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Sunshine Government and Green Neighborhoods: A Green PlatformBy Scott McLarty, Green Party candidate for the Ward One Member of the Council of the District of ColumbiaContents:
PLATFORM SUMMARY(1) We support SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT and POSITIVE GROWTH for DC
(2) Lets end multi-million-dollar free lunch handouts and tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy. Instead, lets reinvest that money along with DC budget surpluses in schools, housing, jobs, and human services. Our services, protections, and resources are under fire and in danger of being sold off, privatized, reduced, diverted, or abolished. Council should resist such pressure from the Board of Trade, the Chamber of Commerce, the Federal City Council, the Financial Control Board, and Congress.
(3) We demand full DEMOCRACY for DC! DC suffers two crises of democracy:
THE GREEN PARTY OF THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIAThere are things happening elsewhere in the world that you don't hear much about in America. Like polls finding the Green Party to be the third most popular party in Germany. Or the news that one of Brazils 26 state governors is a Green. Or that the French environmental minister is one also. Or that the Green Party candidate for mayor of Stuttgart came in second with 40% and exit polls showed him the most popular candidate among all voters under 50. Or that there are now Green parties in over 70 countries.... -- Sam Smith, The Progressive Review (No. 352, December 1997) The Green Party of the District of Columbia is dedicated to social, environmental, and economic justice. The ten key values of the Greens are: Ecological Wisdom, Social Justice, Grassroots Democracy, Non-violence, Decentralization, Community-based Economics, Feminism, Respect for Diversity, Personal and Global Responsibility, Future Focus. Part of a national movement with parties throughout the US, Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia, the Greens first became visible here in DC in the 1996 national election, through the Ralph Nader presidential campaign. Nader placed third in DC. With the Ward One election, the Green Party of the District of Columbia broadens its activism to include local electoral efforts. The DC Greens have already been active on various local fronts, doing everything from testimony at public hearings to rallies and demos:
CANDIDATES PROFILEScott Thomas McLarty was born 19 April 1958 in Oyster Bay, Long Island. He grew up in Babylon, also on Long Island, and attended college at Yale University (BA, 1980), where he studied music, linguistics, and anthropology. He pursued his first interest, musical composition (especially for the theater) through doctoral studies and teaching at the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, part of the University of Cincinnati. In 1983, his musical The Brooklyn Bridge opened on Off-Broadway in New York. He continued to write and produce original musical theater works in Cincinnati, especially through Diaphanous Features Musical Theater Company, which he founded and for which he received grants from the City of Cincinnati and the Fine Arts Fund. After membership in several activist organizations in Cincinnati in the late 80s, Scott was elected facilitator (organizer and spokesperson) for Gay & Lesbian March Activists/ACT UP Cincinnati in 1990, as the AIDS crisis began to take a heavy toll on Middle Western cities. Through ACT UP, Scott
After moving to Washington, DC, in 1993, Scott participated in ACT UP Washington in 1993 and 1994, and worked to promote the AIDS Cure Act and the Single-payer Health Care plan offered by Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota. In 1995, convinced that progress was no longer possible through the Democratic Party, Scott helped organize Third Parties 96. Scott served on the Advisory Board for the Ralph Nader/Winona LaDuke national campaign in 1996. Scott helped reorganize the DC Green Party after the 1996 election, and became a member of the Steering Committee. He has edited and published Green Action, an update of DC Greens activities, and has organized successful events to draw new members. (See the section on The Green Party of the District of Columbia for a list of activities). Scott has had articles published in several national publications, including In These Times, Z Magazine, and The Progressive Review, as well as the local and community publications, small press (Nouveau Midwest, The Washington Peace Letter). In 1996 and 1997 he published Pink Noise, a newsletter with articles on politics and the arts. He is a member of the Emergency Coalition to Save Rent Control, the Labor Party, the Alliance For Democracy, and the Washington Peace Center, and has participated in the Economic Human Rights Campaign, Stand For Our Neighbors (a human rights group based in Mount Pleasant and Columbia Heights), BiNet (a bisexual social and support group), and weekly recycling pick-up at the Bancroft School in Mount Pleasant. A FEW QUOTESI am running to win. This is neither a symbolic nor a single issue campaign... We need someone on Council whose party doesnt kneel before boardrooms or the suburbs. Democratic and Republican leadership has given us years of ineptitude, cronyism, corruption, lack of accountability and an excuse for Congress to take over DC. Corporate and suburban business interests treat DC like a feeding trough... Well find the solution to DCs crises and Ward Ones problems in our own neighborhoods, citizens organizations, unions, and independent political parties. We must rebuild democracy from the ground up! Scott McLarty, Green Party candidate for the Ward One DC City Council seat Who holds power in DC? FEEDING FRENZY: The Vichy vultures are already hard at work on the carrion of the
city. An outfit that calls itself DC 2000 along with such usual suspects at the
Board of Trade and the Federal City Council held an emergency conference
in early September to discuss how to make money out of the federal takeover of the DC.
They didnt quite phrase it like that, but agenda titles included New
Opportunities for Economic Development, Making DC More Business-Friendly,
Capital Gains Cuts and Enterprise Zones. Local pols like [Democratic DC Rep. Eleanor
Holmes] Norton, [Democratic Mayor Marion] Barry, and [Republican At-Large Council Member
Carol] Schwartz turned out to pay homage to the citys welfare fathers. Free
DC News Service #27, September 29, 1997, published by Mayoral candidate Jack Evans has raised almost $217,000 in campaign funds, helped by hefty donations from business leaders in his downtown ward and changes to election law that raise the limit on contributions. Evans, who as a member of the D.C. Council proposed the legislation that removed the restrictive cap, is one of [the] first candidates to benefit from the change, which raised the limit on individual contributions to mayoral candidates from $100 to $2,000.... Some downtown business leaders, including lawyers and developers, chipped in the maximum $2,000 contribution for Evans. At the same time, more than $60,000 came from outside Washington, including the Washington suburbs... -- Evans Filling War Chest for Mayoral Run, The Washington Post, Thursday, February 12 The District is likely to remain firmly under the financial control boards
thumb well beyond the four-year period first envisioned, officials confirm privately. The
District must produce four consecutive balanced budgets before it can escape the control
boards rigid oversight. With audits revealing an unexpected surplus for fiscal 1997,
many District officials assume that the control boards four-year phaseout clock has
already begun ticking. Not so, says Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va. I think
youll see this get extended, said Davis, chairman of the House subcommittee
overseeing District affairs... Davis, who drafted the 1995 Some city planners and elected officials erroneously insist that anything happening is better than nothing. Headline-grabbing civic projects, from big cultural centers to new stadiums, always requiring huge capital investments that cost taxpayers dearly, detract attention from complicated fundamental difficulties. Convention centers, stadiums, aquariums, cultural centers, enclosed malls these are about politics and development profitable for a few, not about developing local economies, enlivening downtowns, or stimulating revitalization. Downtowns compete for these headline-grabbing, budget-straining projects but overlook the actual, complex cities in which they sit. -- Cities Back from the Edge: New Life for Downtown, by Roberta Brandes Gratz with Norman Mintz (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1998) Why should the city provide support to any corporation that is not locally owned and operated? Shouldnt community corporations be the exclusive recipients of municipal subsidies, tax breaks, and pension investments? Why should the city lift a finger to help shopping malls that discourage purchasing from local producers? Why not instead underwrite local labeling, import substitution, and currencies that enhance the economic health of local businesses? -- Going Local, by Michael Shuman (New York: The Free Press, 1998) After a year-and-a-half investigation, members fo the DC Tax Revision Commission have reached a startling conclusion: Taxes have little to do with why people cross the District line. Taxes are not a determinant of why people and businesses locate in the city, explains commission chairman Robert Ebel. Of the 67,000 tax filers lost since 1989, most have relocated to the suburbs of Maryland, which generally taxes both businesses and individuals at a higher rate than Virginia. -- City Desk, Washington City Paper, May 8, 1998 The right of voting for representation is the primary right by which all other rights are protected. Thomas Paine We need to put proportionality at the center of our concept of representation. Lani Guinier What kind of health care do we need? [The Five Principles endorsed by the Ad Hoc Committee to Defend Health Care are] (1) Medicine and nursing must not be diverted from their primary tasks: the relief of suffering, the prevention and treatment of illness and the promotion of health. (2) Pursuit of corporate profit and personal fortune have no place in caregiving. (3) Potent financial incentives that reward overcare or undercare should be prohibited, as should business arrangements that allow corporations and employers to control the care of patients. (4) A patients right to clinician of choice must not be curtailed. (5) Access to health care must be the right of all... [I]n our state [Massachusetts], more than 10 percent of doctors and 700 nurses have endorsed [Ad Hoc Committee To Defend Health Cares] founding statement [in favor of statewide universal health coverage]. Titled For Our Patients, Not for Profits: A Call to Action, this call appears in the December 3 Journal of the American Medical Association, along with a five-page list of Massachusetts signatories. To mark its publication well dump corporate annual reports and other symbols of profit-driven medicine from the Boston Tea Party boat, and hundreds of nurses and doctors will convene at historic Faneuil Hall, linked by satellite to meetings elsewhere... We aim to spark an uprising that spreads rapidly through the health professions and beyond. Already 16 percent of Rhode Islands physicians have endorsed the Ad Hoc Committees call; in New Mexico, the states Medical Society and Nursing Association and the organizations of nurse practitioners, physicians assistants and Hispanic physicians have all endorsed it. Leaders of the Illinois group have introduced the Bernardin Amendment, a measure invoking words from the late Cardinals October 1995 pastoral letter (Health care is an essential safeguard of human life and dignity, and there is an obligation for society to ensure that every person be able to realize this right) to require the state legislature to enact universal health coverage... For Patients, Not Profits by Steffie Woolhandler and David Himmelstein, in The Nation, December 22, 1997 Paid for by Ward One Citizens for McLarty, Philip Barlow,
treasurer. |
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