(The following was originally published on the Green Party website and was a keynote address to the annual meeting of the Maine Green Independent Party.)
Portland, Maine
by John Rensenbrink
It is said quite often now that our future is in doubt. Meaning the future of us–us human beings on this planet. Can action by human beings prevent these dire predictions from coming true? Could Maine be a guiding star to help turn things in a positive direction? What can a political party like the Greens bring to the support of the Maine people in becoming a guiding star?
There is a wedge of time for us humans to fully take up the challenge and make a difference in the equations. We are not helpless. Even the worst case scenarios are based on extrapolations that do not include the efficacy of human choice. There is no expectation in the scenarios that human action could avert the destined destruction. The studies mostly assume that what is going down now will continue in the same downward pattern; there is no room made for human action between now and then, the date in the future by which time they estimate that such and such a dreadful thing will come to pass. So human action has a chance.
There is some comfort, some negative comfort, in this. Quite a bit I think. But it rivets attention on human action now.
Can Maine survive, perhaps thrive? Could Maine be a guiding star? Can the Green Party make an impact? Of what kind?
People are beginning to think survival. Many are buckling down to work in their communities for the long haul—the long haul that it will take to turn things around.
I am not thinking here of protests and demonstrations though those are also very important. They are important because they help to resist the forces that are leading us down a pathway to ruin.
What I am thinking of is people taking charge and digging in to provide for the staples of life and livelihood and the creative power of communities and neighborhoods.
People are growing their own food. They are supporting local farmers. Farmers’ Markets are multiplying. Young people are taking up farming as never before. People are keeping chickens and bees and making gardens on rooftops.
People are conserving energy, to save money and to save the planet. They are insulating homes, unplugging their appliances, hanging clothes out to dry in the sun, developing more energy efficient buildings.
People are connecting more deeply with family, neighbors and friends in our communities, learning to do more for ourselves and placing less value on consuming. People are creating social enterprises that build community and social capital.
Maine people are in the forefront of what YES! magazine calls the rise of the Do It Ourselves Economy. Similar things are happening in all the states and worldwide as well. There are 33,000 cooperatives in the United States with 130 million members. Thirteen million Americans are simultaneously workers and owners in 11,000 employee-owned companies. Nearly one million Americans worked in resource-efficiency and renewable-energy jobs in 2010 according to a Brookings Institute study. This figure is impressive of course but just a drop in the bucket of what is possible and can be striven for. Jill Stein, the Green Party’s candidate for president two years ago called for programs to push that figure up to 20 million green jobs. Which is more like it.
One could go on with this recitation of good things happening. Books are available plus countless blogs and magazine articles that catalogue and celebrate this rising trend, this quiet revolution in the making.
It’s more than a flash in the pan. Far more. But it is still a small thing. It needs protection. And it needs help to grow and flourish.
Protection and help are not forthcoming. Barriers are. In fact, the will and vigor and creative practices of the people are being undermined and suppressed. Huge corporations, behaving like juggernauts, are plundering natural resources and poisoning the air, water, and food. The Monsantos of the world, the oil and coal companies, the Wall Marts, the fracking companies, the big banks and Wall Street itself plunder and exploit nature and people wih reckless abandon.
Mammoth corporations are forcing working people to the wall for little pay and forcing them to compete with one another for jobs whose pay level does not meet the worker’s needs. They pre-empt and ruin small businesses even though it’s a long-standing record that small business provides more jobs than huge corporations.
People cry out for jobs that pay a livable wage. The polls regularly show this. They want clean air, clean water, clean food, clean neighborhoods.
And, speaking of clean, they want clean elections.
Aye, there’s the rub. And Maine is only one of a few states that has clean elections for state office, but even that is now being curbed and threatened.
By whom? The disturbing truth is that politics is taken over by a self-aggrandizing few. The Occupy Movement has laid that bare. The people are left out. Or crowded out. Or sentimentalized out. Or conn’d out. Or bought out. And many acquiesce. Many decide to go along to get along. Some say politics is stinky anyway. Let the bastards run the show. Why should I bother? Many others would bother. But most of the people who might bother are made too busy and anxious about their everyday needs, often desperate needs, to even think of bothering.
So we the people are badly use and abused. We are used for fighting wars, for paying taxes made ever so much higher because of the wars; and we are manipulated into voting against their own interests by the often ingenious and resourceful machinations of the dominant elite, the infamous 1 %.
Something interesting here about the 1%. What is their real situation like? How do they get and keep the power over us?
It used to be that the top one or two or five percent didn’t have to work very hard to manipulate the people. The kings ran the show. Their paid pundits and scholars, plus obedient men of the cloth, declared it the right of some to rule and others to obey. Hierarchy was celebrated and preached and the youth were indoctrinated accordingly.
But a change came, starting only a few centuries ago. The old rhetoric affirming and celebrating hierarchy and obedience to our rulers has been largely replaced. It’s been replaced by a new rhetoric– the rhetoric of democracy and equality and liberty. Now even high potentates mimic the words equality, democracy, liberty. It’s only mimicry, of course, but . . . .
But because of this historic change in rhetoric, the top 1 percent have to figure out adroit and subtle ways to keep power in their hands. They do this in many ways. I will mention several.
In our country, the 1% secure a two-party system. They try to make it seem un-patriotic, even un-American, to create third parties. They make the two party system fit the strategy of bad cop/good cop, tough guy/sympathetic guy, and they alternate them in office. Or, even better: in most congressional districts for example, it’s the Republican every time or the Democrat every time. In any case, this functions to keep the people out.
Securing the system is also done by expanding and deepening the role and influence of money, of which the top oligarchy has lots. Both of the two major parties and their candidates seek it and are showered with it in close to equal amounts. The money comes primarily from mammoth corporations and their hangers on.
Securing the system is also done by imposing and maintaining tight ballot access laws. It’s an unbelievably rigid system that defies imagination as much as it defies democracy. Consequently it is extremely difficult for third parties to get into or stay into politics in a serious way. The argument often used, backed by the Courts, is that allowing third parties on the ballot confuses the people.
Furthermore, to reinforce the exclusion of other voices, the Supreme Court interprets the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution in a manner that enables the 1 % to finance candidates of their persuasion to their hearts content; and enables them to justify this perversion of democracy as a right of freedom of speech; so that now money equals free speech. As a result money inundates every nook and cranny of an inherently corrupted system. Almost all of it is Big Money coming from the 1& and special interests. The people’s money is drowned and the little of it there is in most campaigns is ballyhooed as showing that the playing field, the paying field, is fair and equal.
To round out this pervasive exclusion of the people, top elite strategy is to capture the media. They have done so. Just a few rich and powerful corporations own the mass media. A daily barrage of one-sided information, distorted facts, and narrow viewpoints descends upon the people in an attempt to smother their common sense.
What the Big Money wants gets the priority in the media, in the universities, and in the halls of the legislatures, the executive, and the judiciary. What the big Money wants is the free wheeling opportunity to continue their reckless assault on air, water, food, the integrity of communities, on working men and women—on the people.
And yet one notes that the polls repeatedly show that people by substantial majorities want clean air, clean water, clean food, clean elections, and good meaningful jobs that pay a livable wage.
Thus the wall of exclusion continues to prevail as it did in olden times, but now it’s more devious, divisive and deadly.
We Greens in Maine have partly breached the wall of exclusion. Only very partly. For 30 years we have been building our party to breach the wall and offer with the public a party of a different kind.
A leading resolve of our party and movement is that we do not accept corporate money—either for our candidates or for our party. In the light of what I have just stated about how the top elite keep the power, it’s pretty clear that in rejecting corporate funding and special interest money, we chart a key pathway to a new politics of inclusion of all the people. We are a standing model of integrity for the other parties to emulate. This may seem a brash thing to say, but isn’t it really time for other parties to recognize that their way leads to a bought and sold politics, disastrous for them in the not so long run as well as bitterly ruinous for the people?
But there is much more that we bring to Maine’s future. In Portland, our biggest city, we have gained a substantial presence. We campaign hard. We have gained office for City Council and School Board. We have won a seat for a time in the state legislature, John Eder. A former prominent member of the party, Ben Chipman, now sits in the state legislature as an Independent and pursues actions that advance our issues. We do get the attention of the local media. We help propel successful campaigns, such as for Charter Commission and just recently for a referendum on marijuana legalization. We inspire demonstrations such as the one in Monument Square a few weeks ago to do battle against Monsanto. Also, and very important, we have supported the struggle for gay and lesbian rights from the get go. Which other party can claim that? And we celebrate the great victory for gay marriage.
In Portland and elsewhere in the state we run candidates for the Maine House and Senate. Many of them over the past decade have come close to winning their races. We have run candidates for governor and for the U.S. Senate. We have gone to bat for the U.S. Green Party’s candidates for President and Vice President. One of our members in fact was the U.S. Green Party candidate for Vice President, Pat LaMarche! This was in 2004.
As we do this, we are getting better at it. We are focusing a lot right now on the state House and Senate. We are getting closer to knowing fully what can be, and should be, the focus for policy by our legislators when and as they win office.
I feel strongly that what our legislators can bring is strong, timely, and agile support for the work that people are doing to enable Maine to become a guiding star. Maine people are taking action as I said at the start of my talk. It’s our opportunity and our responsibility to assist that action. Assist that action in two ways: one, stymie and where possible prevent big lobby-laden legislation that holds people back; and second enhance and deepen people’s self-help efforts .
One thinks of all the things that have been started by Maine people and that can grow in the next several years and beyond. Here are just a few: solar power for all households; local wind power projects all around; local farms, local foods everywhere; water controlled by municipalities, not by rapacious corporations; small business renaissance; full scale ecological and hands-on schooling and education; college education for all; homes and safe neighborhoods for all; a state bank; truly universal health care insurance; a fair tax structure; a minimum livable wage for a family. A Bath Iron Works that is dedicated anew to peacetime non-military production.
You and I could go on! They are all attainable right here in Maine. It’s a clear pathway whereby Maine can become a guiding star to help avert impending ruin and act to secure the hope of happiness for all people.
Does this help to explain what MGIP can bring to Maine’s future? Yes, let’s loosen up politics, make it work for people, make it so that their power can start flowing into the political system, start flowing so fast and deep that it inundates all the highways and byways of a corrupt, sick, and deadlocked system.
We are learning. Gaining confidence. We have made and will make mistakes. But as an ancient Chinese proverb has said: “a fall in the pit–a gain in your wit.”
And why should we not be confident: we are on the side of history; we are on the side of nature; we are on the side of justice; we are on the side of the people. One of Martin Luther King’s finest statements is this: “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” We know that. We know in our hearts and in our consciousness and in our conscience that this is where we want to be.