2016 Annual Report

• The New Progressive Alliance (NPA) continued to expand our organizational outreach and is now allied with 32 other national and international organizations. All allies are listed on our website.
• Facebook likes have grown steadily and by the end of the year climbed to 1,580.
• In 2015 we broke a record with 29 Public Comments.  In 2016 we passed our 100^th public comment. By the end of 2016 we had a total of 111 since the New Progressive Alliance’s founding.  All Public Comments  may be found in full on our website.

Where logic and statistics do not sway people, sometimes art such as plays, songs, or other media can. See Make Your Case! number two. 

Our founder, Anthony Noel, said, "One of the least-appreciated musicians of our time (there are so many), Graham Parker, wrote a song many years ago which, like Hunter S. Thompson's cautionary quote about what ails American politics, explains mankind's propensity for paying too much attention to what doesn't matter and too little mind to what does.

This interview was conducted by Rose Roby with comments from Jeff Roby. She and her husband Jeff Roby have done fine work for years as activists and together  run St. Petersburg Independents. 

Rose Roby correctly asks  this crucial question: "So this is a replay of David Cobb’s disastrous Safe States campaign of 2004.  Will anyone be able to take the Green Party seriously as a challenge to the two corporate parties if elements of the party’s leadership won’t get on board with taking the party’s independence all the way?"  (The correct answer is no.)

This interview was conducted by Rose Roby. She and her husband Jeff Roby have done fine work for years as activists and together  run St. Petersburg Independents.

Because I have been observing these trends for quite awhile, I wanted to take a breath after the election and take a hard documented look at where we are going and how we got here.

Sondra Miller here reviews the book EMPOWERING PROGRESSIVE THIRD PARTIES IN THE UNITED STATES: Defeating Duopoly, Advancing Democracy. It is edited by Jonathan Martin.

Increasingly the only real hope for change is third parties, but it will take real work to enact the change. This book and Sondra look at how to begin.

This is a really excellent article by Jeff Roby! Even if I disagree slightly with some of the answers, what is far more important is the questions and recognition of the difficulties are exactly right.

It will be interesting to see how the GP does after this election.

My three  takeaways:
-We have got to stop trusting democrats and giving them one more one last chance.

-As imperfect as the Green Party is, it is still the largest left  third party out there. We should either support it or work to form another party. Working means more than complaining or engaging in intellectual discussions on Facebook.

-The Green Party must fundamentally change to grow or it will be forever stuck. Jeff suggested a good start: "No phone call must be unanswered or unreturned. The party must somehow overcome touting their being a disorganized confederation of state parties as some kind of holy virtue." Michael Cavlan is working on this very thing.

Two long time activists - Julia Williams and Sondra Miller - suggest a path forward.

Jeff and Rose Roby are long time activists. This and other writings can be found at Saint Petersburg Independents.

Sheep dogging is first gaining credibility by criticizing democrats and then encouraging the voters to still vote democratic because that is the lesser of two evils. It is also a way to short circuit real efforts at reform. See The Democratic Party is the More Effective of Two Evils.