The Georgia Green Party

Tag: Georgia

  • Georgia Green Party Statement on Protests in Iran

    Printer-friendly version

    Approved by the Quick Decision Council of the Coordinating Committee on November 30, 2022

    The Georgia Green Party expresses its support for people-centered liberation movements which respect the human rights of women and ethnic and religious minorities in Iran as well as throughout the world. The Georgia Green Party urges the decision-makers in the government in Iran to cease their brutal crackdown on protesters, end human rights violations by police, paramilitary groups and the military. We further urge that they abandon laws and practices which restrict women’s autonomy. The Georgia Green Party urges that women be afforded the same occupational opportunities as men, that their they enjoy equal rights to participate in the governing bodies of the nation and that they enjoy the protection of rights set forth in the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1979) and as reaffirmed in the Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights.

    The Georgia Green Party calls for the United States to refrain from interfering in the internal affairs of Iran, to normalize diplomatic relations, to lift sanctions, to abide by the terms of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Agreement, including its requirement for signatories to disarm, to cease support for human-rights violating governments and to adhere to human-rights standards in its various police, judicial, probation,prison and parole systems.

    The Georgia Green Party affirms the words of Azadeh Shahshahani and Yosi Badie in their September 28, 2022 column in the online version of The Nation:

    History is clear that US intervention, including sanctions, only serves US interests and works as collective punishment for the people of Iran, who are already resisting oppression by their own government. … While the people of Iran seek their liberation, we must stand against the US government’s imposition of sanctions against the Iranian people and resist any actions that seek to silence or distort freedom movements.

    Background Information

    Greens worldwide have long called for an end to war and violence in international relations. The

    history of United States aggression towards Iran makes non-interference in its affairs an even more urgent priority. While it may take years and the courage of whistleblowers to reveal to us and the rest of the world the extent of the covert operations undertaken on the US taxpayers’ dime seeking to undermine the sovereignty of the Islamic Republic of Iran, already public documents (including some cited in the references below) are exposing the role of the U.S. State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Endowment for Democracy in instigating what appears to be a color revolution.

    In 1953, the United States, the United Kingdom and the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, the predecessor to today’s British Petroleum (BP), which operates the same gas stations where you may have filled your car’s gas tank recently, cooperated in Operation Ajax, a covert operation which overthrew Iran’s democratically-elected government and installed the Pahlavi monarchy (dictatorship), which was more pliant to the economic,strategic and petroleum interests of the USA and UK.

    Since the 1979 revolution which overthrew that brutal dictatorship, the United States has overtly sought regime change by supporting Iraq’s invasion of Iran in 1980, implementing sanctions which have damaged the Iranian economy and providing financial and diplomatic support to various opposition groups. Prominent United States politicians have even supported Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK), which the Iranian government claims has killed more than 12,000 Iranians. Most shockingly, the United States assassinated by armored drone Iranian general Qasem Soleimani and others with him in Iraq’s capital Baghdad on January 3, 2022.

    While the full extent of United States covert operations is unknown, it is widely believed that its covert agencies have supported sabotage of Iranian nuclear facilities and assassinations of politicians, military personnel and scientists.

    The United States’s hostility towards Iran resulted in a United States warship destroying an Iranian civilian airplane over Iran’s territorial waters in the Persian Gulf on its normal flight path on July 3, 1988, killing all 290 people on that plane.

    The Georgia Green Party supports abolition of the Central Intelligence Agency and all covert operations and dismantling overseas military bases, the permanent closure of the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), formerly known as the School of the Americas and drastically reducing the size of the military. We must bring the troops home. There is no other way to restrain the United States’s use of military force to control other countries.

    Both the United States and Iran are signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which permits signatories to develop peaceful uses of fissionable material and mandates “negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.” The Georgia Green Party urges all signatories to comply with the treaty, and it notes that Israel, which the United States supports financially, militarily and diplomatically, has refused to sign the treaty and has developed its own nuclear weapons.

    The Georgia Green Party applauds the women and men of Iran who demand an end of laws, customs and abusive practices that discriminate against women and girls. The Georgia Green Party believes the best way to support efforts by the Iranian people is that our nation ceases its violations of women’s rights domestically and internationally. The Georgia Green Party Platform contains a variety of policies which would improve women’s lives in the United States, including fact-based sex education in public schools and universal healthcare, including abortion, and a concerted effort to end men’s violence. The President of the United States must publish without further delay, the Equal Rights Amendment which, after a hundred year long struggle. was finally ratified by the necessary 38th state in January 2020. Internationally, the United States, in its hostility to “communism” and national liberation movements, supported regressive factions worldwide, particularly in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and, wherever these factions have gained power, women’s rights and human rights have been diminished.

    One of the catalysts of the current uprising in Iran was the death in custody of Jîna Emînî, a woman who was detained by Iranian police enforcing a law biased against women. Jîna Emînî was from the Kurdish ethnic minority, whose political and cultural rights successive repressive Iranian governments have curtailed. In the United States, how many people from ethnic minorities and economically-disadvantaged backgrounds have been detained, fined, imprisoned, assaulted and killed by local, state and federal police and even vigilantes enforcing discriminatory and unjust laws? In Georgia, recent high profile cases include Ahmaud Arbery and Rashad Brooks. But let’s not forget about immigration detainees like Felipe Montes (January 30, 2021), Cipriano Chavez-Alvarez (September 21, 2020), Santiago Baten-Oxlaj (May 24, 2020) and others who died after being imprisoned in the Stewart INS Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia. Immigrant women were sterilized when subjected to non-consensual, medically unnecessary and/or invasive gynecological surgeries while in detention at Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla, Georgia. Fifty-seven (57) inmates in Georgia state prisons died by homicide in 2020 and 2021. Female inmates sued the Fulton County Jail System for minimal recreational and therapeutic activities as well as for clean drinking water. The Georgia Green Party believes that the best way to promote human rights abroad is to respect human rights here at home, our home, our Georgia home.

    References

    United Nations General Assembly. Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women. https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/convention-elimination-all-forms-discrimination-against-women [Adopted 1979-Dec-18]

    Women’s Declaration International. Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights. https://womensdeclaration.com/documents/78/DECLARATION_-_FINAL_VERSION_AMENDED.pdf [Accessed 2022-Oct-29]

    Azadeh Shahshahani and Yosi Badie. Iran’s Brutal Crackdown on “Women, Life, Freedom”. The Nation (Online, September 28, 2022). https://www.thenation.com/article/world/iran-protests-jina-emini/

    Platform of the Georgia Green Party, July 24, 2021. Georgia Green Party. https://secureservercdn.net/198.71.233.128/f90.8ee.myftpupload.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/20210724-Georgia-Green-Party-Platform.pdf

    Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training. The Coup Against Iran’s Mohammad Mossadegh. July 31, 2015. https://adst.org/2015/07/the-coup-against-irans-mohammad-mossadegh/

    Jonathan Masters. Mujahadeen-e-Khalq (MEK). Council on Foreign Relations. July 28, 2014. https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/mujahadeen-e-khalq-mek

    Zachary Cohen, Hamdi Alkhshali, Kareem Khadder and Angela Dewan. US drone strike ordered by Trump kills top Iranian commander in Baghdad. CNN. January 4, 2020. https://edition.cnn.com/2020/01/02/middleeast/baghdad-airport-rockets/index.html

    United Nations. Office for Disarmament Affairs. Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). https://www.un.org/disarmament/wmd/nuclear/npt/text (Accessed October 5, 2022)

    Arash Norouzi. The Downing of Iran Air Flight 655: The US Navy “Accident” That Took 290 Innocent Lives. The Mossadegh Project. February 1, 2009 [Updated July 3, 2019] https://mohammadmossadegh.com/news/iran-air-flight-655/

    Petition to President Biden. Green Alliance for Sex-Based Rights. https://greenalliance.sexbasedrights.org/civicrm/petition/sign?sid=1 (Accessed October 5, 2022)

    Deaths at Adult Detention Centers. American Immigration Lawyers Association. September 6, 2022. https://www.aila.org/infonet/deaths-at-adult-detention-centers

    Priyanka Bhatt, Katie Quigley, Azadeh Shahshahani, Gina Starfield and Ayano Kitano. Violence & Violation: Medical Abuse of Immigrants Detained at the Irwin County Detention Center. Project South. September 2021. https://projectsouth.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/IrwinReport_14SEPT21.pdf

    Danny Robbins. Records reveal 57 Georgia prison inmates slain. The Atlanta Journal Constitution. March 4, 2022. https://www.ajc.com/news/crime/records-reveal-53-georgia-prison-inmates-slain/KZ3JV4MT3FH4HLBLZQIA7AFYGA

    Georgia Advocacy Office, et al. v. Patrick Labat, et al. Settlement Agreement Regarding Women Who Experience Psychiatric Disabilities in the Fulton County Jail System. Case 1:19-cv-01634-WMR Document 328-1 Filed 11/01/21. United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, Atlanta Division. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.gand.262654/gov.uscourts.gand.262654.328.1.pdf

    Patrick Labat is the Sheriff of Fulton County, Georgia.

    Iran’s anti-morality police protests: a different view from the ground https://thegrayzone.com/2022/10/09/irans-protests-view-ground/

    Is the Death of an Innocent Woman Being Exploited to Advance the Goal of Regime Change in Iran? https://covertactionmagazine.com/2022/10/11/is-the-death-of-an-innocent-woman-is-being-exploited-to-advance-the-goal-of-regime-change-in-iran/

    Dirty money: Meet the US agent driving the CIA-led riots in Iran https://english.almayadeen.net/news/politics/dirty-money:-meet-the-us-agent-driving-the-cia-led-riots-in

    To understand color revolutions, these articles are a good place to begin:

    Russia And China to Hold Consultations On Countering US-led “Color Revolution” Efforts https://southfront.org/russia-and-china-to-hold-consultations-on-countering-us-led-color-revolution-efforts/

    The Anglo-American Origins of Color Revolutions & NED

    https://matthewehret.substack.com/p/the-anglo-american-origins-of-color

    https://canadianpatriot.org/2022/06/14/the-anglo-american-origins-of-color-revolutions-ned/

    Fighting US Psychological Operations (PSYOPS) in Cyber Warfare & Winning https://www.wrongkindofgreen.org/2018/08/10/fighting-us-psychological-operations-psyops-in-cyber-warfare-winning/

    Is the CIA Supporting Another Color Revolution in Iran — Like the One that Installed the Shah in 1953? https://covertactionmagazine.com/2022/10/10/is-the-cia-supporting-another-color-revolution-in-iran-like-the-one-that-brought-in-the-shah-in-1953/

  • You Can’t Drink Oil; Georgia Greens Thirsty for Clean Energy

    By Rachel Gray, Cobb Greens & Friends

    Different administration, same poison. That’s the overwhelming feeling many environmental activists and Green Party progressives are facing as they once again hit the streets to fight against a president’s pro-business (at any cost) policy that places the planet and her people in peril. On January 29, those streets included downtown Atlanta, when hundreds of concerned citizens — including the boisterous Cobb Greens & Friends — made their voices heard in the Peaceful Walk To Protect Our Environment, spurring the online movement#ATLAgainstPipelines. 

    There is truly one reason and one reason only that America has not moved beyond the fuel fossil era: big oil buys politicians, who then ignore science and vilify efforts to place human health and environmental preservation first. The success of big oil is most apparent in the appointments of T-Rex Tillerson, former CEO of ExxonMobil, as Secretary of State and former Texas Governor, ‘Department of what,’ Rick Perry as head of the Energy Department.

    In February, President Donald Trump resurrected what activists had hoped was a permanent death of both the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines by signing orders to expand energy infrastructure, including sweeping directives to resurrect American-made steel and loosen the process for approving and regulating future dirty energy projects.

    The day after trumpeting that his administration would be cozy with big oil, a pipeline rupture spilled 138,600 gallons of diesel fuel in northern Iowa. But this spill shouldn’t come as a shock, when more than 7 million gallons of oil were spilled across more than 1,000 pipeline leaks between 2010 and 2015, with 200 more significant spills in 2016. And, on January 30, 600,000 gallons of oil spewed out of Enbridge’s Seaway Pipeline in Blue Ridge, Texas, the second spill since the pipeline opened for business in mid-2016.

    And, it’s not just oil pipelines Americans are fighting against. The battle to end fracking and stop natural gas pipeline construction has landed right in Georgia’s back door. If completed, the Sabal Trail will include approximately 515 miles of interstate natural gas pipeline (86 miles in Alabama, 162 miles in Georgia, 268 miles in Florida). The pipeline will be capable of transporting 1 billion cubic feet per day or more of natural gas, traipsing through nine counties in Georgia: Stewart, Webster, Lee, Dougherty, Mitchell, Colquitt, Lowndes and Brooks counties.

    On February 26, Cobb Greens & Friends attended the in-person town hall of Georgia State Rep. Stacey Evans (D), representing House District 42 for the cities of Smyrna and Marietta. When asked about the Sabal Trail, and the use of imminent domain by a self-interested private corporation, Rep. Evans said she had limited knowledge about the project, and inaccurately stated the imminent domain is only used for public government projects. Other concerned residents, out of the more than 50 attendees, expressed their concerns about the corrupt encroachment of imminent domain, as well as fracking, in the state of Georgia with the representative and her staff. The Georgia Green Party will remain outspoken when it comes to environmental protection, public health and citizen rights.

    The real impact on Georgia homeowners was recently covered by Alive 11, when a Bartow County family farmer expressed his sorrow over the condemnation of his land via eminent domain by Oklahoma-based Transco corporation. This gaseous project would embed 112 miles of natural gas pipeline from Murray to Coweta counties. This ‘heavy-handed’ authority jeopardizing 50 land owners is not a public state or federal project, and at least one Georgia resident claims he has yet to be compensated, and his requests for preservation of heirlooms disregarded.

    An International Natural Disaster
    Throughout Central America and South America, thousands of barrels worth of black crude have contaminated the Amazon, putting one of the most vital jungle river systems in the world at risk. Those affected the most are indigenous people in Peru, Ecuador Venezuela, whose daily lives are placed in peril with water sources and food supplies off limits for months or more. Even if lawsuits are filed and waged in courts for years, there is still little to no justice forced upon international corporations like Exxon, Shell and BP, who activists and reporters on the ground accuse of exploiting local children to help with clean up efforts without any protection, violating human rights and human decency.

    Why should citizens in the Americas face hardship when across the pond sustainable energy is reshaping and strengthening communities? Also in January, the Irish Parliament passed historic legislation to divest their national treasury from coal, oil and gas investments. Meanwhile, The Netherlands is investing in vast solar parks and electric trains that run 100% on wind energy.

    Industrious, pro-industry Germany is challenging itself to not only became self-sustaining, but also lead the way in energy storage pioneering. This energy transition revolution, called energiewende, also includes the drastic phasing out of nuclear energy production in the European country. The successful political and social effort has been led by Germany’s Green Party since its founding in 1980, based on one of the progressive party’s central tenants that sustainable, renewable energy is the only way to keep a country intact and healthy.

    The solutions exist, now it takes the political will to enact them in America. The United States has fallen behind, and it will take a Green movement to become a leader again. Presidential candidate Jill Stein, along with her running mate and Georgia resident Ajamu Baraka, made their stance against dirty energy very clear on the campaign trail by leaving their marks in graffiti on Dakota Access’ machinery. As a national party, our stance is clear on Standing Rock. And, from the East Coast to the Gulf Coast, Green Party members say NO FRACKING WAY to drilling. For years, some of the toughest fights have been waged by Green Floridians, and the Georgia Green Party will continue to support these efforts by our neighbors as we unite against the Sabal Trail.

    Planet Protectors
    Despite concerns over contamination from leaks into the water supply, the eventual emission from burning the fossil fuel and the destruction of sacred native lands, the DAPL permits were first granted by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in July, under the watch (or voluntary blindness) of Obama. For months, natives, activists and veterans put life and limb on the line to stop the black snake, and their hard work amounted to a delay. A delay many progressives feel Obama created, so he could be ushered out of office with his supposed environmental stewardship intact, all while leaving a clear path for Trump to continue the destruction.

    Throughout the 2016 presidential campaign, it was the Green Party that told the truth: The constant drip of cheap fossil fuels has come to an end. That regulations are not enough, and it is time to dispel the pipe dream that coal and natural gas extraction and burning is, or ever will be, ‘clean energy.’ Dr. Stein even showed a balance is possible between protecting the planet and building a great economy to be proud of with The Green New Deal.

    Greens want to stop runaway climate change, by reducing greenhouse gas emissions at least 40% by 2020 and 95% by 2050, over 1990 levels, through measures such as a carbon tax that interjects the environmental costs of fossil fuels into the ‘free’ market to eliminating subsidies for corporations pumping out fossil fuels and nuclear power to providing consumers market incentives and investment opportunities in Green sources.

    With 5 percent of the world’s population, Americans consume 26 percent of the world’s energy. Even at a basic level, the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and other native protectors are already supporting a Green initiative that encourages the formation and operation of cooperatives, land trusts, co-housing and other forms of communal and public interest management of land and resources.

    The Green Party demands this country invest in public transportation systems, in a way that has not been accomplished by either the Democrats or Republicans, while also improving energy efficiency in homes, businesses, public spaces and government buildings. This retrofitting with solar panels, wind turbines, hydroelectricity and geothermal technologies is a locally focused solution to a global epidemic that will create millions of jobs.

    TURN YOUR PASSION INTO ACTION

    Great news! Rachel Gray, organizer for Cobb Greens & Friends, made our party’s opposition to Sabal Trail very clear on the pages of the Atlanta Journal Constitution. Now is the time for you to be heard!

    Sample call script:

    Brian Fahrenthold
    Local or State Governmental Affairs
    Sabal Trail Transmission, LLC
    1.888.215.6683
    bcfahrenthold@spectraenergy.com

    My name is _________. I am calling on behalf the Georgia Green Party, to make it clear that our membership wants Sabal to get the frack out of Georgia. President Trump has filled the swamp with black crude, poisonous gas and destructive coal ash.

    Sabal Trail is an egregious waste of government resources and tax dollars. Your dirty conglomerate is violating the rights of Georgia residents with the use of imminent domain to line the pockets of your private international benefactors.

    Green Party Presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein showed a balance is possible between protecting the planet and building a great economy to be proud of with The Green New Deal. Local-sourced, co-op owned, clean, renewable energy is not only safest for the environment and our citizens, but the only economically viable solution.