“It is really a complete pleasure to support your film project because it is living history really,” says Dr. Richard Lobban, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at Rhode Island College, who was a reporter at the time and wrote stories from the field. From 1961 until 1974, Amilcar Cabral and his African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde/Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde (PAIGC) engaged in an intense war against the Portuguese who had colonized Africa. Though Cabral himself was not a Communist, the conflict became one of the hot fronts of the Cold War.

“Cape Verdeans have always seen themselves, because they are an immigrant Afro-American population, as not having an attachment to the African American experience, or at least the same attachment to the African American experience,” Araujo told me several months ago. “The Cape Verdeans in Providence do one job in Providence. They were all longshoremen. The ILA [International Longshoremen’s Association] 1328 is an entirely Cape Verdean union. It was founded by Cape Verdeans. It’s officers are still Cape Verdean-majority. It’s also a very protective union. They were also able to keep the docks honest, which is the problem that they had in Boston and in New York. And they were able to keep it open to Cape Verdeans, most importantly!”

“Cape Verdeans were relatively politically sophisticated to a degree more than Azoreans. And also because of the amount of shipping that passed through there they were also more cosmopolitan,” he said. “They identify as an international people.”

This is a point that is vital to understand because the tensions on the macro level that played out in Cape Verde were staged on the micro level in Rhode Island. For example, the contradictions of race and racism impacted Cape Verdean identity in unique ways. Segregation in schools and churches would confound a population that in some senses does not regard itself as an African population as much as from an island near Africa that has its own unique traditions and culture. The expansion of Brown University and gentrification effectively dispersed a historic neighborhood by the end of the 1960’s.

These were the challenges that Cabral and his contemporaries were encountering when they began an armed insurrection against the same types of systemic racism and exploitation perpetrated by the Portuguese. And this is where the PAIGC’s links with the Communist bloc states proved to be so natural, it was because the ethos of internationalism, which defined Communist solidarity in the anti-colonial struggle, were part of Cape Verdean identity.

“Amilcar Cabral was from Angola, so there was this recognition, the same way that Che [Guevara] was from [Argentina], not Cuba, that there’s an internationalism,” said Araujo.

Guenny Pires, who is directing the documentary, says “I grew up with his story but I never really knew what happened and why. I was little when we got independence in 1975 so I could not understand a lot of stuff… I thought as a filmmaker it would be my responsibility to tell this story.”

Pires says the film was created “to honor Cabral and to keep his message alive.”

Click the Player Below to Listen to the Complete Interview!

Having been produced over the past 15 years, he is now seeking funding for the completion of the picture. And, because his production is partnered with a non-profit, all donations are tax-deductible.

For more information or to donate, visit the website of Txan Films or email them at TxanFilm@gmail.com.

Secretary of State Nellie Gorbea described it as “the most progressive platform ever put forward by an American political party.” Sen. Bernie Sanders said, “Our job now is to see that platform implemented by a Democratically controlled Senate [and] a Democratically controlled House.” Yet one small detail might have Gov. Gina Raimondo nervous.

In between verbiage about public college and healthcare in the proposed Democratic Party platform is a small passage that deals directly with pensions.

Democrats believe it should be easier for Americans to save for retirement and prepare for unforeseen risks and expenses. We will defend the right of workers to collect their defined benefit pensions and make sure workers get priority and protection when pension plans are in distress. Democrats will also fight to protect the earned pension benefits of Americans in multi-employer pension plans. And we will fight against any attempt by Republicans in Congress or on Wall Street to roll back the Conflict of Interest Rule, which requires that retirement advisors put the best interests of their clients above their own financial gain.

In layman’s terms, the Democratic Party publicly rebuked the exact kind of pension reform Raimondo pushed in Rhode Island.

Defined benefit pensions were the norm for Rhode Island public sector retirees until Raimondo introduced the concept of the “defined contribution” plan in her signature overhaul of the state pension system in 2011.

This is a strong rebuttal to the Raimondo-flavor of Democrats, fiscal conservatives that used to define John Chafee’s version of Republican Party politics.

If you or someone you know is a pensioner, consider becoming an Associate member of Rhode Island Retired Teachers Association to support their efforts.

Click Here To Download The Membership Enrollment Form For RIRTA and Support Pension Sustainability!

Donate Today to RIRTA!

And even if you are not involved with the fund, you still can donate to this group and help fund their efforts. Donations (checks preferred, made out to RIRTA- memo line LDF) can be mailed to PO Box 7631, Warwick, RI 02887 or sent via PayPal (see below).

The cancellation of pensioner COLAs was supposed to help the fund return the fund to solvency. But even with retirees having no retirement income, the fund has yet to reach 80 percent funding due to outrageous fees and continued mismanagement.

When Raimondo began her efforts, she held a series of public forums that hindered the ability of pensioners to vocalize their objections. This led to a great deal of heartache for those who had done honest work all their life and were given a muzzle and austerity policy in return for public sector service. But now it is plain that, in the long run, it is Raimondo who has just gotten silenced.

Does this open room for better fiscal management of the fund by Treasurer Seth Magaziner now? Will the pension fund have its solvency and security insured through divestment from high-risk, high-fee hedge funds and a dismally under-performing real estate portfolio? Following Raimondo’s failure to deliver the Ocean State for Clinton in last spring’s primary, could this be another nail in the coffin of a political career built on misrepresentation and misappropriation? Could this small item be the location of post-electoral grassroots mobilizing?

Only time will tell.

The answer to why public school teachers are absent so often is easily explained if you ever walk into our under-funded school buildings that have gone decades without serious renovations and are host to a variety of workplace hazards.

Perhaps Gov. Raimondo is right to be concerned.

“I use the example that our buildings are extremely run-down and they’re not well-kept and they’re not really clean,” said Providence teachers’ union president Maribeth Calabro. “I know of several teachers, myself included, who, somewhere in September, get sick with bronchitis and the last bout of bronchitis that they have is somewhere in February or March. There’s been years where I’ve had bronchitis three and four times, just me personally.

She added, “But I also know other teachers who, when you go to the doctor, the doctor says ‘Are you a teacher? Are you in an older building?’ So we have a lot of respiratory illness, a lot of asthma, a great deal of bronchitis, and it just wears people down. It wears their immune system down to be working in environments that are not clean.”

Click the player below to listen to this interview

Calabro said all stakeholders know the biggest issue in urban education is the facilities.

“I’ve walked our buildings with school committee members,” she said. “I’ve walked our buildings with Senator Pichardo and other members. I’ve walked them with George Nee and Mr. Sabatoni. We all realize, it’s abundantly clear that our buildings are in disrepair, to the point of being just disrespectful in the fact that we think that kids should just come here and feel good about themselves when the building is so run down. There’s an acknowledgement at the state and local level that this is in fact the case. The issue is, and it always comes down to this, it’s the money. So there was a moratorium put on construction funding for schools for a good long time and that moratorium served to further exacerbate the issues that are in schools. We have holes in ceilings, holes in floors, missing screens, you name it. Peeling paint, I can’t even tell you how much peeling paint there is, mold, etc.”

“So all of those things cost money and I realize that and the building trades realize that and I think the public in general, John Q. Public, realizes that it costs money. But there has to be a way sustain and maintain these buildings through funding from the state and/or city that doesn’t hinge upon the whim of the person who is in political office and the fact there is no money. So we don’t have a rainy day fund, we don’t save specifically for schools, we don’t do anything in particular to support school construction that is not charter-like. So all of those things exacerbate the situation in that we have basic needs of our kids and they’re not being met because of financial obligations.”

Last year PTU Treasurer Alex Lucini described how some buildings in his district are supposed to be legally condemned:

“They always pick and choose a topic area every year to focus on and it’s typically never anything positive, it’s always the negative angle which vilifies teachers for whatever reason,” says Providence teachers union president Maribeth Calabro. “I think that it’s very interesting that the conversation just focuses on the word ‘absences’ but it doesn’t talk about reasons for absence.”

“We are Plan B for Bernie,” she said, “As Bernie himself said, it’s a movement, not a man!”

Stein, who will be in Rhode Island on July 20, explained, “The 99 percent is being thrown under the bus by Democrats as well as Republicans. That’s not to say there’s no difference but the differences are not enough to save your job, to save your life, or to save the planet. People growing up today see two parties that have bailed out Wall Street, including a Democratic White House with two Democratic houses of Congress. The two parties, including the Democrats, led the way on the bail-outs for Wall Street, the offshoring of our jobs, and again, thank you to Barack Obama and Bill Clinton leading the charge on the rigged corporate trade agreements, the expanding wars, the attack on immigrant rights, the massive prison-industrial complex and the militarization of our police. For young people looking at this world today it’s not working for them,” she said.

“So, Bernie’s campaign,” she added, “we owe them a great debt of gratitude for standing up and showing how the American people are ready to mobilize and say ‘let’s keep this going, let’s bring that energy and that momentum into our campaign. We deserve a future where we’re calling the shots, where we’re in charge, we are the 99 percent, we are the majority, and Bernie’s campaign showed that there can be majority support for this kind of campaign.” Stein is adamant that, if every student debtor alone in America were to vote for her, the only candidate who is promising student loan forgiveness for all borrowers via executive action, she would have a plurality and win the election.

A medical doctor by trade and a resident of nearby Lexington, Massachusetts, Stein was 18 and raised in Highland Park, Illinois, less than 30 miles away from the site of the infamous 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago that broke down into street riots, something some Baby Boomers have told me they are getting reminded of quite often this week.

“In the events of the last week, between the police murders in St. Paul, in Baton Rouge,” she said, “and then the assassinations of five police in Dallas, and then the revelations of yet another police murder in New York, it’s really I think forced us to stop and really feel the moment here, that we cannot go on like this. This is just a devastating, heartbreaking tragedy, especially to have seen these videos up close and personal.”

She added, “We really need to look at the roots of this disaster, we had both racism playing out and then we had blowback against racism in the shooting of the Dallas police, so we’re all kind of in the crossfire right now of this crisis of racism. And racism and violence really go hand in hand. We’ve got to deal with them both in order to deal with either one of them. So we call for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to understand the origins of this ongoing problem of police violence. It’s roots are in racism that you can trace back to the institution of slavery. Out of slavery, the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t put an end to it, then it was lynching, then it was Jim Crow, then it was segregation and red-lining and deficient schools and the War on Drugs and the prison system and then it was police violence.”

The idea of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission is based on a system that was created after the election of Nelson Mandela in South Africa to confront the deep wounds caused by the apartheid system.

“There’s a history here that we really have to come to terms with,” she explained. “We need to have less reliance on weapons. We need to take a look at police forces around the world that in fact have done away with their weapons.” She goes on to explain “It’s actually police forces that are far safer when they’re not armed because so much of the shooting is defensive and it’s out of fear. So actually police turn out to be far safer when they are not armed as well.”

Stein has previously run for a variety of offices on the Green Party ticket, including its 2012 presidential candidate. She also ran for governor of Massachusetts in 2002 and 2010. She served as member of the Lexington Town Meeting from 2005-2011.

Her medical practice began with internal medicine before it very quickly spurred her towards environmental activism, writing reports titled In Harm’s Way: Toxic Threats to Child Development and Environmental Threats to Healthy Aging. She has worked alongside  Clean Water Action, Toxic Action Center, Global Climate Convergence, Physicians for a National Health Program, and Massachusetts Medical Society while co-founding the Massachusetts Coalition for Healthy Communities. Yet this did not stop her from developing a side-project as vocalist in a folk-rock band called Somebody’s Sister.

Listen to the full interview:

Stein wants to get rid of Common Core and all corporate education deform efforts that bust teacher unions.

“The problem here is that our education system has been bought out again by the highest bidder and that includes the likes of Bill Gates and Arne Duncan, who’s not an educator but is a basketball player, so we have an education system that’s kind of been held hostage by non-educators who are applying really a business model to education,” she told me. “So we really need to put educators back in charge of our school system and of our education. That means having small classroom sizes, it means having well-paid teachers, respecting teachers unions as being critical for high-quality education. And it means doing away with the high-stakes testing which has been used as an excuse to beat up on teachers, to attack teachers unions, and to privatize our schools and to declare them failing.”

One of the major electoral forces in Rhode Island is the union movement. Right now a growth industry in Rhode Island is developing around the construction of wind farms to generate electricity. We quickly get into a conversation about her jobs program called the Green New Deal.

“The Green New Deal would mean an explosion of jobs,” Stein told me. “The Green New Deal would basically create 20,000,000 jobs. And that’s enough jobs to give everyone a full-time, good-waged job transforming our economy on an emergency basis to a sustainable and healthy economy that’s good for workers, that’s good for communities, good for our water supply, our air, and our food and all that. So it’s kind of a transformational package. It’s based on the New Deal that got us out of the Great Depression but in this case it not only solves the economic emergency, which we definitely have, in spite of what they say, we have an economic emergency for millions upon millions of workers who are not represented because they are not actively looking for work, they’re discouraged, or they’ve been forced into part-time work so we don’t see this invisible epidemic of joblessness and under-employment. We need a lot of jobs. We have an economic emergency and we can solve it at the same time we can solve our climate and environmental emergency. So specifically we call for jobs that will green our energy system, that is build wind, water, and sun energy, that will transform our transportation and will create light-rail as well as high-speed rail and restore our bridges and the infrastructure for transportation. And we call also for a healthy and sustainable food system that makes people healthy as well as the planet. And overall it will revive the economy, it will turn the tide on climate change, and it will make wars for oil obsolete. We don’t need to be fighting wars for oil when we have 100% renewable energy right here at home and that’s part of how we fund this. It also funds itself because we get much healthier by getting rid of the pollution and also frankly the dangerous jobs that make people sick. Workers especially pay the price here for a dangerous and toxic energy system where workers are really on the front lines actually have a seven-fold, that is 700% increased risk of dying on the job!”

Stein’s program is a job program, meaning it pays to re-train labor and promises them steady work.

“Workers have been forced into this position of hoping for, begging for job training and then hoping that the right job will come along,” she said. “Well this is a series of basically guaranteed jobs. And they are a combination of independent businesses, and these are largely local businesses so that the profits aren’t going overseas and into corporate pockets. Instead those profits get re-circulated within the communities and help to build a truly healthy economy. So we’re talking about small businesses, about worker cooperatives, and also direct government jobs. And the decisions are made by the community… So for many communities that need housing, that really have a housing emergency, one of the key priorities is actually housing because we’re looking at making communities sustainable, not only economically and environmentally but also sustainable socially. So if housing is the need the community most urgently wants to fill, those are the jobs that are created. It’s nationally funded but locally controlled in order to meet the needs of everyday people and it focuses people’s needs rather than big corporations or the billionaires because this is a one person-one vote process through something called participatory budgeting that actually allows communities to decide without being bought out by the big developers who have a way of buying their way into the decisions that benefit them but leave the communities without the housing we need or the transportation we need or the affordable and healthy energy supply.”

Now the choice lies in the hands of the voters. Stein will be visiting the Ocean State later this month, an event we will be bringing you coverage and updates on as they emerge.

To volunteer with the Stein campaign, e-mail the Rhode Island Green Party at StateCommittee@rigreens.org! And be sure to ask about signing a petition for your town to get Dr. Stein on the ballot!

Carbon farming is a set of planting and seeding strategies that does a series of impressive things.

First, it regenerates soil that would otherwise be lost to erosion or degradation. Second, it sequesters greenhouse gases like carbon in the ground, which both reduces the warming while also fertilizing plants in a way that does not use the nasty chemicals created by Monsanto and other big agriculture industrial players.

Currently, we have to remove 200-250 billion tons of carbon from the air to stop climate change. The soil under all our feet has the capacity to absorb 320 billion tons of carbon.

How do you do this?

This year, I chopped up an extra-large plot to plant my crops in. First, I planted the usual array of peppers, tomatoes, zucchinis, butter crunch lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower, and even a watermelon.

Next, I went down to Allen’s Seed in Exeter and bought several pounds of regular clover seed. After the vegetables were in the ground, I spread the clover seed on top of the open dirt using a fertilizer push cart. After a week of regular watering, the clover began to sprout and fill all those patches that were brown in with a vibrant green. Here’s what it looks like now.

Of course the obvious question must be “isn’t that going to choke out all the vegetable roots?”

Not at all!

Clover is an amazing little plant. Its roots are extremely shallow, meaning they stop about at the point in the soil where my vegetables start. And clover also absorbs nitrogen and carbon and deposits it into the soil. This in practice means it is putting all these materials directly on top of the roots of my vegetables, making it a self-fertilizing garden! What’s more, the level of clover coverage is so thick that it retains water within the soil so that, once you have grown it to a certain height, we are talking about watering on a weekly rather than daily basis!

So it you have both raised bed or traditional ground top plots this summer, seriously think about giving this a try. Climate change is going to impact us all and it is hard to stop that. But it is million of little things, like my tiny clover plants, that can and will make a difference.

Here’s a video from a conference at Tufts University featuring Ethan Roland that explains the potential this presents for large-scale organic farmers if they like to give it a try.

Leiko is a group that bears some striking resemblance to the first Velvet Underground album, back when Nico was lending her ethereal voice to the proceedings. They describe themselves as goth-folk. Check out their music below to take in some of this sonic odyssey!

9 PM Starts | Click Here For More Info

Sources from within the Rhode Island Green Party have indicated that Dr. Jill Stein, presumptive nominee for the party’s presidential bid in November, is going to be visiting Rhode Island on July 20. Time and locations of various events are still being planned.

“I’m voting Jill Stein because she’s our best hope for peace and climate stabilization,” said Nadya Bedford, of Bristol. “Jill Stein understands how important it is to keep fossil fuels in the ground, both to end wars for oil and to keep our major cities dry. She’s willing to stand up to corrupt financiers, ensure access to education, forgive student debt, and empower oppressed groups. She’s condemned torture, cluster bombs, and aggressive occupation efforts. A Jill Stein presidency is only part of a larger effort, and it’s up to all of us who can to make things better, but with Stein as president, and congresspeople like her, we can pivot from the country with the strongest military to the country with the strongest human rights record.”

To volunteer with the Stein campaign, e-mail the Rhode Island Green Party at StateCommittee@rigreens.org! And be sure to ask about signing a petition for your town to get Dr. Stein on the ballot!

Progressives in the Ocean State should take note of the overwhelming primary results. The results were astounding. After the state was proclaimed “Clinton Country”, the results were:

Total Democratic Votes: 122,458
Bernie Sanders: 66,993
Hillary Clinton: 52,749
Uncommitted: 1,662
Write-in: 673

Total Republican Votes: 61,614
Donald Trump: 39,221
John Kasich: 14,963
Ted Cruz: 6,416

There are two points that seem obvious from these results.

First, by a significant margin, the winners of both races have, in their own way, based their campaigns this year around a populist rebellion against neoliberal economic policies that have defined consensus politics for the last quarter century. Since the end of the Cold War, both political parties have embraced these economic doctrines as an agenda while creating political differences based around identity as opposed to class politics. The Rhode Island primary was a massive referendum against this economic system. This is part of a wider global trend we are seeing now. Right populism emphasizes demonization of migrant and refugee populations while Left populism emphasizes class struggle. The instance of Trump and Sanders is roughly akin to what happened in Greece with the rise of Syriza, a social democratic party, and the openly neo-fascist Golden Dawn, though Trump is closer to the center than his Greek counterparts.

Second, the margin of difference is so significant that there is no way Rhode Island would be a swing state. Every politician in the Ocean State understands very well that every unionized worker is worth three votes and they keep that as a holy tenet of the State House, held higher than anything else. Within the next few months we will see a Democratic Party pandering to the union vote in this state with a combination of fear tactics about helping to elect the Donald (even though that flies in the face of everything we learned in 2000 about the electoral college) and pillow talk about how wonderful a Clinton administration will be for unions (even though organized labor suffered significant defeats under Bubba, epitomized in NAFTA, and will continue to do so under Hillary, who has been a strong advocate of the job-killing Trans-Pacific Partnership deal, describing it as a “gold standard” before the Sanders campaign forced her to pivot to the left).

This is simply phooey, Rhode Island only went for Republicans in the two Eisenhower elections (back when the GOP was anti-Communist but pro-union), the 1972 Nixon re-election (the last time a Republican made an honest bid for the union vote), and the 1984 Reagan re-election (when a majority of the country thought that Reagan was managing the economy better than what the Democrats were offering).

In other words, a vote for Stein, whose campaign features as a central plank the roll-out of a pro-union Green New Deal to rebuild and repurpose our national infrastructure on a basis of renewable as opposed to fossil fuels, would send a clear message to the Rhode Island Democratic Party who is in charge in this state and what they expect, making Nicholas Mattiello tremble with fear. The 52,749 people who voted for Clinton are almost assured to stay with her and a section of the Sanders vote will go to her also. But it seems obvious, with the level of disgust at the Clinton machine on the grassroots level compounding daily due to the corrupt nature of the primary process as well as the preposterous handling of the e-mail scandal that there is a safe way to express this populist progressive sentiment in the ballot box come November even if Sanders is not the nominee.

Are you an Employees Retirement System of Rhode Island (ERSRI) pensioner, someone who is paying into the pension, or do you know someone who is either of these? We wanted to introduce you to some of the people who are at the forefront of advocating for the solvency and security of the fund.

The Rhode Island Retired Teachers Association (RIRTA), a retiree advocacy group and not a union, founded in 1954, was created to advocate for the needs and well-being of former educators. But through a chain of events deceptively called “pension reform” by a venture capitalist-turned-General Treasurer named Gina Raimondo, they have ended up becoming something much more than this.

Over the last few years, they have been working alongside Edward Siedle’s Benchmark Financial Services and a few other key groups in the state to see what exactly is going on with the pension and specifically the pension fund. The results have been impressive, to say the least.

When Raimondo took over the Treasury, that was in reality a major achievement for one of her rich campaign benefactors, a former Enron trader named Jon Arnold. Apparently Arnold has serious complaints about the social contract that emerged from the New Deal, including the idea of him being taxed to finance public pensions. So, Arnold has invested big money into a cunning and deceptive bipartisan campaign that first engineered a false narrative of a nationwide “pension crisis” and then put into office politicians, including Raimondo, who would “reform” the various systems by investing them in high-risk, high-fee hedge funds to help out friends of Raimondo and Arnold. In other words, the pension is being raided by Wall Street, pure and simple.

But some people just refuse to tolerate such things and resistance comes from the most surprising places.

“It is like living in limbo and the future is scary,” says one member. Another says, “There are over 20,000 of us suffering our own recession.”

Perhaps these are words that describe your own situation as a retiree. Or perhaps it describes your fears for your own future or that of someone you care about. Either way, the folks at RIRTA are smart enough to know there is a problem and are working hard to advance and protect the solvency and secure the pension fund.

They have been financing a series of forensic audits by Benchmark that name the names and tell the truth about who is winning and losing on the pension. They have also amended their membership rules to include Associate member, a retired person who is receiving a pension from ERSRI fund. This means that those people you have been thinking about who put their money into the pension can now join up with one of the hardest-working groups in the state that wants to make sure the fund remains solvent and secure.

Click Here To Download Their Membership Enrollment Form!

And even if you are not involved with the fund, you still can donate to this group and help fund their efforts. Donations (checks preferred, made out to RIRTA- memo line LDF) can be mailed to PO Box 7631, Warwick, RI 02887 or sent via PayPal (see below).

We will be bringing you, in the coming weeks and months, a series of articles that explain to you both how the pension policies continue to impact people while also helping readers develop a better grasp of these concepts so that we all understand what it all means and what to expect from our elected leaders in maintaining the solvency and security of the fund.

The parade dates back to 1926 and was created as a spoof of a nearby Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company in Boston that had as a member the consistently mute President Calvin Coolidge. Whether this mockery intended to include Coolidge’s views on ethnicity is unclear. He was amazingly progressive in some regards and supported laws against lynching, fought the influence of the Ku Klux Klan in national politics, appointed African Americans to prominent federal offices, and signed the important Indian Citizenship Act. Though the Swamp Yankee irreverence has been known to be reactionary in some instances, last year included a float featuring Bernie Sanders, showing that progressives can have an impact and perhaps change hearts and minds when they like.

Glen Bennett, who will be going to his first Green Party nominating convention this summer, noted “I am excited to start petitioning and we have seen an influx of volunteers as the time approaches to begin the effort. Dr. Jill Stein seeks to heal the ailing politics of the United States and is inspiring voters with a message of ecological healing, justice, and an economy that works in our communities, not just for the 1%.”

Dr. Stein, a native of Chicago who hails from Lexington, MA, has over a quarter-century experience in the medical field and is co-founder of the Massachusetts Coalition for Healthy Communities. She has previously run for Governor of Massachusetts in 2002 and 2010, State Representative in 2004, Secretary of State in 2006, and was a candidate in the 2012 presidential election. She is currently, with Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party, bringing lawsuit under anti-trust laws against the Commission on Presidential Debates. Stein is currently already appearing on the ballot in 21 states and in the District of Columbia. According to Rhode Island state law, all those who desire to appear on the ballot must submit a petition with signatures to the Secretary of State to appear on the November ballot by September 9 at 4 pm. In May the Rhode Island Green Party nominated Dr. Stein out of a selection of candidates that were made available.

“I’m real excited and we’re looking to start petitioning here in Rhode Island very soon. We’re getting a constant stream of new volunteers. A lot of people who were supporting Bernie [Sanders] are starting to look at Jill very seriously. There was a national conference and it was all about Bernie but, as soon as you got outside of the main auditorium, into any of the little discussion groups, there was a lot of people talking about Jill! I think this is going to be a very interesting year politically and the Greens really have the opportunity to do something different,” says Gerritt, who previously ran for Mayor of Providence as a Green. “Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, is running at about 7% in recent polls and Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party candidate, is running about 11% in some polls. That is huge! Between the two of them, they’re equal to Ross Perot in the election!”

In a June ABC News/Washington Post poll, 70% of Americans viewed Donald Trump unfavorably and 55% viewed Hillary Clinton unfavorably. “More and more Rhode Islanders are rejecting the most unpopular and untrustworthy big party candidates for president ever,” says Gerritt.

In a May Data Targeting poll, 55% of Americans said they would favor an independent challenger to Clinton and Trump. It is obvious that a serious crisis of leadership has occurred within the two-party system. “The Republicans really have to wake up and change,”  says Gerritt. “There is something wrong with the political philosophy of the party that controls Congress. So they have to implode! Of course the Democrats aren’t doing much better! They’re basically saying to all of their energized base ‘uh, go away or get co-opted‘ and this year people really have a place to go. Jill has done this before so she knows how to run a campaign and she’s got a great campaign on the ground.”

For more information or to get involved in the Stein petition drive or other Green Party efforts, email StateCommittee@rigreens.org.

[From a press release]