Why Democracy Needs People with Humility and Chutzpah

The Chronicle of Higher Education's Academe Today section has a wonderful symposium asking what will be the defining ideas of the next decade. We'd like to excerpt some of the essay of Parker J. Palmer, founder and senior partner of the Center for Courage and Renewal, "Humility, Chutzpah, and the Future of Democracy." It seems relevant to anyone running for political office in 2010 and those who will be voting in November:

Democracy in America is a series of narrow escapes, and we may be running out of luck... For all of its shortcomings, we keep telling ourselves, "the system works." Now all bets are off. We have fallen under the spell of money, faction, and fear.
­—Bill Moyers

Democracy is a perennial experiment, and this is not the first time its outcome has been in doubt. Blaming what's wrong on "them" may be great adolescent fun, but we need grown-ups who can focus on the root problem: We need to restore our capacity for civic community. If educators do not attend to reviving "We the people"—a defining American idea since 1787—the deterioration of American democracy will accelerate in the decade ahead.

As the historian Joseph J. Ellis has argued, the democratic institutions the founders created were "not about providing answers, but rather about providing a framework in which the salient questions could continue to be debated." For two and a half centuries, those structures—designed like a loom to hold the tensions of diversity—have allowed us to keep reweaving the fabric of our common life. But American political institutions cannot work as intended unless they are inhabited by citizens who possess what Alexis de Tocqueville called democratic "habits of the heart."

Today we are in particular need of two such habits: humility and chutzpah.

"Humility" means knowing I must listen to others—especially to those who seem most alien to me—in order to understand and feel at home in a diverse world. If our students are to develop this habit, we must restore our commitment to the liberal arts. We must teach them to seek out opposing viewpoints; to appreciate ambiguity; to explore contradictions without fear; to appreciate the truth of paradox; to expand their sense of who they mean when they use the word "we."

"Chutzpah" means knowing my own voice and having the courage to speak it—with respect for others and in confidence that my voice counts. If our students are to develop that habit, we must teach in ways that make them participants in, not spectators of the educational process. We must engage them in learning communities where facts, ideas, and values are sifted and winnowed. We must immerse them in off-campus experiences where civic action is tied to reflection.

Too many Americans allow the tensions of diversity to tear them and their communities apart. They retreat from the public realm to the foxholes of private life, from which they lob rhetorical grenades at "the enemy," producing more psychodrama than social change. Democracy, meanwhile, continues to wither in the face of "money, faction, and fear."

Democracy depends on citizens who can work within the democracy's tensions by speaking confidently and listening openly, finding new ways to think, act, and connect with one other. We who educate the young (and the not-so-young) must spend the next decade proving that we value the gift of democracy and are doing what we can to pay it forward.

If You Are Anti-Hispanic/Latino, Anti-Immigrant, Racist, Islamophobic, Homophobic, Anti-Semitic or Misogynistic -- Don't Vote for Richard Grayson

You can vote Republican instead. I don't want your vote.

Why Reviving Revenue Sharing Would Be Good for America -- and Arizona

The number one issue of this campaign, and of the last couple of years of the Great Recession, is how to get our economy moving again. Right now, policy makers seem paralyzed by outdated notions, fear, and political dissent by those like Jeff Flake, who are wrong, wrong, wrong about everything.

Jeff Flake and the Republicans' solution to our economic crisis and terrible unemployment is their usual laissez-faire, trickle-down, supply-side, yada yada crap that started us on the path to extremes of wealth and poverty but mostly great gains for the very, very richest of Americans and bupkis or losses for the other ninety percent and more of us.

Their solution to everything is to cut government spending (which they certainly failed at spectacularly during their years of federal control in the Bush adminstration) and lower taxes: Grover Norquist's "Starve the Beast." Because Jeff Flake - although he's got his sinecure right in the middle of it - hates the federal government and thinks it can do nothing.

So when the Republicans take control of Congress, and if they gain the White House in two years, will drastically cut out needed spending just as they opposed the stimulus. Yesterday we reprinted a column by Laura Tyson explaining why the first stimulus did work but was too small to be effective in such a virulent Great Recession caused by a major financial catastrophe and why we need a second stimulus.

Today we post a column, from the Business section of yesterday's New York Times, by economist Robert J. Shiller on one form the stimulus can take, "The Case for Reviving Revenue Sharing." Revenue sharing is something that even conservative Republicans should like because it takes decision to the state and local level, but real fanatic extremists like Jeff Flake can never be satisfied in their irrational hatred of government at all levels. (We wonder if Jeff Flake's toilet training caused his psychological problems.) Herewith, Shiller's proposal:

PROTRACTED unemployment is eating away at millions of people. And the economy’s failure to create enough jobs for them is part of a vicious circle that could keep turning for years to come.

In my last column, I called for big, temporary government programs aimed directly at putting people back to work. But how might we best accomplish this? The clock is ticking, and we don’t have time to create new national organizations to employ people. Instead, the most efficient approach is to use existing organizations for specific ideas and projects.

State and local governments as well as nonprofit and other organizations need to be mainstays in this effort. We need to enlist their help — without telling them exactly what to do. As for a framework, think of the general revenue sharing program adopted by Congress in 1972.

In his 1971 State of the Union message, President Richard M. Nixon advocated general revenue sharing to offset the tendency for power to be concentrated in Washington. Give local governments the money and “put the power to spend it where the people are,” he said.

Support for the idea was not confined to Republicans. A leading Democrat, Senator Hubert H. Humphrey, supported it in 1972, saying that federal taxes were more progressive than state and local ones and that federal money could be spent more effectively by people with local knowledge than by “some agency head in Washington.”

General revenue sharing came under attack in the Reagan years, and Congress ended it in 1987, arguing that by breaking the link between taxation and local needs, it encouraged higher taxes.

We are in a different time now. State and local governments are in severe fiscal trouble, and their constitutions often prevent deficit spending. In these circumstances, the federal government, which does not face such constraints, needs to raise revenue for them.

Legislation providing the states with $26 billion, which President Obama signed into law this month, took an important step in this direction. It did not create true general revenue sharing, because it tied the funds to specific needs — mostly hiring teachers and paying for Medicaid. But it did free states to use other resources as they saw fit.
(Illustration by David G. Klein)

It is time to bring back true general revenue sharing — temporarily — to stimulate the economy. Hundreds of articles in political science and public policy journals have studied past efforts, and analyzed the concept of fiscal federalism, without establishing general revenue sharing as a fundamental pillar of Keynesian stabilization policies. This lapse is understandable: most of these articles were written before the current economic crisis, the most serious since the Great Depression.

The need for a Keynesian revenue-sharing program is clear. After Congress approved stimulus legislation in 2009, Lawrence H. Summers, head of the National Economic Council, said that “it’s harder to spend $300 billion within a year on quality projects than you might think.” And no wonder the task was tough: decision makers in Washington were removed from local needs.

Martin Shubik, a professor of mathematical institutional economics at Yale, has proposed creating a “Federal Employment Reserve Authority,” a permanent agency that would do extensive research and maintain a detailed list of ready-to-go public works projects should a recession come. That’s a great idea, but we do not have such an agency now, and, if we did, it might still suffer from a Washington bias.

Now, local governments are laying off a wide variety of employees, including teachers, police officers and social workers. So why don’t we embrace general revenue sharing? Unfortunately, when faced with a need for stimulus, members of Congress seem to prefer to start their own projects, for which they are likely to get more credit from voters. Local governments, meanwhile, which are more likely to know where spending is really needed, remain in deep trouble.

It’s time for the public to assert loftier expectations. We need to respect existing government bureaus and organizations for their ideas, and get down to the business of financing important jobs temporarily, and on a huge scale. This will avert more layoffs, and perhaps give cities and states time to recover to the point they can pay local employees from local revenue.

When the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt began its vast job creation program in 1933, it had to accept certain practical realities, which limited the immediate stimulus that could be provided. Foremost among them was that the government had to work largely within the framework of existing organizations — whether state and local governments, the military or nonprofit groups — which provided much of the economy’s infrastructure.

Economic stimulus is not a matter of turning on the money spigot, as some economists are wont to describe it. It is about getting the widespread cooperation of dispersed organizations to provide jobs, at least for as long as the economy is weak.

When the Roosevelt administration and Congress created the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1933, it was done within the framework of the Army. There seemed to be no other organization that could move hundreds of thousands of young men into wilderness encampments where they could work on conservation efforts. But the Roosevelt C.C.C. placed no more than a half-million people in jobs. We need to reach further than that.

Labor unions, which represent workers who naturally fear displacement by people in new jobs, might seem to be an obstacle. But unions do have an idealistic base, and working union members have sons and daughters and friends and relatives who are unemployed. The unions need to be consulted if new jobs are to be created in a relatively nonthreatening way. In a savvy move, President Roosevelt made a union leader the head of the C.C.C.

The concept of general revenue sharing can also be extended to the nation’s nonprofits, including charities and foundations. The government has long given support to such organizations, but usually in the form of narrow grants. But broader general revenue grants could be made in times like these.

Millions of people need jobs, and there are organizations that could help put them to work. It’s time to move forward.

Why We Need a Second Stimulus - and Why Radical Laissez-Faire Conservatives Like Jeff Flake Were Wrong About the First One

Today we'd like to reprint today's New York Times op-ed by Laura Tyson, the Berkeley economics prof and former chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers and the National Economic Council. We agree with her totally as to "Why We Need a Second Stimulus" (emphasis ours):

OUR national debate about fiscal policy has become skewed, with far too much focus on the deficit and far too little on unemployment. There is too much worry about the size of government, and too little appreciation for how stimulus spending has helped stabilize the economy and how more of the right kind of government spending could boost job creation and economic growth. By focusing on the wrong things, we are in serious danger of failing to do the right things to help the economy recover from its worst labor market crisis since the Great Depression.

The primary cause of the labor market crisis is a collapse in private demand — the same problem that bedeviled the economy in the 1930s. In the wake of the financial shocks at the end of 2008, spending by American households and businesses plummeted, and companies responded by curbing production and shedding workers. By late 2009, in response to unprecedented fiscal and monetary stimulus, household and business spending began to recover. But by the second quarter of this year, economic growth had slowed to 1.6 percent, according to a government estimate issued Friday. Clearly, the pace of recovery is far slower than what is needed to restore the millions of jobs that have been lost.

Households and businesses are on a saving spree to rebuild their balance sheets. Their spending relative to income has fallen more than at any time since the end of World War II. So there is now a substantial gap between the supply of goods and services the economy is capable of producing and the demand for them. This gap is starkly reflected by the 23 million Americans who are looking for full-time jobs and the millions more who have left the labor force because they could not find one.

The situation would be even worse without the $787 billion fiscal stimulus package passed in 2009. The conventional wisdom about the stimulus package is wrong: it has not failed. It is working as intended. Its spending increases and tax cuts have boosted demand and added about three million more jobs than the economy otherwise would have. Without it, the unemployment rate would be about 11.5 percent. Because about 36 percent of the money remains to be spent, more jobs will be created — about 500,000 by the end of the year.

But by next year, the stimulus will end, and the flip from fiscal support to fiscal contraction could shave one to two percentage points off the growth rate at a time when the unemployment rate is still well above 9 percent. Under these circumstances, the economic case for additional government spending and tax relief is compelling. Sadly, polls indicate that the political case is not.

Two forms of spending with the biggest and quickest bang for the buck are unemployment benefits and aid to state governments. The federal government should pledge generous financing increases for both programs through 2011.

Federal aid to the states is especially important because they finance education. Although the jobs crisis is primarily a crisis of demand, it also reflects a mismatch between the education of the work force and the education required for jobs in today’s economy. Consider how the unemployment rate varies by education level: it’s more than 14 percent for those without a high school degree, under 10 percent for those with one, only about 5 percent for those with a college degree and even lower for those with advanced degrees. The supply of college graduates is not keeping pace with demand. Therefore, more investment in education could reduce both the cyclical unemployment rate, as more Americans stay in school, and the structural unemployment rate, as they graduate into the job market.

An increase in government investment in roads, airports and other kinds of public infrastructure would be cost-effective, too, as measured by the number of jobs created per dollar of spending. And it would help reduce the road congestion, airport delays and freight bottlenecks that reduce productivity and make the United States a less attractive place to do business. The American Society of Engineers has identified more than $2.2 trillion in public infrastructure needs nationwide, and a 2008 study by the Congressional Budget Office found that, on strict cost-benefit grounds, it would make sense to increase annual spending on transportation projects alone by 74 percent.

Over the next five years, the federal government should work with state and local governments and the private sector to finance $1 trillion worth of additional investment in infrastructure. It should extend the Build America Bonds stimulus program, which in the past year has helped states finance $120 billion in infrastructure improvement.

The federal government should also create and capitalize a National Infrastructure Bank that would provide greater certainty about the level of infrastructure financing over several years, select projects based on rigorous cost-benefit analysis, invest in things like interstate high-speed rail that require coordination among states and attract private co-investors in projects like toll roads and airports that generate dedicated future revenue streams.

But can the government afford this additional spending? The answer is yes. Despite the large federal deficit, global savers, including savings-hungry American households, are snapping up United States government securities at very low interest rates. And they will continue to do so as long as there is ample slack in the economy and inflation remains subdued. Over the next few years, there is little risk that federal deficits will crowd out private investment or precipitate a crisis of confidence in the American government, a spike in American interest rates or a sudden drop in the dollar.

On the other hand, as long as private demand remains weak, the risk is uncomfortably high that trying to reduce the deficit — by cutting spending or increasing taxes — will tip the economy back into recession or condemn it to years of faltering growth and debilitating unemployment. In fact, either outcome would depress tax revenue and could mean larger deficits.

Faced with these risks, as long as the economy is operating far below potential, policy makers should do two seemingly contradictory things. First, they should provide additional fiscal support for job creation and growth. And, second, they should enact a credible multiyear plan now to stabilize the ratio of federal debt to gross domestic product gradually as the economy recovers.

By easing capital market concerns about the government’s future borrowing needs, such a plan would permit larger deficits and slower debt reduction while unemployment is still high. The long-run debt problem — the result of imprudent fiscal decisions before the recession, escalating health care costs and an aging population — must be addressed once the economy has recovered. But for now the priorities of fiscal policy should be jobs and investment.

That's not going to happen with laissez-faire out-of-touch corporate lackeys like Jeff Flake controlling Congress.

But most of you in the East Valley - even if you're out of work or your house is underwater or in danger of being foreclosed - are just too stupid to realize it, and that's why you vote Republican against your own interests. East Valley voters are largely the stupidest people on the planet Earth. (They're ugly, too.)

Rep. Jeff Flake: He'll Work His Ass Off for the Billionaires Who Pay His Bills

As Frank Rich wrote in his exposé of the billionaires who bankroll the Tea Party and radical Republicans like Arizona's sure-winner-as-a-five-term Congressman Jeff Flake:

Their program opposes a federal deficit, but has no objection to running up trillions in red ink in tax cuts to corporations and the superrich; apologizes to corporate malefactors like BP and derides money put in escrow for oil spill victims as a “slush fund”; opposes the extension of unemployment benefits; and calls for a freeze on federal regulations in an era when abuses in the oil, financial, mining, pharmaceutical and even egg industries (among others) have been outrageous.

The radical billionaires of Koch Industries gave safe-seat Jeff Flake $12,500 in campaign contributions in 2008 and more this year.

When he and his Republican allies control Congress, they can start taking away unemployment insurance, Medicare and Social Security and shoveling more money to their big-corporation benefactors like Koch Industries, which has recently received almost a hundred million dollars in federal funding.

Jeff Flake: a Congressman who will stand up for the rights of billionaires and do shit for 99% in the East Valley. If you're really stupid - and most of you in the East Valley are - you'll vote for him in November.

Tea Party Voters: You're Using the Wrong Utensil!

Instead of using a teaspoon, you should all go fork yourselves.

Congratulations to Democratic and Republican Primary Winners in Arizona's Sixth Congressional District

We would like to congratulate Rebecca Schneider on her victory in the Democratic primary on Tuesday. She ran a valiant, basically DIY campaign in 2008 without any discernable help - indeed, little notice - from either the Arizona Democratic Party (which at one point did not even list her on its website with the other congressional candidates) or from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. With little funding, she managed to get about 34.5% of the vote.

We would also like to congratulate Rep. Jeff Flake on his victory in the Republican primary on Tuesday. He beat his opponent by about two to one, but his opponent was clearly inferior to the incumbent in numerous ways. We certainly think Rep. Flake is a right-wing extremist, but at least he is intelligent whereas his opponent was clearly stupid and never made a compelling rationale for his candidacy even among the troglodytes who vote in East Valley Republican primaries.

Rep. Flake is assured of election to his fifth term in November. Arizona's Sixth Congressional District's PVI is +15R, making it all but impossible for any candidate but a Republican to win. Given that 2006 (when Flake had no Democratic opponent) and 2008 were elections in which Democrats made huge gains and 2010 is shaping up as a wave election in which the Republicans should recover their House majority and Arizona Democrats need to defend threatened incumbents in the First, Fifth and Eighth Congressional Districts, no one but Jeff Flake - who's never gotten less than 63% - can win in November.

The status of the Green Party primary is unclear at the moment. The unofficial election returns from the Secretary of State show that 40 write-in votes were cast, but we don't know who they were for or how the Secretary of State will interpret the statutes regarding write-in primary candidates. In 2008, Green Party write-in candidates who did not receive the same number of votes as petition signatures they would have needed to get their names on the primary ballot were not placed on the November general election ballot.

Although the statutes haven't changed, the Secretary of State's Election Division has apparently decided - in what seems an arbitrary and capricious manner - to interpret the write-in statutes differently in 2010. We'll see what happens.

As noted in an earlier post, we have been "vetted" but "not endorsed" by the Arizona Green Party, which says it will consider endorsing us if we go forward to the general election. We will not seek their endorsement. To say that we are not impressed with the leadership and candidates of the Arizona Green Party would be an understatement.

With the exception of the Sixth Congressional District race - where we're waiting to find out if we'll be on the ballot - we will be voting a straight Democratic ticket in November.

A state canvass to certify official election results for federal, statewide and legislative races is scheduled for September 7. Stay tuned.

Today Is Primary Day. Vote for the Least Worst Candidate of Your Choice.

How Conservative Republicans Played the Inept, Bumbling Arizona Green Party

The Arizona Green Party today issued this press release:
Arizona Green Party (AZGP) announces endorsed candidates for 2010 elections

The following Green Party candidates have been endorsed by AZGP. We encourage registered voters in Arizona to vote for, support, volunteer, and donate to their campaigns:

1.Jerry Joslyn: U.S. Senate; http://joslynforsenate.com
2.William Crum: U.S. Congress (CD 2); write-in candidate for General Election; http://www.newmenu.org/williamcrum
3.Leonard Clark: U.S. Congress (CD 3); write-in candidate; http://www.newmenu.org/leonardclark
4.Rebecca DeWitt: U.S. Congress (CD 4); http://www.dewitt4congress.com
5.Deborah O'Dowd: State Representative (LD 6); write-in candidate; http://www.newmenu.org/deborahodowd
6.Justin Dahl: State Representative (LD 12); http://www.newmenu.org/justindahl
7.Luisa Valdez: State Representative (LD 15); http://www.luisavaldez.com
8.Angel Torres: State Representative (LD 16); http://www.newmenu.org/angel_torres
9.Gregor Knauer: State Representative (LD 17); http://www.gregorknauer.com
10.Linda Macias: State Representative (LD 21); http://www.newmenu.org/lindamacias
11.Kent Solberg: State Representative (LD 27); http://www.kent4house.org

The following Green Party candidate has been vetted, but remains non-endorsed by AZGP. If he is successful in the Primary Election, we may reconsider endorsing him for the General Election.


1.Richard Grayson: U.S. Congress (CD 6); write-in candidate; http://grayson-green.blogspot.com

# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # #

There are several Green Party candidates that are actively opposed. We strongly advise all registered Arizona voters to not waste their votes on these individuals during the August 24th Primary Election or the November 2nd General Election (assuming they advance). The offices include: Governor, Secretary of State (write-in), Treasurer (write-in), Corporation Commission (2 write-in candidates), U.S. Congress (CD 5, write-in), State Senate (LD 10, 2 write-in candidates), State Representative (LD 17, write-in), State Senate (LD 17, write-in), State Representative (LD 20, write-in), State Representative (LD 22, write-in), and State Senate (LD 23, write-in).

If you don't understand why a political party would actively oppose so many of its own candidates, including its candidate for Governor, upon whose vote totals the party is dependent for maintaining continued ballot presence in Arizona, perhaps this memo to Green Party candidates from a week ago will explain what happened:

Date: Mon, 16 Aug 2010

Green Party candidates:

At yesterday's skype meeting I gave a report about the current status of the carpetbagger candidate situation. I just sent you the first of two parts of that report, and this is the second. The part below contains information from the perspective of the Arizona Green Party, and some of it is confidential, so please do not share it except talking among AzGP SC members or endorsed candidates.

But we particularly need input from candidates about where to go next, so please respond. Time is short before we have to either act, or not act, so think it through, but give your input in the next day or two.

claudia

As you know, a number of candidates who have signed-up to be write-ins in our August 24 AzGP primary are strangers to us. But there are three things about them that we DO know:

1. None of them has anything Google can uncover about them [no paper trail],
2. They were all Rs the day before, and
3. Derek Lee, who gathered signatures, through his professional company, for Larry Gist [the pirate who is on the ballot as our candidate for governor], is now the campaign manager for Gist, AND for at least some, and possibly all, of the others. It is unclear whether Derek organized all this at his own behest, in the hopes of raking in Clean Elections monies for advising their various campaigns, or by somebody who is paying him to do this mischief, or -- well, whatever else would explain it.

Regarding Gist, we had hoped to field a write-in against him, and defeat him in the primary, replacing him with someone who would use that megaphone to really run a Green campaign, and provide some coat tail for our other candidates, or at least not embarrass the party in the way that we are fearful Mr Gist will. It didn't happen. We approached a number of possibles, and they all had good personal reasons why it could not be.

But the problem with Mr Gist has been eclipsed by the staggering number of similar unknowns who are now pirating our ballot line, by filing on July 15, at the last minute, so that we would have no chance to oppose them. If Arizona law were even-handed [read that as "constitutional"], we could still remove them, by the simple expedient of contacting Geen Party registrants, and telling them NOT to write these guys in. The Democrats had the same idea, and even contacted us offering to pay for such a mailing, since these pirates will be spoiling races which their candidates might otherwise win.

However, ARS § 16-645 D would make such a letter, by itself, merely symbolic, because this statute allows, in our Party and only in our Party, for a person to become a Green the day before, submit write-in documents on the last possible day and minute, and then, unopposed, elect himself to the November 2 ballot. All by the expedient of having a single vote-- his own-- cast in the form of a write-in, on the August 24th ballot.

We have been silent about this statute, which is tucked away in a section of the statute book about 200 pages from the sections dealing with write-ins, candidates, signatures, etc. It is in the section that has bureaucratic formulas for the process that county election officials follow in canvassing the vote, and reporting the results to the SoS, who then puts them on the November ballot.

Some of you have asked why we didn't tell you all about this provision, to save you having to get signatures. The answer is three-fold. One is that we did not want the information publicized, because we did not want the very problem we now confront-- pirates.

Second is that it would have made it impossible for the candidates who are going to be Clean Elections qualified to do so in time. Third is that we don't think it is constitutional, and if we had used it, all acting at the last minute, all of our candidates could have been challenged in court, and bumped off the ballot, making all our ballot access signature gathering worthless.

So we've been looking for an attorney with federal court election experience, to see if we can make the challenge ourselves, and bump the pirates. NOTE: If we talk about this, the pirates will know that they have to get more votes than just their own, and will set about to do so-- a quick mailing to all the registered Greens in the state. Derek Lee is easily set up to pull that off. So DO NOT TALK ABOUT IT, except among ourselves.

Ten talks have been:
1. To the law firm that represented us Arizona Green Party v Bennett. They agreed about the law, but they only have 4 lawyers, and only one is an election lawyer, and they are already committed to a case elsewhere, that is going to take all his time for the next two months.
2. To a contact in the Arizona Libertarian Party. They pursued a successful lawsuit a few years back, to overturn the law about open primaries, as it regarded to them. They won. The bad news is that they had to pay the lawyers up front.
3. To contacts within the Arizona Democratic Party, including their lawyer, pointing out that they cannot achieve their stated desire -- to protect their candidates from a spoiler effect by persons who are not even serious candidates, unless we join them in a lawsuit, funded by them, to overturn this statute. Waiting for a response.

We are not adverse to spoiling races in order to run our candidates, as that is what makes democracy work, unless a run-off or instant/same ballot run-off is used to tally votes. But the Arizona Green party does not spoil races for the sport of it. So we offered, instead, to be plaintiffs in a federal suit to toss this law out.

So here are the choices:
1. If we get a lawyer, we go forward. We may or may not win [I'd call our odds 60-40]. The downside is that we might lose our own, endorsed write-ins, if they don't get enough Greens to write them in under the rule that applies to all other political parties. The upside is that we won't have to deal with these carpetbaggers again, and any pirates trying to board the Green ship in the future will know that we can stop them.

2. If we don't get a lawyer, we call a press conference as soon as these turkeys become official, and we denounce them, denounce those who sent them our way, denounce those who wrote the law, denounce derk lee, denounce the Ds for not caring enough about their own candidates to fight this. We'll feel better, and it will at least not be the press ferreting it out with their own spin on it. But the downside is that we will be in the position, in November, of asking the average voter to remember which Green Party candidates are the endorsed candidates, and which the pirates. We end up hurting our own, endorsed candidates. It's kind of like when a weed grows to closely to the crop that you can't pull the one without getting the other. So you wait til the harvest, when you can better deal with it.

3. We do as little as possible now on the negative side, and just work doubly hard for our endorsed candidates. And we challenge the law later, when we have the time.

Candidates, what are your comments?

claudia ellquist
AzGP

=======
ARS § 16-645 D "Except as provided in subsection C of this section
[about precinct committeemen --ce], a certificate of nomination shall not
be issued to a write in candidate of a party which has not qualified for
continued representation on the official ballot pursuant to ARS 16-804
[this would be us --ce] unless he receives a plurality of the votes of
the party for the office for which he is a candidate."

Rep. Jeff Flake: "Deficits Don't Matter. The Federal Government Needs to Send Three Million Dollars Each to the Richest 120,000 Americans."

Here is Paul Krugman's column in the New York Times today. One thing Jeff Flake is passionate about is making sure checks averaging $3,000,000 to each of the richest people in America. How about sending $250 a week to Arizonans who've been laid off and can't find another job? Nah. Jeff Flake says that's wrong:

We need to pinch pennies these days. Don’t you know we have a budget deficit? For months that has been the word from Republicans and conservative Democrats, who have rejected every suggestion that we do more to avoid deep cuts in public services and help the ailing economy.

But these same politicians are eager to cut checks averaging $3 million each to the richest 120,000 people in the country.

What — you haven’t heard about this proposal? Actually, you have: I’m talking about demands that we make all of the Bush tax cuts, not just those for the middle class, permanent.

Some background: Back in 2001, when the first set of Bush tax cuts was rammed through Congress, the legislation was written with a peculiar provision — namely, that the whole thing would expire, with tax rates reverting to 2000 levels, on the last day of 2010.

Why the cutoff date? In part, it was used to disguise the fiscal irresponsibility of the tax cuts: lopping off that last year reduced the headline cost of the cuts, because such costs are normally calculated over a 10-year period. It also allowed the Bush administration to pass the tax cuts using reconciliation — yes, the same procedure that Republicans denounced when it was used to enact health reform — while sidestepping rules designed to prevent the use of that procedure to increase long-run budget deficits.

Obviously, the idea was to go back at a later date and make those tax cuts permanent. But things didn’t go according to plan. And now the witching hour is upon us.

So what’s the choice now? The Obama administration wants to preserve those parts of the original tax cuts that mainly benefit the middle class — which is an expensive proposition in its own right — but to let those provisions benefiting only people with very high incomes expire on schedule. Republicans, with support from some conservative Democrats, want to keep the whole thing.

And there’s a real chance that Republicans will get what they want. That’s a demonstration, if anyone needed one, that our political culture has become not just dysfunctional but deeply corrupt.

What’s at stake here? According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, making all of the Bush tax cuts permanent, as opposed to following the Obama proposal, would cost the federal government $680 billion in revenue over the next 10 years. For the sake of comparison, it took months of hard negotiations to get Congressional approval for a mere $26 billion in desperately needed aid to state and local governments.

And where would this $680 billion go? Nearly all of it would go to the richest 1 percent of Americans, people with incomes of more than $500,000 a year. But that’s the least of it: the policy center’s estimates say that the majority of the tax cuts would go to the richest one-tenth of 1 percent. Take a group of 1,000 randomly selected Americans, and pick the one with the highest income; he’s going to get the majority of that group’s tax break. And the average tax break for those lucky few — the poorest members of the group have annual incomes of more than $2 million, and the average member makes more than $7 million a year — would be $3 million over the course of the next decade.

How can this kind of giveaway be justified at a time when politicians claim to care about budget deficits? Well, history is repeating itself. The original campaign for the Bush tax cuts relied on deception and dishonesty. In fact, my first suspicions that we were being misled into invading Iraq were based on the resemblance between the campaign for war and the campaign for tax cuts the previous year. And sure enough, that same trademark deception and dishonesty is being deployed on behalf of tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.

So, for example, we’re told that it’s all about helping small business; but only a tiny fraction of small-business owners would receive any tax break at all. And how many small-business owners do you know making several million a year?

Or we’re told that it’s about helping the economy recover. But it’s hard to think of a less cost-effective way to help the economy than giving money to people who already have plenty, and aren’t likely to spend a windfall.

No, this has nothing to do with sound economic policy. Instead, as I said, it’s about a dysfunctional and corrupt political culture, in which Congress won’t take action to revive the economy, pleads poverty when it comes to protecting the jobs of schoolteachers and firefighters, but declares cost no object when it comes to sparing the already wealthy even the slightest financial inconvenience.

So far, the Obama administration is standing firm against this outrage. Let’s hope that it prevails in its fight. Otherwise, it will be hard not to lose all faith in America’s future.

If you want to make sure the richest 120,000 Americans get their average checks for three million dollars and at the same time make sure laid-off Arizonans get bupkis in unemployment compensation, vote for Congressman Jeff Flake or his even more moronic opponent Jeff Smith in Tuesday's Republican primary.

Where Are the Stand-Up Candidates?

In his Washington Post column titled "Wanted: A Few Stand-Up Candidates," David Broder begins:

The Democrats seem determined to teach us the price of vacillation, while the Republicans are bent on instructing us on the rewards of obstruction. What a helluva choice awaits in the November election.

That is one reason you should consider voting for the Green Party's true candidates this fall.

More of Broder:

This is my sour August reflection on the two months of travel ahead of me on the campaign trail -- a search for candidates who may lift the gloom and restore some faith in the principled politics so lacking in Washington these days.

President Obama, who seemed to embody those hopes two years ago -- as did the man we knew historically as John McCain -- crystallized the disillusionment in back-to-back performances last weekend.

On Friday night, addressing a Muslim gathering in the White House, Obama was the eloquent espouser of high moral principle, arguing for the unquestionable right of a Muslim charity to build a community center and mosque in the neighborhood of the World Trade Center, site of the Sept. 11 massacre.

On Saturday, panicked by evidence of public disagreement with his stand, he backtracked more than halfway to assert that he was not recommending any such project.

What a stand-up guy. And what a stand-up party, whose Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, capsulized the same equivocation in a single formal statement, coming out simultaneously for and against the mosque.

Here is the question they are evading: If Ground Zero is "sacred ground," as some argue, because of the nearly 3,000 lives that were lost there to savagery, then should it not be shared with any religious building? Would a church or a synagogue be as equally objectionable as a mosque? If not, then the implicit message is to blame all Muslims for the actions of al-Qaeda, a leap into stereotyping that is almost racist. Obama had it right the first time, but he couldn't bring himself to stick to his guns, and Reid treated the issue as he does most things, as less important than his own survival.

So you turn to the Republicans and find -- what? A party that claims to deserve political rewards for almost unbroken and increasingly debilitating across-the-board opposition to common-sense measures in the national interest.

You can go back to the fiscal rescue effort in the winter of 2009, when the national economy teetered on the brink of collapse, and find that only three of more than 200 Republicans in the House and Senate voted for legislation to apply a tourniquet to the bleeding. What irresponsibility.

Look at health care. After many months of foot-dragging and near unanimous voting to preserve a ruinous status quo, Republican leaders are targeting for retroactive extinction the one feature of the new law that would empower outside experts to do what Congress will not -- control costs in Medicare. What hypocrisy.

I could cite more examples, such as when energy and climate change legislation came up for votes or financial regulation. But let me focus on the report in Tuesday's Post that the delay in Senate consideration of the new strategic arms treaty with Russia means, as the story said, that "for the first time in 15 years, U.S. officials have lost their ability to inspect Russian long-range nuclear bases."

The inspections were guaranteed by the old START agreement, which expired in December. The successor treaty was negotiated in April, but the Senate has not taken it up because several Republican senators have raised questions about its possible effect on plans to modernize the U.S. nuclear fleet.

Republican Richard Lugar, probably the Senate's leading authority on nuclear disarmament, told reporter Mary Beth Sheridan that the delay "is very serious and impacts our national security."

But Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona, the deputy Republican leader and one of the main voices challenging the urgency of action, told Sheridan he had assumed the inspections were continuing. What a price to pay for ignorance.

And what a choice the voters face.

You can vote for a candidate for Congress who'll put America's interests, and yours, first. If you're an independent or a registered Green Party member, please consider voting for Richard Grayson in Tuesday's primary.

Independents can ask for a Green Party ballot, and after voting for Jerry Joslyn for U.S. Senator, fill in the circle by U.S. Representative and write in "Richard Grayson." Write-in votes for Richard Grayson count; no other write-in votes count.

We only want votes from people who think we will represent them well, and we don't give a damn how many people vote for us. Do what you think is right.

Please use a pen or pencil. Thanks so much!

Yes, Muslims Have the Right to that Community Center on Park Place

It's pathetic that we feel we have to say something about the proposed Islamic community center on Park Place in lower Manhattan. We once worked around the corner, on Murray Street, teaching a night class for Borough of Manhattan Community College, which has its main building nearby on Chambers Street and which lost a building, Fiterman Hall, during the 9/11 attack.

To us, the mosque is definitely not at Ground Zero, the site of the twin towers and the soon-to-be One World Trade Center. It's on a side street a couple of blocks north, which in terms of cramped downtown Manhattan, is as far away as Ironwood Drive is from Power Road.

There are already two mosques nearby, one dating from 1970 and one from 1985. There are also a bunch of bars and strip joints, as well as a pizzeria which serves the tomatoey, cheeseless marinara slices we like.

The people in charge of the proposed center worked with lots of New Yorkers, including a rabbi at an Upper West Side synagogue we attended when we lived in that neighborhood in the 1980s, to make it something like the J.C.C.'s - the Jewish Community Centers you find all over America, like the ones we know in Chandler and Scottsdale.

Growing up in Brooklyn, we knew Muslims and saw their mosques since childhood. The Islamophobia sweeping America is no different than the anti-Hispanic hatred that Arizona has, to its shame, become known for.

We agree totally with Mayor Bloomberg: New York is the freest city in the world, built and sustained by immigrants professing every faith, and inshallah, it will remain so. Stay out of city planning business, scummy anti-American bigots and sleazy politicians. Muslims have the same right to worship as you do.

Rep. Jeff Flake: "My Constituents are Stupid" -- And He's Right!

Politico Mafioso reports:

Wednesday, August 11, 2010
CONGRESSMAN JEFF FLAKE - Heat of the campaign

I’m often asked by my colleagues in Congress how I can vote “no” on cleverly-worded spending bills that seem on their face to be the legislative equivalent of motherhood and apple pie. I could never explain a ‘no’ vote like that to my constituents,” they say.

“You don’t have my constituents,” I tell them. “They’re Arizonans. They believe in limited government, and they understand.”

In other words, you're assholes.

And he's right.

I've lived all over the country: in different parts of Florida, New York and California; Wyoming and Arkansas; New Hampshire and Virigina and suburban Chicago and New Orleans.

The stupidest people in the U.S. live in the East Valley. If you're part of the intelligent, cultured minority and are not a registered Democrat or Republican (that would automatically exclude you), I hope you'll vote in the Green primary and write for me. But frankly, I don't care that much. Because Jeff Flake knows his constituents, and he's certain to win.

The Sixth Congressional District of Arizona has been gerrymandered to include an overwhelming majority of morons.

The truth is, bad as Jeff Flake is, he's probably better than you morons deserve. He is sensible on immigration (a co-sponsor of the DREAM Act) and ending the funding for the useless war in Afghanistan; supportive of antidiscimination legislation against gay and lesbian workers and for ending the boycott with Cuba; and at least more reasonable than most Republicans on the need for a carbon tax to ameliorate global warming.

It's actually pretty amazing that such stupid voters constantly re-elect someone as intelligent as Jeff Flake. But he should easily win his Republican primary against a just-as-wingnut but much stupider opponent, Jeff Smith.

Why Arizona Republicans Want to Destroy the Constitution

In today's Washington Post, Harold Meyerson's column explains why crazy un-American Republicans - to his credit, so far Rep. Jeff Flake has resisted this - want to destroy their party's most valuable contribution to the U.S. Constitution, the document that the creepy Tea Partiers claim to revere despite their inability to read or follow it. And it's not because they're all neo-Nazi sympathizers like the moronic thug Russell Pearce:

The Republican war on the 14th Amendment's citizenship clause is indeed directed at a mortal threat -- but not to the American nation. It is the threat that Latino voting poses to the Republican Party.

By proposing to revoke the citizenship of the estimated 4 million U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants -- and, presumably, the children's children and so on down the line -- Republicans are calling for more than the creation of a permanent noncitizen caste. They are endeavoring to solve what is probably their most crippling long-term political dilemma: the racial diversification of the electorate. Not to put too fine a point on it, they are trying to preserve their political prospects as a white folks' party in an increasingly multicolored land.

Absent a constitutional change -- to a lesser degree, even with it -- those prospects look mighty bleak. The demographic base of the Republican Party, as Ruy Teixeira demonstrates in a paper released by the Center for American Progress this summer, is shrinking as a share of the nation and the electorate. As the nation grows more racially and religiously diverse, Teixeira shows, its percentage of white Christians will decline to just 35 percent of the population by 2040.

The group that's growing fastest, of course, is Latinos. "Their numbers will triple to 133 million by 2050 from 47 million today," Teixeira writes, "while the number of non-Hispanic whites will remain essentially flat." Moreover, Latinos increasingly trend Democratic -- in a Gallup poll this year, 53 percent self-identified as Democrats; just 21 percent called themselves Republican. [This is even more true in Arizona, where the state GOP has declared war on Latinos.]

To be sure, the wretched state of the economy could drive some otherwise Democratic-inclined Latino voters to the GOP this November. But Republicans are doing their damnedest to keep this from happening. Their embrace of Arizona's Suspicious-Looking-Latinos law and their enthusiasm for stripping Latino children of their citizenship will only hasten Latinos' flight.

Sentient Republican strategists such as Karl Rove have long understood that unless their party could win more Latino votes, it would eventually go the way of the Whigs. That's the main reason George W. Bush tried to persuade congressional Republicans to support immigration reform. But most lawmakers, reflecting the nativism of the Republican base, would have none of it.

By pushing for repeal of the 14th Amendment's citizenship clause, the GOP appears to have concluded: If you can't win them over -- indeed, if you're doing everything in your power to make their lives miserable -- revoke their citizenship.

The Center for the Future of Arizona's "The Arizona We Want" Survey of Candidates

A couple of weeks ago, the Center for the Future of Arizona asked candidates to answer questions from voters in a survey called The Arizona We Want.

I submitted my answers the next day. The Center for the Future of Arizona asked candidates to post their answers on their websites, along with a link to the survey and other candidates' responses. After two weeks, no candidates for U.S. Senator, Governor, Attorney General, Secretary of State, Corporation Commission State Mine Inspector, State Treasurer have responded, nor has a single candidate for State Senator.

One candidate for Superintendent of Public Instruction, Jason Williams, a Democrat, has responded, as have just four candidates for State Representative, all Democrats: Aaron Jahneke in District 10, Ken Clark in District 15, Pat Carr in District 2 and Steve Farley in District 28.

Two other candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives have also responded to The Arizona We Want survey: Republican candidate Ed Winkler in the Third Congressional District and the very capable Green Party candidate, Rebecca DeWitt, whom I support, in the Fourth Congressional District.


Here are our reprinted survey responses:

Composite Questions

Your Vision
What is your vision for the state? How will Arizona be different if you are elected to office?

Arizona needs to suck less.

It's dead last in education rankings among the state. The state's economy has been based on the unsustainable growth of the real estate industry, and of course that bubble has long burst, with the predictable disaster. Now in the rest of the country, when I am among civilized people, when you do say you're an Arizona resident, they invariably say something disparaging about the state - usually, but not always, regarding the state's intolerance - but sometimes for other reasons.

The truth is that Arizona, among the fifty states and District of Columbia, is not a good place to bring up children. It is not a good place to be a student at any level of P-16 education. It is not a good state to be a senior citizen because of the inadequate services for the elderly. It is not a good state to be if you are highly educated, because the jobs aren't there - nor are the important cultural and social amenities are largely absent as well.

And even those bigoted nativists who designed the odious SB 1070 would say Arizona is not a good state if you are Hispanic/Latino. Or different from their white-bread-with-mayo-and-Tea-Party regressive, repressive, antediluvian Weltanschauung - which, for all I know, may sound slightly better in the original Germany. It's far from a coincidence that the anagram for "Arizona" is "or a ****."

The state's transportation system is a disaster brought about the suburban sprawl that Arizona is almost synonymous with. The state's tax system is antiquated. The entire state has been judged in a dysfunctional manner by a moronic legislature pursuing an extremist, un-American agenda.

That's why I'm running for the U.S. Congress, not the rented ******** that is the Arizona Legislature. What idiot would want to associate with the uncultured, unintelligent baboons who run the worst state in the union?

At least as a Congressman I'll get to live in the Washington, D.C., metro region most of the time and it will get me out of Arizona. As bad as it is, Arizona still deserves adequate representation on Capitol Hill Rep. Jeff Flake *brags* about doing nothing in bringing jobs, capital improvement projects, individual government benefits and assistance to the voters of the Sixth Congressional District.

Since your group is about Arizona's future, here's my guess on that: The majority of Arizonans under 18 aren't white and soon that'll be true not just in seven states as it is now, but the entire U.S. But the same time, the country is also aging, as the massive baby boom generation (I'll be 60 next year) moves into retirement. But in contrast to the young, fully four-fifths of this rapidly expanding senior population is white. That proportion will decline only slowly over the coming decades, with whites still representing nearly two-thirds of seniors by 2040.

As a recent article at the National Journal by Ronald Brownstein ("The Gray and the Brown," from which I've taken some of this), notes: A contrast in needs, attitudes, and priorities is arising between a heavily (and soon majority) nonwhite population of young people and an overwhelmingly white cohort of older people.

Already, this plays out in Arizona over the tension between the older white and younger nonwhite populations in the dispute over the sucky SB 1070. It's not entirely along ethnic and age lines, as my own old white guy's positions attest, but look at the 2008 presidential election: young people (especially minorities) strongly preferred Democrat Barack Obama (again, to be fair, so did many "young-thinking" oldsters like myself and my 83yo dad in Apache Junction), and seniors (especially whites - but again, also a few "old-thinking" chronologically young people, mostly white Young Republicans with acne and bad haircuts) broke solidly for Republican John McCain.

Over time, the major focus in this struggle is likely to be the tension between an aging white population that appears increasingly resistant to taxes and dubious of public spending, and a minority population that overwhelmingly views government education, health, and social-welfare programs as the best ladder of opportunity for its children.

As Brownstein says, there's an irony here: "The twist is that graying white voters who are skeptical of public spending may have more in common with the young minorities clamoring for it than either side now recognizes. Today's minority students will represent an increasing share of tomorrow's workforce and thus pay more of the payroll taxes that will be required to fund Social Security and Medicare benefits for the mostly white Baby Boomers. Many analysts warn that if the U.S. doesn't improve educational performance among African-American and Hispanic children, who now lag badly behind whites in both high school and college graduation rates, the nation will have difficulty producing enough high-paying jobs to generate the tax revenue to maintain a robust retirement safety net."

The future of America is in this question: Will the Baby Boomers recognize that they have a responsibility and a personal stake in ensuring that this next generation of largely Latino and African-American kids are prepared to succeed?

I think many more progressive states will answer that question with a resounding Yes. As for Arizona, things don't look so hot. We may need for the Joe Arpaios and Russell Pearces and the doddering Tea Party crowd and backward-looking Republicans to die off first. But it won't happen soon enough, in my opinion, to save Arizona from disaster.

I tell young people in Arizona to vote with their feet and get the hell out of here.

Other states have great advantages - like a functioning state government and not being the worst state for education, por ejemplo.



Your Issues
What issues are most important to you? What positions on those issues will cause voters to support you?

Jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs ad infinitum.

Unless we can get Americans back to work in good jobs at good wages, we're ******. Obama's stimulus package has saved millions of jobs, but it was too small to be truly effective to get a vibrant recovery going. We need for the federal government to do what it did in the New Deal: be an employer of last resort. We need to adequately support those who are currently out of work. We need to put in place policies that will encourage small business hiring and corporate hiring. We need a better educational system, a better transportation system, single-payer health care (Medicare for all), a fairer tax structure, policies that will reverse the decades-long severe income and wealthy inequality that, as many of our other policies, makes the U.S. the odd (and struggling) duck among the developed nations.

Jeff Flake's laissez-faire free-market fanaticism caused the fiscal implosion that made the effective bank bailout necessary, but he and the other crazed right-wingers apparently have not learned their lesson. The recently enacted financial regulation, like the stimulus and health care reform passed in this Congress, are a good start but inadequate to bring vigorous safety and prosperity to the system.

I would immediately withdraw our troops from the useless, unwinnable wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and I will not vote to add another penny to the $1.15 trillion these foreign misadventures. As a Jew who has taught at Jess Schwartz Jewish Community High School in Phoenix, I strongly support an independent Palestinian state and an end to the repressive occupation and a return to a secure Israel within the pre-1967 war borders. I support engagement with democratic elements in the Green movement in Iran, a fair trade policy without protectionism, cooperation with the UN, our allies in Europe, aid for developing nations, assistance to forestall and fight the genocide we've sadly witnessed in the past decade, and renewed talks with our hemispheric and contintental neighbors.

I favor a carbon tax. I favor a one dollar a gallon "Patriot Tax" on gasoline to help "green" industries and jobs develop. I oppose offshore drilling. We must curb greenhouse gases and end our dependence on fossil fuels which has made our whole society captive to the dictatorships of many oil states and their tinhorn dictators.

I favor comprehensive immigration reform with a clear path to citizenship for the hard-working undocumented people among us. I favor equality for all in terms of gender, race, religion, age, national origin, sexual orientation, disability status or any other differences, which ultimately are all trivial because we are all Americans and the Constitution guarantees us equal protection under law.



Your Politics
Partisanship and divisiveness are becoming endemic at virtually all levels of government. As a candidate, what kind of assurance can you give that the interests of Arizona citizens are going to be put before party, special interests, or personal ideology?

I'm not a Republican or Democrat and I'm not an ideologue. I'm a progressive, but I support valid and well-thought-out conservative ideas. Look, I'm not stupid enough to think I'm going to win this election, or even come in second, but I suggest that you can't get this kind of assurance from any candidate who answered this survey.

Voting for someone is always, in some ways, a leap of faith. Jeff Flake, the incumbent, has a clear record of putting first his obstructive political party, the special interests who've given him millions in campaign funds, and his obsolete, discredited personal ideology that says that the best thing a government can do in any situtation is absolutely nothing.

And in eight years in Congress Jeff Flake has been excellent in doing nothing for the people of Arizona or the U.S. In contrast, I'd put regular people first, not last.



Your Approach
If elected, you will be expected to take action on a number of issues that are important to citizens. Many of your decisions about one issue will affect other issues. Your decisions on education will affect job creation, for example, and your decisions on healthcare will affect state finances. Please describe your approach to dealing with the multiple implications of these kinds of decisions.

Read, study, talk with people, get out there and see what's happening. Make my decisions based on reliable evidence, not narrow ideology. Wait until all the information and feedback is in before taking action.

Unfortunately, ideology is all Jeff Flake and the even more regressive (and much stupider) Republicans who control Arizona base ther decisions on.

A 1978 rebellion against spiraling property taxes in California morphed like a virulent virus into a national attack on public spending in general. Measures like Prop 13 and its progeny have created a fiscal crisis for states like Arizona, one which they "solved" by slashing funding for education and other public programs.

The Great Recession offers Arizona and the U.S. an opportunity since it underscores the foolhardiness of tax cuts favoring the wealthy and other polices that have fueled spiraling inequality over the last generation. Such regressive right-wing programs favored by Flake and other "free market" conservatives have produced a less just and stable country, contributing to actions like the dismantling of public higher education in the more backward states such as Arizona.

Just to use that as an example, federal financial programs have softened the blow of reduced state funding for public higher education - but only at the cost of ensuring tat the public subsidizes private colleges and universities attended primarily by wealthy families and the take-the-student-loan-money-and-run frauds of the for-profit criminal enterprises like the University of Phoenix which dominate Arizona's feeble private higher education "system." Call it "socialism for the rich" or kleptocracy or whatever, it's the Arizona right-wing way.



Issue-specific Key Questions to be Answered



Job Creation

1.What is your perspective on the value of incentives for economic development? How important are incentives, and should they be planned at the state level or at the local level?
As I stated above, incentives for economic development and job creation are important at the federal level - which would be my concern as a member of Congress - as well as the state and local level.



2.What kind of collaboration do you desire between education and industry? How would you foster that collaboration to generate more jobs and better qualified employees?
I've been a college professor, a law school faculty member and administrator, and a high school teacher since 1975. I could write a lot about this. There needs to be collaboration between education and industry, but it has to be carefully planned as to best practices.

But I'd commend to you two recent books, "Saving State U" by Nancy Folbre and "Unmaking the Public University," by Christopher Newfield. These books, particularly Newfield's, explaining the dismantling of public higher education systems like California's excellent one and Arizona's middling-but-something one.

The rise of the knowledge economy after World War II, and with it a mass college-educated middle class, presented a threat to conservative U.S. elites. Writers such as John Kenneth Galbraith heralded the rise of this new class of knowledge workers in the 1960s by celebrating their capacity to generate not simply economic growth but also far more capacious forms of human development.

Back in my day, the university was the key locus of these attempts to challenge widespread forms of social alienation. Activist academics argues that while late capitalism had generated notable economic development, it was simultaneously promoting underdeveloped people who channedled all their energies into the office cubicle to the service of monolithic corporaations.

This critique of one-dimensional humanity, voiced from within and to a certain extent against, the mass university of the postwar period, overlapped with the sweeping denunciations of the racist, imperalist, sexist, homophobic values embraced by the country's elite and embodied in much of the established currriculum. As an undergraduate at Brooklyn College, I was a student representative on the Faculty Council curriculum committee (student power had gotten us equal representation) in the early 1970s.

The reaction of elites to all this, according to Newfield, was to unleash a renewed wave of red-baiting, the likes of which we see today in primitive states like Arizona and media outlets like Fox News. For the culture warriors, the critique of a system managed for the benefits of the powerful few was not only wrong - it was dangerous, since it threatened to fatally compromise what they mistakenly believed was the "strength" or the nation: their own hold on power.

Newfield argues that this cultural attack by the right effectively diminished economic claims of the middle class by trashing its key sources of cultural legitimacy. Why should public funds be spent to support the work of professors if those professors are "dangerous" to the country and its fehkokteh values.

So, getting back to your question, now, in place of an expansive and inclusive approach to the intellectual development of well-rounded human beings, we have what the right wing has championed (and the implication behind your somewhat moronic question): the effective resegregation of public education and the dominance of narrowly economic benchmarks -- in other words, what critics like Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades have termed "academic capitalism."

In this increased pinched world view, probably shared by your organization for political reasons even though I suspect that in your heart and mind you know better, non-quantative disciplines such as those in the humanities are a drag on the university since they produce far less lucrative intellectual property.

But if you read Newfield's book, you see that he demolishes the common myth that scientific research brings in external funds and therefore supports the university, while fields like art history and anthropology are non-marketable boondoggles. The truth, Newfield shows, is exactly the reverse: scientific research may be important, but it rarely leads to immediately profitable applications. Instead, relatively inexpensive fields like the arts, humanities and social science that subsidize the natural sciences.

Instead of concentating, as your sniveling question does, on "industry," and viewing, as you and your conservative allies do (though you of course would be shocked, shocked to find yourself on the dias of the same banquet as the Russell Pearces of the state), education as a ****ing "investment" that will pay off in higher wages (which of course, it does, which is why - with a J.D., M.A. and M.F.A., I and my similarly well-educated friends, are suffering very little or not at all in this recession), education's function is not a "collaboration" between itself and "industry" = but to better equip people to be effective actors by providing them with the tools for critical thinking.

Countless people have emerged from college with a completely different and far richer sense of themselves, their interests and their abilities. It's this kind of transformation, of which being an informed civic actor is just one part, that Newfield and to some extent Folbre discusses in their books. Access to education is crucial because it enriches people's *lives*, not just their bank accounts or the coffers of anyone else.



3.I’d like to ask the candidates what they will do to create green jobs for Arizona? It’s been our experience that this draws young people. It’s a very exciting occupation for young people, and I think that would do a lot to turn around our per capita income.
As a Congressman, I'd be creating green jobs for all Americans. What the state legislature can do is up to them, and given its recent experience and worldview, it ain't gonna do ****.

So while you're 100% correct that green jobs draw young people, it's probably too late for Arizona unless the state suddenly changes directly drastically.

For now, I'd recommend young people in Arizona who are interested in green jobs move to New York, Massachusetts, Oregon, other states, or - if they're really adventurous - China.



4.In Arizona, 97 percent of the businesses here are run by small business owners. What are you going to do to help the small business owner create jobs?
For one thing, create Medicare for All so that they can avoid offering health insurance to employees and incurring expenses that are a drain on their businesses.



5.Do you really believe that we need to diversify our business base rather than just waiting for real estate construction and tourism to recover? What actions would you take to foster that?
Duh. Real estate is dead. Construction is dead. Tourism, thanks to the boycott of this misbegotten state (which I support), is dead.



Education

1.Do you believe that the success of public education is the most important role of government in the State of Arizona?
Yes. Arizona's being dead last in education and the very low percentage of residents who've got bachelor's degrees is why it is a failed state. If you are a parent interested in your child's education, move out of Arizona if you can.

Arizona now is lucky to produce graduates with the intelligence of "Jersey Shore"'s Snooki, who brags that she's read only two books in her entire life (one of them the crappy "Twilight," written, or course, by an Arizonan).

Arizona's Snookis aren't on MTV reality shows but in the halls of the state legislature.



2.There’s been a substantial reduction in funding for higher education in this state, and I’d like to know specifically from candidates what level of investment you will support in higher education and how you believe that will support our economy.
Hey, I live much of the year in a state other than Arizona because I work in higher education and Arizona funding is so poor, there is no way I can make a living in the Cactus State. Funding for higher education needs to be at least doubled. On the federal level, I can't help you that much. Ask the legislative and statewide candidates.



3.How would you ensure our students rise to national/international standards? How will they become “career-college ready” with the state’s current education fiscal budget?
The only way Arizona's students can rise to international standards is to move to another country or another state.



4.Every candidate says they support education. What specifically will you do to change education in Arizona?
Stop electing Republicans who hate education and believe it is not the government's job.



5.Knowing that getting a child ready for kindergarten begins at birth, how do you plan to support a P-20 educational system?
Yes. This is crucial. Don't hold your breath in Arizona, though. It's a vicious cycle because the leaders are so uneducated; many in the legislature barely have a K-12 education.

Ironically, the older whites who currently are so vocal in their anti-minority prejudices and who favor reducing funds for education (see question #4, above) will increasingly depend on the payroll taxes paid by younger minorities to fund Social Security and Medicare benefits, as well as state benefits in Arizona, which already has a majority-minority demographic among those under 18.

The number of whites in the workforce will decline over the coming decades, and all of the increase in the labor market will come among minorities. Today, only about three-fifths of Hispanic and four-fifths of young black people complete high school, compared with about 90 percent of whites; similarly a much larger share of adult whites (about 30 percent) than blacks (17 percent) or Hispanics (under 13 percent) have obtained college degrees.

So oldsters like myself have a tremendous stake in investing in the education of young Latinos and African-Americans so they will get good jobs and we can tax the daylights out of them to support the baby boomers' retirement. The racial gap in achievement has to be narrowed if there's any serious hope for American competitiveness in the global economy.

Indeed, if the U.S. does not significantly improve college completion rates for African-Americans and Hispanics, the overall share of American adults with college degrees will decline very sharply in the next 10 or 15 years. That's an ominous trend in an increasingly knowledge-based economy.

Arizona probably will not be part of that global economy, just some third-world backwater unless it make a 180-degree turn.



Natural Resources

1.Do you support having the whole state comply with the 1980 Groundwater Management Act, which requires that you cannot pump out any more groundwater than is naturally or artificially replenished? Right now there are vast areas of the state, mostly in the rural areas, that do not have to comply with that law.
Yes.



2.I would ask any candidate if they're willing to support continuation of the Growing Smarter program, which helps protect our natural resources. In particular, do you support bringing back the scorecard program, which was never fully implemented?
Yes.



3.What is your position on state trust land reform, and would you be in favor of giving the State Trust Land Department more latitude in the way they manage their lands for the benefit of Arizona schools?
Yes.

The Department is a single entity, an "it," not a "they." You must have learned grammar and usage in Arizona schools.



4.What is your commitment and plan to keep all of our state parks open? And should they be publicly funded?
Duh, in a civilized state or country this would not be asked. Yes, yes, ******* yes.



5.Will you look beyond the needs of Maricopa and Pima counties? To what extent will you consider the needs of smaller cities and rural areas with regard to water and environmental issues?
Yes, this is important.



Healthcare

1.If elected, will you work to expand Kids Care again to deal with the 40,000 children that are on the waiting list at the time?
Yes.



2.What will you do to close the gap for the working poor who do not qualify for AHCCCS but cannot afford private insurance?
Medicare for All.



3.We have a shortage of healthcare professionals in Arizona, and the University of Arizona has gone through extensive planning to expand the medical school in Phoenix. It requires a great deal of investment. Are you supportive of continuing this investment or increasing it?
Supportive.



4.Given the current extreme shortage of doctors in the State of Arizona, what would you do about tort reform to help more doctors want to practice here?
When Arizona sucks less, doctors will want to move here. Other states with the same tort system don't have this problem.



5.Do you support additional funding for Graduate Medical Education, which helps put medical residents in rural community hospitals?
Yes.



Immigration

1.The majority of Arizona citizens support SB1070, despite the fact that some communities have decided to take legal action. Do you specifically support or oppose SB1070?
I oppose this piece of ****.



2.Do you support the removal, in whatever way, of the 600,000 estimated illegal immigrants? Or do you support creating a process in which some of those would be able to stay in the state and in the country legally?
I support amnesty, if you call it that.



3.My question is about the children who come to this country at three years of age and have gone through elementary school and high school. Are you in favor of sending them back, even though they had no reason to be in this country except their parents brought them here?
What are we, ******* *****? No, don't send them back. The fact that you ask this question is truly nauseating.



4.Will you do everything possible when you get into office to make sure that the federal government does the job it has been constitutionally mandated to do, which is to protect our borders from illegal entry?
I'll be in Congress and pass comprehensive immigration reform.



5.What kind of influence can you bring to bear on our Congressional delegation to secure a comprehensive immigration policy for this country and especially for our state?
Duh, I'll be in Congress, so I can influence myself by giving myself a good talking-to every morning when I shave and look in the mirror, all right?



Leadership & Government

1.How do you feel about an open primary concept for legislative office, where anyone can vote in a primary election and the general election is a runoff between the first and second (place) candidates?
This system sucks in Louisana and hasn't worked out that well in Washington. In Louisiana it produced David Duke. Arizona has too many extremist neo-***** who in a multi-candidate field could make the runoff with a small percentage of the vote. So I oppose this system.



2.In almost every election, we have propositions on the ballot. How do you feel about proposing some kind of legislation that these voter-mandated programs be revisited periodically and referred back to voters on some kind of regular basis?
Generally, I don't favor legislation by voters. Of course the legislature is filled with assholes and is even more incompetent.



3.Do you support changing the position of Secretary of State to Lieutenant Governor?
Yes.



4.Do you support term limits?
No.



5.Do you support a redistricting process that results in more politically competitive districts?
yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my ******* all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.



6.Will you support a constitutional convention to modernize our state government?
No. I don't trust the people who would be delegates. They wouldn't "modernize" it; they'd do the opposite.



State Finances

1.If you want to decrease taxes in Arizona, you can do it with a simple majority. But if you want to increase taxes, you need a two-thirds vote. Are you willing to do anything about that so we can increase or decrease easier as needed?
This 2/3 law is moronic and should be repealed.



2.Every issue we’ve talked about really has some cost to it. What I want to know is what your top priorities are for state spending? Where should the dollars go first, and where should they go last?
I'm a federal candidate, but education first.



3.It’s my understanding that there’s a cap on the amount of money or revenue that can go into the rainy day fund. Do you favor removing the cap?
Yes.



4.We are experiencing a severe economic downturn, and I think part of that is because of the tax structure we have in Arizona. What do you feel the appropriate mix of taxation should be in the state?
This is a state issue. The taxes in Arizona are too low, though.



5.Oftentimes our cities are burdened with unfunded mandates. I want to know the candidates' opinions about unfunded mandates and if they would be willing to lessen them or eliminate them altogether.

Sometimes the federal government needs to tell the stupider states like Arizona what to do, like to make sure their citizens are treated like human beings. Burdensome unfunded mandates should be eliminated.

Here is the June 8, 1010 press release from the Center for the Future of Arizona:

ARIZONANS, CFA WORKING TO ADVANCE CITIZENS’ AGENDA
FIVE JUNE TOWN MEETINGS TO HELP DECIDE QUESTIONS FOR CANDIDATES
DURING 2010 ELECTIONS

PHOENIX – This month Arizonans have some new opportunities to shape the conversation with candidates as part of the 2010 elections. Residents from five communities will participate in The Arizona We Want citizens' agenda through a series of invitation-only town meetings in Peoria (June 8), Flagstaff (June 14), Mesa (June 17), Tucson (June 21) and Sierra Vista (June 22).

Additionally, all Arizonans are encouraged to submit their questions for candidates online at www.TheArizonaWeWant.org.
The town meetings will help frame specific questions for candidates in seven areas: job creation; education; healthcare; natural environment and water management; tax policy; immigration; and quality leadership and the modernization of Arizona's state government. The forums are being co-hosted by the Center for the Future of Arizona, the cities and local community organizations.

CFA will carry forward the citizens' questions in a consolidated report to be made available to all candidates, the media and others interested in the 2010 election. The questions will be compiled and published twice – prior to the start of early voting in the primaries, which begins July 29, and prior to the start of early voting in the general election, which begins October 7.

According to Lattie Coor, chairman and CEO of the Center for the Future of Arizona, the effort is designed to address the serious disconnect between citizens and elected officials. According to Coor, who is spearheading The Arizona We Want citizens' agenda, the Gallup Arizona Poll commissioned by CFA found that only 10 percent of Arizonans believe that their elected officials represent their interests. Recent online polling on The Arizona We Want Web site indicates that only three percent of those responding strongly agree that their elected officials represent their interests.

“Despite the perception that Arizonans have very different perspectives and interests, the Gallup Arizona Poll found there is remarkable consensus among our citizens on a broad range of issues and public policy positions,” Coor noted. “The challenge now is to make sure we elect public officials who will help move Arizona forward in a way that is consistent with what our citizens want.”

Every Citizen’s Voice Matters

“The Arizona We Want is a powerful new wave of civic engagement that has huge potential formaking our government truly representative of our citizenry," Coor said.

The center encourages all citizens to contribute to the “citizen voice” by submitting their questions online and taking the Gallup Arizona Poll at www.TheArizonaWeWant.org.

Thousands of individuals have participated online since the formal poll was completed last year, including members of more than 50 Arizona organizations.
"Increasing the number of citizens who are taking the Gallup Arizona Poll online will strengthen our shared commitment to greater civic engagement," Coor said. "It will also encourage candidates for public office to take our collective concerns seriously."

ABOUT THE CENTER FOR THE FUTURE OF ARIZONA
The Center for the Future of Arizona is an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization based in Phoenix. It is helping to shape and define Arizona’s future through an action-oriented agenda focused on issues and topics critical to the state. More than a think tank, the center is an independent “do tank” that combines public-policy research with collaborative partnerships and initiatives that will create opportunities and quality of life for all Arizonans.

It's typical of Arizona candidates that only a handful cared enough to respond to this survey after all that effort.