Last week, I spoke with Green Party presidential candidate Kat Swift. Swift just passed another hurdle on the path to the Green Party presidential nomination, having gathered the five thousand dollars donations required to be considered by the party as an official candidate.

The following is a transcript of the first part of of my conversation with Swift (my questions are in bold type, and the normal type are Swift’s responses):

A lot of our readers are independent, and I’m a former Democrat myself. I decided to leave the Democratic Party behind, but I haven’t gone to the Greens yet, either, though I consider myself progressive. I’m wondering what you have to say to Democrats, or to progressive independents about why we ought to consider getting involved with the Green Party and with your presidential campaign in particular.

I had this conversation, actually, with a staunch Democrat just last night. It comes down to this: The Democratic Party leadership is basically flipping its finger off at the Democratic grassroots membership, and has been for the last eight years, when they say, as when Gore didn’t contest George W. Bush’s environmental stance in Texas, he was horrible in the debates, they didn’t challenge the results in Florida, and then in 2004, the blatant violations in Ohio.

The Green Party and the Libertarian Party were the only ones who filed a recount in Ohio. The Democratic Party conceded immediately.

If your party isn’t going to stand up for your right to vote, then why are you even bothering?

What about on the issues? What would you say is the most important issue that has been neglected by the Democrats and Republicans that you can address as a Green Party presidential candidate?

The big one would be corporate control over the government, over the political process. Ron Paul does talk about this, but Ron Paul is shut out of the Republican Party. Kucinich does talk about it a little bit, but he is shut out of the Democratic Party. So, basically, the two parties are shutting out people who are bringing up issues like corporate control of the political process and how money is the root of all control and power, and who has power and who is able to get elected.

It’s interesting to see how the Democratic Party now is speaking greenspeak on the issues that Greens have been speaking about for a long time. They’re talking about environmental degradation. They’re talking about health care issues, wages, and workers rights, and it’s interesting to see how the Democratic Party kind of greenwashes what they say, but if you look at their policy decisions, they’re not really making decisions that support workers’ rights or protecting the environment or doing sustainable growth. They’re just saying it because they can see that the Green Party is talking about these issues, and they better jump on board these things, because it’s in the Reader’s Digest. It’s in the mainstream media about these issues and concerns.

That’s how we got the forty-hour work week to begin with, was third party movements, and the major parties appropriating third party issues because they are so important to the majority of citizens and residents of the United States.

More to come…