Greens Blast Governors in IL, NY, CA

In Illinois, Rich Whitney has become the latest Green to take his state's governor to task, following Alison Duncan in New York and Lisa Green in California.  In his speech Whitney states:

I must confess that I wrote most of this statement before listening to Governor Quinn’s State of the State address today. That’s because we don’t need the incumbent Governor to tell us what the State of the State is. We all know what it is. We’re living in it. In a word, it’s dismal.

Our State government is almost completely dysfunctional . . . Yet our incumbent legislators won’t fix the problem, even though it is well known that the State cannot continue to function without some type of major tax reform . . . Yet instead of recognizing what most of the people realize needs to be done, and fixing the problem, most of them lack the political will to do what is right and instead do what is expedient; what their paymasters want. The only things that they agree are politically “safe” to do – even though they are wrong – are the very things that ensure that the crisis will be even harder to solve in the future: More borrowing, more delayed payments, more fund sweeps and one-time gimmicks, more reliance on alcohol, tobacco and gambling taxes, and more deterioration of education and services . . .

The central problem in Illinoisan and American politics today is that we have a government run by the same giant corporate and banking interests that have brought us to ruin. These interests use the Democratic and Republican parties to get the exact same results by slightly different means. And as long as we have that, as long as we have government by the highest bidders, government of, by and for the wealthy and powerful, the problems we face will not be solved.

What the current State of the State should tell us is that there is an overwhelming need for new political leadership, leadership that comes from the people and the progressive movements that already have most of the policy answers to the problems facing us today. We need leadership that comes from the movements for peace, social justice, civil rights, the environment, labor, women’s rights, real health care reform, education reform, and grassroots democracy, including economic democracy. We need leadership that comes from a real people’s political party, a party based on these movements and their core principles; a party that does not accept corporate money and its corrupting influence. That’s where I come from, that’s what my campaign is about, that’s what the Green Party is about.