Nice try Nerd, but some of us know more about the environmental movement than that.

First, you are quoting the rating given to Congress by the League of Conservation Voters--who have endorsed Kerry. He may have a "career" rating of 96%, but that is just marketing tool. It is also essentially meaningless when you look at Kerry's record on trade, which LCV doesn't, and his "look the other way" record in that area of environmental activism is abysmal. It was Dean that pushed Kerry into making the empty campaign promise of "reviewing the labor and environmental standards" of all our trade agreements. And Dean pretty much sucks on free trade too. So this campaign promise is one of those "if elected" sorts of things. Sure he'll review them. A distinguished government panel with heads of corporations and global corporate capitalist think tankers, who will "study" the trade agreements, and put the white paper on the shelf.

Did you forget, or are you just choosing to ignore Kerry's vote against Kyoto?

Kerry's connections to his wife's so-called "environmental" foundation is just more evidence of his connections to global corporate capitalists through the back door. There is only one issue he has done more demagoguing on than environmental issues since announcing his candidacy, and that is his military service.

Voting for independents and third parties is doing something positive. It is building towards a future alternative, participatory, representative democracy. It is to vote against McGovernment.

The global grassroots movements aren't aligned by nations anymore, because the corporate capitalists that are undermining participatory democracy around the globe transcend them legally, economically, and politically. These movements are creating decentralized, non-hierarchical webbed organizational structures that confound the mainstream, hierarchical, top down corporate models with charismatic "leaders" calling all the shots. The internet has been central to this type of parallel universe, and the activists working as a part of this web are no longer naive enough to believe that electoral politics will create social, political, and economic change: rather, these are the people who have already figured out that electoral politics have become one of the greatest barriers to those changes.