Rebekah Kennedy for Senate, As A Green

Rebekah Kennedy, a civil rights lawyer from Fort Smith, Arkansas, is running as a challenger against incumbent U.S. Senator Mark Pryor. Although Senator Pryor is a Democrat, he almost always votes with Republicans on important legislation, and has earned the resentment of rank-and-file Arkansas Democrats.

The following transcript is from part of a conversation between Rebekah Kennedy and Irregular Times.

What brought you to this Green Party candidacy?

Well, that’s almost two questions, because half of that question is what brought me to the Green Party, and the other half of that question is why it’s so important now to run against Mark Pryor in particular, and to give the people of Arkansas a choice for this seat.

As far as what attracts me to the Green Party, I was born and raised Democrat in a state where most people are born and raised Democrat. There’s a popular mythology that Arkansas is a red state, but as is the case with so many things, that’s been simplified to the point of being untrue.

The dynamics of politics in Arkansas are a little bit different than they are in some other places. There may be some places in the United States where being a Democrat is still a way to make a difference for progressive values in America, but by and large Arkansas is not one of those states, particularly on a state level. The Democratic Party in Arkansas has been in control of the state government, particularly with majority control of the state legislature, for over 100 years, and has failed to bring about any progressive change for 100 years.

For those reasons, I decided to look for a political party that could be a vehicle, not merely of ambition, but of values and positive progressive public policy. That’s what led me to the Green Party.

If the Democratic Party doesn’t stand for progressive values in Arkansas, what does it stand for?

The status quo, certain narrow business interests, fear of Republicans, to some extent.

What happens to liberal Democrats in Arkansas is that they find themselves constantly voting for people who don’t share their values or their vision of public policy, for fear of politicians who would do even worse things if elected. That’s not a road toward progress.

How then, can those people have any hope for representation in Arkansas. What’s the path you see for that?

I think that the first step is that we have to have a political party that will represent us and give us a voice in the process. That’s why I’ve spent the last seven years working to build the Green Party – because I think it’s the best shot we have at building a political party that will really do what we need a political party to do. That is to say, rather than having a system for making sure that someone’s friends in Little Rock gets the state jobs they’re interested in, which is the primary function of the Democratic Party in Arkansas, we need a political party that will work to elect progressives, and advocate for progressive legislation and actively try to stop antiprogressive legislation.

The Green Party is going to be the vehicle for doing that in Arkansas, because I see that a lot of people have put a lot of time and energy into trying to fix the Democratic Party from the inside, and I won’t say that doesn’t have some value, perhaps in a more progressive state, but the degree of sweeping out you would have to do to make the Democratic Party of Arkansas a vehicle for progressive change is such that you might as well try to make the Republican Party of Arkansas a vehicle for progressive change.

In fact, there have been times when, lacking any other vehicle, the Republican Party has been the vehicle people in Arkansas have used to try to bring about progressive change. That’s why we have a large category of Rockefeller Republicans in Arkansas, which is a term that may sound odd to people in some places, but they’re sort of liberal in the sense of being forward looking and in favor of education and science. In some cases that kind of Republican has been the only alternative to the back-slapping, good old boy Democratic politics.

Mark Pryor Targeted by Progressives For Removal From Senate in 2008

In the wake of his vote for the FISA Amendments Act, Senator Mark Pryor has been targeted by progressives for removal from the United States Senate in 2008.

The FISA Amendments Act allows George W. Bush to conduct electronic spying operations against the American people with no restraint. Here’s what the law does:

makes it legal for the federal government to spy on you electronically – Reading your email, listening to your telephone calls, watching what web pages you visit, including tracking you on Gather, following your financial transactions

without any explanation of why they’re doing the spying

without anyone outside of the Executive Branch knowing that the spying is being done

without oversight by Congress

gives telecommunications companies retroactive immunity for helping the government do this even before the Protect America Act was passed

The truth is that Mark Pryor’s problems go way, way back. The Progressive Patriots legislative scorecard for Mark Pryor gives him a score of just 6 out of 100.

Senator Pryor was placed into the United States Senate by his daddy, who was also Senator Pryor in his time. They treated it like a family inheritance instead of a democratically-elected position. So, Mark Pryor does not feel beholden to Democratic voters in Arkansas so much as he feels beholden to his father’s buddies and political allies. Those political insider friends of Mark Pryor have made sure that there is no Democratic Party primary challenger for Pryor in the 2008 Senate election. As always, Mark Pryor gets the skids greased for him all the way.

Rank and file Arkansas Democrats have had it with Mark Pryor’s two-faced politics. In 2008 in Arkansas, ordinary Democrats are against Mark Pryor, and many are defecting to the Green Party campaign of Rebekah Kennedy.

When Fertility Leads To A Dead Zone

For the last century, Americans have been stuck in a simplistic mechanical model of prosperity: The more we produce, the more prosperous we become. One of the most profound refutations of that model is the Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone, a great area of the Gulf of Mexico, spreading from the delta of the Mississippi River in Louisiana, where no marine animals can live.

This dead zone is created by the great industrial agricultural push in America’s MidWest. For generations, farmers have been told by the government that they’ll be most successful if they fertilize their fields with fertilizers created, not through the natural decay of plant materials, but in factories far from the field. Those fertilizers then run off into streams that feed into rivers that feed into the Mississippi River, which flows into the Gulf of Mexico. There, the fertilizers create such an intense bloom of plant growth in the water that the decaying plant material creates a vast stretch of water in the Gulf of Mexico that is starved of oxygen, and kills any animal unlucky enough to swim into it.

The maps below show the results of a recent study by the US Geological Survey, tracing these fertilizers, nitrogen and phosphorus back to the states upstream where they enter the Mississippi River watershed.

The following states have only 31 percent of the area in the Mississippi River watershed, but they contribute 75 percent of the nitrogen and phosphorus that lead to the Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone:
Illinois
Iowa
Indiana
Missouri
Arkansas
Kentucky
Tennessee
Ohio
Mississippi

That study ought to have been done by the US Department of Agriculture, given that it’s agriculture that delivers so much of the pollution into the dead zone. People ask what good organic, sustainable farming does us. This new USGS study makes it clear. Organic, sustainable farming could spare us dead zones.

What is Wrong With the Arkansas Democrats?

After this weekend, I am left scratching my head, wondering what is wrong with the Democratic Party in Arkansas.

All but one of the Arkansas Democrats in Congress voted this weekend to support George W. Bush, and to treat the Bill of Rights like garbage. What do they teach in Arkansas schools – blind obedience to authority, combined with disrespect for the Constitution of the United States of America?

The Protect America Act, which does not protect America, but does rip to shreds the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, is designed to give more power to the least trusted member of the federal government: Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. This despicable new law, already signed into effect by President Bush, allows Alberto Gonzales to set up spy operations without any supervision and without any real limits. Alberto Gonzales gets the power to go anywhere in America, and order anyone to do his bidding, to help him spy on other Americans. If anyone refuses to cooperate with his orders, they can be thrown in prison. If anyone tells about Gonzales’s programs to spy on American citizens, they can be thrown into prison. There are no search warrants. There is no real congressional oversight. The only person who is given the power to evaluate the legality of the programs activities is… you guessed it, Alberto Gonzales.

This law gives Alberto Gonzales, the man who has been caught lying to Congress, breaking the law, abusing his powers for political purposes, and spying against Americans in violation of the law, a big fat reward for his wrongdoing. Apparently, the Democrats in Arkansas think that’s a great idea.

Democratic Senator Blanche Lincoln voted with the Republicans in favor of this law of despotism

Democratic Senator Mark Pryor of Arkansas voted with the Republicans in favor of this law of despotism

Democratic Michael Ross of Arkansas voted with the Republicans in favor of this law of despotism

Democratic Vic Snyder of Arkansas voted with the Republicans in favor of this law of despotism

When the American Civil Liberties Union found out about the freedom-killing provisions of the Protect America Act, and that Democrats in Congress were considering voting for the new law, it released the following statement: “That a Democratically-controlled Senate would be strong-armed by the Bush administration is astonishing. This Congress may prove to be as spineless in standing up to the Bush Administration as the one that enacted the Patriot Act or the Military Commissions Act.”

Spineless seems to be a pretty good word to describe the Arkansas Democrats… save one. One Arkansas Democrat in Congress did not vote in favor of the fascist Protect America Act. Thanks to Representative Marion Berry, the one Democrat from Arkansas in Congress who did not forget the oath all members of Congress swear to defend the Constitution of the United States of America.