Invitation

Dear politically active friends and fellow citizens,

Problem: a corporate controlled militarist state “in denial” about 6th Extinction, peak oil, climate change, obsolesence of “war,” AND a polarized-dysfunctional “two party system” incapable of changing anything important for our survival.

Solution: Since 2001 I’ve been thinking and writing about “waging peace” and “conserving consensus” on the basics: top soil, rainforests, ecological restoration, etc. Blogging, circulating brochures, crawling for congress, etc. educates me, but doesn’t organize people. Still, I’ve convinced myself that we need a well-organized, well-financed, Transition Party that pulls some votes from the “right” side of the spectrum, appeals to independents and the 100 million eligible voters who are on the sidelines, and can persuade some liberals in a close election between 3 candidates for a House seat.

This Transition Party must support:

1. a non-interventionist, “bring ALL the troops home” (Ron Paul) foreign policy. We are not policing the world, nation-building, waging war when we can’t have our way. Our Democracy is falling apart here. We can’t export by force what we don’t have.
2. clearly articulated goals for a strictly limited but extremely “cost effective” Global Organization Of Democracies (GOOD), one nation one vote, that meets year round in support of the International Criminal Court, and is focussed on peace, justice, air, water, resource issues and preventing resource wars thru diplomacy and public education.
3. conserving Nature and the Constitution.
4. clean energy, clean production, clean (‘instant runoff’?) elections.
5. a heavy stress on “jobs”: Relocalization and Reskilling themes of the Great Transition.
6. a platform tailored to decentralist “teaparty” trends while speaking Truth to corporate power behind the massive corpstate configuration that currently confronts us.

Let me elaborate just a bit on #6. Many people across the voting spectrum, and some of that huge number of currently non-voting citizens, will be looking for a Party that has a genuine, coherent, reasonable vision of the sustainable future and very specific job-creating plans for how to get there from here. The Great Transition teams (n.e.f. in UK & N.E.I. in USA) need to become thinktanks for the Transition Party USA, producing, for examples:

• plans for reprioritizing research in all university disciplines;
• plans for returning troops to reforest and permaculture all 50 states;
• plans for NASA scientists to focus on saving coral reefs, rainforests, etc.
• plans for “well regulated militias” in each state to stay in that state and never go abroad, crossing state borders only in state-governor-declared emergencies;
• plans for each state to phase out it’s portion of the “military industrial complex” and phase in “green 20 hour week” jobs for all;
• plans for “single payer” health insurance within each state;
• plans for holding state-chartered corporations accountable.

This list could and should become a very long one, inspiring debates within the Transition Party and between parties, congressional district by congressional district.

Please help us shape a Transition Party in all 50 states that can hold conventions and primaries a year from now in early 2012, and run primaries filled with Transition Party candidates in each of the 435 Congressional Districts.

Yours for peace and against waste, Charlie Keil