This comes out of another post I make on another thread and a discussion on Thom Hartmann yesterday. I have always thought we needed a labor party. Let's face it, most Americans either work for someone else or want to work if they are unemployed, or are former retired workers and many are small business people. That puts most of us in the majority and regardless of how we think about other issues, this is the one thing we are united in. The demonstrations by labor in Wisconsin with participants from both parties shows us where the real divide is. We all want bargaining rights, safe workplaces and benefits that enable us to live a middle class life. Most of us also want access to health care and education for our children. Again we are all pretty united on these issues regardless of what we think of others.

So where does the Green Tea Party come in? We take over the Democratic Party. Thom Hartmann laid this out brilliantly. He said the Tea Party movement, although really funded by corporations and using gullible people for their own purposes, has taken over the GOP. He said instead of going off and forming a third party, which is only divisive, we need to take over the Democratic Party the same way. We are stuck with a two party system, so we need to get our Party to work in a way that is beneficial to the majority of Americans. There have been movements like Move On and more recently Van Jones efforts in the Progressive Alliance to do just that. The problem that I see is that these movements are not very focused on one big unifying identity and try to cover too many issues. All these little grass roots movements don't get a big majority to turn out to make change.

Thus, we need labor, the largest constituency here in the USA. However, just for the sake of labeling we could call ourselves The Green Tea Party for Labor as in opposition to the other Tea Party. It also signals that we care about environmental issues. Some of the organization that are already out there could merge in to one big Green Tea Party since they already have the organization mechanisms in place to get to work right away. Does anybody think this could work?