DoDo, the Greens are not a left wing party. Not by a long shot. I admit that I go to green party member GPs and dentists. But that has more to do with 'life style' and not politics. And talking about the Greens in Hessen. The last left wing leader of the Greens was Jutta Dittfurth. That was years ago. As you may probably remember she left the party in protest because of Joschka Fischer's realo politics. Do you remember the Krebsmühle project, the big alternative workers co-operative in Oberursel? Well, they hated Dittfurth. And for a good reason. We were then engaged to create new, innovative, self determined and self controlled networks of workers co-operatives. Dittfurth (again: a Protestant predicant's daughter) had studied too much undigested marxist political economy for beginners to understand what we were up to. She still clang to the simplified mechanisms of Engel's postulates in his 'Dialects of Nature' and continued to dream of a final clash of classes. We had no part in it. She didn't see us and subsequently betrayed her party base in Hessen. Dittfurth didn't use the Greens political influence to foster our initiatives. OK, that was then. It's history now. What we witness today is a Greens party which fights for the votes of dentists and other better-off income earners. They compete with the FDP not with left wing parties.

"The USA appears destined by fate to plague America with misery in the name of liberty." Simon Bolivar, Caracas, 1819