News
January 14, 2008

Contact:
David Bedell, Fairfield County Green Party Secretary, (203) 977-8106 This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Richard Duffee, Congressional candidate, (203) 588-0161, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Mike DeRosa, CT Green Party Co-Chair, (860) 919-4042, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Candidate Will Challenge Shays and Himes

NORWALK, CT—On Sunday afternoon, members of the Green Party met at the Norwalk Library to select a candidate for Congress from the 4th District. They nominated Richard Duffee of Stamford, a retired lawyer and impeachment activist.

He will run for the seat currently occupied by Republican Christopher Shays, which is also being contested by Democrat Jim Himes.

Another candidate, solar energy engineer/designer Gerald Falbel of Stamford, sought the Green nomination but failed to garner sufficient support. Several caucus participants voted for the option "None of the Above” in lieu of a candidate, but the majority supported Duffee’s nomination.

When asked his reasons for running, Duffee cited the need to reverse the current Iraq war policies, to prevent war against Iran, and to counter the Bush administration's environmental legacy and failure to address global warming or public safety threats such as the nearby Indian Point nuclear power plant.

Congress Has Failed to Impeach

Above all, however, Duffee decided to run because Congress has not used its power of impeachment to end what he describes as the criminal activities of George Bush and Dick Cheney. "I believe the current Congress has not taken seriously the oath of office to defend the Constitution. We are in a constitutional crisis that cannot end until we repudiate empire and imperial presidencies and return to our Republic.

"We need a government based on trust, openness, honesty, and disinterested public action. It is clear that Bush and Cheney regard us not as citizens, but as subjects, using all the techniques of ruling an empire—secrecy, deceit, betrayal, fraud, mystification, and violence. These are inherently incompatible with the moral prerequisites for maintaining a Republic based on the rule of law."

"Christopher Shays is guilty of breaching his oath of office by supporting a criminal president and vice president. He may be guilty of crimes against peace in his pursuit of the Iraq War."

Duffee has started a campaign blog at http://richardduffee.blogspot.com.

Minor parties such as the Green Party have to petition their way onto the ballot, and if they do not run a candidate in any given year, then they lose their ballot line for that office.

For the Congressional seat, Duffee’s supporters will have until early August to collect at least 2100 signatures of voters in the 4th District.

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Richard Duffee on the issues:

• Health care: "There's nothing wrong with the Canadian single-payer plan—the vast majority of Canadian citizens are happy with it—including the doctors."
• Jobs: "We can make jobs the way FDR did in 1932, this time by hiring people to do insulation, solar power, wind power, geothermal, retrofitting, and so on, and making it available to everyone at cost the way the GI bill made housing available to veterans after World War II."
• Foreign policy: "We should comply strictly with all the provisions of international law we created but now disavow. We should comply with the United Nations Charter, the Nuremberg rules, the Geneva Accords, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the 1996 International Court of Justice opinion that nuclear weapons are illegal, and fully fund the UN, help it reform so it can function, and behave as a normal law-abiding nation—which Article 6 of our Constitution says we are supposed to be."
• Global warming: "Global warming is lethal. Several factors—loss of rainforests, collapse of glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica, exacerbation of El Niño—may make exponential heat spikes that will cause drought so severe that no one can survive it, flooding great enough to wipe out vast coastal areas and whole nations, horrific storms, sudden freezes, and such chaotically unpredictable weather that no agriculture can succeed."