The Green Party of the United States will hold its 2014 Annual National Meeting , in St. Louis, Missouri, from Thursday, July 23 to Sunday, July 26.
Greens will convene at the University of Missouri-Saint Louis. The 2015 meeting will feature Green Party panels, workshops, meetings of the Green National Committee, and other events. Green candidates running in 2015 and 2016 and elected officials are expected to attend.
Greens will also discuss the party’s involvement in 2016 elections, including the nomination of a Green presidential candidate.
The meeting is open to the media and public. A credentialing page for reporters, bloggers, and other members of the media interested in covering the meeting will be posted online soon.
Greens are working with local activists in Missouri to provide workshops and events on racial justice in the wake of protests in Ferguson after the police shooting of Michael Brown in 2014, as well as in Baltimore more recently after the killing of Freddie Gray. Ferguson is in St. Louis County.
The Green Party supports the demand from Black Lives Matter for police departments to be directly accountable to the communities they serve. The party has called for an end to occupation-style (“broken windows”) policing, racial profiling, wide racial and class disparities in arrests and sentencing, and mass incarceration. The Green Party strongly opposes the war on drugs and prison industry ownership by private corporations, which has created a financial incentive to fill up cells with more inmates.
Greens have supported protests against police brutality and for reforms in the criminal justice system. See “Baltimore Green Party Urges Continued Protest and Electoral Strategy in Response to Police Violence“.
Green Plans for 2016
Greens meeting in St. Louis will prepare for 2016 national, state, and local races. The Green Party will hold a nominating convention next summer to choose its presidential nominee.
“The Green Party will run a Green candidate for the White House in 2016. While Bernie Sanders has excited many progressives, he will very likely be defeated in the Democratic primaries. A Green candidate will keep alive important ideas that would otherwise be erased in the contest between the two corporate-money candidates of the Democratic and Republican parties,” said Tamar Yager, co-chair of the party’s Annual National Meeting Committee.
The Green Party has joined a legal challenge to the Commission on Presidential Debates, which is controlled by the Democratic and Republican parties. See “Green Party, 2012 Green presidential nominees are among the plaintiffs in the ‘Our America Initiative’ law suit against the Commission on Presidential Debates“.
So far, four Greens have expressed interest in running for the nomination: Darryl Cherney, Rosa Clemente, Kent Mesplay, and Jill Stein. Dr. Stein was the party’s nominee in 2012.
