GREEN BRAINS IN CONGRESS

The big controversy swirling around the Green Party these days is their decision to run a Presidential candidate. Dennis Kucinich has appealed to the Greens, and Norman Solomon has declaimed their decision. "A small party that is unwilling to pick and choose its battles -- and unable to consider the effects of its campaigns on the country as a whole -- will find itself glued to the periphery of American politics," Solomon says. The Greens have outthought you, Mr. Solomon: a party that isn't declaimed by YOU for running a candidate is not only short a candidate, and thus short a big opportunity for party-building, but won't even merit the denunciation of peripheral critics such as yourself, and that would be as peripheral as it could get. Unfortunately, you suggested no positive role for our party. So we can assume you want us to tuck our tails between our legs and join the Democrats?

At any rate, Greens need to focus in 2004 on local races: and we need an issue that will galvanize the public behind the stupidity of the Demopublicans and Republicrats. So let's aim at the big vote for stupidity of the last term: the No Child Left Behind Act. The Green Party should run strong races against every Congressmember and every Senator who voted for this bill, and who thereby gave us a generation of overtested, bored schoolkids and a school system that exists to fund testing corporations while preparing kids for lowpaying jobs with a decade of misery each.

And let's bring back the big demands, placing them in bullet form:

• Guaranteed employment at living wages for all: bring back the social contract
  
• Ecologically-sound ("sustainable") economy
  
• A demilitarized globe
  
• Global democracy: one person, one vote
  
• Global fair economics: reparations for exploitation
  

The Demopublicans and Republicrats won't dare touch this stuff, because it exposes the fundamental immorality of the political and economic status quo.