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"I can't see the left getting pissed off though. They've not objected to chimera research before."
Oh yes you can: http://www.greens.org/s-r/20/2...

In the aftermath of the loss of the Columbia, the Bush administration directed NASA to return to deep space exploration, arguing that if we are to risk the lives of astronauts in space it ought to be for big things like exploring new worlds. Part of this was the Constellation program to return to the moon to build a permanent manned base at the lunar south pole before putting a man on Mars, which congress under-funded and president Obama cancelled. But the other part was a boost to the Bush administration's re-start of the 1960s nuclear power and rocket engines programs which like everything else he did alarmed the political left.,/p>

The Bush restart of the nuclear rocket engines program was called "Project Prometheus" and was allowed to die-off as Constellation slipped its schedule, was underfunded, and the politics of the day eliminated further Democratic cooperation with Bush.

Actually, someone did above. But I appreciate you doing so also!

Among the liberatrian-minded (as most of the people commenting here appear to be, though that's no surprise at Slashdot), Greens are given a bad rap as carrying on the worst elements of state socialism. In fact, this is not the case:

Greens favor devolving power to states and even municipalities
Greens want government out of our bedrooms
Greens want to decriminalize (most) drugs
Greens have no interest in taking guns away from law-abiding citizens
Greens understand that so-called "free-trade" treaties are just the government shilling for corporate power
Greens are big fans of free software

And some of you will remember that 2004 Green Party Presidential candidate David Cobb and Libertarian Party Presidential candidate Michael Badnarik appeared together in the most lucid and respectful debates in generations -- and then fought together for the integrity of the vote after the election that neither of them managed to win. They disagreed on some topics, but actually agreed on more.

Looks like Fast Breed Reactors would be a great idea if not for their perceived violation of Nuclear Non-Proliferation (see third pillar). These would work with existing nuclear power plants.

On the other hand, this report contrasts the "benefits" of the above, also showing that nuclear is more expensive in the kWh arena. Of course, the comments about cancers can itself be contradicted with this study.

Apparently there are political winds blowing about energy everywhere.

We're down to the wire on having any recounts affect any electoral college votes.
They all meet on December 13th to discuss and submit sealed votes.

But we're not talking about the Presidential election, not in this state at least. Washington state's gov race could go on for years, AFAIK.

Ohio, on the other hand, is another story entirely. And even if the electors pick Massa Dubya on Monday, the results must still be certified by Congress on January 6, 2005. If the Green/Libertarian recount push discovers that Ohio could have swung the other way, Congress will be forced to intervene -- and if they choose to go with the tainted results, Bush will have the distinction of having both his terms clouded by disputed election results.

I've contributed to the recount fund. I hope everyone here does as well.

Here. And please do, it's worth every penny, even if just to confirm the ability / inability of the machines.

Funny, I didn't think the first count was done yet.

They want $110,000 in donations to pay the required fees. Looks like $10 per precinct.

How many members of Congress do you have? How many locally elected officials does the Green Party have? How many judicial appointees do you have? See the pattern here?

According to http://greens.org/elections/

429 Candidates in 2004
40 States
74 Types of Offices

And I do indeed see a pattern:

37 Victories in 1996-7
44 Victories in 1998-9
131 Victories in 2000-1
146 Victories in 2002-3

Considering the obstacles faced by third-party candidates... I like what I see so far.

How can you even begin to be a viable choice if you don't have candidates across the board in a majority of electorial races. Even if your positions are fantastic on the issues without at least a glimmer of support from the congress you are dead in the water.

Assuming that Green Party candidate David Cobb gets the same opportunity as Badnarik, I hope you ask the same question. Cobb represents the so-called "electoral" wing of the Green Party, as opposed to the "ideological" wing.

He wants to *elect* Green candidates -- starting at the school boards and building up. Nader, on the other hand, has shown no such flexibility, prefering to tilt at windmills instead of opening the little door at the bottom. He gave us name recognition -- political oxygen, if you will -- but didn't know when to step aside. So at their convention, the Greens gave him a not-so-gentle push. I think the 2004 convention will be remembered as the day the Green Party grew up.

I suspect that Cobb's answer to your question will be along the lines of "We do indeed have candidates, both on the ballot and currently serving, in races from the top of the ballot to the bottom. Watch us grow!"

For the Libertarians' sake, I hope Badnarik can give the same answer.

Relatedly, at the recent GP convention in Milwaukee, we used free software to record and display the delegates votes. We used Debian, with Apache and MySQL and the scripts were written in Perl and GPL'd, not so much that they were very interesting, but on the principle that voting systems should be open. We used Debian as it reflects our values, and we wanted something stable.

-Susan
http://greens.org/~sdridi

The freedom to protest.

My site, uses the color attribute of <hr> tags extensively. They are easy and light formatting tools that don't play hell with browsers that don't read them.

Well, here are a few reasons they might be suspicious of the US...

You must understand something about the Green Party here. It's not a monolithic organization like the Republican and Democratic parties, it's a federation of local Green Parties. They have 10 key values, but not a unified platform. The maximum income plank comes from the Green Party USA platform.
My point, in case anybody missed it, saying that you haven't heard of anybody disagreeing with a particular plank of a platform is a spectacular FUD tactic: You can smear somebody on the basis of omission! C'mon. For a person or a party to explicitly disagree with a particular plank, it would first have to be on their radar screens, so to speak.
I cannot speak for all of the state parties, but I know that the Wisconsin Green Party platform does not include such a plank. Ralph Nader's 2000 campaign platform did not include such a plank. Omitting it from the platform surely implies disagreement, no?

Whichever way you look at it this is the end of the line for corporate deregulation. Regulation is now going to be considered pensioner friendly and stockholder friendly.

Well, at least until the current round of presidential speechifying and toothless legislating subsides Wall Street's fears, and corporate America's hand returns to the cookie jar.

In and of themselves, public scandals tend not to result in meaningful and structural change. To move beyond political grandstanding and weak legislation (and the bills being looked at currently are very weak -- see CitizenWorks for more info) requires a significant, independent-minded citizen's movement. A corporate accountability movement of this type could begin with demanding reforms in governance and accounting practices (like forcing corporations to expense stock options, a measure rejected by congressional Democrats), and move on to demanding serious and structural changes, such as taking corporate money out of politics (which will require public financing of elections, and breaking up the corporate strangehold over the news media.

But expecting a significant trend to reverse deregulation to suddenly spring up amongst politicians who continue to take their orders from major corporate donors is, unfortunately, too optimistic.

At the very least we will see the sweatheart deals arranged by Enron and the Gramms to exclude energy derivatives from oversight being swept away.

Don't count on it. As far as I remember, the current legislation doesn't repeal Gramm's Enron bill.

But at the deeper level I think that politicians are not going to be able to score easy votes by dennouncing regulation.

No, few voters are going to get hot and bothered about changes in corporate accounting regulations. However, most of them know, pretty intuitively, that they're getting screwed by big business. Frankly, most of the world understands that the current economic order doesn't operate for their benefit (particularly folks in the two-thirds world who don't just lose money on Enron stock, but get displaced by Enron-financed dams).

And no, that's not Marxist babbling -- take a look at some polling numbers: 67% think most corporate executives are dishonest, 57% think white collar crime happens very often, and the percentage who name big business as the largest threat to America's future is at an all-time high (38%).

However, the public doesn't trust politicians to solve these (or most) problems, probably a leading cause of why fewer and fewer of them bother to vote. And nobody's going to trust grand-standing Democrats like Lieberman (who spends most of his time on his knees before the insurance industry) to take a firm stance against over-reaching corporate power.

IMHO, the only way we're going to see a viable political movement for corporate accountability is with a strong, progressive, independent third party. At the moment, both in the U.S. and around the world, that's the Green Party. Provided we continue moving beyond feel-good environmentalism, the Greens can be a grassroots and effective voice for change, by bringing up these issues when people are paying some attention to them (during the election season) and offering bold solutions, rather than more of the same focus-grouped bullshit. The Green Party in the U.S. is now organized in almost every state, and has a platform full of creative ways to advance real, grassroots democracy.

In closing (and for the purposes of extending my pomposity a bit further), I'd like to remind folks that corporate abuse of power affects everyone, in millions of ways -- whether you're a white-collar type whose 401(k) is suddenly worthless, a software developer who's forced to deal with ludicrous patents, or a worker whose job just got shipped to Mexico. And it will take all of us to effect the changes so desperately needed.

(P.S. Another great resource on corporate power is the Program on Corporations, Law, and Democracy.)

Don't bother, the Republicans are just as much in the pocket of corporations as the Democrats are. If you really want someone who represents the peoples' interests, and not those of the campaign contributors, you're going to have to go with a third party. I suggest this one, as they do not accept corporate contributions, and are thus unlikely to be influenced by corporate money.

I'll give you a hint -- the cure for a Republican isn't to replace him with a Democrat, or vice versa. The Democrats and the Republicans are both bought and paid for by the same corporations, and they merely play a game of good-cop/bad-cop to get you to vote for one party or the other -- but no matter which of the two parties wins, the corporations are in control. Hence the SSSCA, DMCA, etc.

If you don't like this situation, I suggest you vote for one of our fine third parties, and/or support a transition to instant runoff voting to help break the Democrat and Republican parties' lock on elections.

GlobalGreens seems to run the only world conference of Greens, who are in most democratic countries as a full party. They recognize the Green Party of the US (Association of State Green Parties), Nader's org, and run those press releases on their web site. So that's the Greens' idea of who the US Greens are. The old party is leftists.

Except there's no point. You can just join the Green Parties.

U.S. workers average more hours on the job per year than workers in any other industrialized country -- Greenies.

Time to destigmatize leisure time! Being particularly lazy, I've been watching the work phenomenon closely. When I worked at an investment bank, the analysts would routinely put in 80-100 hours per week. A paralegal friend of mine easily put in more. To no effect: they aren't going to retire earlier, they've experienced less life, and the money was eh.

Unless your job is your career (lifer entrepreneurs, artists), I don't see a problem with working 20hrs a week to live. In a resource-rich, modern and enlightened society, there shouldn't be a stigma attached to doing as little labor as possible, especially if that labor is nonessential to your interests. Of course, capitalism doesn't seem to be set up this way... but apparently it's possible to survive in an industrialized culture while doing less work, so long as you're not American:

France & Germany make do with shorter work weeks. Germans are much more productive than either the Japanese or the Americans. They don't spend their time off recuperating so that they can go back to work on Monday, which seems to be the case in the States. And, Not all of the industrialized world has the same balance of work and non-work time that we do in the US. Work Time, Free Time.

A hasty Google search has more info on this topic.

In his award-winning "Culture" books, scifi writer Iain M. Banks creates stories in a created a post-plenty universe where all physical needs are satisfied without cost. Difficult to envision, but he does a good job.

Vandana Shiva has been protesting the interference of Monsanto with local communities for years. Biodevastation, Water Rights.

Also watch out for Bechtel, using the same tactics in South America Water War Victory.

These corporations are changing the face of the planet for a quick one-time profit. They lack any ties to the local communities they despoil. Take the money and run... Yet the after affects will be long lasting and world wide. And people wonder why we have a cultural image of mad scientists. Once again, proprietary science has allowed itself to create a monster it thought it could control. We'll see...

In other words, thank you for playing and please try again.

You got Ralph Nader confused with Jello Biafra who was a candidate for the Greens nomination, but lost it to Nader.

Perhaps the reason why you got confused was you also failed to read the disclaimer on the beginning of the Greens website here that states "This platform is not binding for candidates on any level".

For more information on the Green party, check out this link. Notice on this website that it has a link to Ralph Nader's platform, as ratified at the Green Party National Convention, June 2000.

This is the platform Ralph Nader supports, don't believe the rumor mongers.

You got Ralph Nader confused with Jello Biafra who was a candidate for the Greens nomination, but lost it to Nader.

Perhaps the reason why you got confused was you also failed to read the disclaimer on the beginning of the Greens website here that states "This platform is not binding for candidates on any level".

For more information on the Green party, check out this link. Notice on this website that it has a link to Ralph Nader's platform, as ratified at the Green Party National Convention, June 2000.

This is the platform Ralph Nader supports, don't believe the rumor mongers.

Though moderated as "informative", this comment offers no link to any position paper by Nader talking about a maximum wage. In fact, a search of Nader's web site for the phrase "maximum wage" yields no results.

A maximum wage was a plank in Jello Biafra's platform in the Green Party primary.

This platform is not binding for candidates on any level.
Here is a link to the Platform endorsed by the Nader/LaDuke campaign.

How about this? A member of the green party needs only to adhere to these 10 key values. The candidate's platform is what THEY feel is important, unlike Republicrats, where the platform is controlled by the party. Ralph Nader's platform may be shocking to people who aren't used to having to consider real issues.

More importantly, the guy is way ahead of all the other third party candidates, is on the ballot in 30 states already (including Montana :-) Thank you Mr. Wachs and co.) with more to come, and he has eight percent popularity. If enough people vote for him, the Green Party (I was a staunch Democrat before I found the Greens) will become a "recognized" political party.

There is an alternative to the Republicrats. Question is are there enough Amerikan voters who remain un-brainwashed by the Amerikan Corpratist State.

Judging by what I'm seeing here, I doubt it...

John, this was one of your worst articles.

Who is José Bové, and is he admirable?

He is a Frenchman who was born in Bordeaux in 1953, and grew up at Berkeley, as his parents studied Biochem. Back in France, he refused to do his military service and dropped out of Bordeaux University to immerse himself in various leftist political and ecological movements. In 1975 he and his wife decided to move to the country, take up sheep farming and join a local peasant movement (Confédération paysanne), which he terms 'a trade union', though I do not understand in what sense he means this) against a plan to extend an army base in southern France. He was arrested for "invading" the base during a 1976 protest, and he spent three weeks in prison. (The military project was canceled five years later, more due to the economy than nanything else

In 1998, he blew up up a silo (which belonged to the pharmaceutical firm Novartis) because it contained genetically modified corn. Here's Mssr. Bove's own statement about his actions and motives. It appears to have been written in English, or at least be an authorized translation. I haven't found a French original or variant translations.

In 1999, he became a 'national hero' (according to his supporters -- he's certainly a cult figure) for damaging an unfinished McDonalds with a bulldozer, and later organizing a massive giveaway of Roquefort cheese to protest US import restrictions. He also is known for staging 'illegal' free Roquefort and French bread picnics in front to McDonald's during the WTO protests in Seattle. Distributing the cheese was 'illegal' because it was unpasteurized. Time magazine did a piece on him

But he's not in jail for the bulldozer attack. he spent 20 days in jail for that in 1999. He calls that the greatest favor the judge could have done, due to the publicity it gave him.

On Wednesday, April 19, 2000, an attack on a McDonald's resulted in the death of a '28 year-old waitress'. Jose Bove is believed to have ordered this attack. He has always proclaimmed his movement (Confédération paysanne) to be nonviolent, but admits that violent means have been used, and often refers to the groups actions as 'combat' (same in French as English) I found a French account of the attack that you can babelfish, if necessary

I also found an 12/99 interview where he outlines his current views. He is not an ultra-liberal (in fact he denounced ultraliberalism as 'suicidal'), his personal views are a patchwork of conflicting insistence on individualism and collectivism, (which becomes harder for me to render coherently, the more I read) Politically, he opposes 'internationalization' and insists that 'each nation has a right to choose what it wants to eat' (he supports French Bans on US food, while protesting US bans on French foods)

I leave an analysis of his ideology to others -- anyone but Katz.

Yes! They're the ones I'm thinking of. They exist in the US too. They think their presidential candidate actually is going to win the election. Now, I'm a registered Green and like third-party candidates as much as anybody, but a president elected on a meditation platform? Hm. Interestingly, though, they seem to be playing down the meditation thing -- it's hard to find it mentioned on their site. Perhaps they realized what a bizarre idea it is.

Ralph Reed no longer works for the Christian Coalition - he now runs Century Strategies, a political lobbying & campaign group. He left the CC shortly before they lost their tax exemption when the IRS determined they were not a non-partisan group (no big surprise to anyone with a functioning frontal lobe).

So many people on Slashdot bitch on and on about corporations running things or having an undue influence in public affairs in the States. There is one candidate who is actively campaigning against the current state of affairs. Check out Ralph Nader & the Green Party at www.votenader.org and www.greens.org.

Yay Nader! If you're interested in getting involved, go to a meeting of your local Green Party. It's fun, it's productive, it'll help make a difference. Or just click the link and learn more -- knowledge never killed anyone. (This being /., I just know someone is going to come up with a counterexample. Grr.)

I think freedom (with respect to software and otherwise) is a big thing for Ralph Nader (he pushed for punishment of MS for anticompetitive practices). He also seems to have a proven track record of supporting the little guy as well as being a good speaker and an informed, intelligent individual. I am sure he would be in my corner more than he would be in some lobbyists' pocket.

Check it out:
http://www.votenader.com/

Also if he gets >5%, then the Green Party becomes an officially organized party and gets federal funding.

Official political party sites

Democratic National Committee

Democratic Socialists of America

Green Parties of North America

Labor Party

Libertarian Party

Natural Law Party

Reform Party

Republican National Committee

Socialist Party USA

Workers Party

Official candidate sites

Gary Bauer

Bill Bradley

Pat Buchanan

George W. Bush

Steve Forbes

Al Gore

Orrin Hatch

Alan Keyes

John McCain

Donald Trump

www.ralphnader.org is running Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) on Linux

www.nader2k.org is running Apache/1.3.4 (Unix) on Linux

And as he'd probably run under the Green banner.. www.greens.org is running Apache/1.3.4 (Unix) on Linux www.greenparty.org is running Apache/1.3.4 (Unix) on Linux Hmm.. makes sense. I've always thought that the best way for the Green Party to get the message out would be through the Internet. "Grassroots democracy" is one of their ten key values, and what could be more "grassroots" than the Internet? All in all, I'm fairly suprised no one has mentioned the anti-MS Public Citizen Nader.

--

http://www.greens.org/s-r/17/17-21.html

http://thewinds.org /archive/newworld/terminator_seeds04-98.html