The STEADY Party : re-birthing the Greens under a new banner

Greens, yes, but by an accident of history....

The Greens had no idea how vacuous  the term GREEN would become when they set about naming their various parties all those years ago.

And in fact few choose to call themselves Green in the earliest days.

Only after the German Greens' success, did the term get adopted holus bolus by other ecologist parties.

Even deniers claim to be a little bit green today.

Maybe its time then to get at the heart of the green movement and pick a name that no Liberal, Conservative or Socialist will take up, unless they give up 200 hundred years of their party traditions.

A STEADY party is probably swiftboat-proof,by name, anyway

A steady state economy oriented party might as well rename itself the STEADY party : pure and simple.....

Andrew Loog Oldham Svengali to Christine Milne ? Would you let your daughter marry a GREEN ?!

For once, don't blame  Fleet Street : it was they what got took !

To this day, most people think it was a British Tabloid editor at something like the Daily Mail (or worse) who first blared out the screaming 1965 headline, "would you let your daughter marry a Rolling Stone ?"

If was this headline, reproduced worldwide and then forever after, that most people agreed "made" the Rolling Stones.

Actually, the original tagline was from a series of ads ran by the canny manager of the Stones, youngster Andrew Loog Oldham, in a few music weeklies --- and only later picked up and improved upon by Fleet Street heavies.

Oldham was very young - even younger than the Stones and had never run a band before - was in fact too young to legally get a music agent's license, but he made up in street smarts what he lacked in age, experience, contacts or capital.

He was half Australian which might account for a good bit of his sheer brass. Who knows, maybe he is Down Under, visiting relatives, and offering pro bono advice to our Christine.

Anyway, back to the Stones --- itt was obvious too - in hindsight - that it was a father editor , not a mother editor, who reproduced the headline along with a frantically worried editorial.

No mother would be so daft : mothers - women - in fact know damn well that lots of nice girls love to go out with bad boys.

Particularly bad boys that good old Dad can't stand and forbids them to ever see.

Okay, now cue "The Nasty".

"The Nasty", head of the Australian Liberal (libertarian ) party, is ironically enough less a libertarian on social issues and rather more a wet blanket catholic of the most hair-shirted variety.

So naturally, "The Nasty" has taken the bait that the Green party leader Christine Milne (or someone a lot like her) has so carefully laid out for him .

He and his tame newspapers are off on a tear about all the evils that will prevail upon hapless morally-muddled Aussies if they dare to think of dating a Green.

Its a risky strategy "Nasty" - just listen to ole Rupert . His papers may have gotten a one day blip in circulation out of repeating the headline ,but it was the R. Stones who have been dining out on it ever since.

And frankly, "Nasty", if you have anything left after you tithe, I 'd take it out of shares in News Corpse and put it into Sticky Fingers, PLC.

My bet is that 10 years from now, they'll be worth a lot more than a few newspaper properties filled with rusting Big Iron and no customers.

And if someday, during your watch, the Green Horror ends up in Government or Opposition, prepare to blame yourself.

Voters are a lot like daughters : they don't always like being told what NOT to do ....

Aussie papers ask "Would you let your daughter marry a Green - they drink the blood of children you know"

"Earned Media", by the tonne, for Aussie greens

If a political party sells its soul to the rich and greedy, it can afford to obtain lots of "paid media" , by buying newspaper ads.

If the newspapers talk about your party without you paying for it, then it is called "earned media" .

Normally Green parties worldwide can't get either form of media.

But not for the Australia Greens for last few weeks - or for a few weeks more apparently.

It has been a two party punch-up on the Greens - the Labor party has teamed up with the Coalition-supporting daily media to go at the Greens on every possible point around the compass.

Far more extreme than the Communists, far more loonie than the Tea Party seems the thrust of the hundreds of articles against the Greens.

Millions of Australians are waking up, drinking coffee and reading papers and listening to radio and TV and learning for the very first time that the Greens are one of the serious parties - serious as in "feared".

I think the Coalition and Labor are going to regret this punch-up :
parties that are joked about or ignored, go no where.

Parties feared by the rich and powerful tend to be seen potential governments-in-waiting by the resentful non-rich and the non-powerful.

And there are lots of them about ......

Australia's top paper makes it official : Greens now a major threat to traditional parties

GREENS replace Liberals as Aussie Labour's bete noire

The Sydney Morning Herald - "Big Thunder" - says that the Labour Party is taking a big risk by its very public declaration of war against the greens rather than against its traditional opponent , the libertarian-oriented Liberals.

The Liberals have also joined in the braying, as it too is losing some of its young educateds to the Greens as well.

A wrenching voter and party re-alignment is definitely under way down under, where the green revolution all began 40 years ago this year .....

Is anything LEFT ? What is RIGHT ? Death spiral of traditional politics

Political Parties deathwatch

The only thing dying faster than paid newspapers and TV news is the political party.

Membership is down badly - even worse than voter turnout.

Above all, the greying memberships' spirit is gone - they haven't got enough energy left to get angry or to get happy.

What is so socialist about our socialist parties ?

They try to collect a grab bag of ever changing ideas to attract their supporters ----- just as the free-enterprise-less capitalist parties struggle to find their grab bag of ideas to get their 15% of the electorate to the polls.

When the winning government party got 33% of the votes of the one half of the electorate who sought to be added to the election lists and then bothered to show up to vote, you know you have serious dry rot.

Thank goodness for deniers vs greens : genuine anger and energy

God bless the deniers and the greens - at least those two still get fired up and angry at each other.

The older parties can't do it anymore - not even with the promise of government patronage to act as their Viagra.

We need to find a new line in the sand that divides and angers voters enough to take out memberships, knock on doors, put out a sign, give money, vote.

And left vs right ain't it - not after 150 years, it is just played out : both parties believe in an ever-growing economy and only quibble over the details of dividing the swag.

CATO vs CASSE , now there is an electoral fight I'd like to have a pony in : Endless Growth in the very short term versus an Eternal Steady State of Happiness.....

Human Exceptionalists versus CASSE is the new "ballot question" in all future elections

Denying limits is the Kool Aid of Denial

Denying that humans must face the same biological and material restraints as all other lifeforms , is the hallmark of the climate denier and of the libertarian.

They call it "human exceptionalism" - extending to all humans the virtue they once thought only belonged to Americans.

Like skygods, they live in a plane (neat pun, yes ?) well above Nature and its material limits.

Human willpower will inevitably triumph material limits : "mind over matter".

CASSE disputes the CATO's Room 101

Herman Daly has promoted the idea of a steady state economy for decades.

He and his supporters (count me as one) argue that a world with a steady number of people consuming a steady (not ever growing) amount of the world's resources can just about manage to keep human civilization afloat for a few more generations.

His organization is known as CASSE --- think of it as the Matter to the Cato Institute's Anti-Matter ( another clever pun, no ?)

 CASSE as a sort of Earthling Central versus CATO as Skygod Central.

If we got rid of all the parties - including the Greens - and had Cato vs CASSE duke it out for our votes, we might have both a more interesting election AND truly an earth-settling election.

Doom on one side - Hope on the other....

Now, please sign the CASSE Petition  ! *

* And a hat tip to Brian Czech for telling us all about the progress this steady steady idea is making among even the "limitless-growth-is-a-law-of-nature" economists.

human exceptionalism : the GAULEITERS of GREED

The Rape of the Earth

Chuck it, W J Smith !

As Chesterton said of the anti-christs of the Bar a long, long time ago, its not about the souls of christian peoples, its all about the fees.

Greed......