Planet Earth Peace Party

In response to the many e-mails and suggestions we have received from our fellow earthlings across the globe regarding the Global 2008 U.S.A. Presidential Election Poll that is being conducted by The Planet Earth Peace Party we are implementing the following suggestions:

one) internet users who share an ip address can now vote by e-mail address as well as any other internet user who would prefer to vote that way.

two) internet users can now nominate a candidate by e-mail. the nomination will count as one vote.

three) internet users who nominate the candidate have the option of having their reasons for the nomination posted.(please do not use profanity as all profanity will be edited to acceptable family standards levels).

four) internet users who vote or nominate candidates in the polls will not have their e-mail addresses sold to a third party.

five)The Planet Earth Peace Party will store the e-mail addresses collected from the poll only for the sole and only purpose of validating the poll and will not spam the nominators’ or voters’ e-mail addesses.

six) Nominators who wish to post their nomination may offer one link and/or an e-mail address.

seven) The material provided by the nominators must adhere to and respect the recognized copyright laws and etiquette of the internet…

eight) voters and nominators may contribute opinions regarding any of the candidates to be posted(subject to editing for profanity and copyright) and may offer one link and/or e-mail address.

nine)nominators or earthling internet users who wish to have their opinions and views “posted” in the Global 2008 U.S.A Presidential Election Poll may request a “proof” via e-mail before their post is published by the Planet Earth Peace Party.

ten)e-mail address voters, nominators, and opinion “posters” may do so by e-mailing global@PlanetEarthPeaceParty.com.

All “posting” inquiries shoud be directed to the Planet Earth Peace Party director of posting gerry@PlanetEarthPeaceParty.com.

And now with permission of Mr. U.R. Abel we are proud to present the first nomination to be posted in the Global 2008 U.S.A. Presidential Election Poll courtesy of Mr U.R. Abel(Mr. Abel has given our posting department permission to add links to expand on his words to better serve our readers and members)

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My name is not important however I question the the choice of some of your candidates and the omission of far more worthy candidates such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He came to my school when I was a little boy and taught us how clear cutting forests was bad for the planet and it was unnecessary because you could make just as much money not chopping the forests down and destroying them forever. He said keeping a forest alive was as simple as pruning a tree or houseplant, you just had to care about it and want it to flourish. He taught me that you could make just as much money pruning the forests and keeping them and wildlife alive and healthy for generations to come. He taught me to recycle, reuse, conserve,and not litter. He taught me that if I was eating the food I was buying the same day anyways I didn’t need to fill up landfill sites with unnecesary packaging and non bio-degradable garbage. I learned all this from a 2 hour visit from him to my school. He made a lasting positive impression on me as a child.

Unfortunately his teachings fell mostly on deaf ears to the people who could have made a difference in this world and now we are being plagued by global warming and all the people in power do is make better commercials about saving the environment. The earth is sick and it is getting sicker every day. Global warming isn’t caused just by cars and smokestacks. When you cut down the trees entirely the land gets ruined and turns into a mirror for the sun and makes everything else wrong that we do much worse.

While the prospect of voting for Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bill Gates or Robert de Niro in your poll is quite intringuing, I would actually like to see Robert F. Kennedy Jr.elected President of the United States of America. He would make an actual difference.. He would make the world a better place to live in and try saving it for us and our future grandchildrens’ grand children just as his father and uncle made a difference in the world we live in by ending apartheid in the United States of America allowing blacks to go to college, legally use any public washroom and legally sit in the front of a bus.

I nominate and vote for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.to be President of the United States of America in the year 2008 with possibly Al Gore as his Vice President. He’s by far the best man for the job and probably the only person who could actually make the world a better place if he were elected President of the United States of America.

About me: I am a disabled freelance journalist trying to make a living from the internet. I would be interested in any journalistic internet employment opportunities or any internet business opportunities that do not require capital but have potential for profit.

Please elect Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the President of the United States of America in the year 2008. He is our our best chance and only hope.
I can be reached at r.u.abel.2@gmail.com

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Hear Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speak at the SOS | Live Earth | 7.7.07 Concert live from New York

Some of the words of Robert Kennedy Jr. :

The Creator of the Universe reveals himself to Mankind through nature:

I don’t believe that nature is God or that we ought to be worshiping it as God, but I do believe that it’s the way that God communicates to us most forcefully. God talks to human beings through many vectors. Through each other, through organized religions, through wise people, and through the great books of those religions. Through art and literature and music and poetry. But nowhere with such force and clarity and detail and texture and grace and joy as through creation.

We don’t know Michelangelo by reading his biography. We know him by looking at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. And we know our creator best by immersing ourselves in creation. And particularly wilderness, which is the undiluted work of the Creator. [applause] And you know if you look at every one of the great religious traditions throughout the history of mankind, the central epiphany always occurs in the wilderness. Buddha had to go to the wilderness to experience self realization and nirvana. Mohammad had to go to a cave in the wilderness. Moses had to go to the wilderness of Mt. Sinai for 40 days alone to get the Commandments. The Jews had to spend 40 years wandering the wilderness to purge themselves of 400 years of slavery in Egypt. Christ had to go into the wilderness for 40 days to discover his divinity for the first time.

His mentor was John the Baptist, a man who lived in the Jordan Valley dressed in the skins of wild beasts and who ate locust and the honey of wild bees All of Christ’s parables are taken from nature. I am the vine; you are the branches. The mustard seed, the little swallows, the scattering of seeds on the fallow ground, the lilies of the field. He called himself a fisherman, a farmer, a vineyard keeper, a shepherd. The reason he did that was that’s how he stayed in touch with the people. It’s the same with all the Talmudic prophets, the Koranic prophets, the Old Testament prophets, the New Testament prophets. Even the pagan prophets like Aesop, they did the same thing. They used parables and allegories and fables drawn from nature to teach us the wisdom of God.

That daily connection to nature gave them a special access to the wisdom of the Almighty. Christ was saying things that were revolutionary like all the prophets. He was contradicting everything that the common people had heard from the literate sophisticated people of their day. They would have dismissed him as a quack, but they were able to confirm the wisdom of his parables through their own observations of the fishes and the birds. And they were able to say, he’s not telling us something new; he’s simply illuminating something very, very old. Messages that were written into creation at the beginning of time by the Creator. We haven’t been able to discern or decipher them until the prophets came along and immersed themselves in wilderness and learned its language and then come back into the cities to tell us about the wisdom of God.

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George W. Bush’s record and actions regarding the environment:

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The verdict of history sometimes takes centuries. The verdict on George W. Bush as the nation’s environmental steward has already been written in stone. No president has mounted a more sustained and deliberate assault on the nation’s environment. No president has acted with more solicitude toward polluting industries. Assaulting the environment across a broad front, the Bush administration has promoted and implemented more than 400 measures that eviscerate 30 years of environmental policy. After years of denial, the president recently acknowledged the potentially catastrophic threat of global warming, but the words have no more meaning than the promise to rebuild New Orleans “better than ever.”

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Mountain Top removal in Appalachia to mine coal
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Above all, Kennedy says that blowing up mountains and burying streams is taking precious resources that rightly belong to the public and to future generations.

“They are stealing historic landscapes,” Kennedy said. “They are stealing an entire state.”

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This is the worst environmental president we’ve had in American history. If you look at NRDC’s website, you’ll see over 400 major environmental rollbacks that are listed there that have been implemented or proposed by this administration over the past four years as part of a deliberate, concerted effort to eviscerate 30 years of environmental law. It’s a stealth attack. The White House has used all kinds of ingenious machinations to try to conceal its radical agenda from the American people, including Orwellian rhetoric. When they want to destroy the forests, they call it the Healthy Forest Act. When they want to destroy the air, they call it the Clear Skies Bill.

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Under the Bush administration, the big polluters, as the author and activist Jim Hightower has pointed out, have eliminated the middleman. “The corporations don’t have to lobby the government any more. They are the government.”

The Top 12
Ann Klee (2001–6), general counsel, E.P.A.; counselor to Interior secretary Gale Norton
Prior to her government appointments, Klee was a partner at Preston Gates & Ellis, where she worked for clients from the transportation, mining, timber, and waste-management industries on cases involving the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, and Superfund.

J. Steven Griles (2001–4), deputy secretary, Department of the Interior
While employed at Interior, Griles, a former lobbyist for coal, oil, and gas interests, negotiated payments of over $1 million from National Environmental Strategies, a lobbying firm in which he had had a principal interest. Griles’s tenure was described by an inspector general as an “ethical quagmire.”

Lynn Scarlett (2001–present), assistant secretary, then deputy secretary, Department of the Interior
Scarlett was previously president of the Reason Foundation, a libertarian think tank. In a 1997 article she wrote, “Environmentalism is a coherent ideology that rivals Marxism in its challenge to the classical liberal view of government as protector of individual rights.”

Gale Norton (2001–6), secretary, Department of the Interior
Norton served two terms as Colorado attorney general before joining a Denver law firm, where she represented numerous developers and lobbied for NL Industries, a paint manufacturer which has been the target of a dozen lawsuits alleging lead poisoning and has been a defendant in lawsuits involving 75 toxic-waste sites.

Richard Stickler (2006–present), assistant secretary, Mine Safety and Health Administration
As reported by The Charleston Gazette, Stickler “worked for BethEnergy Mines of Pennsylvania for 30 years, worked briefly for Massey and then headed Pennsylvania’s Bureau of Deep Mine Safety from 1997 to 2003, when he retired. Stickler’s mines had accident rates twice the national average.”

William Wehrum (2005–present), acting assistant administrator, E.P.A.
Wehrum is a former Latham & Watkins lobbyist specializing in Clean Air Act issues. He was involved in crafting lenient rules for power-plant mercury pollution in which a dozen paragraphs were taken from a Latham & Watkins memo.

James Connaughton (2001–present), chairman, Council on Environmental Quality
Previously a partner at Sidley & Austin, Connaughton represented General Electric and arco in their Superfund toxic-waste fights with the E.P.A.

Jeffrey D. Jarrett (2006–7), assistant secretary, Department of Energy
Prior to his work in government, Jarrett spent 13 years in the coal-mining industry. In March, he returned to the private sector when the Coal Based Generation Stakeholders Group hired him as its executive director.

Francis S. Blake (2001–2), deputy secretary, Department of Energy
Blake played a key role in formulating Bush’s controversial Clear Skies legislation, meeting with dozens of energy-industry lobbyists in closed-door sessions. Blake has since been named chairman and C.E.O. of Home Depot.

William Gerry Myers III (2001–3), solicitor, Department of the Interior
Myers has compared federal land-use regulation to “the tyrannical actions of King George.” After leaving Interior, Myers rejoined Holland & Hart, where he represents several extractive-industries clients.

Rebecca W. Watson (2001–5), assistant secretary, Department of the Interior
Watson had a lengthy legal career helping mining- and timber-industry clients. She has ties to the anti-environmental groups Defenders of Property Rights and the Mountain States Legal Foundation.
Thomas Sansonetti (2001–5), assistant attorney general, Department of Justice
In previous stints at Interior, Sansonetti was involved in the Exxon Valdez settlement and the infamous spotted-owl litigation. He has worked as a lobbyist on behalf of mining and energy interests.

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Cuyahoga River on fire

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Over the past 22 years as an environmental advocate, I’ve been disciplined about being nonpartisan and bipartisan in my approach to these issues. I don’t think there are any such things as Republican children or Democratic children. I think the worst thing that could happen to the environment is that it become the province of a single political party.

It was mentioned that I have a book out that is very critical of this President, and that’s true, but it’s not a partisan book. I didn’t write that book because I’m a Democrat and he’s a Republican. If he were a Democrat, I would have written the same book. I’m not objecting to him because of his political party. I’ve worked for Republicans, if they’re good on the environment, and Democrats on the same level. But you can’t talk honestly about the environment in any context today without speaking critically of this President. [applause]

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If all the hidden costs that Americans currently pay for oil were reflected in the price at the pump, gasoline would cost more than $13 a gallon :

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The global climate crisis is the result not of an orderly free market, but of a distorted market run amok. A truly free market is the planet’s best friend. Free markets promote efficiency. “Efficiency,” after all, means the elimination of waste ? and pollution is waste. The pollution that is catastrophically heating the Earth is the result of market failure; the incapacity of a poorly designed marketplace to place a proper value on an essential asset ? the atmosphere. That market failure has brought us to the brink of a planetwide environmental collapse.

King Coal and the oil barons like to pretend that their industries dominate the energy sector because their products are cheaper and more efficient than alternative fuels, giving them a competitive advantage in the free market. This is a myth. The dominance of fossil fuels is the direct result of corporate welfare and crony capitalism that would make a Nigerian dictator balk. Direct federal subsidies to Big Oil ? everything from loan guarantees and research support to outright tax breaks and waived royalty fees ? amount to as much as $17 billion a year. That taxpayer money distorts the marketplace, artificially lowering the price of gasoline and making it difficult for other fuels to compete. Little wonder that the oil industry was able to report profits of more than $137 billion last year.
According to Terry Tamminen, former director of the California EPA, the true costs of our oil dependence run as high as $807 billion a year ? or $2,700 for every U.S. citizen. If all the hidden costs that Americans currently pay for oil were reflected in the price at the pump, gasoline would cost more than $13 a gallon. In short, taxpayers and consumers are essentially giving the oil industry a subsidy of $10 for every gallon of gas sold in America. If we simply eliminated those subsidies and created a truly free market, renewable sources of energy would beat oil ? as well as nuclear power and coal, which receive equally grotesque subsidies. It is only through these giant subsidies that gasoline has a prayer of competing with alternative sources such as biofuels and wind, which produce energy far more cleanly and efficiently, at far less cost.

Hidden subsidies to the industry are even higher than the direct benefits it receives from our government. Studies show that oil pollution causes at least $4.6 billion in damages each year to crops, forests, rivers, buildings and monuments ? destruction that Big Oil is not held liable for. The industry also fails to pick up the annual tab for the $54.7 billion that Americans pay to treat the host of debilitating illnesses caused by oil pollution. In addition, taxpayers spend as much as $100 billion each year to defend the industry’s infrastructure around the world, maintaining bases in the Middle East and providing military escorts for oil tankers bound for America. And that does not include the more than $100 billion that the Pentagon has spent annually in Iraq since the war began ? another expense that should appear on Big Oil’s tally sheet.

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One out of every four black children in America’s cities now has asthma:

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I’ll give you an example. As I said, a gigantic diminution in quality of life has taken place in this country as a direct result of this President’s environmental policy that Americans mainly don’t know about. I’m just going to focus on one industry, which is coal-burning power plants. I have three sons who have asthma. One out of every four black children in America’s cities now has asthma. We know that asthma attacks are triggered primarily by bad air — by ozone and particulates. We know that the principle source of those materials in our atmosphere is the 1,100 coal-burning power plants that are burning coal illegally. It’s been illegal for 17 years. President Clinton’s administration was prosecuting the worst 75 of those plants, but that’s an industry that donated $48 million to this President during the 2000 election cycle and has given $58 million since.

One of the first things that Bush did when he came into office was to order the Justice Department and EPA to drop all those lawsuits. The top three enforcers at EPA, Sylvia Lowrance, Bruce Buckheit, and Eric Schaeffer, all resigned their jobs in protest. These weren’t Democrats. These were people who had served through the Reagan and Bush administrations, the earlier Bush administration. A top Justice Department official said that this had never happened in American history before, where a Presidential candidate accepts money, contributions from criminals under indictment or targeted for indictment, and then orders those indictments and investigations dropped when he achieves office.

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Six giant multinational corporations now control all 14,000 radio stations in our country, almost all 6,000 TV stations, 80 percent of our newspapers, all of our billboards, and now most of the Internet information services :

Then the rest of us — the majority of Americans — are still getting our news from electronic media, and it’s the corporate-owned media, which has no ideology except for filling its pocketbooks. Many of them are run by big polluters. All of them are run by giant corporations that have all kinds of deals with the government and are not going to offend public officials. This all started in 1988 when Ronald Reagan abolished the Fairness Doctrine. The Fairness Doctrine said that the airwaves belong to the public. They were public-trust assets, just like our air and water, and broadcasters could be licensed to use them but only with the proviso that they use them to promote the public interest and to advance American democracy. They had to inform the public of issues of public import. They had to have the news hours. (None of those networks wanted to show the news, because it’s expensive, and they lose money on it.) They had to avoid corporate consolidation. They had to have local control and diversity of control. That had been the requirement of the law since 1928.

Today, as a result of the abolishment of that doctrine, six giant multinational corporations now control all 14,000 radio stations in our country, almost all 6,000 TV stations, 80 percent of our newspapers, all of our billboards, and now most of the Internet information services. So you have six guys who dictate what Americans have as information and what we see as news. The news departments have become corporate profit centers. They no longer have any obligation to benefit the public interest; their only obligation is to their shareholders, and they fulfill that obligation by increasing viewership.

How do you do that? Not by reporting the news that we need to hear to make rational decisions in our democracy but, rather, by entertaining us, by appealing to the prurient interests that all of us have in the reptilian core of our brain for sex and celebrity gossip. [applause] So they give us Laci Peterson and Michael Jackson and Kobe Bryant, and today we’re the best-entertained and the least-informed people on the face of the earth. This is a real threat to American democracy.

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A conversation with the Governator :

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Hear a recent conversation between California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Some final words of wisdom from Robert. F. Kennedy Jr. :

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We’re living in a science-fiction nightmare today in the United States of America, where my children, and the children of millions of other Americans who have asthmatic kids, live in a world where the air is too poisonous for them to breathe. Where my children, and the children of most Americans, can no longer safely go fishing with their father and mother and come home and eat the fish — because somebody gave money to a politician.

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Hole in the Ozone Layer Over Antarctica

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I’ll close with a proverb from the Lakota people that all of you have heard, that’s been adopted by the environmental movement. They said we didn’t inherit this planet from our ancestors; we borrowed it from our children. I would add to that: We must return to our children something that is roughly the equivalent of what we received, not just in the quality of the environment but in the integrity of the values that have been handed down through generations of Americans.

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About Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s reputation as a resolute defender of the environment stems from a litany of successful legal actions. Mr. Kennedy was named one of Time magazine’s “Heroes for the Planet” for his success helping Riverkeeper lead the fight to restore the Hudson River. The group’s achievement helped spawn more than 130 Waterkeeper organizations across the globe.
Mr. Kennedy serves as Chief Prosecuting Attorney for the Hudson Riverkeeper and President of Waterkeeper Alliance. He is also a Clinical Professor and Supervising Attorney at Pace University School of Law’s Environmental Litigation Clinic and is co-host of Ring of Fire on Air America Radio. Earlier in his career he served as Assistant District Attorney in New York City. He has worked on several political campaigns including the presidential campaigns of Edward M. Kennedy in 1980, Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004.

He has worked on environmental issues across the Americas and has assisted several indigenous tribes in Latin America and Canada in successfully negotiating treaties protecting traditional homelands. He is credited with leading the fight to protect New York City’s water supply. The New York City watershed agreement, which he negotiated on behalf of environmentalists and New York City watershed consumers, is regarded as an international model in stakeholder consensus negotiations and sustainable development. He helped lead the fight to turn back the anti-environmental legislation during the 104th Congress.

Among Mr. Kennedy’s published books are the New York Times’ bestseller Crimes Against Nature (2004), St. Francis of Assisi: A Life of Joy (2005), The Riverkeepers (1997), and Judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr: A Biography (1977). His articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, The Nation, Outside Magazine, The Village Voice, and many other publications. His award winning articles have been included in anthologies of America’s Best Crime Writing, Best Political Writing and Best Science Writing.

Mr. Kennedy is a graduate of Harvard University. He studied at the London School of Economics and received his law degree from the University of Virginia Law School. Following graduation he attended Pace University School of Law, where he was awarded a Masters Degree in Environmental Law.

He is a licensed master falconer, and as often as possible he pursues a life-long enthusiasm for white-water paddling. He has organized and led several expeditions in Canada and Latin America, including first descents on three little known rivers in Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela.

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