Press Release

WASHINGTON, DC- The Grassroots Netroots Alliance (GNA), a project of the Organic Consumers Fund, was launched today. GNA sees itself as complementary, yet also an alternative, to MoveOn.org and other pre-existing progressive, radical, and libertarian online networks. “Millions of Americans at the ‘netroots,’ those drawing their information and inspiration from the open sources of the Internet, are connecting the dots between the burning issues. A potential new majority are realizing we must move beyond ‘business as usual’ and tepid reform and unite our heretofore fragmented forces and communities into a qualitatively more powerful current,” according to Ronnie Cummins, GNA Director.

GNA aims to move progressive activism beyond single-issue politics and campaigning to a multi-issue, radical but practical platform that stimulates local alliance building and grassroots action, focused on pressuring the politicians and pushing through reforms in national, state, and local legislatures that addresses the “burning issues.”  These burning issues include: 

1. War, Peace, and Constitutional Liberties;

2. Climate Crisis;

3. Health;

4. Economics & Trade; and

5. Democracy.

Some of GNA’s specific demands include: 

1. Get Out of Iraq;

2. Stop Global Warming and Green the Economy;

3. Repeal the Patriot Act and Restore Constitutional Liberties; and

4. Implement Universal Health Care, Economic Justice, Election and Media Reform, Civil Rights, Corporate Accountability, and Drug Policy Reform.

According to GNA Director Cummins, “The crazed neo-con project for world domination, aided and abetted by profit-obsessed multinational corporations; countered feebly by the ‘loyal opposition’ of centrist Democrats, single-issue public interest groups, and top-down ‘progressive’ organizations like MoveOn, have brought us to the precipice. Radical crises demand radical remedies. Millions now understand it’s time to take our demands to the streets and the suites of the corporations and the politicians. Move over MoveOn. The grassroots are coming.”

GNA’s first major project is a comprehensive 2008 Candidate Survey, which netroots and grassroots activists around the country are sending to their elected representatives and candidates for office at the local, county, state and federal levels. The Survey is a multi-issue questionnaire for candidates and elected officials that asks politicians to consider 40 important policy proposals drawn from the nation’s diverse rainbow of progressive causes and campaigns.  The Survey can be found on the web at:
http://grassrootsnetroots.org