One question I have been asked is whether or not the Green Party should ever endorse a Democrat or a Republican. The policy I always hold to and fight for is to never endorse RepubliCrats unless they've already defeated a first choice in a primary. If they re-register Green I will consider endorsing them. If they cannot reregister, that's sign of importance number one they will not hold to green values when elected. Our future as a meaningful party depends on our integrity. We are NOT an endorsing party, we are a nominating party, and that means when you seek our support we expect you to be a member of at least a party that has principles. I'd consider endorsing a Libertarian over a Democrat because I know where the Libertarian stands (and I agree with them 90 percent). Our very existence relies upon the fact that we are a trusted and consistent alternative that speaks truth to power, no matter how polished power may have manifest. I'm ever watchful that we, as a true alternative party may fall into the old Hegelian model of left versus right and line up with the Dems when they appear far enough left. A verdent party such as ours is not left, nor right, but Forward. We do not favor central governments to manage all our problems -- we want local, decentralized control and communitarian values, instead. We do not favor corporate bankers, New York advertising firms, and Hollywood Enternumbment -- we want to take back control from corporate interests and assert our rights as humans to drive our own destiny. We do not favor large corporate monopolies paying small franchise fees for exclusive utility contracts or getting tax abatements in enterprise zones to contribute to urban sprawl -- we want to foster small, independent businesses (including cooperatives and public districts as well as small propreitors) who use their own associations to interoperate and develop extensive systems of international standards backed by the power of local governments. As a divergence, I want to mention some things about decentralization and how it relates to transcending the old left-right dichotomy. Kind of a blog post, as it were: The Internet has proven that decentralization works. There's more peer-to-peer traffic on the Internet than all other traffic, combined. That scares the metaphorical shit out of the powers that be, and Richard Clarke has said that the US has an Internet PATRIOT Act just around the corner if we get a major cyber attack. But thanks to a few maverick professors and students at Berkeley (Jon Postel and Vincent Cerf, a couple examples), who created the Internet Engineering Task Force with ARPA funding (now known as DARPA), the Internet has been most resilient to cyber attacks. Ironically, despite its origination of the Internet, the US is WAY behind its connectivity rates compared to other countries. You may have seen the news about the happenings in Georgia, but in addition to tanks, Russia launched a cyber war on Georgia, trying to prevent their administration from communicating internally and externally. Right now, China is in a cyber war against the US (and has been for the last couple years). The Air Force has a cyber command center specifically to address that. China is not only targeting government channels, but it has a system of state-sponsored electronic espionage against corporate trade secrets all over the world. The skirmishes often go unreported due to the nature of trade secrets and the sensitivity of large corporations to their image of security, but I know many in the security industry and that's what they talk about (minus details in public). China hasn't been very successful in its cyber war because it doesn't grok decentralization. In fact, spammers love China because they decentrally control vast bot networks within China for diseminating mass emails and attacks. Decentralization can be robust, but it has to be a coordinated and conscious decentralization that balances anarchy with community. If you've been watching the Olympics at all you'll see the stark contrast between those sports where ingenuity is involved versus repetition. In gymnastics, diving, and weightlifting, the Chinese dominate. In team sports and evolving sports like basketball or beach volleyball, western nations dominate. They still have to buy their engineering know-how from IBM when they bought their ThinkPad division (hopefully Apple is headed to replace them as the corporate standard laptop). The core silicon fabrication facilities are all still outside China. In China you don't find the agents of change anywhere, just conformity to specifications. China may have discovered gunpower, but they've created a nation of over a billion conformists to a central government through propaganda and pseudo-leftist ideology -- perhaps with the help of that gunpowder. But what is the alternative? Robert Reich's 1970 classic The Greening of America laid out the vision we must seek to complete: the overcoming of the first and second consciousnesses (classical liberalism of the individual and statist liberalism) to move to a third consciousness, the Greening of America -- a more true synthesis than Marx or Hegel ever dreamed. If we, as a nation, are unable to move beyond those two consciousnesses, the Chinese's Second consciousness is nearly complete, and they are ready to dominate us, stuck back here debating the merits of the first and second consciousnesses. They are a shining example of what this nation would be like if controlled by the likes of the Democratic Party: nearly full employment under a centrally planned economy moving rapidly to industrialization. Interestingly, the Republican administration acts completely corporate and statist -- the hallmarks of the Second Consciousness. Some might call it fascism. The Second Consciousness, though, depends on ready access to fossil fuels. That dependency is also its Achillies heel. In the US, fiscal conservatives in this country have managed to somehow revert the clock of time and deindustrialize the US into a low wage service-based economy, while the control the Democrats have leaned areas it controls toward higher wage K-sector economies. We have to remember though that both of the parties are capitalistic to the core, for even in their empty promises, one stresses the individual, the other stresses the urban corporation and sometimes (and decreasingly) its union of employees. As true progressives, we can't give into the pressure to turn back the clock to reactionary politics, but always consider the alternatives: instead of a direct copy of the British National Health System or an expansion of medciare, we need to empower local doctors and have state-level administration of our universal health services. Indeed, European countries are about the same size as our states. Instead of sales, whole property, and payroll taxes (favored by capitalists in the two major parties -- remember bankers got the federal reserve and the federal income tax passed) we need to consider expanding the estate tax and changing to geonomic and resource extraction taxes: true shifts to the Third Consciousness. We need a minimum income guaranteed by 100 percent estate taxes to enable creative souls to create wonderous artistic, utilitarian beauty without being insecure about their basic sustenance. Instead of public financing of political campaigns, the state could mandate the public airwaves provide free political information disemination and ban all money in politics as legalized bribery. Rick Metsger, who lost in the Democratic primary, champions this issue, although he supports the backwards blanket primary. Instead of blanket primaries, Instant Runoff Voting can be used. Runoffs and range voting (although judges that don't use strategy to manipulate ranges work really well in range voting, the same success cannot be expected by the voting population compared to IRV) seem to work for the Olympics. It can work here for us -- in 1908 Oregon voters had the foresight to enable preference and proportional voting into our Constitution. In the USSR and China and during the New Deal, you still have/had compulsory wage slavery. You could choose the CCC (or the CCCP) or starvation. We have the resources to move beyond that with our incredible ability to automate, but we need the sustainable, Green vision to lead us not on the path to self-destruction, but, instead, to universal creativity. The two major parties like to talk about Green jobs, however it's not the audacity of hope that will lead us forward, but the ingenuity of innovation. We need innovative politics, innovative businesses, and innovative communities to really move us forward into Reich's Third, Green Consciousness. All three of those require innovative people. If we can remake our society in a Green vision, the prize is a future for our planet. If not, wars for oil will dominate a slow, petroleum-lubricated path toward a charcoal-smoked planet. If society slides down that path with unabated thirst for oil, there only lies humanity's self-immolation, suspended by Eisenhower's Cross of Iron.