Green Platform Amendment Proposals for 2020

A portion of a photograph at the head of Chapter IV of the GPUS Platform.

The Annual National Meeting and Presidential Nominating Convention of the Green Party of the United States is scheduled for the weekend of 11-12 July. Thanks to COVID-19, we're not going to Detroit for the convention; Detroit is coming to us via teleconferencing platforms.

Speaking of platforms, I am grateful to California Green mover & shaker Diana C. Brown for alerting tout le monde vert on Facebook regarding this year's proposed amendments to the GPUS national platform. The Platform Committee will consider 15 changes—submitted by several different committees, caucuses, and state parties—which I'll list in summary form below the Read More.

​Keep in mind that the Platform is more about desired outcomes than processes for achieving them. It can include a call for abolition of the Electoral College without presenting the nuts and bolts of how to rescind the provisions in Article II, Section 1, Clause 3 of the Constitution and the Twelfth Amendment.

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The Green Party National Committee lists the 15 proposals in order of what chapters and sections they address. If done incorrectly, full consideration of 15 proposals could take all week; fortunately, the Platform Committee has very specific groundrules and time limits in place for discussion of each. So it looks more like the US House than the "deliberative" US Senate (though it doesn't really look much like either, also fortunately).

Bits of editorial commentary from dbc follow some of these summaries in parentheses.

CHAPTER I: Democracy

• California Greens want to change the Party's call for Instant Runoff Voting, specifying Ranked Choice Voting. RCV would apply in the presidential race as well, along with abolishing the Electoral College.
• The Eco-Action Committee wants to add a paragraph about "address[ing] environmental degradation in all its forms" as a matter of Domestic Security. (The verb address seems a bit vague, don't you think?)

CHAPTER II: Social Justice

• Eco-Action also proposes adding points regarding Consumer Protection, requiring information about the environmental impacts ("Eco-Labeling") on packaging of consumer products, and...
• ...adding to the long list of Education provisions, calling for the addition of environmental and horticultural education to public school curricula.
• The Platform Committee itself proposes generalizing existing language on the rights of US Armed Services veterans, wherever the language is specific to veterans who had been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan.
• Minnesota Greens and the Black Caucus propose adding a whole Police Accountability subsection in the Criminal Justice section of the Social Justice chapter. (I have already seen some controversy regarding the clause about requiring cops to carry liability insurance; apart from the general desire some day for a dismantling of policing as we know it, it seems like a proposal to toss more money to the insurance mafia.)

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CHAPTER III: Ecological Sustainability

• The Eco-Action Committee is back in its usual neighborhood with three new chunks of text: a new point about the US signing on to international biodiversity preservation agreements...
• ...an international agreement to cooperate in cleaning up oceanic plastic waste...
• ...and a new section of this chapter regarding International Environmental Policy. (I'm not so fond of the granting of legal personhood status to major ecosystems, as it feels to much like granting legal personhood to corporations. I'd prefer creating a special super-person status for these ecosystems, with major legal consequences for any nation-state, corporation, group, or individual who harms them.)
• The Animal Rights Committee hopes to add two points under Ethical Treatment of Animals, banning captivity of cetaceans for entertainment purposes, and...
• ...encouraging adoption of a plant-based diet to mitigate or reverse the ecological fallout from animal agriculture.

CHAPTER IV: Ecological Economics
Everything here comes from the Banking and Insurance Reform Committee:

• Two new paragraphs to add to the section on Banking and Insurance Reform. They call for (Section I, Paragraph 12) legal consequences up to and including revocation of corporate charters for financial industry malfeasance, and (Paragraph 13) stronger protection of homeowners against home foreclosures.
• Another new paragraph, farther down in the section, explicitly calling for expansion of public banking on the Bank of North Dakota model. (Among other benefits, public banks allow local governments to borrow money for public works projects without paying exorbitant interest to corporate banksters and while keeping the money in the community. dbc approves.)
• Reduce the national debt by cutting wasteful defense expenditures and corporate bailouts, among other measures.
• Moving paragraphs from Section I (Banking and Insurance Reform) to a new Section N (Monetary Reform), with some minor changes in the wording, but major changes to the operations of the Federal Reserve.