Please note: In my announcement speech I misspoke. In 2006, it was either 15 or 17 Democrats that won by 5,000 votes or less thanks to the netroots activists. In my speech, I suggested that we organize, not just every two years, but constantly year after year, to bridge the gap by which Centrists lose to Greens and progressives. I, of course, meant just the opposite. We should organize to overcome the margin by which progressives and Greenish candidates lose to centrist Democrats in primaries, and the margin by which Democrats lose to Republicans in the general elections. That’s how the Democrats won the House back in 2006, and it’s how we can take over Congress from the corporatists now!

To further confuse things, because of the 2010 census, Congressional districts were recently redrawn, and we are now in the 2nd Congressional District, not the 1st!

Also, in case it wasn’t clear, my proposal is to respond to the urgency of the 1990 EPA, IPCC, and Woods Hole Research Institute’s reports saying we needed to reduce our emissions 55-80% below 1990 levels by 2000 or 2005 (depending on the report) by reducing our emissions 80% below 1990 levels in the next ten years. That’s why nothing short of an all-out emergency program to convert away from fossil fuels as fast as humanly possible is now our only option for cultural and ecological survival. Nothing else can make those reductions that fast. And our lives and the entire fate of the planet depend on our doing just that!

 

Video: Andy Caffrey announces 2012 1st District Congressional Run at Humboldt Nuke

On April 26, 2011, the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear power catastrophe, Garberville resident, organizer, and videographer, U.S. Green Party co-founder, 26-year veteran Earth First! organizer Andy Caffrey announced his 2012 Democratic Party campaign.  He says it’s time to give the Democrats and Republicans a chance to vote Green.  Time for a truly Green candidate and a truly Green political response in Congress to the state of social, economic, and ecological crises, this age of criminal corporations run amok.

Andy gave this speech starting exactly at 2:15 PM on the shore adjacent to what was formerly known as the Humboldt Bay Nuclear Power Plant. This was at a rally he organized with other community members to revitalize the anti-nuclear power movement on the North Coast in solidarity with the people of Japan and in opposition to President Obama’s plans to unleash more nuclear power time bombs in the U.S.

Caffrey has fought nuclear power and for Green alternatives since the mid-1970s when he protested at San Onofre with Helen Caldicott and Winona LaDuke while a student at UC San Diego. He went to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon in 1987 with Dave Foreman and Earth First! as part of a direct action campaign that shut down a recently-opened uranium mine in the drainages of the Grand Canyon. And he was there in Tennessee in the summer of 1994 fighting Watts-Bar, the last nuclear power facility to go online in the U.S. He pledges to take a fierce fight to the House floor against what he calls Obamanukes  and to shut down all currently-operating nuclear power facilities. His first target is the taxpayer nuclear liability bail-out law the Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act of 1957 (the year Caffrey was born) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price-anderson_act].

Caffrey is running for two main reasons. First, to redirect the United States federal government towards an adequate emergency response to the Climate Crisis (a term he coined). He considers the 2004 Asian tsunami an apt analogy: “The people who waited at the beach until they saw the wave coming before they got up to flee, even if they turned and ran as fast as they could in the right direction, were just as dead as those who stayed on the beach sunning themselves until the very last moment. The only ones who survived were the ones who left early enough and got far enough away in time. We must deal with the urgency and order of magnitude of the Climate Crisis on the terms nature is demanding of us, from what our best science tells us, no matter what that means for corporate America and its investors.”

Andy believes there is only one response offered so far to the public that is up to meeting the magnitude and urgency of the crisis, a crisis he has studied and organized to fight for 30 years. That response is his New Green America plan.   A plan to bring the nation away from the brink of ecological chaos, away from economic, social, and moral collapse, and to jail corporate and federal political criminals and mass murderers. He emphasizes, “Gerald Ford betrayed his country and democracy itself when he pardoned Richard Nixon! Nixon should never have been pardoned! That led to Reagan getting away with genocide in Central America and Iran-Contra,  since then, similar criminal military escapades have been carried out by every president, especially George W. Bush, but even now, President Obama. It’s got to stop right now!”

New Green America Congressional action begins with his second reason for running, to enact a bioregionally-based Green New Deal. That means an immediate long-term, emergency, citizen safety net bail-out and Taxing the Rich, ending corporate welfare, corporate personhood, the War on Drugs, and retreating the American Empire to reduce the military down to one that simply is there to protect Americans and their U.S. property.

It means legalizing marijuana at the federal level. It means the redirection of trillions of federal taxpayer dollars away from corporate bankster and military bail-outs and back to the states and counties where they belong to create good, long-term, safe and healthy jobs in sustainable industries and ecological restoration. It means rebuilding post fossil fuel, post-nuclear, sustainable, localized economic infrastructures and restoring nature, so that everybody can meet their needs from as close to home as possible.

Because our consumerist, industrialist American economy is never coming back, the Green New Deal must also provide a tremendous investment loss safety net for working and retired Americans as thousands of corporations fail over the coming decade. Americans have got to feel safe in order to work together in harmony as we go though this Great Green Conversion together, truly as one America and as one world.

Caffrey is related to Civil War hero General John A. Logan, the founder of Memorial Day, who was a Democratic and a Republican Congressman, Republican Senator, and Republican Vice Presidential nominee of 1884. Logan was one of seven Congressmen who ran the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson in the Senate. Logan read the charges against Johnson on the Senate floor. Caffrey says impeachment is a family tradition he is proud to have. He laments that he wasn’t in Congress on January 20, 2001, the day George W. Bush walked into the White House! He would have put impeachment at the top of the Congressional agenda.

 

For more information please check out http://www.CaffreyForCongress.org/

You can find Andy at facebook, twitter,  youtube and many other social networks. See site for links!

or write to:

Caffrey For Congress

P.O. Box 324

Redway, CA 95560

 

NOTE: In June 2011 preliminary new Congressional Districts drawn from the 2010 census data have drawn Mike Thompson out of the First District into a new district. Second District Rep Lynn Woolsey of Marin County is now in the First District. However, the same month, Woolsey announced her retirement.