Green Declaration of Independence

July 4, 2001

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for a people ennobled by the promise of freedom to transcend the political bonds forged by long-standing loyalties and start anew, a decent respect for the opinions of humankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

And so, 225 years after the founding of this nation conceived in liberty, the Green Party still holds these truths to be self-evident: that all individuals are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights: that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, all governing institutions, including those governing economic life, derive their just power from the consent of the governed; that when those institutions become destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish them.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that institutions long established will not be changed for light and transient causes, and accordingly all experience has shown that people are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

Petroleum Inferno in the Garden of Eden

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing inevitably the object of despoiling the natural world on behalf of a soulless materialism, evinces a design to reduce us under absolute despotism, it is our right, it is our duty, to throw off such tyranny, and to provide new alternatives for our future security.  The history of the present economic system of competition, exploitation and injustice is a history of repeated violence, all having in direct object the erosion of community and the destruction of the Earth, which gives us life.

What then, are we to believe of that venerable institution known as Minnesota's Democratic/Farmer/Labor Party, which presumes to provide redress for these grievances?  Surely the title itself must rightly be considered a cynical misnomer, as the fortunes of democracy, farmers, and laborers have withered even within its strongholds.  Still less can the Republican Party lay claim to representing the desires of those who seek a society based on ecological wisdom or social and economic justice.  Founded on the principle of universal emancipation from slavery, the party that once stood for liberty now shackles the poor and the dispossessed with corporate control and oppression.

So must the Green Party declare its independence from the traditional political structures that subvert the foundation of our nation.  We call for a renewed spirit of democracy, grounded in ecological and egalitarian values and a recognition of the inseparable link between individual welfare and the vitality of the whole.  As evidence of the need for such renewal, we offer these facts to a candid world:

• Democracy, "the rule of the people", has given way to the rule of bureaucrats, and the agendas of powerful interest groups shrouded in mystery and deceit.

• Farmers have become expendable pawns in the game of global corporate agriculture and direct genetic tampering with the code of all life on Earth.

• Labor has witnessed a steep decline in the minimum wage relative to the cost of living over the course of the last three decades, and the public has been increasingly forced to assume the costs of poverty, thereby subsidizing the rich.

• Rather than challenging the structural and philosophical assumptions that tie economic prosperity to an irrational growth imperative that inevitably results in environmental and cultural destruction, the DFL Party takes pride in its collaboration with Republicans and the ongoing lunacy of the project known as "the economy".

• From top to bottom, the primary goal of the two-party system is to cling to political power at almost any cost, in order to deny power to any opposition.  The result is lowest-common-denominator rhetoric and stupefying ideological conformity.

Therefore, as members and candidates of the Green Party of Minnesota, we solemnly publish and declare our independence from the two-party system and the corporate republic for which it stands.  And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the power of the people, we mutually pledge our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.

written by Lowell Nelson & Mark Knapp
© 2001-2007