***Platform** **of the Greens/Green Party USA***

This platform was adopted by the delegates of the membership of the
Greens/Green Party USA (G/GPUSA) at their annual Green Congress, meeting
in Chicago, May 26-28, 2000. It reflects the majority views of the
G/GPUSA membership.

G/GPUSA's national officers, spokespeople, and National Committee are
expected to act ina manner consistent with the policy framework set by
this platform. In keeping with G/GPUSA's structure of "democratic
decentralism" where accountability is bottom-up, not top-down, the
platform is not binding on the state and local affiliates of the
Greens/Green Party USA.

This platform, therefore, does not necessarily reflect in every respect
the views of Green Party candidates at any level, including Ralph Nader
and Winona LaDuke, Green Party candidates for President and
Vice-President in 2000.

*The Greens/Green Party USA is the original Green Party organization in
the USA. It carries forward the radical vision of the early Greens based
on grassroots political and economic democracy, nonviolence, social
justice, and ecological sustainability.*

*Formed as the Committees of Correspondence in 1984, the annual Green
Congress changed the name to Green Committees of Correspondence in 1989
and to The Greens/Green Party USA in 1991. G/GPUSA is a membership
organization of individual members who participate in affiliated local
and state organizations and support the organization with dues scaled to
their ability to pay. G/GPUSA is structured as a confederation of local
and state affiliates, with 40 local organizations and 19 state
organizations, including 15 state Green Parties, affiliated at the time
of the May 2000 Green Congress in Chicago.*

Green politics is an ecological approach to politics that links social
and ecological problems. Ecology studies the relationships among
organisms and their environment. Political ecology brings human
institutions and ideologies into this holistic perspective.

We find that the same institutions and ideas that cause the exploitation
and oppression of humans also cause the degradation and destruction of
the environment. Both are rooted in a hierarchical, exploitative, and
alienated social system that systematically produces human oppression
and ecological destruction.

For the Greens, therefore, the fights against racism, sexism, class
exploitation, bureaucratic domination, war, and all other forms of
social domination and violence are central to the movement for an
ecologically sustainable society. In order to harmonize society with
nature, we must harmonize human with human.

The Greens carry forward the traditional values of the Left: freedom,
equality, and solidarity. We want to create a truly democratic society
without class exploitation or social domination. But Greens expand this
notion of a classless, nonhierarchical society that is harmonized with
itself to include an ecological society that is harmonized with nature
as well.

To the social movements, the Greens say that in order for humanity to
progress toward a democratic society, we must resolve the ecological
crisis so that people are still around to enjoy democracy. To the
environmental movements, the Greens say that in order to have an
ecological society, we must have a democratic society so that people
have the power to choose ecological sustainability. To survive, we must
have ecological sustainability. To choose ecological sustainability, we
must have the power of democracy.

The following platform planks are the immediate policy goals we support
to move us toward an ecological democracy.

***An Economic Bill of RightsAn Economic Bill of Rights***

-   **Universal Social Security:** Taxable Basic Income Grants for all,
    structured into the progressive income tax, that guarantee an
    adequate income sufficient to maintain a modest standard of living.
    Start at \$500/week (\$26,000/year) for a family of four, with
    \$62.50/week (\$3,250/year) adjustments for more or fewer household
    members in 2000 and index to the cost of living.

-   **Jobs for All:** A guaranteed right to job. Full employment through
    community-based public works and community service jobs programs,
    federally financed and community controlled.

-   **Living Wages:** A family-supporting minimum wage. Start at \$12.50
    per hour in 2000 and index to the cost of living.

-   **30-Hour Work Week:** A 6-hour day with no cut in pay for the
    bottom 80% of the pay scale.

-   **Social Dividends:** A "second paycheck" for workers enabling them
    to receive 40 hours pay for 30 hours work. Paid by the government
    out of progressive taxes so that social productivity gains are
    shared equitably.

-   **Universal Health Care:** A single-payer National Health Program to
    provide free medical and dental care for all, federally financed and
    controlled by democratically elected local boards.

-   **Free Child Care:** Available voluntarily and free for all who need
    it, modeled after Head Start, federally financed, and community
    controlled.

-   **Lifelong Public Education:** Free, quality public education from
    pre-school through graduate school at public institutions.

-   **Affordable Housing:** Expand rental and home ownership assistance,
    fair housing enforcement, public housing, and capital grants to
    non-profit developers of affordable housing until all people can
    obtain decent housing at no more than 25% of their income.
    Democratic community control of publicly funded housing programs.

***Grassroots DemocracyGrassroots Democracy***

-   **Community Assemblies:** Ground political representation in a
    foundation of participatory, direct democracy: a Community Assembly
    in every neighborhood, open to all of its residents, acting as a
    grassroots legislative body, with its own budget for local
    administration, and the power (in concert with other Citizens
    Assemblies who share a representative) to monitor, instruct, and
    recall representatives elected to municipal, state, and federal
    office.

-   **A Proportional, Single-Chamber US Congress:** Abolish the
    disproportional, aristocratic US Senate. Create a single-chamber US
    Congress, elected by a system of mixed-member proportional
    representation that combines district representatives elected by
    preference voting and party representatives seated in proportion to
    each party's vote.

-   **Environmental Home Rule:** Establish the right of every state,
    county, and municipality to restrict or prohibit the production,
    sale, distribution, storage, or transportation of any substance it
    designates as dangerous or toxic.

-   **Average Workers' Pay for Elected Officials:** Pay elected
    officials average workers' salaries so that they understand the
    needs of average people and stop being an elite of professional
    politicians with separate class interests.

-   **DC Statehood:** Full self-government and congressional
    representation for the people of Washington DC.

***Fair ElectionsFair Elections***

-   **Proportional Representation:** Elect legislative bodies by
    proportional representation where each party has representation in
    proportion to its total vote.

-   **Preference Voting:** Elect single offices by majority preference
    voting where voters rank candidates in order of preference and votes
    are distributed according to preferences in instant runoffs until a
    winner receives a majority of votes.

    **Public Campaign and Party Financing:** Equal public campaign
    financing and free broadcast media time for all candidates who agree
    not to use private money. Equal free broadcast media time for party
    broadcasts. Public financing of parties through matching funds for
    party dues and small donations up to \$300 a year.

-   **Fair Ballot Access:** Federal legislation to require each state to
    enable a new party or any independent candidate to qualify for the
    ballot through a petition of no greater than 1/10^th^ of 1% of the
    total vote cast in the district in the last gubernatorial election,
    with a 10,000 signature maximum.

-   **Eliminate Mandatory Primaries:** Allow parties the right to
    nominate by membership convention instead of state-run primaries.

***Ecological Conversion***

-   **Ecological Production:** Set goals and timetables to phase out and
    ban the production and release of synthetic chemicals and to convert
    all production to materials that are bio-degradable, bio-inert, or
    confined to closed-loop industrial cycles. Use federal investments,
    purchasing, mandates, and incentives to:

-   Phase out most chlorinated and other synthetic petrochemicals and
    phase in natural, biodegradable substitutes.

-   Phase out synthetic fertilizers and pesticides and phase in organic
    agriculture.

-   Shut down waste incinerators, phase out landfills, and phase in full
    recycling.

-   Require manufacturers to be responsible for the whole life cycle of
    their products by taking back used packaging and products for
    re-manufacturing, reuse, or recycling.

-   Legalize industrial hemp as an ecological source for wood pulp,
    paper, cloth, lubricants, fibers, and many other products.

-   **Renewable Energy:** Invest non-renewable energy sources in the
    creation of self-reproducing, renewable energy systems. Use federal
    investments, purchasing, mandates, and incentives to:

-   Shut down nuclear power plants.

-   Phase out fossil fuels and phase in clean renewable energy sources.

-   Reduce auto-based transportation and expand pedestrian, bicycle, and
    rail transportation.

-   **Biotechnology---No Patents on Life; No Transgenic Organisms:**

-   Ban patents on life forms in order to preserve genetic diversity and
    common access to our common inheritance of nature, including
    farmers' access to seeds and breeds.

-   Ban the release into the environment and the use in food production
    of genetically modified organisms that result from splicing the
    genes of one species into another.

-   **Environmental Defense and Restoration:**

-   Full funding for anti-pollution enforcement and toxic sites clean-up

-   Preserve ecosystems and biodiversity by strengthening the Endangered
    Species Act and expanding areas designated as wildlife refuges and
    wilderness areas.

-   Ban old-growth logging, clear cutting, and strip mining.

-   End all commercial exploitation of public lands by private timber,
    mining, and cattle grazing interests.

-   Ban off-road vehicles on federal lands. Decommission National Forest
    logging roads.

-   Restoration of public lands degraded by commercial interests.

-   Manage federal lands primarily for ecosystem protection and
    restoration.

-   Support large-scale ecological restoration based on conservation
    biology.

-   **Environmental Justice:** Strengthen and enforce laws against
    targeting toxic industries and dumps and air pollution at ethnic
    minority communities.

-   **A Just Transition:** A Superfund for Workers to guarantee full
    income and benefits for all workers displaced by ecological
    conversion until they find new jobs with comparable income and
    benefits.

***Sustainable Agriculture***

-   **Fair Farm Price Supports**: Reform farm price supports to cover
    the costs of production plus a living income for family farmers and
    farm worker cooperatives.

-   **Subsidize Transition to Organic Agriculture**: Subsidize farmers'
    transition to organic agriculture while natural systems of soil
    fertility and pest control are being restored.

-   **Support Small Farmers:** Create family farms and farm worker
    cooperatives through a homesteading program and land reform based on
    acreage limitations and residency requirements.

-   **Break Up Corporate Agribusiness:** Antitrust enforcement to break
    up corporate agribusiness in farm supplies, food processing, and
    wholesale and retail marketing. First option to buy divested
    businesses to cooperatives of working farmers and consumers. Support
    integrated, self-reliant, regional food systems managed by farmer
    and consumer cooperatives.

***Economic DemocracyEconomic Democracy***

-   **Eliminate Corporate Personhood:** Legislation or constitutional
    amendment to end the legal fiction of corporate
    personhood.**Eliminate Corporate Personhood** Legislation or
    constitutional amendment to end the legal fiction of corporate
    personhood.

-   **End Corporate Limited Liability:** Make corporate shareholders
    bear the same liabilities as other property owners.

-   **Federal Chartering of Interstate Corporations**

-   **Periodic Review of Corporate Charters:** A public corporate
    charter review process for each corporation above \$20 million in
    assets every 20 years to see if it is serving the public interest
    according to social and ecological as well as financial criteria.

-   **Strengthen Anti-Trust Enforcement:** Require breakup of any firm
    with more than 10% market share unless it makes a compelling case
    every five years in a public regulatory proceeding that it serves
    the public interest to keep the firm intact.

-   **Democratic Production:** Establish the right of citizens to vote
    on the expansion or phasing out of products and industries,
    especially in areas of dangerous or toxic production.

-   **Workplace Democracy:** Establish the right of workers at every
    enterprise over 10 employees to elect supervisors and managers and
    to determine how to organize work.

-   **Worker Control of Worker Assets---Pension Funds and ESOP Shares:**
    Pension funds representing over \$5 trillion in deferred wages
    account for nearly one-third of financial assets in the US. 11
    million workers participate in employee stock-option plans (ESOPs).
    Reform ERISA, labor laws, and ESOP tax provisions to enable workers
    to democratically control their assets.

-   **Democratic Conversion of Big Business**: Mandatory break-up and
    conversion to democratic worker, consumer, and/or public ownership
    on a human scale of the largest 500 US industrial and commercial
    corporations that account for about 10% of employees, 50% of
    profits, 70% of sales, and 90% of manufacturing assets.

-   **Democratic Conversion of Small and Medium Business:** Financial
    and technical incentives and assistance for voluntary conversion of
    the 22.5 million small and medium non-farm businesses in the US to
    worker or consumer cooperatives or democratic public enterprises.
    Mandate that workers and the community have the first option to buy
    on preferential terms in cases of plant closures, the sale or merger
    of significant assets, or the revocation of corporate charters.

-   **Democratic Banking:** Mandatory conversion of the 200 largest
    banks with 80% of all bank assets into democratic publicly-owned
    community banks. Financial and technical incentives and assistance
    for voluntary conversion of other privately-owned banks into
    publicly-owned community banks or consumer-owned credit unions.

-   **Democratize Monetary Policy and the Federal Reserve System:**
    Place a 100% reserve requirement on demand deposits in order to
    return control of monetary policy from private bankers to elected
    government. Selection of Federal Reserve officers by our elected
    representatives, not private bankers. Strengthen the regional
    development mission of the regional Federal Reserve Banks by
    directing them to target investments to promote key policy
    objectives, such as high-wage employment, worker and community
    ownership, ecological production, and inner city reconstruction.

***Progressive and Ecological TaxesProgressive and Ecological Taxes***

-   **Ecological Taxes:** Tax pollution, resource extraction, harmful
    products, and the use of our common wealth of natural capital (land
    sites according to land value, timber and grazing lands, ocean and
    freshwater resources, oil and minerals, electromagnetic spectrum,
    satellite orbital zones).

-   **Simple, Progressive Income Taxes:** Enact a no‑loopholes,
    graduated personal income tax with equal taxation of all income,
    regardless of source. Provide an income tax credit for each
    dependent to replace and fully compensate for the current exemptions
    and deductions that benefit to the average taxpayer, such as the
    home mortgage deduction and medical deductions.

-   **Eliminate Regressive Payroll Taxes:** Fund Social Security, Health
    Care, Unemployment Insurance, and Workers Compensation out of
    progressive income and wealth taxes.

-   **Guaranteed Adequate Income:** Build taxable Basic Income Grants
    into the progressive income tax structure to create a Universal
    Social Security system that ensures everyone has income for at least
    a modest standard of living above the poverty line.

-   **Maximum Income:** Build into the progressive income tax a 100% tax
    on all income over ten times the minimum wage.

-   **End Corporate Welfare:** Target subsidies for worker- and
    community-owned enterprises, not absentee-owned corporations. Put
    subsidies in the public budgets where they can be scrutinized, not
    hidden as tax breaks in complicated tax codes.

-   **Progressively Graduated Corporate Revenue and Asset Taxes**

-   **Wealth Tax:** Enact a steeply progressive tax on net wealth over
    \$2.5 million (the top 5% of households).

-   **Inheritance Tax:** Replace the loophole-ridden estate tax with a
    no-loopholes, progressive inheritance tax on inheritances over \$1
    million.

-   **Stock and Bond Transfer Tax:** Encourage a shift from speculative
    to productive investments through a federal stock and bond transfer
    tax on all securities transactions.

-   **Currency Speculation Tax:** An internationally uniform tax on
    currency conversion to discourage speculation. Revenues from the
    currency speculation tax should be channeled through international
    agencies into ecologically sustainable, democratically controlled
    development in poor countries.

-   **Advertising Tax:** A tax on advertising to fund a decentralized,
    pluralistic media system of real public broadcasting, public service
    broadcasting on commercial media, and independent nonprofit,
    noncommercial media**.**

-   **Federal Revenue Sharing:** Reduce state and local government
    dependence on regressive sales and property taxes through federal
    revenue sharing that combines centralized collection of progressive
    and ecological taxes with decentralized decisions on spending.

-   **Ecological and Feminist Economic Accounting:** Expand the Bureau
    of Labor Statistics into a Bureau of Household, Labor, and
    Environmental Statistics with revised national economic accounts,
    statistics, and indicators that include stocks and flows of natural
    wealth, household production, and labor time values. Existing
    national income accounts and indicators such as gross domestic
    product (GDP) ignore the ecological foundations of the economy and
    the value of household production. Ecological accounting will
    identify the true costs of resource depletion and pollution and
    hence appropriate eco-taxes to internalize full costs. Social
    accounting will identify the true value of household production and
    its contribution to the economy and social well-being. Labor time
    accounting will record and publish the current and dated labor time
    for goods and services, establishing the average labor time required
    for each product. These labor time values will serve as shadow
    prices against which to judge the fairness of actual market prices.

***Human Rights and Social JusticeHuman Rights and Social Justice***

-   **End Institutionalized Racism, Sexism, and Oppression of People
    with Disabilities:** Strengthen civil rights, anti-discrimination,
    and affirmative action laws, programs, and enforcement.

-   **African American Reparations:** A national commission on
    reparations for African Americans.

-   **Indian Treaty Rights:** Honor all treaty obligations with Native
    Americans and Chicanos.

    **Immigrant Rights:** Support the rights of immigrants to housing,
    education, health care, jobs, and civil, legal, and political
    rights.

-   **Reproductive Freedom:** People should be free from government
    interference in making their reproductive choices, including
    abortion, which should be covered by all publicly funded medical
    insurance programs.

-   **Comparable Worth:** Legislation to enable women and minorities to
    receive equal pay for work of equal value.

-   **End Discrimination Against Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and
    Transgendered People:** Outlaw discrimination on the basis of sexual
    orientation in housing, employment, benefits, and child custody.

-   **Same-Sex Marriage:** Legal recognition of same-sex marriages.

***Criminal and Civil Justice ReformsCriminal Justice***

-   **Abolish the Death PenaltyAbolish the Death Penalty**

-   **Prosecute Police Brutality---The Jonny Gammage Law:** Require
    independent federal investigation and prosecution of law enforcement
    officers charged with violating the civil rights or causing the
    bodily injury or death of a human being.

-   **End Political and Racial Persecution by the Criminal Justice
    System:** Freedom for all political prisoners and prisoners of
    racial injustice. Clemency for Leonard Peltier. New trial for Mumia
    Abu-Jamal.

-   **Restorative Justice:** Establish a humane criminal sanction system
    based on prevention, restitution, rehabilitation, and reconciliation
    rather than vengeance, forced labor, and profits for the
    Prison-Industrial Complex. Restore full funding for college degree
    granting programs in state and federal prisons. Jobs and justice,
    not more police and prisons.

-   **Legal Aid:** Expand funding of legal aid and public defender
    programs so all people can have competent legal representation.

-   **Fight Corporate Crime:** Strengthen laws and enforcement against
    corporate crime with penalties that include incarceration of
    executives and revocation of corporate charters.

-   **Oppose Tort Reform that Limits Class Action Lawsuits and Caps
    Victims' Compensation:** The threat of high victim compensation
    awards by civil juries must be maintained as an important deterrent
    to corporate crime.

-   **Civil Liberties**: Support the Bill of Rights. No compromise on
    civil liberties and due process for "national security,"
    "anti-terrorism," or "the war on drugs." Repeal the 1994 Crime and
    1996 Anti-Terrorism bills. End domestic political spying by police,
    military, and intelligence agencies.

-   **End the "War on Drugs:"** Decriminalize possession of drugs.
    Regulate and tax drug distribution. Release nonviolent drug war
    prisoners. Treat drug abuse as a health problem, not a criminal
    problem. Drug abuse treatment on demand.

***Labor Law ReformsLabor Law Reform***

-   **Repeal Repressive Labor Laws:** Repeal the Taft-Hartley Act, the
    Landrum-Griffin Act, the Hatch Act, and state "Right-To-Work" laws
    which have crippled labor's ability to organize by outlawing or
    severely restricting labor's basic organizing tools: strikes,
    boycotts, pickets, and political action.

-   **A Workers' Bill of Rights:** Enact a set of legally enforceable
    civil rights, independent of collective bargaining, which (1)
    extends the Bill of Rights protections of free speech, association,
    and assembly into all workplaces, (2) establishes workers' rights to
    living wages, portable pensions, information about chemicals used,
    report labor and environmental violations, refuse unsafe work, and
    participate in enterprise governance, and (3) establishes workers'
    rights to freedom from discharge at will, employer search and
    seizure in the workplace, sexual harassment, and unequal pay for
    work of comparable worth.

-   **Expand Worker' Rights to Organize and Enjoy Free Time:Repeal
    Repressive Labor Laws** Repeal the Taft-Hartley Act, the
    Landrum-Griffin Act, the Hatch Act, and state ARight-To-Work@ laws
    which have crippled labor=s ability to organize by outlawing or
    severely restricting labor=s basic organizing tools strikes,
    boycotts, and pickets.

-   **Majority Card-Check Recognition of Unions**

-   **Strong and Speedy Penalties for Employers Who Break Labor
    LawsStrong and Speedy Penalties for Employers Who Break Labor Laws**

-   **Ban Striker ReplacementsBan Striker Replacements**

-   **Triple Back Pay for Illegally Locked-Out WorkersTriple Back Pay
    for Illegally Locked-Out Workers**

-   **Unemployment Compensation for Striking and Locked-Out
    WorkersUnemployment Compensation for Striking and Locked-Out
    Workers**

-   **Binding Contract Arbitration at Union Request**

-   **Full Rights for Farmworkers, Public Employees, and "Workfare"
    Workers under the Fair Labor Standards Act**

-   **Ban Prison Slave Labor:** End the use of US prisoners to produce
    goods and services for sale to the public.

-   **Double-Time Pay for All Overtime**

-   **Prohibit Mandatory Overtime**

-   **6 Weeks Paid Vacation Annually in addition to Federal Holidays**

-   **1 Year Paid Educational Leave for Every 7 Years Worked**

-   **1 Year Parental Leave for Each Child Born with No Loss of
    Seniority**

-   **Right to Work Short Hours:** No discrimination in pay and
    promotion against workers who choose to work short hours.

***Revitalize Public EducationAn Economic Bill of Rights***

-   **Equalize School Funding with Federal Revenue Sharing:** Federal
    financing of all public education (instead of by regressive local
    property taxes) so that every school has the resources it needs to
    provide the highest quality education for every child. Use a simple
    formula based on student population with adjustments based on need
    to help bring up school quality and student performance in poor
    communities.

-   **Decentralized Administration:** Cut through stifling centralized
    administration with site-based planning, policy-making, and
    management with participation by parents and teachers with
    release-time. Maintain central support staff for decentrally
    administered schools.

-   **Class Size Reduction:** Federal legislation and financing to
    reduce student-teacher ratios in classrooms to 15 to 1 in all public
    schools.

-   **Pre-School Programs:** Federal legislation and financing for
    public schools to make available Head Start-type programs for
    pre-Kindergarten children starting at age 3.

-   **After School Programs:** Federal legislation and financing to make
    available after-school recreational and educational programs for all
    school age children.

-   **Children's Health:** Clinics in all schools to check eyes, teeth,
    and general health at all grade levels. Healthy food at breakfast,
    lunch, and after school programs. Birth control information at
    middle and high schools.

-   **Improve Teacher Training and Pay:** Improve the quality of
    teachers with support for career-long training. On-the-jobs
    apprenticeships for teachers-in-training. Teacher pay scales
    comparable to other professionals with similar education and
    responsibilities.

-   **Multicultural Teaching Staffs:** Strengthen affirmative action
    programs to recruit and support ethnic minorities to enter teaching
    at every level: teacher, aide, assistant, apprentice.

-   **Tuition-Free Higher Education:** Federal legislation and financing
    for tuition free education at public universities and technical
    schools for everyone who wants it.

-   **Oppose the Privatization of Public Schools:** We oppose all
    schemes for corporations to pursue private profits at the expense of
    public schools and schoolchildren.

-   **No School Vouchers:** No school vouchers from public budgets for
    private schools.

-   **No For-Profit or Religious Charter Schools:** Stop the diversion
    of public funds to for-profit corporations or religious
    organizations running charter schools with unaccountable
    administrations, uncertified teachers, and segregated student
    bodies.

-   **No Commercialization:** Stop turning school children into a
    captive market for commercial marketing interests with franchises
    that undermine democratic funding and accountability.

-   **No High-Stakes Testing:** Stop the curriculum takeover by
    commercial standardized test and test-prep corporations. Stop
    linking administrator and teacher pay and student graduation and
    retention to standardized test performance. Stop reducing education
    to answering multiple choice questions. Put teachers back in charge
    of ongoing, genuine assessment in the classroom.

-   **Curriculum for a Multicultural Participatory Democracy:** We
    support a democratic public school curriculum that fosters
    curiosity, critical thinking, and free expression, that explicitly
    promotes democratic and egalitarian anti-racist, anti-sexist, and
    multicultural values, that replaces Eurocentric with multicultural
    textbooks and other curriculum materials, that does not sort
    children into academic and non-academic tracks, and that is
    academically rigorous with high expectations for all children.

-   **Support Bilingual Education:** Minority-language children with
    limited English proficiency must have instructional programs that
    build on their native language and culture while building English
    proficiency.

***Free, Diverse, and Uncensored Media***

1.  **Infodiversity:** An uninformed people is not free. Create a vital,
    democratic, diverse media system, delinked from corporate profit
    objectives and able to present a wide range of issues and ideas in
    their full complexity, free from censorship by government or by
    private corporate power.

    **Support Nonprofit and Noncommercial Media:** A decentralized,
    democratic system of public funding of diverse nonprofit,
    noncommercial media, including broadcast, print, film, website, and
    other cultural production. Funding to exceed existing support for
    for-profit media, including lower mailing rates and tax deductions
    for donors. Guarantee free, universal internet access.

    **Real Public Broadcasting:** Complete public funding for real
    public radio and television broadcasting, with no advertising or
    grants from private corporations or foundations. Support a
    decentralized, pluralistic system of multiple national networks and
    local stations, all independently controlled by boards elected by
    their publics and their workers.

    **Regulate Public Airwaves in the Public Interest:** Reassert the
    public's right as owners of the electromagnetic spectrum used as
    broadcast airwaves to regulate their use in the public interest.
    Re-appropriate 6 prime-time hours a day of commercial broadcast time
    on each station for real public service broadcasting: ad-free
    children's and news/public affairs programming. Fund this liberated
    time by charging commercial broadcasters rents for the bandwidths
    they use, a tax on sales of commercial stations, and a tax on
    advertising. Program this ad-free time under the control of artists'
    and educators for the children's programs and journalists for the
    news and public affairs programs. Restore the Fairness Doctrine.
    Free time for all candidates for public office. Prohibit paid
    political ads or require free ads of equal time for opponents.
    Redistribute substantial bandwidth concessions to public, nonprofit,
    and locally owned commercial stations, including low-power stations.
    Increase stakeholder representation on and public accountability of
    the Federal Communications Commission.

    **Antitrust Actions to Break Up Media Conglomerates:** Reform
    antitrust legislation to require the break up of corporate giants
    because their concentrated power threatens democracy, not just
    competitive pricing, especially with regard to media concentration
    where a few media conglomerates control the public's access to
    information. Require separate, independent firms for all TV
    stations, TV networks, TV show producers, radio stations,
    newspapers, magazines, book publishers, film producers, music
    recorders, internet service providers, cable TV systems, cable TV
    stations, amusement parks, retail stores, and so forth. Repeal the
    pro-conglomeration Telecommunications Act of 1996. Subsidize the
    existence of multiple newspapers and magazines to express a
    diversity of opinion in all communities.

***International Solidarity***

-   **A Global Green Deal:** Build world peace and security through a
    Global Green Deal. First, the US should finance universal access to
    primary education, adequate food, clean water and sanitation,
    preventive health care, and family planning services for every human
    being on Earth. According to the 1999 UN Development Report, it
    would take only an additional \$40 billion to ***Fund Global Basic
    Human Needs***, an amount that is only 13% of the 2000 US military
    budget. Second, the US, which now spends half of the world's
    military expenditures by itself, should demilitarize its economy and
    reinvest the Peace Dividend in financing and technical assistance
    for an ***Ecological Conversion of Human Civilization to Sustainable
    Systems of Production***.

-   **Peace Conversion:** Cut US military spending unilaterally by 75%
    in two years to establish a non-interventionist, non-offensive,
    strictly defensive military posture and save nearly \$250 billion a
    year.

-   **Peace Dividend:** Dedicate the \$250 billion a year Peace Dividend
    to the Global Green Deal, Ecological Conversion, the Economic Bill
    of Rights, and providing full income and benefits for all workers
    and soldiers displaced by demilitarization until they find new jobs
    at comparable income and benefits.

-   **Unilateral Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Disarmament:** These
    weapons of mass destruction have no place in a non-offensive
    military. The US should set the example and demand that other
    nations match our lead before the proliferation of weapons to
    countries around the world leads to mass destruction.

-   **Cooperative Security:** Pursue a \"cooperative security\" strategy
    that seeks mutual arms reductions, progressive elimination of
    cross-border offensive capabilities, and further cuts in military
    spending. The goal is to progressively demilitarize down to a
    non-offensive defense of U.S. national territory using a coast
    guard, border guard, national guard, and light air defense system,
    which would cost about \$3 billion, or less than 1% of current US
    military spending.

-   **Democratize the United Nations**: Cooperative security cannot work
    as long as the United Nations remains a US puppet. Support reforms
    to democratize the United Nations, such as more proportionality and
    power in the General Assembly, an elected Security Council, and the
    elimination of the Great Power Veto on the Security Council.

-   **A Pro-Democracy Foreign Policy:** We call for a fundamental shift
    in US foreign policy, from supporting repressive regimes in the
    interests global corporations to supporting the pro-democracy labor,
    social, and environmental movements of the people.

-   **Support International, Multilateral Peacekeeping to Stop
    Aggression and Genocide**

-   **No Unilateral US Intervention in the Internal Affairs of Other
    Countries**

-   **Close All Overseas US Military Bases**

-   **Disband NATO and All Aggressive Military Alliances**

-   **Ban US Arms Exports**

-   **Abolish the CIA, NSA, US Army School of the Americas, and All US
    Agencies of Covert Warfare**

-   **End the Economic Blockades of Cuba, Iraq, and Yugoslavia**

-   **Cut Off US Military Aid to Counter-Insurgency Wars in Columbia and
    Mexico**

-   **Freedom for Lori Berenson and All Political Prisoners**

-   **Require a National Referendum to Declare WarRequire a National
    Referendum for Declaration of War**

-   **End Global Financial Exploitation:** Cancel the debt owed by poor
    countries to global banks. End the exploitation of poor countries by
    IMF "structural adjustment" policies. Abolish the IMF and World Bank
    and replace them with a democratic international financial
    institution for balancing international accounts and financing
    short-term current account balances.

-   **Fair Trade:** Withdraw from the World Trade Organization, NAFTA,
    and all other corporate-managed trade agreements that are driving
    down labor and environmental conditions globally. Establish an
    internationalist social tariff system that equalizes trade by
    accounting for the differences among countries in wages, social
    benefits, environmental conditions, and political rights. Tariff
    revenues to a democratic, international fund for ecological
    production and democratic development in poor countries in order to
    level up social and environmental conditions to a high common
    standard.

For more information:

**The Greens/Green Party USA**

P.O. Box 1134

Lawrence MA 01842

978/682-4353

gpusa@igc.org

www.greenparty.org