Please join with Earth First!, Rainforest Action Network, Ruckus Society, and Climate Ground Zero co-founder Mike Roselle and support Andy Caffrey’s run for Congress in 2012 no matter where you live! It’s a job for the whole planet!
Andy Caffrey for Congress 2012
California, 2nd District
The North Coast Choice!
P.O. Box 324, Redway, CA 95560
http://www.CaffreyForCongress.org
Please share this link! CaffreyForCongress.org
November 28, 2011
Dear Planet Saver,
It’s been 41 years since the first Earth Day. Back in 1970 we were cursed with smog in our cities, toxins on our farms and in our food, clearcuts, lead in the paint of toys, dangerous drugs, suburban sprawl, overgrazed public lands, oil spills, strip mining, and radiation from nuclear power and nuclear weapons.
After 41 years of our collective activism, we are now plagued with smog in our cities, thousands more toxic chemicals on our farms and in our food, massive global deforestation of all our tropical, temperate, and boreal native forests and other habitat extermination, the extinction of over 100 species each day, the collapse of 90% of the world’s fisheries and over 40% reduction of the world’s phytoplankton–the very foundation of life itself and a major producer of Earth’s oxygen, lead in the paint of toys, dangerous drugs, suburban sprawl, overgrazed public lands, ocean-destroying oil spills, mountaintop removal coal mining, tar sands, radiation from nuclear power and nuclear weapons, genetic engineering, nanotechnology, the ozone hole, and a planet-exterminating climate crisis.
But you wouldn’t know anything was wrong with Mama Gaia if you went just by what President Obama and Congress are saying is important to work on today.
According to professor Stephen M. Meyer, the Giant Panda, the African Elephant, the Sumatran Rhinoceros, the California Condor, all of Hawaii’s endemic plants, all of the world’s tigers, and the African Lion are already doomed to extinction. So are the Mountain Gorilla, Orangutan, Polar Bear, several penguin and seal species, and the Cheetah. They are referred to as Ghost Species, virtually impossible to save now. In just the last ten years, lion populations plummeted from 200,000 to 20,000 and poaching is more out of control that ever before. You see, as the animals become more rare, the Black Market price for them goes up and more people go after them until they’re all gone.
But according to the Republicans and Democrats, our spaceship is endlessly recuperative and endlessly vast and we just have some medium-sized maintenance tasks to perform… by making adjustments in our finances. But this is the ideology of the cancer cell! Unlimited, undifferentiated growth is great! Until you kill the host and die with it!
It can become too late.
What the Hell happened?
Well, one obvious answer that we must admit is that collectively we simply didn’t do enough to stop it. We had better things to do, I guess, instead of focusing and fighting hard enough to prevail. But then who among us knew had bad it already was or what to do about it back in the 1950s, 60s and 70s? Who saw the big picture to such a degree as to envision the reality of the crisis? Who had the luxury of the time to study everything? Well, a couple of people did like Rachel Carson, David Brower, and E.F. Schumacher. There were a handful of teachers.
As a 12-year old child witnessing the first Earth Day, it was clear to me that there were alternative, ecologically-benign pathways available to all the world’s people. The toxic L.A. smog I grew up in could be eliminated, we could build our towns, homes, and transportation systems entirely from renewables if the government would subsidize Green technologies (called the soft path) instead of nuclear, oil, coal, and freeways. Our farms could all be organic. Our communities could be safe, secure, and alive with culture and freedom if we abandoned consumerism and militarism as the base of our economy. With increases in productivity, we could all work 20-hour workweeks. Our kids would have a future brighter than our own for at least seven generations.
What we did wrong was put our faith in the Republicans and Democrats of our representative democracy to respond to the science with their consciences and deal with these problems in the best ways possible for the wellbeing of all. But instead, as we can now see, we got a pathocracy, a delusional government of conscienceless psychopaths who every day since I was a boy, have kept on murdering the planet and tens of millions of people for the profit of those that economist James Galbraith calls the “richer than the rich.” The world’s newest species is the billionaire.
In other words, we didn’t take on corporatism and now we have a plutocracy that is dismantling our democracy far faster than you know, sucking the wealth of the middle class up to the richer than the rich killing the buying power of the middle class and permanently destroying the economy’s ability to provide jobs. Forget about concerns that we’re going into a double dip recession or that it’s a European crisis. When you throw in peak oil and peak every other resource and the contraction of industrialism that is mandatory for dealing with the climate crisis, the economy is a goner. It’s about to get clobbered like nothing before. And so are we, especially our kids and grandkids.
Now, one of the main reasons we didn’t do enough is that we didn’t know what the hell to do about it, in which direction to harness our focus. We like to think the best of people, even our politicians when we meet with them one-on-one. But despite their behaviors and track records and the fact that the Republicans in the House and Senate (and at least half of the Democrats) all lie to us every single day, we keep voting them back in and expecting something better! Republican voters are so oblivious and clueless they’re voting back in the people who have most destroyed our economy and the planet, the ones whose economics causes the collapse! More Republicans! What they’ve done is turn the United States’ federal government into the largest organized crime syndicate and terrorism network the world has ever seen.
And in 2012, the Democrats are only left with doing the same thing, re-electing President Goldman Sachs Obama.
RIP the Land of the Free…
As a boy, every night at dinnertime, my family watched the body bags and body counts from the Vietnam war, a war that was started by a lying president who insisted we were attacked by the North Vietnamese in international waters when nothing of the kind ever happened. LBJ and Richard Nixon were war criminals, but the Republicans and Democrats in Congress just let them walk! After Nixon was pardoned by Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan became a war criminal who knew he could get away with unleashing death squads that murdered hundreds of thousands of innocent people, especially in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala. As an activist, I spent most of the 1980s fighting this brutal, savage, monstrous war against the brown, black, and red-skinned people of our continent.
The USA School of the Americas was teaching “our” dictators and the leaders of the death squads how to torture and exterminate entire villages of peasants. In other words we ran and still run a School of Terrorism. Ronald Reagan said he took responsibility for the traitorous illegality of the Iran-Contra affair, but he suffered no penalties whatsoever for his criminal responsibility and betrayal of our nation by selling weapons to our enemy, an impeachable offense. In fact, just last week they unveiled a new statue of Ronald Reagan in Washington DC at Reagan National Airport!
And that pattern of murderous criminality by our presidents has continued with every president and every Congress ever since.
They are not going to stop themselves!
Well, I’ve been fighting them for decades. I haven’t given up at all, ever! Every single day for decades I’ve taken on Republican and Democratic government officials from the local to the national level. With my fellow Earth First!ers and other community members I’ve taken on multinational corporate CEOs and won. The BBC considers me a “World Historic Figure” for organizing the first grassroots campaign against genetic-engineering on the planet. They call me the “World’s First Crop Puller,” because my team, the Strawberry Liberation Front and then Mindless Thugs Against Genetic Engineering engaged in the first ecotage action against genetic engineering when we pulled up all the strawberry plants that were set to be sprayed with their altered bacterium Frostban.
More importantly, the multifaceted campaign I organized–testifying at hearings, press releases and press conferences, radio and TV interviews, demonstrations, a lawsuit, our own legislation requiring (GE project-crushing) liability coverage to conduct tests such as those strawberry field trials of Frostban, and we collected signatures of ⅓ of the test town’s residents on an anti-test petition–resulted in the bankruptcy of the corporation Advanced Genetic Sciences a year later.
The head of the project told me in a long phone conversation a year later, “You don’t know how successful you’ve been. All of our investors are pulling out because they think the ruckus you guys are making is going to delay the release of the commercial product longer than they want to wait for a return on their investment.”
What’s even better, is that these actions shut down that entire wing of the GE industry. There has been no product development anywhere on Earth of atmospherically-released GE microbes ever since these actions in 1987. California Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom recently said he was inspired by our “strawberries campaign” back then to introduce to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors a Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO) food-labeling bill.
So that’s one thing you don’t have to worry about because of my work.
I’ve been shouting the alarm on the climate crisis for 30 years, forming the world’s first direct action climate group, Climate Action NOW!, and even coining Al Gore’s favorite meme “Climate Crisis” back in 1996.
As an activist and elected party official, I helped found both of the U.S. Green parties, the Citizens Party back in 1980, and both the East Bay Green Alliance in 1985 and the Berkeley Greens in 1987 of the modern Green party movement. I’ve worked on other legislation too, such as the Citizens party’s Affordable Housing initiative in 1982 and the Forest Forever initiative with Earth First! and numerous other conservation groups in 1990.
Now I’m running for Congress and I can use your help.
The 2nd district on the North coast of California is unique to say the least. Voters here say that in 2012 they will vote Democratic over 4:1 compared to the 15% who say they will vote Republican. It covers six counties from the Oregon border down to the Golden Gate Bridge. Three of the counties, Mendocino, Humboldt, and Trinity are world famous as The Emerald Triangle where the finest marijuana in the world is grown. My hometown of Garberville is the very heart of it. Up here, the future economy lies in the post-prohibition of cannabis, both medicinally and recreationally. I’m one of the main organizers of the project to incorporate Garberville and most of the rest of southern Humboldt into its own city, Emerald City so that we can write our own cannabis regulations and build our Ecotopia. I’m also a Proposition 215 patient myself and will tenaciously take on the federal lifestyle overlords on the floor of the House for our rights to be well and for full cannabis/hemp legalization. Not one more day in prison for any nonviolent marijuana usage!
We have no entrenched multi-national corporate power anymore or any military bases, or even incumbents running for this Congressional seat due to brand new district lines and the state’s new Top Two Open Primary in which all candidates run against each other in one nonpartisan primary next June. The top two vote getters, regardless of party affiliation, move on to the November general election. I have a tremendous advantage here. My political consultants consider my race one of their three sure wins for 2012.
Only three candidates have experience as elected officials, and only one above the county level, a junior assemblymen. Seven out of nine candidates are from Marin or Sonoma counties in the urbanized southern part of the new district. They will divide that half of the electorate seven ways. I am the only candidate who knows and has lived in the entire district, especially the four rural northern counties. I’ve lived here for over two decades. I’m the only candidate who truly knows the people, places, and institutions of the four northern counties. All the others, the Highway 101 candidates from the San Francisco Bay Area, have to learn about us from scratch. The frontrunner is bragging that to learn more about us he came up here recently and did the tourist circuit. He even went through the drive-through redwood tree! Oh boy! So now he has the knowledge of our region of a tourist!
I’ve gone through the timber wars against Charles Hurwitz’s Maxxam liquidation logging and economic vampiricism of the Pacific Lumber Company since 1986, fighting all that time for ecologically-sustainable forest jobs for our timber workers. I’ve saved at least three lives in SoHum, including that of two Vietnam War veterans. Out of nothing, I organized with five “church ladies” two winter homeless shelters. Almost daily, a handful of us do other person-to-person work to aid our homeless neighbors. Now we’re fighting for a Porta-Potty since the local Chamber of Commerce thinks by having no public bathrooms in town, they’ll drive away all the unhoused folks who hang out there!
So I’m ready to take the fight to Congress. I’ve devised a campaign strategy to elect widely-respected community leaders who can’t raise a million dollars (the going price for a Congressional seat), which is good since three of the other candidates have already raised a quarter of a million dollars! We can do it, especially now with the growing Occupy movement, by combining our real world community organizing networks, community and progressive radio, and the expanding netroots communities. All we have to do to be competitive is reach as many voters with our own videos, radio programs, and public meetings as the millionaire candidates reach with their paid advertisements. Once we master this, then most of the advantage of having a million dollars disintegrates away.
In my case, it’s already working! My media outreach and video production, as you can see in the adjoining video links email, lifted me to 3rd place in September and 2nd place by October. So now is the time when I most need your help! As the big dollars start to shape the competition I need to keep expanding my network meeting with folks in six counties and linking folks up in cyberspace. My budget for doing this is $50,000. While money is not the essential ingredient of this campaign, what money is budgeted is really needed!
What we’re inventing here is revolutionary. First, even though I’m registered Democratic at this time in order to get enough votes to win and to organize Green Politics within the progressive Democratic community, with your support we will be electing the first Green to the U.S. House of Representatives ever! Second, with this community/netroots strategy shown to be successful, in 2014 and 2016 we can knock out several more corporatists and eclipse the Teabaggers as the opposition voice in Congress. Imagine 20 Michael Moores and Amy Goodmans shutting down business as usual in Congress and relentlessly informing and pressuring president Obama from the Greens out front as we teach the American people the practical solutions of the Ecotopian path. We could actually Occupy Congress!
When you consider that the International Energy Agency’s brand new report calls out that in only five years, “If fossil fuel infrastructure is not rapidly changed, the world will ‘lose forever’ the chance to avoid dangerous climate change,” what other choice do we have? Five years. This is not just a lyric for a David Bowie song anymore. We’ll only have four years by the time the 2012 elections are finished. Time has run out for solutions from the status quo Republicrats! Our only choice now is to come together and focus on ousting corporatists and shutting down their schemes of planetary termination by electing our community leaders to Congress and fighting our asses off as if all life depends upon us, because it does!
The alternative in five years is to have that horrible conversation with our kids and grandkids, “Sorry we killed your planet.”
So, please, get involved today and write a check to “Caffrey For Congress” or make your contribution online at the campaign’s web site http://CaffreyForCongress.org. Then forward this letter and the video links email to your own network. The campaign and the seven New Green America proposals that are it’s foundation are explained in the interviews of me and at http://CaffreyForCongress.org.
We can no longer think, “what can our candidates get out of the Republicratic establishment.” We have to ask, “What must we get out of the federal government and how can we use our cleverness to get it in time.”
When you consider someone sitting on a beach in Thailand as that monster tsunami was bearing down, if that person waited too long, it didn’t matter if he turned and ran away, even if he ran in the right direction. If he didn’t leave early enough and get far enough away, he was just as dead as if he stayed on the beach finishing his drink. That is exactly our plight with the climate crisis. If we don’t change society and our economy enough and in time as nature presents itself, then we kill our children’s planet.
On the other hand, I’ve been working on this crisis and its solutions for over 30 years with the greatest scientists and activist organizers in the world. When I’m elected you and them come along with me in Congress every single day. I’ll make a web video after every day Congress meets in which I’ll tell you who the bad guys are, who the good guys are, what legislation to fight, and what we can support. With your help, starting in January I’ll be commencing monthly community meetings in ten towns of our district to begin the process of collectively writing our own legislation! I hope the first bill I introduce to Congress is written with your help, and maybe even your good ideas!
That’s the choice I’m asking you to make today. Help me organize the 40,000 or so voters I need to be a Top Two vote getter in June and I promise you the Fight of our Times in Congress and the White House, in the streets, factories and schools. This is our Hail Mary pass for America and the planet! And we can make it together!
Thanks for your time and consideration! Please spread the word and take action! Supporting this campaign increases support for all of the other campaigns I still work on to shelter the homeless (we got permission just this week to use land near Garberville to build a camp for southern Humboldt homeless for the winter and beyond which will have Porta-potties and showers!), to halt the Caltrans highway expansion through the ancient redwoods of Richardson Grove, to incorporate southern Humboldt into our own Emerald City, to fight nuclear power and the climate crisis and for a wild, evolving Earth.
It’s time to turn it up!
As always, for a New Green America (and planet!),
Andy Caffrey
You can mail your check to:
Caffrey for Congress
P.O. Box 324
Redway, CA 95560
staff [at] CaffreyForCongress [dot] org
http://CaffreyForCongress.org
Thanks!
P.S. Please check for me and the campaign at facebook, youtube and twitter! Also, I’ve put together the world’s greatest archive of Earth First! activist and cultural videos at youtube.com/HaydukeVideo.
New Green America:
1) Fight The Climate Crisis as Threat Number One
2) Rebuild America’s Infrastructure around Bioregions and Sustainability to meet all our needs as close to home as possible
TAX THE RICH
Medicare for All and Expansion of the Social Safety Net
3) Retreat the U.S. empire. Use the military only to defend Americans and their US property
4) End Corporate Personhood
5) Legalize Marijuana and End the War on Drugs
6) Prosecute the Bush administration for Crimes Against Humanity, War Crimes, Torture, and Murder
7) Electoral Reform, Ranked-Choice Voting, and Paper Ballots. Get Corporate Money out of Elections
Paid for by The Committee to Elect Andy Caffrey to Congress