#TreeParty2016
OFFICIAL PRESS RELEASE
This election cycle, perhaps it is time for our country to consider a truly progressive recovery plan, akin to FDR’s “New Deal,” but way more platform cooperativism.
The Tree Party supports a platform to heal the American Commonwealth from over-leveraged foreign investments, and their related regime change conflicts; which have drained and denigrated the working class’s health and environmental quality of life via massive infrastructure underfunding policies.
Since President James K. Polk put the Monroe Doctrine (1823) at the center of American Foreign policy in 1848, the U.S. government has relied on aggressive pursuits to preserve sovereignty, as well as acquire foreign goods and labor. The Doctrine’s interventionist stance allowed for the invasions of First Nations’ lands, then Hawaii, Guam, the Philippines, then in trade domination policies since the post-WWII era’s Marshall Plan, then puppet governments in Latin America, and more recently to Iraq and other Arabic lands including Libya and Syria. To “protect”our foreign interests we have chosen countless times as a country, as a People, to favor exploitation of our fellow peoples. Whether local or internationally, we have chosen competition over cooperation for the last two centuries. In today’s understanding of wealth as wellbeing, the current of these choices has thrown us far far away from our ethical banks. Along the way we have oppressed our neighbors, and sacrificed our liberties. Instead of clean water for the people of Flint, we have been misled into a society whose organizational bodies and representatives are corrupted by personal profit motives, which endlessly overshadow the public good.
In 2013, Secretary of State John Kerry publicly announced the end of the Monroe Doctrine. Yet currently, the establishment presidential candidates both advocate for foreign strategies that will revive it’s tenets.
We need leadership devoted to restoring our People, our freedoms, and our lands. We need leadership finally ready to leave behind the tyranny of interventionism. We need leadership that clearly sees the reflective edges of the latent American ideals of Emerson and Whitman — for we are a People who must transcend this election’s historical moment.
Conservatives, progressives and independents can gather within a cohesive mission to expel the Neoliberal-Globalist agenda to focus our government’s efforts on the reinvigoration of our urban landscapes and agricultural methods, creation of a zero emissions transportation system, free education, perhaps basic income for all, easy access to medicine and mental health services, government and taxation reform, and updated civil rights.
Oh, and clean drinking water for humanity. In the next 4 years. Or am I the only one who thinks it’s absurd that 40% of the world’s population doesn’t have access in 2016?
So, where are our candidates? Who will take up our cause? Let us now work to generate a thriving, global good will and sustained peace.
The ends of corporate property schemes stressing foreign and domestic relations are evident in the ongoing, massive, public corruption perpetrated by lobbyists. Lobbying has provided elites a powerful mechanism to promote interventionist strategies for private gains with corollary consequences extant in the incarceration of Leonard Peltier, domestic police brutality, the current operations at Guantanamo Bay, the TPP, Citizen’s United, the Panama Papers, the expulsion of Edward Snowden, Wall St.’s continued price fixing of global trade via the WTO, and private interest leveraging through other predatory formations. As we know in 2016, the result of our government’s collusion with this now preemptive doctrine, are the irreversible effects of consumerist-caused global climate change by the year 2030. In comparison to the activities of ISIS, the effects of climate change are by many magnitudes the true threat which we must adapt to and combat. In response to almost 200 years of invoking a preservationist strategy towards our foreign relations, we have sown many seeds of imperialism through our nation’s lobbying and contracting practices, and at a very costly price to our founding pursuits.
Wendell Berry is another American thinker, who also believes there is an ecological justification for shifting our economic policies. He writes, “If landed properties are democratically divided and properly scaled, and if family security in these properties can be preserved over a number of generations, then we will greatly increase the possibility of authentic cultural adaptation to local homelands. Not only will we make more apparent to successive generations the necessary identity between the health of human communities and the health of local ecosystems but we will also give people the best motives for care-taking and we will call into service the necessary local intelligence and imagination. Such an arrangement would give us the fullest possible assurance that our forests and farmlands would be used by people who know them best and care the most about them.” Doesn’t that sound more like the doctrine we, the People, originally signed? Shouldn’t America return to being much more homegrown?
As the People of 2016, as today’s voters, might we find new direction towards achieving a common liberty and trust by pursuing a regenerative approach to our society’s ills, rather than continuing the interventionist regime?
Rather than a commercially driven global strategy, which develops based on productivity and profit motives for growth, and turned us first into the world’s cowboys then into its police, now its security; a regenerative economy learns to live within its means, and cultivates a distributed abundance within ecological relations and production cycles based on natural seasons, instead of the financially engineered funneling of markets that have conglomerated our contemporary industries into krakens.
Ariane Burgess also writes with a regenerative perspective towards the U.S.’s economic strategy since the Monroe Doctrine, “For about two hundred years humans have been living with the message that exponential growth is good. This worldview has given us permission to overconsume — food, resources and goods. This overconsumption has lead to the destruction and depletion of nature, increasing poverty and a sense of social isolation for many… We urgently need to change the way we’re doing things. We have the knowledge, skills and models for living and leading in a different way, in a way that benefits all beings we share this planet with. This way of living creates a Regenerative Culture.”
By pursuing a ‘Regenerative Doctrine,’ we might find ourselves in good company with more than a few budding nations. New Zealand, Costa Rica, Iceland, and Bhutan — each with their own complex social narratives — are promoting similar regenerative cultural values as a basis for economic policymaking. One common node of their nations’ movement to uphold the commonwealth, is that their leaders are much more defined in terms of the wellbeing of its land and people, than just the measure of their hands in deal making. In Australia, South America, and Canada, regenerative influences are also leading to sincere social dialogues of indigenous reconciliation, granting progressive rights to animals and natural bodies like waterways.
So if you want to see America transcend the brutal detour of upholding the Monroe Doctrine, heal our over-developed lands, rehabilitate our ailing peoples, and rediscover values of a “common wellbeing,” please do consider joining the Tree Party as we work towards a Regenerative Era for our country and beyond.
