aug16,2005

Green Party - Fremont/Newark/Union City

(Calif., USA)

Report on GP-FNU meeting, Wed., Aug. 10, 2005

Number in attendance: 4

1) Discussion of our information table at the Aug. 6-7 Fremont
   Art and Wine Festival

Two volunteers secured the table site Saturday morning before the table itself arrived.  (Non-profit table sites were "first come, first served".)  One volunteer supplied a beautiful, large poster with our Green Party name and symbol. Three volunteers brought literature for the table, and they and a fourth volunteer kept the table staffed with at least one person through Sat. and Sun.  The fourth Green hadn't come to any of our meetings before, but he did a very good job at the table.  In all, it was a great team effort by seven Greens.

We had heard that in previous years the site for non-profit groups tables was a bad location, set too far off the path of festival foot traffic.  Whether or not this year's non-profit section was in a different location, it turned out to be good enough.  It was on the southwest side of the short block of Paseo Padre Parkway between the music stage set up at Mowry Ave. and the regular vendor booths along Capitol Ave.  True, foot traffic among the vendor booths did not pass by the non-profit tables, but there was still a good amount of foot traffic passing by.  There were people entering or leaving the festival from the Mowry/Paseo Padre intersection, as well as people walking between the music stage and the vendor booths.

Probably 50-90 people stopped at the table (we didn't keep a count of this).  42 signed the Impeach Bush petition (the one initiated by Vets for Peace), and 8 people signed up for our mailing list.  We got into many good conversations with people.

We evaluated the Saturday experience and made improvements for Sunday.  Primarily, we decided to make some issue-specific posters (besides our Green Party "identification" poster).  So on Sunday, we put a small "Impeach Bush, Sign the Petition" poster on the front of the table, and a large poster on the local bill for the Iraq war (Fremont=$150 million).  These posters had a very postive effect.  Many people came to the table directly asking to sign the petition, so that poster clearly drew many people to the table.  Many people passing by stopped to read the poster on the local bill for the war, and quite a few of them then came up to the table.  These issue-specific posters made a big difference, so the table had much more activity on Sunday than on Saturday.   Saturday got 7 impeachment signatures and two mailing list sign-ups, while Sunday got 35 impeachment signatures and six mailing list sign-ups.  Overall, we were very pleased with the tabling results, and should do it next year, too.  We also need to either find a volunteer with a spare table, or get our own table, to make future tabling easier.

2) Final planning for Sept. 9 film showing

We will show the documentary "Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear, and the Selling of American Empire" at 7:30pm on Friday, Sept. 9 in the Meeting Room of the public library in Newark, 6300 Civic Terrace Ave.  The film is 64 minutes long; we will start the film after some opening remarks lasting a few minutes.  To sum it up in one sentence, it is about how Bush and his "neo-con" foreign policy team hijacked our grief over the 9/11 attacks, and manipulated it into support for invading Iraq.

(Directions:  Go to the corner of Thornton Ave. and Newark Blvd., look for the tall city building -- 6 stories high, or more -- about a block away.  The library is 1-story building on the other side of this tall building.)

Here is our final "to-do" list (tasks have been assigned):

3) Discussion of some issues for drawing up our bylaws

Eventually we must draw up bylaws to get "chartered" as an official local chapter of the Green Party of Alameda County.  As partial preparation for this, we discussed the concepts of consensus decision making and supermajority thresholds for "fall-back" voting when consensus cannot be reached.  These concepts are widely used in the Green Party.  It was only a preliminary discussion, and we did not come to any conclusions.  (Besides, this was an unusually small meeting, and something as important as group bylaws will have to include as many people as possible in the discussion and decision process.)  Most meeting attendees felt we should resume discussion only after we've had a chance to read some example bylaws, such as from other groups (ex: Tri-City Peace & Justice) and other Green Party county and local organizations, including our own GP of Alameda County (which we have to be in compliance with).

4) Discussion of Green Party National Meeting held in July

The Green Party of the US (GPUS) held its Annual National Meeting July 22-24 in Tulsa, OK.  The most notable event at this meeting was a set of three proposals introduced by the state parties of New York and Vermont:
  1. GPUS prop. #153 - On more closely approximating one Green, one vote.
  2. GPUS prop. #154 - Rules to ensure that delegates to our presidential nominating convention reflect the will of Green voters in presidential preferenceprimaries, caucuses, or state conventions.
  3. GPUS prop. #155 -
Prop. 153 - One Person, One Vote:
(Final text as voted on at Tulsa: http://green.gpus.org/cgi-bin/vote/propdetail?pid=153 )

Prop. 153 sought to more closely approximate the principle of one person, one vote within the national party.  This is currently not the basis for representation of state parties in the national committee, or at the national presidential nominating convention.  For example:

State
 # of Green Party (GP) Members
 # Seats on nat'l committee
 # votes at 2004 convention
Calif.
 157,000 registered Green voters (this includes some outdated records - maybe 10% to 30%? See Note 1)
 13
 132
Ohio
 1,400 (yes, one thousand four hundred; see Note 2)
 4
 22
Indiana
 48 (yes, forty-eight; see Note 3, below)
 2
 10
Note 1: See http://www.ss.ca.gov/elections/sov/2004_primary/voter_reg_by_county.pdf
Note 2: See http://www.ohiogreens.org/membership/index.html
Note 3: See Indiana Green Party June 2005 state meeting report:
    http://www.indianagreenparty.org/minutes/igpminutesjune05.pdf
[To find the number of national committee votes a state party is allowed, go to this page and click on the link for the state you want to look up:
    http://green.gpus.org/cgi-bin/vote/contacts
To see how many votes a state party had at the June 2004 presidential nominating convention, check the preliminary allocation of delegates at http://www.gp.org/convention2004/delegate_1.html , and the actual votes cast in the first round of voting at http://www.gp.org/convention2004/round1.html .  Both of these pages, and others related to the 2004 convention are linked at http://www.gp.org/convention2004/process.html .]

One of the main arguments for the current allocation of delegates at the national level is that several state governments allow voters to affiliate with a political party by marking a check-box on a voter registration card, or filling out a separate party affiliation card.  This in effect amounts to the state government helping a political party to recruit members.  In states in which you cannot register Green on an official voter form, Green parties have a harder time recruiting a large number of members because they do not receive such help from the state government.  If they did, they would have a larger membership.  So that point of view favors granting a state party representation not of its actual members, but of some greater number of members it could have if the state's voter registration forms or primary ballots gave voters the option of declaring affiliation with the Green Party.  There are several other angles to this issue, as well.

Prop. 154 - Delegate rules:
(Final text as voted on at Tulsa: http://green.gpus.org/cgi-bin/vote/propdetail?pid=154 )

Prop. 154 would have given a Green presidential primary candidate the right to approve or disapprove of the delegates chosen from each state to represent that candidate at the national convention.  It also would have bound the delegates on the first round of votes at the national convention to vote according to how their state's Green voters expressed their preference in their state's primary election, or state party caucus or convention.

(The way GP of Calif. chose its delegates in 2004 was to leave it up to each Green Party county council.  Typically this meant the county council would ask who wanted to go - largely who could afford it - and which candidate they favored.  It gave the actual candidate no right to have her/his supporters verify that the volunteering delegate indeed had primary loyalty to that candidate.)

(California and many other state Green parties already bound their convention delegations to vote in the first round in the same pattern as their states' Greens had expressed their presidential preference, so Prop. 154 was pretty routine in this respect.)

Prop. 155 - Independence from the Democratic Party:
(Final text as voted on at Tulsa: http://green.gpus.org/cgi-bin/vote/propdetail?pid=155 )

This was the most controversial of the three propositions.  It would have prohibited the GPUS from supporting any Democratic Party candidates, and would have asked (but not required) state Green Parties to adopt similar rules for statewide elections.  It did not apply to local elections, where the question of endorsing a Democrat arises most often.  This is obviously controversial, as many Greens favor endorsing some of the more progressive Democrats.

The 3 proposals - the results

The Green Party (GP) of California voted on these proposals at our state convention in Sylmar in late May.  These votes were recommendations to the national committee, not bylaws changes for the GP of Calif.  To have been adopted as official policy for the GP of Calif., these proposals would have had to include actual bylaws language, and would have had to pass with 80% approval.  The vote at our state convention was about 75% in favor of Prop. 153 (one Green, one vote), 70% in favor of Prop. 154 (delegate rules), and 60% in favor of Prop. 155 (independence from the Democrats in national and statewide races).  At the national committee meeting in Tulsa, however, the GPUS national committee voted against all three proposals by about 2-to-1.

These 3 proposals were developed by a loose network of Greens calling themselves Greens for Democracy and Independence.  Though all three proposals were rejected by the national committee, some of the issues involved in these proposals will undoubtedly arise again before or at next year's annual national meeting, and perhaps at future state party assemblies, too.  Stay tuned...

(Also, see last month's meeting minutes; it had URLs for the text of the 3 proposals on the GPUS website, as well as some other comments about the proposals.)

5) Other items deferred to subsequent meetings:

6) Next meeting

Tuesday, Sept. 13, 8pm (to 9pm or later)
Newark Public Library
6300 Civic Terrace Ave.
(We can't start earlier because some other group has the room reserved from 7-8pm.)
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