>yoshie, i never said school boards and city councils. i explicitly
>included "state" level in my list. you could run independent or
>third party candidates for congress, for instance. for state
>governorships, perhaps. etc. my guess (and admittedly its a guess)
>is that these are easier campaigns to run (both from the monetary
>perspective and the effectiveness of grassroots door-to-door
>campaigning) and a win here and there can be consolidated (as
>opposed to the 2-3% nader gets which will buy us zero clout
>anywhere). brad meyer i think makes similar points in his response.
It should be easier for a Green Party candidate (or a candidate of another political party on the left) to be elected for US Representative, US Senator, or Governor than for President. As I mentioned, this year, 57 Green Party candidates are running for seats in the US House of Representatives, and 7, the US Senate. Combined impacts -- in terms of fundraising, new party activists, new registered Green voters, new state parties, new party ballots, media coverage, etc. -- of all of them, however, are smaller than Nader/LaDuke 2000 or a Green Party presidential ticket in the future headed by an intellectual in Nader's league of name recognition, political connections, and fundraising capacity (and few US leftists are -- perhaps no US leftist today is -- in Nader's league in these three respects). That's the truth based upon empirical facts.
>>John Kerry voted against even Kyoto in 1997, even though Kyoto
>>itself was a very weak protocol severely circumscribed by the
>>market principle (cf.
>><http://montages.blogspot.com/2004/06/day-after-tomorrow-greenwashing.html>).
>
>what about the bush govt efforts to open up various national parks
>for drilling and other invasive activities? i believe kerry would
>roll them back. i am sure you will agree that in small ways, kerry
>will be better for the environment, than bush.
I doubt that John Kerry will be better for the environment than George W. Bush. Each president since Richard Nixon was on the whole worse for the environment than the one before. Bill Clinton was worse than Ron Reagan and George H. W. Bush: e.g.,
<blockquote>In 1992, a dozen regional and national environmental groups filed suit in federal district court in Seattle to block further timber sales on federal lands in the region. Judge [William] Dwyer filed an injunction charging "repeated and systematic" violations of environmental laws and the release of new acreage for logging came to a halt. This does not mean that there has not been any logging of old growth in the last year and a half, however. Timber cutting on company-owned land has continued unabated, and enough federal land had already been released to sustain logging in the National Forests until sometime next year.
On the heels of the 1993 "forest summit," the Clinton administration commissioned the U.S. Forest Service (which is actually part of the Agriculture Department) to come up with a series of options for resuming timber sales in accordance with Judge Dwyer's ruling. The study team was headed by Jack Ward Thomas, a senior research ecologist at USFS who has since been appointed by Clinton to head the agency. . . .
Thomas's team came up with eight scenarios, allowing up to nearly a billion board-feet (approximately 20,000 acres) of National Forest timber to be extracted every year for the next decade. Four million board-feet was the typical rate through the 1980s. Each scenario was evaluated for its projected effect on the probability of survival of key forest species (owls, murrelets, salmon, and over a thousand others) through the next century. The White House rejected all eight options as not permitting enough logging to satisfy the timber industry's friends in Congress, and ordered the development of an additional scenario, the dreaded "Option 9."
Like many Clinton initiatives, Option 9 borrows progressive language to serve far more dubious ends. It was roundly praised by the media and some environmentalists for limiting future logging, establishing reserves for spotted owls, and establishing buffer zones along important river watersheds. Funds were promised for job-creating waters led restoration programs to further protect salmon runs. But, typically, there is a steady stream of exceptions, conditions and loopholes that ultimately could give the timber industry free reign over half of the remaining old-growth forest. Thinning and "salvage" logging would be allowed even in the owl reserves, and logging on the dryer eastern slopes of the Cascades could be increased to make up for losses in timber revenue on the western side. The plan would relax limits on logging on privately owned lands, a matter of special concern in California, where most of the remaining unprotected redwoods are owned by corporations such as the notorious Maxxam conglomerate. Forest-dependent species would continue to disappear, even according to the plan's calculations. The land would continue to be degraded, and the rapacious practices of the timber companies would continue to dominate the ecology and the economy of the Cascadian region long into the future. ("The Clinton Forest Plan," <em>Z Magazine</em>, April 1994, <http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20031202102241558>)</blockquote>
<blockquote>Stewardship contracts.
These give loggers access to profitable trees in national forests in exchange for agreeing to thin overgrown areas that don't have commercial value. Started as pilot projects in 1999 under the Clinton administration, these now number nearly 90 after Congress expanded the program in 2002. (Miguel Llanos, "Log Trees to Save Forests from Fire?" June 15, 2004, <http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5014243/>)</blockquote>
George W. Bush is worse than Clinton. And the next POTUS, be he Bush (44) or Kerry, will be worse than Bush (43), simply because the next POTUS will not roll back the bad things that are written into law and put into practice under the current and prior administrations and will introduce new bad things that will roll back the good things, old and new, that people struggled for and gained in the past. -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * OSU-GESO: <http://www.osu-geso.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>