You can't vote for an antiwar candidate, a peace and justice candidate, if state laws keep peace and justice candidates off the ballot. You can't vote for a candidate opposing Common Core and school privatization if those are not allowed on the ballot. Up till now, Georgia's Democrats and Republicans have colluded to restrict the choices of voters by keeping other parties and candidates off the ballot. —Bruce Dixon, co-chair of the Georgia Green Party

Ballot access barriers were enacted with the exact intentions which drove poll taxes, literacy tests, all-white primaries and lynchings for those who would integrate them. Today Judge Story has helped us dismantle another of the bricks left standing in Georgia's Jim Crow legacy; one which has silenced the voices ready to offer a path forward from the crisis we face while the legacy parties squander resources on immoral wars of foreign aggression, sacrifice our health for the profits of the insurance, pharmaceutical and agriculture industries and our policy makers continue to bury their heads on the impact of global warming. —Hugh Esco, co-chair of the Georgia Green Party

Until March 17, 2016, the state of Georgia had the second-highest signature requirement in the nation, behind North Carolina. North Carolina now stands very, very far ahead at about 90,000 signatures required for a third party or independent to get on the ballot. Indiana is now second most restrictive at about 26,000 signatures.

In 2006 the North Carolina Green Party sued the state over the undemocratic signature requirement, but the case was decided in the state's favor.

On presidential Primary Day, Tuesday, March 15, 2016, we will stage a political intervention.

RSVP for it here!

The Democrat-Republican corporate duopoly does not serve our needs. Over 28% of North Carolinians do not identify with either party. North Carolina needs more choices—choices that are not addicted to corporate money and the cycle of havoc it has caused. 

The North Carolina Green Party will intervene by mobilizing 100+ activists to collect signatures on presidential Primary Day 2016 at polling stations to get the Green Party on the ballot. These activists will be:

-Green Party members
-Supporters of Dr. Jill Stein, Green Party candidate for president
-Libertarians, who'd rather have a real debate against Greens than a staged duopoly debate
-Other third parties, who know that if Greens can do this, then they will be able to as well
-Supporters of fair elections such as Free the Vote North Carolina
-Anti-capitalists who know the system is rigged for the 1%
-People who believe in peace and oppose the military–industrial complex and funding of war criminals
-Opponents of police militarization, private prisons, and the police state
-People of color who know the two-party corporate system is complicit in institutional racism
-LGBTQIA+ people who know the Green Party has stood up for their rights before the Republicrats
-Environmentalists who know we must act now to save the planet from human-induced climate change
-People who want clean, green, stable jobs
-Laborers who want the right to unionize in North Carolina
-Students who want to abolish student debt and get rid of a homophobic UNC president
-Persons with disability who want access to better coverage and equal paying jobs
-People that know drugs are a medical issue not a criminal issue—that pot should be legal
-Supporters of "home-rule" who understand the Democrat-Republicans in Raleigh don't know what's best for our communities
-And so many more

Together, the Green Party will get on the ballot and stay there, allowing radically different candidates to run for office.

North Carolina will have four options in 2016. We look forward to debating the Libertarians on the many significant things that we disagree on. The Green Party looks forward to running candidates to speak up for the people of North Carolina, and how the duopoly of Republicans & Democrats have not best served the people.

Until then we are all staging an intervention on this broken two-party system that has not worked, is not working, and will not work.

RSVP here to collect signatures on presidential Primary Day, March 15, 2016, at a polling station near you to get the Green Party on the ballot.

Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein was recently interviewed by Larisa Karr of Asheville, North Carolina, for the UNCA Blue Banner newspaper. The story is here.

Supplementary video interview below.

The International Socialist Organization has been organizing discussion panels across the country on whether socialists and the broader left should be supporting the Bernie Sanders campaign or backing the Green Party. The following panel, titled "Socialism, Bernie Sanders, and the Democratic Party: Debating the 2016 Election," was held in NYC in mid-December. See the full video below.

Green Party of New York State co-chair Gloria Mattera speaks beginning at minute 20:45 and argues that the left needs to support Jill Stein and the Green Party now, rather than later. Mattera is also a senior staffer with the Jill Stein campaign.

On November 16, Governor Pat McCrory, in concert with other Republican governors and congressional members, called for the federal government to cease accepting refugees from Syria and vowed to stop accepting Syrian refugees into North Carolina. In light of the complicity of the United States and its allies in the creation and arming of ISIS, and in particular the role of Republican and Democratic lawmakers in creating the refugee crisis, this action cannot be viewed as sincere concern on the governor’s part.

ISIS is a creature of the United States that came into being to fill the political vacuum created by the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our clumsy attempts at regime change in Syria created a new space for ISIS to occupy. Arms that were intended for “moderate” rebels in Syria and for Kurds in Iraq have ended up in the hands of ISIS. Our allies in the region, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, pretend to fight ISIS while providing material support to them. Saudi Arabia is the source of Wahhabi Islam, the repressive fundamentalist ideology that ISIS espouses. Turkey, a NATO member country, freely allows militants and arms for ISIS to cross its borders, while closing the border to Syrian refugees and Kurds fighting against ISIS.

The Syrians who have been displaced by the ongoing war are not terrorists. They are ordinary citizens whose homes, jobs, and neighborhoods no longer exist. McCrory and his conservative cohort present them not as people displaced by war but as primitive and dangerous outsiders. Like citizens of the United States, Syrian refugees want peace and prosperity, and the United States has played a primary role in denying those conditions in their homeland.

McCrory has no authority to deny them entry into North Carolina—refugee resettlement decisions are made only on the federal level—and he knows that the United States already has stringent background checks in place. The North Carolina Green Party calls on Governor McCrory to stop promoting distrust and fear against Syrians, and to make North Carolina welcoming to all political refugees and asylum seekers.

For more information, contact Wayne Turner, North Carolina Green Party co-chair, at (919) 491-3186 or [email protected].

Dr. Jill Stein just finished a whirlwind tour of North Carolina November 14–17, stopping for events in Charlotte, Asheville, Greensboro, Raleigh, and Durham.

During Stein's visit, she and Bruce Dixon (of Black Agenda Report and the Georgia Green Party), as well as North Carolina Green Party co-chair Wayne Turner, Michael Dennis of the Triangle Greens, and I talked to many people about ballot access in our state and laid out a new plan for mobilizing supporters and achieving it. Stein’s tour got ample media coverage, relatively speaking, appearing in at least 9 media outlets we know of. And we signed up many people to help with our ballot access effort.

Our goal: obtain 200 volunteers committed to collecting 500 signatures in the next 6 months.

These numbers might seem high, but they are completely doable—as long as we all understand that it’s possible to collect 100+ signatures in one day’s work. Example: In the Triangle, NC Green Party member Jan Martell collected 188 the other day. I collected 110. And Wayne Turner collected 37 in a matter of an hour and a half. We simply need your commitment and camaraderie in this effort. We’ve already had 33 people sign up to help in just a few days.

We will kick off this initiative with a BALLOT ACCESS PLEDGE.  Michael Dennis of Durham has built this new North Carolina Green Party website on the NationBuilder platform to launch the initiative. It is a powerful tool to help us get this work done—to keep us connected to each other and to emphasize the shared nature of this work.

Please go to the website http://ncgreenparty.nationbuilder.com/ballot_pledge to read and sign the pledge. Forward this link to other people in your networks that might be interested.

When you take the pledge, you won’t be alone: We’ll follow up with you, answer your questions, and provide you with resources both for gathering signatures and enlisting new petition carriers. (We don’t merely want people to sign. We want to turn signers into people who collect signatures.) And we’ll notify you of venues and events in your area that are prime venues for gathering signatures.

We are also working to get other organizations on board as allies in our petition drive. Already the International Socialist Organization chapter in Asheville has committed to gathering signatures for us. They are very impressed with Jill Stein and helped bring out about 80 people for her talk at UNCA last Sunday, November 15. If that non-Green group has committed to helping us, I would hope that our own Green membership will also commit. We will continue to keep you informed as more organizations and individuals come on board.

Let’s start meeting locally and start talking seriously about getting a ballot line for 2016. Unless each one of us commits now, there will be no alternative to Hillary Clinton and the GOP in 2016.

Michael Trudeau

Triangle Green Party
[email protected]

The Energy Modernization Act: A Green Response

On Thursday, May 26 the North Carolina legislature passed, with no public input and no committee debate, Senate Bill 786, which is a bill to expedite fracking for natural gas in North Carolina. This bill is odious in many ways, but there are two provisions in particular that stand out as representative of the open contempt of the government for the citizenry and for the exercise of democratic government.
 
The first and most publicly discussed is the provision that protects the contents of fracking fluids as trade secrets, and makes their disclosure to the public by anyone other than the owners of the product a felony. This provision is deliberately intended to cow the opponents of fracking. It places the interests of private companies over that of the citizens who might be affected by the companies’ actions, and it reveals the legislature as a tool of those interests. This cannot be disguised by any amount of braying about job creation and cheaper energy. And it reveals that the legislature's and the governor’s attitude towards the citizens of NC is one of disdain for their voice, disregard for their future and sneering contempt for the idea of a government that works for the good of all.

The second and less discussed provision of the bill, but possibly the one with the greatest impact from the Green point of view, is section 113-415.1. Titled explicitly "Local ordinances prohibiting oil and gas exploration, development, and production activities invalid; petition to preempt local ordinance.", the provision contains the following language " It is the intent of the General Assembly .... to place limitations upon the exercise by all units of local government in North Carolina of the power to regulate the management of oil and gas exploration, development, and production activities...".

The Green principal of decentralization of power is clearly violated by this language. Greens maintain that the concentration of power in the hands of a central authority leads to concentration of wealth, militarization and a diminution of democracy. All of the seeds of those consequences are contained in the sweeping and arrogant language of this provision.

Additionally, this language makes a mockery of the "small-government" ideas so publicly beloved (and privately belittled) by the Republican Party and its extremists. In effect it says, "Small government for me, but not for thee." That this dissonance is not acknowledged by the bill's proponents speaks volumes about the intellectual and moral barrenness of the Republican Party, and that of the Democrats that voted with them.

The North Carolina Green Party calls upon the citizens of North Carolina to reject the ideas inherent in the passage of this bill and decry the ill-concealed anti-democratic intent of the legislature and the governor in creating, passing and signing into law this deliberately malicious piece of legislation.

 NCGP Endorses Solarize Charlotte

Solarize Charlotte is part of a statewide effort to make going solar as easy and affordable as possible. The North Carolina Green Party enthusiastically endorses this effort to help provide clean, local, economical alternatives to fossil fuels, which have devastated and degraded our land, water and air and continue to push us toward catastrophic climate change. Solar power is an investment in clean air and water, jobs in the community, and most importantly an investment in our future.

Join the Fight for 15 Campaign in NC.
Contact Ben Carroll at [email protected] .

The North Carolina Green Party Supports Increasing the Minimum Wage to at least $15.00/hr.

 If the supply of money is fixed and is doled out in the zero-sum game that conservatives argue constitutes the economy, then the Green values of Social Justice and Equal Opportunity demand that workers be compensated adequately for their labor. In the last four decades, the gap between the bottom economic rungs and the top earners in our society has increased to levels not understood by the general public. As pointed out in a paper produced by the National Bureau of Economic Research, and quoted from an article in the March 31 issue of Scientific American, “The top 20% of US households own more than 84% of the wealth, and the bottom 40% combine for a paltry 0.3%. The Walton family, for example, has more wealth than 42% of American families combined.” The idea that increasing the wealth of a fraction of the bottom 40 percent of the population will spell economic doom in the face of such gargantuan disparity in wealth is unsupported and suggests either irrational fear or insatiable greed on the part of opponents of minimum-wage increases. If we are willing as a nation to permanently consign increasing numbers of our population to permanent economic underclass status so that a small percentage of the population can live in opulence, then social justice and equal opportunity have become empty rhetorical phrases. The North Carolina Green Party believes that it is possible for all people to have a decent and dignified life without the need to struggle desperately for the bare necessities of survival. Increasing the minimum wage to at least $15.00 per hour is an important step in realizing that goal. 

Supporting Data  for an Increase in the Minimum Wage

The typical arguments against increasing the minimum wage are

• Minimum-wage jobs are entry-level jobs. Paying more than minimum wage removes the incentive for people to get ahead. This argument is usually accompanied by an anecdote telling how Person A went from (insert low-skill job here) to being the master of his or her own destiny, if not the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. 
• Businesses will fail due to the burden of paying employees a livable wage. 
• The pool of jobs available to all workers will decrease as businesses make do with fewer workers to cut down on labor expenses.
• Increasing the minimum wage does not reduce poverty. 

There are other arguments against raising the minimum wage that deserve closer attention. These arguments use labor, poverty, and employment data in a sparse and one-dimensional fashion, without acknowledgement of the myriad causes of poverty or the impact of an increase in the minimum wage on the overall economy (see here for a Heritage Foundation argument against minimum-wage increase). 

Perhaps one of the most disingenuous arguments is that a minimum-wage increase will help only a relatively few people in the workforce. Per an analysis at Politifact, using 2013 data, only 2.6 percent of the population is paid at or below the federal minimum of $7.25 per hour. This works out to a little over 4 million people. What is left unsaid (and the listener is not supposed to think about) is that an increase in the minimum wage helps anybody who is working below the level of the proposed new wage floor. What if the wage earner makes $9.25 an hour and the new minimum is $15.00? Suddenly a lot more people benefit from the wage increase.

According to a list of potential benefits put out by the National Employment Law Project (NELP), an organization that works on labor policy issues affecting low-wage workers, more than 35 million employees would benefit from an increase in the minimum wage to $12.00 (by the year 2020). This number includes 19.6 million women. 

The NELP list includes other segments of the working population, in percentages of the total labor force that might benefit from a wage increase. For example, 35 percent of the African American labor force, or about 11 million people, would benefit from an increase in the minimum wage (derived from Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) numbers for 2015 estimated employment). 

What would the impact of an increase in the minimum wage be on the economy? This is argued back and forth by economists of various ideological bents. However, one thing is certain: workers earning minimum wage have little purchasing power. In a 2013 article in the Atlantic, a graph from BLS data shows that the purchasing power of the minimum wage peaked in 1968 when the federal minimum wage was just $1.60. In 2013, this was equivalent to earning $10.56. Since 1968, although the value of the minimum wage has (slowly) risen, an increase in the hourly wage from $1.60 to $7.25 has been handily outpaced by inflation. The net result is that a person earning minimum wage today actually makes $3.31 an hour less than his or her counterpart in 1968, without considering further erosion due to inflation since 2013.

The arguments against increases in minimum wage—which sound strangely like the arguments cited when Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Fair Labor Standards Act into law in 1938—have always focused on the detrimental effect on businesses. However, as the Economic Policy Institute documents, during 1978 to 2011 while the minimum wage increased from $2.65 to $7.25 an hour, the average wage compensation for CEOs of publicly traded companies increased from approximately $1 million to over $12 million annually. In that same period, the ratio of CEO wages to workers’ wages increased from 18.3:1 to 209.4:1.

Let’s assume that there are only 4 million workers affected by a minimum-wage increase, as many opponents claim. If the wages of each worker were increased by $5.00 per hour, the total increase would be $20 million. That means the average annual salary of only two CEOs is sufficient to increase the pretax income of 4 million people by 69 percent. This is a fact of the economy we live in. And this is wages only—it does not consider stock options, golden parachutes, and other incentives. (See William Black of New Economic Perspectives for insight into how these compensation packages create perverse incentives for CEOs to enrich themselves at the expense of the investors.)

None of this takes into account gains in worker productivity, which would make todays minimum wage at least $16.54 per hour, or the fact that today’s minimum-wage workers are considerably more educated than minimum-wage workers in 1968. 

Another potential impact of an increase in the minimum wage that is routinely ignored by opponents is the effect that higher wages in the pockets of workers have on economies. Opponents have always claimed that businesses will go under every time the minimum wage goes up. Since after decades of economic analysis this never seems to actually happen, what would be the effect on economies if workers had more money in their pockets? Low-wage workers spend money. Like any CEO, they have to eat; live under a roof; and pay for transportation, clothing, and medical care. Grocery stores, clothing stores, apartment complexes, car dealers, and bicycle shops, and even the fast-food chains and other restaurants that so bitterly oppose increases in the minimum wage, would be the beneficiaries of this money. The principle here is that one person’s expenditures are another person’s income. If few people have money to spend, few people can make a living. This is a prima facie cause of the economic slump we are in today. 

In sum, the North Carolina Green Party supports an increase in the minimum wage to at least $15.00 per hour because

• Providing a living wage to every worker affirms their intrinsic value as human beings.
• Our broader economy will be stronger.
• Economic realities, such as inflation, demand that wages rise with changes in the purchasing power of money.
• It is time for the pendulum of economic power to begin to return from its extreme that favors the wealthy and politically connected over the needs of a majority of the population.

Join the Fight for 15 Campaign in NC.
Contact Ben Carroll at [email protected] .

Jill Stein will tour North Carolina from November 14-17. 

For more detailed event information, continue to keep checking out Events section as well as the NCGP Facebook page. Details will be updated as they are confirmed. 

November 14: Charlotte
--NCGP Semi-Annual Party Meeting
--Meet & Greet Fundraiser @ TBD

November 15: Asheville
--Talk at UNC-Asheville with the International Socialist Organization
--Meet & Greet Fundraiser @ Block Off Biltmore

November 16: Triad
--Panel Discussion on Intersectional Justice @ Guilford College
--Meet & Greet Fundraiser @ TBD

November 17: Triangle
--Talk at Duke University with Students for Justice in Palestine
--Meet & Greet Fundraiser @ TBD