Green Party Watch

While Starr answered his own question, “War! What is it good for?” with the response “Absolutely nothing!”, Wes Rolley gives a more detailed answer to the question, “What good is growth?” in his column in the Morgan Hill Times.

One of his Green Talk columns, the essay includes this gem.

It should not be the automatic goal of our government to grow the economy nor should it be the goal of government to continue growing. Just as a cancer will eventually take all of our energy to sustain its insatiable expansion, so growing government will eventually take all of our monetary resources and growing the economy will eventually take all of our natural resources. The end result of all of this will be collapse and possibly the death of our civilization.

Rolley regularly blogs at California Greening.

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Shades of Green

By Liz Smith-Anderson

The election is over, the winner declared. The Democrats are dancing in the streets while the Republicans grimace and grind their teeth in an attempt to hide their disgust. Barack Obama won millions of votes by promising change. He has promised change in the way we deliver healthcare, the way we treat the environment, and has offered to protect our constitutional rights. Wait a minute. This sounds very ‘Green Party’ to me. Could it be that the radical thought paradigms of the far left have evolved into centrist thinking? Has the average citizen finally accepted that the way ‘things were done’ in the past just won’t work in today’s world. Is it possible that Obama will be ‘the one’ who pulls it all together and actually is able to move our nation towards that more perfect union dreamed of by our founders?
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The little town of Morega, CA in Contra Costa County is the site of a show down between pro-growth and moneyed land-owners against anti-sprawl “open space advocates” in town, including the town’s Mayor, Green Party member Lynda Deschambault, whose term is up this year. The battle has heated up, resulting in two opposing land-use measures that will appear on the November 4 ballot:

The first measure is an effort by open space proponents to bar most new homes and businesses outside of downtown Moraga.

The second is a defensive measure that sticks closely to the city’s current plan and allows up to 300 luxury houses, and mandates $7 million for the city’s use. The measure is sponsored by the Bruzzone family, longtime Moraga landowners who could lose most of their development potential under the other initiative.

Growth proponents point to the town’s dwindling budget and say it needs a modest infusion of shops and homes to boost its tax base, while critics cite negative traffic and environmental impacts of sprawl.

From here the local politics turn personal:

Lee Bren, a 31-year Moraga resident who lost to Deschambault in the 2004 election, has launched an all-out e-mail assault against the mayor. He accuses her of misrepresenting her background and conspiring behind the scenes to advance her political agenda.

Another group has been quietly conducting opposition research on Deschambault, filing public records act requests seeking verification of the contents of her resume and 2004 ballot statement.

Deschambault, however, has decided not to run for re-election, which means that the pro-growth groups will have to campaign on the merits of their plans rather than negatively against the out-going Mayor. That may not stop them from continuing their character assassination attempts though.

This is a great story of the Green Fight on the Ground.
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