consulting firms that control campaign messages, strategies and has excluded access by citizen groups to candidates, generally preferring corporatism over democracy, regardless of its rhetoric.
It also doesn’t advance any path to electoral victory to abandon half the country—the red states—and surrender them to the Republicans. The mountain states and North and South Dakota used to have Democrats representing them in the Senate. Failing to compete in these low population states concedes about ten Senate seats at the outset.
Most telling in these last remaining days is the refusal for Kamala Harris and most Congressional candidates to have front and center proven and proper vote-getting agendas reflecting the New Deal.
It also doesn’t advance any path to electoral victory to abandon half the country—the red states—and surrender them to the Republicans.
To begin with I’m referring to raising the GOP frozen federal minimum wage to at least $15 an hour from its present $7.25. Democrats need more than a throwaway line on wages. They need to pour some of the billions of dollars raised into media and groundgame campaigns around the slogan “go vote for a raise, you’ve long earned and been denied by the Republicans.” That, authentically conveyed by thousands of Democratic candidates will get the attention of 25 million underpaid and struggling workers, who make our real economy run daily. Why aren’t the Dems ringing that bell?
Another winner for 65 million elderly voters is to pledge with full throttle to increase Social Security benefits frozen for half a century and to raise the Social Security tax on the wealthy to pay for it. Astonishingly, Kamala Harris and her handlers are not championing the “Social Security 2100 Act” which had 200 sponsors in the Congress, led by Congressman John Larson and Senator Richard Blumenthal. The throwaway line is that they “will protect social security” as it deficiently exists. Talk is not enough. The Democrats need to organize and communicate to drive this message.
Third, they should be championing government-paid child care, maternal and family sick leave and the child tax credit—all opposed by the Wall Street GOP. Paid for by raising taxes on the wealthy—this issue is an 85 percent poll winner. Instead, Harris and the Dems mumble with some general rhetoric that nobody really believes. Western countries have long had such social safety net protections for families and children.
The Democratic Party has abandoned the blue collar, New Deal roots of the Roosevelt era and ferociously dialed for the same commercial dollars as does the GOP.
Get-out-the-vote efforts are still inadequate. The Party has trouble listening to Rev. William Barber who argues that just a ten to fifteen percent increase in low-wage voter turnout from 2020 would win the November elections. Instead of scapegoating the Green Party and spending money to block Third Party ballot access, the Democrats should try harder to tap into the 80 to 90 million non-voters who stay home, many of whom don’t see anything benefiting them coming from bloviating, hypocritical politicians.
If readers want more ideas for ways to get more votes, such as midnight shift campaigning, and cracking down on corporate crooks, they can obtain my usable new book “Let’s Start the Revolution: Tools for Displacing the Corporate State and Building a Country that Works for the People” and go to winningamerica.net.
Are you wondering why Tim Walz didn’t do better against J.D. Vance in the VP debate? Vance managed to normalize criminal felon Trump with his serial lies and law violations, corruption, abuse of women, awful presidential record (recall his lethal mocking of the early Covid-19 pandemic), because Walz was muzzled by the Harris campaign operatives. He was told what not to speak about and to hew to the narrow Party line. That kind of advice may sink the genocidal Democratic Party with its insular cowardliness in November.
Will these observations get the attention of the tiny number of ruling Democratic Party operatives who make most of the major decisions for their rank and file? Probably not. But similar advice from loyal party columnists like Dana Milbank, Michelle Goldberg, Eugene Robinson, Charles Blow, E.J. Dionne, Paul Krugman, among others, may breach the upper deck’s aloofness.
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