A car bumper with stickers like "Sure you can trust the government. Ask any indian." on it.   Matt from OC and Pat from San Mateo County in front of a WELCOME sign.

Magali in front of an American flag.    Barrington in a Green Party T shirt.

After a brief opening ceremony, the meeting began with the statewide officials of the GPCA being recognized. Click on the picture of Magali from that set to see the rest of them.

Next Barrington led us in a brainstorming session to figure out what the greens could do to save America. We broke into subgroups to tackle the problem. Click on his picture to see the laundry list my group came up with. Other answers ranged from "How can we save America when it ranges from Alaska to Argentina, and we are only a small part of North America?" to "Instant Runoff Voting will solve the problem!", and a host of other possibilities. Stay tuned for more focused results as the years go by....

Nativo addresses the Green Party. Not shown is a room full of Greens eating vegetarian food.   Erika with mike to the left of Tom in black hat. 

Nativo Lopez is the President of the Mexican American Political Association, which is usually referred to as MAPA. I missed the first few minutes of his speech, but when I came in he said the Latino Community is going to be doing voter registration drives to get their people into the Green Party. Following that they plan to use the tools that come with that to change the face of local government in areas where they are strong and the Democratic Party isn't responding to their needs. He got a good hand for his strong words.

I remember seeing his name in the paper all the time when I lived in Orange County. I asked Christina about him one time, and she said "he has been around a long time." This was definitely a change from times past that I remember. Nativo did not just come, give us a speech and leave. Rather he spent the whole weekend grinding his butt in the meeting like the rest of us. Anybody that wanted to talk to him had adequate opportunity. I felt like he was treating the Green Party with respect. It seems like something is going to happen as a result of this. 

Then we voted to upgrade the media subgroup of the Communications Committee to a Standing Committee. This streamlined some of the command structure, and required them to elect Co-Coordinators, who will be accountable to the Coordinating Committee and the General Assembly from now on.

Chuck in a Forward T shirt.   A table with lots of buttons on it sits between a rack of shirts and a GPSMC sign.

Chuck began his session by explaining that he had been at a Peace event and had told someone "that's in the platform" when asked a foreign policy question. After going home and seeing it wasn't there, he started working on the plank revision we had in front of us (click his picture to see the version we started the meeting with) he took a lot of input about how to make it better, and hopefully we will consense to an even better foreign policy plank at our next statewide meeting.

Whiteboard with text and Erika.   A pair of shoes that look more like cats.

Then we had breakout sessions. The choices were Green Issues, Platform, or Media. I went to media because my many trips to Green Issues had convinced me that wasn't the place to go again. I didn't go to Platform because I think the platform already has more words that I agree with than we need to mend our fuelish ways. What we need is more credibility in the words, not more words on paper. I was hoping there might be some kind of role for new alternative media there.

Gail smiles.   Orval talks.   Kevin speaks.

Sunday morning started with some open mike time for Candidates from the fall election. Gayle McLaughlin was introduced by Jeannie Rosenmeier as "the first elected Green in Contra Costa County." Orval Osborne talked about not quite winning in Santa Barbara, where he expects to run again next time. Kevin McKeowan talked about getting re-elected in Santa Monica.

What  I remember about Sunday was going to the Grass Roots Organizing Working Group (GROW) and the International Protocol meetings. Both of those were held in room 147, which was conveniently located at the back of the room where the plenary met.

Words about the meeting.


The following Tuesday at the Green Party of Santa Clara County meeting, Alex handed out copies of this summary of his feelings about the meeting.

The next day I found this in my email:
>
>I have put the notes from Sunday on a website, along with image files
>of the poster-sized results pages from "Greens Save America."
>
>These can be found at:
>
>http://daltrey.org/dec_plenary/
>

To see my pictures from other Green Party meetings, click here.