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Green Party candidate for President Jared Ball has released his political platform and a list of actions he would take in the White House. Most of the items are not what you would find in a Democratic Party candidate’s platform, putting the lie to the notion that the the political world fits into two camps to be represented by two champions:

Platform

* Registering and increasing Green Party membership among the Indigenous, Black and Latino communities.
To accomplish this we will campaign in every state and help the Green Party get on the ballot in as many states as possible.

* Redistribution of wealth as an umbrella approach to the issues of health care, housing, employment, education, the country has plenty of money the problem is that 1% have more than 90%. We have the resources for all our citizens to live healthy lives and we must not settle for less.

* Political prisoners, police brutality and the prison industrial complex. US repression around the globe starts with its repression of its own “citizens” at “home.” In addition to creating an unacceptable tax burden our current criminal justice system is racist, classist, and has a devastating long term effect on our American community.

* Green environmental policies

* Immediate withdraw of troops from iraq, afghanistan and redeployment to new orleans and other areas of the nation in desperate need of redevelopment

* Media justice - revocation of telecommunications act of 1996, an end to payola and play lists, enforced public service requirements for FCC license-holders including the creation of reporting staffs at major commercial radio targeting black and latin america.

My first day as president I would:

1. Pardon Leonard Peltier, Mumia Abu Jamal, Sundiata Acoli, David Gilbert and all other political prisoners.
2. I would immediately open investigations into a properly developed “Marshall Plan” for the US which would focus on rebuilding the most needy communities based on new Federal guidelines for minimum levels of housing, healthcare and education for all. This plan would include reparations for African descendants to all communities improperly treated by this society throughout history, with special attention to Indigenous communities who have been robbed and cheated by our government for decades.
3. I would undertake the immediate repeal NAFTA. This would be part of an initiative designed to improve the working conditions of all workers so as to eliminate concerns over immigration “legal” or “not.”
4. I would repeal the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (and free up licenses for low-power FM and increase funding to a redesigned public broadcasting community).
5. I would seek to immediately raise the requirements and pay of those in education (pre K - 12) to rival professional athletes. By capping salaries of both athletes and team owners we could fund the proper education of all our children.
6. I will never support legislating women’s bodies. I would reject this even as an issue for discussion or debate. The debate must be redirected toward the issues women site as reasons such as, rape, poverty, disease, health care, for wanting an abortion. These are the real issues.
7. W.E.B. DuBois not only gave up on both major parties but this entire country in part in response to this nation’s and Black America’s inability to break from the two-party dominance fraudulently imposed on us. Our standards must be raised so as to make clear how neither major party has offered us anything but samples of what rights we were born with and long-since owed.

The presence of Ball’s platform here shouldn’t be interpreted as an endorsement of it. For instance, in my opinion there’s a certain fetishization of the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal and I have yet to see the evidence that exonerates him. If the name Mumia Abu-Jamal is a proxy for a more complicated discussion of issues such as the intersection of race criminal justice, standards of evidence, and incarceration rates, why not have that discussion? Why not incorporate that into a presidential platform?

An instance of a policy initiative proposed by Jared Ball that isn’t even remotely realistic is the idea to “immediately raise the requirements and pay of those in education (pre K - 12) to rival professional athletes. By capping salaries of both athletes and team owners we could fund the proper education of all our children.” You can’t immediately raise teacher requirements without immediately firing teachers, team owners don’t get paid salaries (is Ball referring to coaches?), and there’s a problem of scale thanks to the huge difference in numbers of teachers and numbers of professional athletes. We see more professional athletes on television, but they number at most in the thousands, and I imagine the really well paid athletes number in the hundreds. Teachers number in the millions (see the handy-dandy Statistical Abstract of the United States). Assuming there are about 500 athletes in the country earning $10 million apiece, and assuming you take away all these athletes’ money, that would leave a pot of $5 billion to distribute. That sounds great, doesn’t it? But there are about 5 million elementary through high school teachers in the country. Divide $5 billion by 5 million and you get an extra thousand dollars per teacher, which is nice but isn’t going to create radical change. And that’s only if you don’t want to spend that money in other ways to “fund the proper education of all our children.”

That said, I think the candidacy of Jared Ball and others is highly valuable because it offers a taste of something different from the same old thin gruel offered by the Democrats and Republicans year after year after year. Ball’s ideas are creative and some of them are original, and I think our national conversation would be enriched if candidates like Ball had more voice. There are going to be some good ideas in there if we’ll listen.

If you’d like to hear more voices like Jared Ball in the presidential election process, one way to go about making that happen is to amplify those voices by linking in to and otherwise sharing their ideas. You can depend on Katie Couric to completely ignore Jared Ball and other candidates like him, but that doesn’t mean you have to.

If you really like what an alternative candidate has to say, throw some cash his or her way. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama don’t really need your extra $30. In fact, they’ll probably waste your $30 by sending you $60 worth of fundraising appeals in the mail and over the phone. Send $30 to a candidate like Jared Ball and that money will go straight to useful things like printer paper or webhosting fees or the cost of a press release. We need more voices in this election, not fewer, and since we can’t passively rely on the industrial giants to supply us with those voices, we’ll have to actively find and amplify them ourselves.