The GPU is an original and continuing member of the Association of State Green Parties (ASGP), founded in Middleburg, Virginia in 1996. This U.S. group is the officially recognized organization of most Green Parties world wide. Other Green organizations with international political ties have also existed in America for over a decade. For me, the ASGP and the GPU are great organizations. They are not, however, the be all or end all of anything.

What then, basically, is this all about? The ASGP proclaims to concern itself with issues of "ecological wisdom-grassroots democracy-social justice-peace and non-violence" among other things; these and much more! The core and the heart issues of this world and all civilization, especially now, revolve around the necessity for Real Democracy and the peril of current Economic Realities; Real Democracy-Economic Realities: what they are and what they could be. At the beginning of this century, H.G. Wells set the terms for the living future when he declared that humanity is in a race between "education and extinction."

As presently constituted, blind avaricious global corporate capitalism, it's sweeping complete world influence bordering on institutional dictatorship, it's phony free market rhetoric, and it's practical indifference to the integrity of any living population or resource on earth, is the single most powerful threat to long term planetary wellbeing! Whew! That's a stark statement!

Of course, those in charge of the global corporate systems, along with their Robespierre-like associates in the financial and investment sectors, hardly see themselves as devils. More likely, they see themselves as Gods of creation, and, in a sense, so they are. They are transforming the world. If their way prevails, I confidently predict neither they nor we will recognize the disaster that results. They are arrogant, lamebrained Gods, making money for the few, dictating obscene financial returns for investor shareholders, demanding increase in annual profits for said investors to produce the 20% to 40% annual increase in share price that the financial markets have come to expect as their due. Do they think this trend will continue forever?

So far, with many bumps along the way, congenitally misinterpreted by the institutions responsible for said bumps, the system has deluded itself into thinking that instead of fool's paradise, it has gained the formula and founded real paradise.

It's actually history's ultimate greed game, dressed up and promoted as sunshine and progress for all. It's pretend! It's a lie! Many of the players, however, may actually believe their propaganda themselves; it's easier on the conscience that way.

A fatal flaw, states David Korten, board chair or the Positive Futures Network and author of "When Corporations Rule the World", is that Global Capitalism has confused "money" with "wealth." Says Korten: "Money is a number which, by social convention we agree to accept in exchange for things of real value." Real wealth, for Korten, "include such things as trees, food, our labor, fertile land, buildings, machinery, technology, even love and friendship; things that sustain our lives and increase our productive output."