Founded in 1996 as the Massachusetts affiliate of the Green Party of the United States, the Green-Rainbow Party of Massachusetts (GRPM) bases its ideology on the Ten Key Values of the North American Green Movement. Among these values are the following:

• Ecological Wisdom: Seeking to greatly restrict, if not altogether dismantle, such industries as logging, mining, fishing, hunting, trapping, and oil exploration in the American wilderness, GRPM embraces the anti-capitalist agendas of radical environmentalism — whose ultimate goal, as writer Michael Berliner has explained, is “not clean air and clean water, [but] rather … the demolition of technological/industrial civilization.”
• Social Justice and Equal Opportunity: Reasoning from the premise that American society is replete with social and economic inequity, GRPM seeks to eliminate capitalism and replace it with a socialist system mandating the redistribution of wealth so that “[a]ll persons … have the rights and opportunity to benefit equally from the resources afforded us by society and the environment.” “We support a restructuring of social, political and economic institutions,” GRPM elaborates, “away from a system that is controlled by and mostly benefits the powerful few, to a democratic, less bureaucratic system.”
• Community-Based Economics: GRPM supports an economic system that “will offer meaningful work with dignity, while paying a ‘living wage’ which reflects the real value of a person’s work.”
  (This is reminiscent of the Revolutionary Communist Party‘s ideal: “Work will no longer be enslaving but productive, creative, and fulfilling. Everyone will work cooperatively to contribute the most they can to society and everyone will get back from society what they need …”)
• Nonviolence: Lamenting what it characterizes as America’s excessive aggression and militarism, GRPM deems it “essential that we develop effective alternatives to our current patterns of violence at all levels … [and] to demilitarize our society and eliminate weapons of mass destruction.”
• Feminism: “We have inherited a social system based on male domination of politics and economics. We call for the replacement of the cultural ethics of domination and control, with more cooperative ways of interacting which respect differences of opinion and gender.”
• Respect for Diversity: Placing a premium on “cultural, ethnic, racial, sexual, religious and spiritual diversity,” GRPM asserts that “the many diverse elements of society should be reflected in our organizations and decision-making bodies.” Toward that end, the organization supports group preferences in the form of affirmative action programs.

In GRPM’s opinion, virtually all U.S. foreign policy decisions are flawed and, in many cases, immoral. For example, the organization’s 2006 Statement on the U.S. Occupation of Iraq calls for “all members of the Bush administration and all top military officers to be tried for war crimes”; implores the American government “to stop their imperialist project of military and economic domination of the world”; and supports “U.S. soldiers who wish to resist any illegal service, including service in the illegal occupation of Iraq.”

GRPM’s 2006 Statement on U.S. Imperialism and Sudan similarly depicts America as the principal source of conflict around the world: “We reject the racist mischaracterization of the situation in Darfur as genocide being perpetrated by Arabs. The U.S. military and economic intervention over the last decade, which has worked to impoverish and destabilize Sudan, has largely caused the humanitarian crisis of civil war and famine in the Darfur region. We oppose any military intervention in Sudan by the U.S., the UN, or imposed by any other foreign power. … In 1967 Martin Luther King noted that the United States is the ‘greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.’ Given that this fact about the USA has remained true, we condemn the U.S. government declaring Sudan a ‘terrorist’ nation.”

GRPM reserves an equal measure of contempt for America’s strongest Middle Eastern ally, Israel. The organization’s 2006 Statement on Palestine calls for “the end of all American military and economic aid to Israel”; “divestment initiatives that seek to withdraw institutional investments from Israel state bonds and corporations that do business with Israel”; and “academic boycotts of Israeli academics and academic institutions.” Asserting that it “rejects all apartheid-based governmental systems and calls for a secular, democratic governing entity for all people in the geographic region of historic Palestine (today referred to by some people as Israel, the West Bank and Gaza),” GRPM “supports full implementation of the Right of Return for each Palestinian refugee, which means each Palestinian has the right to choose to return to his or her home and lands.” In GRPM’s calculus, the “Right of Return” should be extended not only to whatever survivors remain from the group of some 725,000 refugees who originally left Israel at the time of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, but also to an additional 5 million people who are the descendants of those refugees.

In 2006, GRPM’s candidates for Governor and Lieutenant Governor, Grace Ross and Wendy Van Horne, won only 2 percent of the popular vote. But the Party’s candidate for Secretary of State, Jill Stein, garnered 18 percent; and its candidate for State Treasurer, James O’Keefe, drew 16 percent.