David Cobb began the afternoon by getting us to give this pair a hand for all the work they did making the event happen. Then he introduced our keynote speaker, Gar Alperovitz. Gar was a friend of Senator Gaylord Nelson, the guy who made Earth Day an annual national event.

     

What I remember him saying is something like "now is the most critical time in American history, and it's up to us to move things forward in a constructive way."

     

Pam Hartwell-Herraro talked about the nuts and bolts of getting governance to work at the grass roots level. As the Mayor of Fairfax, California she is up close and personal with that. She explained that one tool for keeping value circulating in the community is local currency. For Fairfax that's the fairbuck, that coin she waved at us.

     

Dr. Margaret Flowers was the next speaker.

After that we held the vote on which Candidate should be the Green Party Nominee for President. Holly Hart of Iowa and Colin Beavan of New York served as the moderators.

        

     

  

     

Greetings from the Kingdom of Hawaii, currently occupied as the 50th State of the USA...

        

     

The Great State of Massachusetts would like to hold their vote for the second round....

     

     

New Jersey brought attention to their candidate for high political office, and I sort of got a picture of the guy waving...

  

        

     

Texas cast one vote for the guy standing to the right of their speaker, Rhett Something or other.

     

  

Then I heard "Massachusetts casts its votes for the NEXT PRESIDENT OF THE USA, JILL STEIN!" The place went nuts...

  

Ben Manski took the stage to ask that we affirm Jill Steins choice for Vice President, Cheri Honkula. There were no objections, so it wasn't long before Cheri took the stage to introduce herself as our candidate for Vice President.

  

Cheri explained that she had become a housing activist when she had been a homeless single mother living in her car during a Minnesota winter. Actually, living in the car was working well enough until the car got impounded. Then she had kids she needed to get out of the weather quick. The only thing she could find in her price range was an empty repossessed house. Since then her life had become a campaign against the cold hearted nature of the big banks. She finished her speech by introducing Jill Stein.

     

Jill Stein began by thanking us for the nomination. Then she explained that her journey towards the nomination had started when she tried to get Massachusetts to change their public health laws with good ideas. She learned that the incumbents wanted more money than they were getting from the health care industry as well, and she couldn't give them that. Then she ran through a long list of positions. Most of them I agreed with. As examples she said that the USA needs to get out of the exploitative wars business, and that "marijuana is dangerous because it's illegal, not illegal because it's dangerous." She finished by asking us all to help the campaign between now and election in every way possible.