This week on Clearing The FOG Radio Margaret Flowers will be interviewed by Kevin Zeese about her plans to run for US Senate in Maryland. Flowers is normally a co-host on the show but this week she will change roles and be interviewed by her co-host. Flowers and Zeese not only co-host Clearing The FOG but also co-direct Popular Resistance and are partners in life. So, you can expect an in-depth conversation about why she is running for Senate, how she plans to win as a third party candidate and what she will do when she is elected.
Listen here:
Margaret Flowers, Candidate for US Senate by Clearingthefog on Mixcloud
Relevant articles and websites:
Flowers for Senate Facebook Page
Video: Interview with Bill Moyers 2010
Video: Interview with Bill Moyers 2013
Guest:
Margaret Flowers, MD is a mother of three and pediatrician who since leaving practice in 2007 has worked tirelessly for social, economic and environmental justice. She is most widely known for her work to create an improved Medicare for all national health system. Flowers views running for office as a next important step in her advocacy work on a broad range of issues that impact people in Maryland and across the country.
Research shows that the current political system is a plutocracy in which the interests of the wealthy are overwhelmingly represented by the two wealth-dominated parties, the Democrats and Republicans. Urgent racial, economic and environmental issues including racially-biased police violence, the expanding wealth divide and the ticking of the climate clock compel us to build an alternative political party that represents the interests and necessities of all of the people, particularly those who are most oppressed, and puts the planet before profit. Flowers is seeking the nomination for US Senate of the Maryland Green Party which has ballot access in 2016.
Flowers earned a BS in Biology from Georgetown University and moved to Baltimore in 1986 for medical school. After graduation from the University of Maryland School of Medicine in 1990 and completion of pediatric residency at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore in 1994, Flowers worked first as a hospitalist in Carroll County where she was director of the pediatric program and then in private practice in Reisterstown and Sparks, Maryland. She left practice in 2007 to advocate full-time for a single payer health care system at both the state and national levels. In this work she saw the connection between health and a range of issues among them jobs, housing, education, racism, poverty, the corrupt finance system, environmental degradation and energy as well as how all these issues were prevented from making progress because of a corrupt and dysfunctional political system.
Flowers has testified before the Maryland state legislature and Congress to advocate for a Medicare for All health system. Flowers served as co-chair of the Maryland chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program and as Congressional Fellow for Physicians for a National Health Program. During the 2009-2010 national health reform process she organized briefings, lobby days and testified before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee in June, 2009 and before the National Commission for Fiscal Responsibility and Reform in June, 2010. She is currently an advisor to the board of PNHP. She was co-founder of the Mobilization for Health Care Reform. Flowers serves on the coordinating committee of the Health Care is a Human Right Campaign-Maryland.
Flowers views the struggle for health care as part of a broader social, racial, economic and environmental justice movement. She joined Kevin Zeese in March, 2011 as co-director of ItsOurEconomy.us in order to educate, organize and mobilize around social and economic justice issues and democratization of the economy to reduce the wealth divide. She is co-editor of PopularResistance.org which grew from the Occupation of Washington, DC on Freedom Plaza (October2011) and continues to report on and help organize events around the country. She co-hosts Clearing the FOG radio which airs on We Act Radio, 1480 AM in Washington, DC. She has appeared on Bill Moyers’ Journal, Democracy Now and Fox Business News as well as many local and international outlets and in documentaries. Her writing is published in TruthOut, TruthDig, Alternet , Counterpunch and other online outlets. Her twitter is @MFlowers8.