state-level third-party politics supporting green campaigns in california and nationally in 2000 when ralph nader ran and it took quite a bit of effort to get these people to set aside their single issue focus and figure out how to come together and are brought local political tent where people's differences about the nature of socialism in the nature of capitalism and other big picture questions were set aside in the interest of pursuing a concrete agenda for local change, local improvement that proved to be because of the persistence and patience of the group achievable over the last 15 years. this was not a diversity town as we have examples from the 16s manys of people trying to take over city government in madison, santa monica, santa cruz, berkeley, bernie's wonderful progressive movement take over in the 1980s, those are different kinds of cities. richmond is not a university town is for many years it was until recently much contested, dominated by an unholy alliance of the oil company, originally standard oil, now chevron, local developers, the chamber of commerce, building trades organiz