Why it's tough to vote Green

To be honest I want to support Rich Witney and LeAlan Jones, the Green Party candidates. Their views along with Democratic candidate Ben Lowe, a Green at heart, for whom I will gratefully vote are the most sensible in this time of crisis. However I fear the split from a vote given to the Greens will return the Republicans to power and all their malignant policies which had plunged our country into economic disaster and which we rejected when America voted for Obama.

The national debt doubled under Reagan and Bush; Clinton brought us prosperity and debt reduction; then GWB redoubled the debt again. His wars, continued by Obama, aided and abetted by the military industrial complex, enriching itself, threaten to become a perpetual conflict, as our current recession turns into the double-dip, disastrous depression everyone fears.

Obama's every attempt to make good on the hope he inspired in us has been obstructed by the do-nothing/nothing-doing Republican opposition. Republicans have no specific plan to alleviate unemployment, no specific plans to stimulate Main Street businesses, no specific plan to staunch the foreclosures, no specific plan to replace the hard-won health care bill that extended coverage to millions, no specific plan to address the losses in education and economic threats to our local and state infrastructure.

Party hacks, politicians like Peter Roskam, go along with the lobbyists, content to be in the pockets of the corporations, rather than work for the common good. Ben Lowe is taking no special interest money as a matter of policy.

Wars and the irresponsible refusal to budget or pay for them with a draft or war taxes accompanied by costly tax reductions for the wealthy this is the Republican legacy I fear if I vote my conscience for Green. Thank God for Ben Lowe.

Marion J. Reis

Wheaton