Richard Grayson Arizona Green Party for Congress

Reflections on the Election of 2010 and the Arizona Green Party

2010-11-18T09:38:00.000-08:00

It's now several weeks after the November 2 election. Even the closest races have been or will be decided soon, and we thought we'd give -- for ourselves, if no one else (like our entire campaign) -- some reflections on it.

Today's Arizona election results update shows that we got 3,407 votes in the Sixth Congressional District. (Sincere thanks to all the folks who voted for us.) That's more than the other two on-the-ballot Green candidates for Congress, the ones who were "endorsed" by the Arizona Green Party, not pointedly sued in federal and state court to keep us off the ballot like we were. Of course, we got 1.36% of the vote, and Leonard Clark in the Third District got 1.58% (3,298 votes) and Rebecca DeWitt in the Fourth District got 2.57% (2,365 votes). The Arizona Green Party also endorsed William Crum in the Second Congressional District, but he ran as a write-in (apparently the AZGP's antipathy to write-in candidacies extends only to those candidates they don't like anyway) and there are just 290 write-in votes (just 0.11%, some no doubt for Mickey Mouse or Lady Gaga).

Our 1.36% share of the vote in the Sixth Congressional District is about what the "endorsed" U.S. Senate candidate, Jerry Joslyn got: 1.44% statewide. For someone who ran a "serious" campaign and who appeared on TV debates, that was a pathetic showing. In the state Treasurer's race, Thomas Meadows achieved 2.58% of the vote, beating the pants off Joslyn in a similar four-way race. Compared to Joslyn's 24,603 votes, Thomas Meadows managed to garner 46,115 votes, making him the Arizona Green Party's top vote-getter along with the Arizona Green Party's champ of 2010, 20-year-old Benjamin Pearcy, who got 47,121 votes running for one of two open seats on the Corporation Commission. Go Benjamin! Not bad for a 20-year-old kid who lives on Mill Avenue (near the Starbucks that was his campaign HQ) and who couldn't testify at the federal trial when the Arizona Green Party tried to kick all of us non-endorsed candidates off the ballot because he was in jail at the time.

Indeed, if Pearcy or Meadows -- who's 27 and was described as "a tarot card reader with less than a dollar to his name" in the New York Times article about Republican Steve May recruiting Mill Avenue street people to run write-in candidacies in the Arizona Green Party primary -- had been the Arizona Green Party's gubernatorial candidate and had gotten 3,000-4,000 more votes, the party would have achieved the magic number of 50,000 votes to make its place on the ballot secure for the next four years (as state Green Parties did in New York, Massachusetts and Texas), without having to get petitions again in 2012 or being subject to the law that made the party vulnerable to write-in candidates winning primaries with a literal handful of votes (we won with six votes).

The non-endorsed Arizona Green Party candidate for governor, Larry Gist -- who petitioned his way onto the ballot -- had the worst percentage showing of any party candidate, endorsed or not -- with a truly bad 0.93% of the vote: 16,128 votes (again, remember that Meadows got 30,000 votes more than he did although they both ran in four-way statewide races).

Another supposedly "sham" candidate, Theodore Gomez, got 42,645 votes running for the other seat on the Corporation Commission. If the good results (at least by Arizona Green Party 2010 election standards) for the candidates supposedly recruited by the Republican Party to siphon off votes for Democrats don't gall the bosses of the Arizona Green Party, you can blame it on their trademark stupidity.

Suing the ballot-qualified candidates in federal court and then in state court -- a miserable failure both times -- was the perhaps the height of the Arizona Green Party's stupidity in this election. It will be their major contribution to the 2010 election and only solidified the public image of the Arizona Green Party as a laughingstock in the minds of both conservative and liberal Arizonans.

And it was needless. The Arizona Green Party is very touchy about not "endorsing" Democratic candidates even in races where there is no Green candidate, but they didn't hesitate in letting the Arizona Democratic Party pay for their lawsuits. Nor did they care about employing aggressive and untruthful tactics (the federal complaint contained numerous lies and errors, and in court the Democratic Party's hired lawyers said the Arizona Green Party didn't want to be associated with us because of a swastika on our blog here, completely ignoring the obvious context in which we were protesting the Nazi-like SB 1070).

Indeed, as Leonard Clark, an endorsed candidate for Congress, said in disgust, the lawsuits had the effect of showing the Arizona Green Party disregarding several of its Ten Key Values (Grassroots Democracy, Social Equality, Decentralization), the party's credo that we explicitly swore (and still affirm) our allegiance to many times -- though that wasn't good enough for the poohbahs of the Arizona Green Party to consider us anything more than a "sham" candidate.

We never understood the Arizona Green Party and Democratic Party contending that the "sham" candidates would siphon off votes and allow the Republicans to win some races they otherwise wouldn't. The laughable logical conclusion of this argument seemed to be that they expected the "sham" (non-endorsed) candidates would actually do better than the "real" (endorsed) candidates in garnering votes! If any Green candidate would take votes that would otherwise go to Democrats, why did it matter if she was endorsed by the party or not?

The AZGP bosses don't seem to understand that a political party on the ballot isn't a club; it's a party. It uses the state to hold its primaries. Anyone can join at any time. The Secretary of State or local elections officials have no business asking any Arizonan why she is choosing to register as a member of a political party or if she is a "sincere" or "genuine" member of that party. Thank God in America we don't have to uphold loyalty oaths to political parties.

Secretary of State Ken Bennett was right when he said he had no choice but to uphold the candidacies of people who, like us -- or Benjamin Pearcy, Thomas Meadows or Theodore Gomez -- who upheld the letter of the law and got their paperwork in without anything being wrong with it. If you don't like it, Arizona Green Party bosses, then you're fools for working so hard to get on the ballot. You can't guarantee that the candidates you disfavor will not win your primaries; just ask the Republican party leaders in Delaware, Nevada and Alaska.

The Democratic Party also were hypocrites in the so-called "Siphongate" brouhaha. It's clear that Arizona Democrats were complicit in covertly supporting Libertarian candidacies among conservative voters, just as Democrats in other states got fake "Tea Party" candidates on the ballots to siphon off votes for Republicans.

Meanwhile, challenging the non-endorsed Arizona Green Party candidates was moot, given that there's not one race in the entire state where any Green Party candidate, endorsed or not, made a difference in who won an election. The margin of victory for every Republican who won was greater -- usually much greater -- than the percentage of the vote garnered by any Arizona Green Party candidate.

Indeed, in the race where a third-party mattered most, Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords' successful re-election in the Eighth Congressional District, the 3.93% of the vote for the Libertarian candidate was twice the size of Giffords' 1.46% margin of victory. There was no Green candidate, and if there had been no Libertarian candidate, the Republicans probably would have picked up their third Democratic U.S. House seat.

It appears that none of the endorsed Arizona Green Party candidates for the state legislature ran in any district that was not reliably Republican or Democratic. Linda Macias, who we (as a member of the Pinal County Greens) endorsed for State Representative in District 21, got a really impressive 17.15% of the vote, but she ran in a race with two Republicans and no Democrats or other candidates.

We were not impressed, as we said, in our meeting by phone conference with the Arizona Green Party. If we were so abhorrent to them, why did they allow us to vote on endorsing other candidates for Congress and the state legislature? Why did they invite us to join their Yahoo Group for Arizona Green Party candidates?

What surprised us was the low level of educational attainment among the Arizona Green Party leaders. Of course, in Arizona, there's a much lower percentage of college graduates than in most states, so that's kind of understandable. But the stupidity of some of their questions and remarks floored us. Some of them didn't seem to understand that members of Congress serve in Washington, D.C. and not Phoenix or were not subject to the state Clean Elections laws. They seemed ignorant about electoral history and few seemed actually to have taken part in campaigns despite being around for a while. Perhaps it was more naïveté or ignorance than stupidity, but these were the leaders of the Arizona Green Party.

Anyway, we wonder what their contribution to the election of 2010 was. Arizona Green Party bosses seem content with their little fiefdom -- one gets the impression that these are people who are content to be big machers in a little world rather than foot soldiers in the Democratic party.

Of course we would be hypocrites if we didn't understand that. Nobody runs for Congress or the state legislature or anything else without being somewhat of an egotist. It's just that egotists are helped if they're also a little savvy.

And so, since we still adhere to the principles of the Arizona Green Party's Ten Key Values -- like transparency, which is why we posted the memo by Claudia Ellquist that so pissed off the party bosses -- even if they don't, we've decided to remain a registered voter in the Arizona Green Party.

And just to piss them off and give them advance notice of 20 months, we are today announcing that we will be a candidate for the Arizona Green Party nomination for Congress in the 2012 primary. That is, if they can do the work to make sure we're on the ballot again. All we need is one write-in vote to win! And our name's easier to spell than "Murkowski."

* * *

(We're posting the Arizona Green Party logo on top of this post because it concerns the Arizona Green Party. Previously the party bosses complained to Google's Blogger service about us using the logo without permission and so we removed it from some posts. Apparently the Arizona Green Party doesn't believe in the "fair use" provision of U.S. copyright law and so we await their next legal move, as they apparently have nothing better to do.)

AZ-06 Green Party House Candidate Richard Grayson Concedes: "The People Won't Have Dick Grayson to Kick Around Anymore. Don't Cry for Me, Arizona."

2010-11-03T05:37:00.000-07:00

The people have spoken, the subhuman douchebags.

According to the latest election returns, I received more votes than I would have expected in Arizona's Sixth Congressional District: 2,461, or 1.3%. I got more votes than any other Green Party candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives even though the Green Party bosses refused to endorse me and tried to kick me off the ballot by suing me in federal court. (Obviously they lost, but they were losers long before that.)

Congratulations to Jeff Flake on winning his umpteenth term in Congress and to Rebecca Schneider for running such a valiant race on the Democratic ticket and to Libertarian candidate Darrell Tapp on his stylish hat.

Don't cry for me, Arizona. You won't have Dick Grayson to kick around anymore. I am re-registering as a voter in Brooklyn, New York although I will continue to spend winters in the boondocks of Apache Junction.

Thanks again to my voters.

An Election Day Morning Message to All from Arizona's Sixth Congressional District Green Party Candidate Richard Grayson

2010-11-02T05:01:00.000-07:00

Thanks to everyone, especially Janelle Monae!

Arizona Sixth Congressional District Green Party Candidate Richard Grayson Says: VOTE OR DIE!

2010-11-01T08:49:00.000-07:00

Why the Moronic Moralists Will Win This Election, Why They'll Make the Economy Worse, and Why This Candidate Doesn't Care If You Vote for Him or Not

2010-11-01T02:27:00.000-07:00

If you've already voted for me or will vote for me tomorrow, thank you. I appreciate it very much although certainly there's no way that career politician Jeff Flake can lose his seat in Congress. A vote for me -- or for the fine Democratic candidate, Rebecca Schneider -- is basically a protest vote by someone who's actually living in the real world.

However, most of you who live in Arizona's Sixth Congressional District -- the East Valley cities of Mesa, Chandler, Gilbert, Apache Junction and Queen Creek -- are ignorant morons. That's why I don't give a fuck if anyone votes for me or not.

That gives me the freedom politician candidates don't have. I can say what I feel and do what I think is right without having to care about whether the unwashed masses agree. Maybe I'll get 100 votes or so, votes for which I'm grateful, but in the end, it doesn't matter.

The overriding issue in this election is the terrible economy. Unfortunately, morons like most Sixth Congressional District voters will just make things worse. In his New York Times column today, the Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman explains why. It's essentially Macroeconomics 101 for Dummies, and so most East Valley residents can use it:

“How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills?” That’s the question CNBC’s Rick Santelli famously asked in 2009, in a rant widely credited with giving birth to the Tea Party movement.

It’s a sentiment that resonates not just in America but in much of the world. The tone differs from place to place — listening to a German official denounce deficits, my wife whispered, “We’ll all be handed whips as we leave, so we can flagellate ourselves.” But the message is the same: debt is evil, debtors must pay for their sins, and from now on we all must live within our means.

And that kind of moralizing is the reason we’re mired in a seemingly endless slump.

The years leading up to the 2008 crisis were indeed marked by unsustainable borrowing, going far beyond the subprime loans many people still believe, wrongly, were at the heart of the problem. Real estate speculation ran wild in Florida and Nevada, but also in Spain, Ireland and Latvia. And all of it was paid for with borrowed money.

This borrowing made the world as a whole neither richer nor poorer: one person’s debt is another person’s asset. But it made the world vulnerable. When lenders suddenly decided that they had lent too much, that debt levels were excessive, debtors were forced to slash spending. This pushed the world into the deepest recession since the 1930s. And recovery, such as it is, has been weak and uncertain — which is exactly what we should have expected, given the overhang of debt.

The key thing to bear in mind is that for the world as a whole, spending equals income. If one group of people — those with excessive debts — is forced to cut spending to pay down its debts, one of two things must happen: either someone else must spend more, or world income will fall.

Yet those parts of the private sector not burdened by high levels of debt see little reason to increase spending. Corporations are flush with cash — but why expand when so much of the capacity they already have is sitting idle? Consumers who didn’t overborrow can get loans at low rates — but that incentive to spend is more than outweighed by worries about a weak job market. Nobody in the private sector is willing to fill the hole created by the debt overhang.

So what should we be doing? First, governments should be spending while the private sector won’t, so that debtors can pay down their debts without perpetuating a global slump. Second, governments should be promoting widespread debt relief: reducing obligations to levels the debtors can handle is the fastest way to eliminate that debt overhang.

But the moralizers will have none of it. They denounce deficit spending, declaring that you can’t solve debt problems with more debt. They denounce debt relief, calling it a reward for the undeserving.

And if you point out that their arguments don’t add up, they fly into a rage. Try to explain that when debtors spend less, the economy will be depressed unless somebody else spends more, and they call you a socialist. Try to explain why mortgage relief is better for America than foreclosing on homes that must be sold at a huge loss, and they start ranting like Mr. Santelli. No question about it: the moralizers are filled with a passionate intensity.

And those who should know better lack all conviction.

John Boehner, the House minority leader, was widely mocked last year when he declared that “It’s time for government to tighten their belts” — in the face of depressed private spending, the government should spend more, not less. But since then President Obama has repeatedly used the same metaphor, promising to match private belt-tightening with public belt-tightening. Does he lack the courage to challenge popular misconceptions, or is this just intellectual laziness? Either way, if the president won’t defend the logic of his own policies, who will?

Meanwhile, the administration’s mortgage modification program — the program that inspired the Santelli rant — has, in the end, accomplished almost nothing. At least part of the reason is that officials were so worried that they might be accused of helping the undeserving that they ended up helping almost nobody.

So the moralizers are winning. More and more voters, both here and in Europe, are convinced that what we need is not more stimulus but more punishment. Governments must tighten their belts; debtors must pay what they owe.

The irony is that in their determination to punish the undeserving, voters are punishing themselves: by rejecting fiscal stimulus and debt relief, they’re perpetuating high unemployment. They are, in effect, cutting off their own jobs to spite their neighbors.

But they don’t know that. And because they don’t, the slump will go on.

¿Comprende?

Prominent Republican Endorses AZ-06 Green Party Congressional Candidate Richard Grayson

2010-10-31T03:43:00.000-07:00

“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”

Arizona Sixth Congressional District Green Party Candidate Richard Grayson Announces Support of Sanity and/or Fear

2010-10-30T14:47:00.000-07:00

Look at This Fucking Politician

2010-10-25T18:54:00.000-07:00

See him get elected to an umpteenth term in a week. He'll do it without breaking a sweat or spending much of the millions he's got in the bank in campaign contributions from oligarchs, plutocrats and fat cats.

Watch him do nothing. Again.

Just stand there and gape for another two years.

Repeat. Forever and ever, till he wants to leave.

Because Jeff Flake owns this congressional district and whatever one will replace it two years from now. Because East Valley voters are mostly morons. Elementary, my dear Watson.

No shit, Sherlock.

Rep. Jeff Flake Calls for Post-Election Return of U.S. to Robbery by Corporate Insiders Who Destroyed Their Own Companies and Caused Worldwide Crisis

2010-10-24T04:11:00.000-07:00

Speaking on Fox News Sunday, Arizona Rep. Jeff Flake said he looked forward to re-election to the House of Representatives, where he expects his fellow Republicans will win at least a 7,000-seat majority. He called for a return to letting corporate insiders rob America blind while bankrupting their own companies and plunging the world economy into an even more effective Great Depression-like crisis. Flake suggested that after the election, President Obama should resign immediately and that the late Austrian economist Fredrich Hayek be sworn in to replace him as the new U.S. President.

The Arizona Republican said he was delighted with the prospect of "limited government run by people of limited intelligence" like himself and vowed that in the next Congress he would "work very hard to further concentrate wealth in this country among the few billionaires with the prescience to provide me with campaign contributions."

Arizona Green Party Congressional Candidate Richard Grayson Says: Do the Arizona Hustle!

2010-10-23T04:21:00.000-07:00

AZ-06 Green Congressional Candidate Richard Grayson Endorsed by Arizona Is Too Damn Hot Party

2010-10-21T07:23:00.000-07:00

Our campaign has won the endorsement of the Arizona Is Too Damn Hot Party:

Apache Junction, Ariz., October 21 - Today the Arizona Is Too Damn Hot Party endorsed Richard Grayson, running for Congress in Arizona's Sixth Congressional District as a Green Party candidate, on the basis of his support for legislation to combat climate change.

"Richard Grayson is one candidate for Congress who understands that Arizona is too damn hot," the party's statement said. "Grayson will work in Congress to make Arizona a cooler place."

We're grateful for their support.

Arizona Green Party Congressional Candidate Richard Grayson: Populism, Yea Yea

2010-10-14T16:18:00.001-07:00

Crabby, Constipated Congressman Jeff Flake's Credo: Think Small and Carry a Big Ego

2010-10-13T10:43:00.001-07:00

Thomas L. Friedman's column in today's New York Times has an anecdote whose punch line reminds us of blow-dried, empty-headed morons like Congressman Jeff Flake, the inmates who'll soon be running the Congressional asylum:

Kishore Mahbubani, the dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, is over for tea and I am telling him about what I consider to be the most exciting, moon-shot-quality, high-aspiration initiative proposed by President Obama that no one has heard of. It’s a plan to set up eight innovation hubs to solve the eight biggest energy problems in the world. But I explain that the program has not been fully funded yet because Congress, concerned about every dime we spend these days, is reluctant to appropriate the full $25 million for each center, let alone for all eight at once, so only three are moving ahead. But Kishore interrupts me midsentence.

“You mean billion,” he asks? “No,” I say. “We’re talking about $25 million.”

“Billion,” he repeats. “No. Million,” I insist.

The Singaporean is aghast. He simply can’t believe that at a time when his little city-state has invested more than a billion dollars to make Singapore a biomedical science hub and attract the world’s best talent, America is debating about spending mere millions on game-changing energy research.

Welcome to Tea Party America. Think small and carry a big ego.

That's Jeff Flake's credo. Except his petty penny-pinching -- granted, his chronic constipation would make anyone a little grumpy -- isn't about millions. He begrudges a few thousand spent on projects all over the country and ridicules them -- with sorry puns that must get a lot of laughs wherever morons congregate -- in his "Egregious Earmark of the Week."

He'll never spend a dime to do shit to help people, real people. He'll spend plenty of his political capital to make sure the Capitol adds to the national debt and balloons the deficit by cutting the taxes of his billionaire buddies/campaign doors.

To some of us, that's egregious. If you're in the tiny minority of non-moron voters in Arizona's Sixth Congressional District, you probably agree.

Jeff Flake, Arizona Is in an Economic Depression and You Do Nothing But Extol Free Markets and Ask for Tax Cuts for Millionaires

2010-10-13T02:13:00.001-07:00

Tomorrow's New York Times features a very long front-page story by our friends Michael Powell and Motoko Rich, "Across the U.S., Long Recovery Looks Like Recession." For those of us in the East Valley and in Pinal County, where our house is, the Great Recession's sputtering recovery seems more like the Great Depression:

Florence, Ariz.

In 2005, Arizona ranked, as usual, second nationally in job growth behind Nevada, its economy predicated on growth. The snowbirds came and construction boomed and land stretched endless and cheap. Then it stopped.

This year, Arizona ranks 42nd in job growth. It has lost 287,000 jobs since the recession began, and the fall has been calamitous.

Renee Wheaton, 38, sits in an old golf cart on the corner of Tangerine and Barley Roads in her subdivision in the desert, an hour south of Phoenix. Her next-door neighbor, an engineer, just lost his job. The man across the street is unemployed.

Her family is not doing so well either. Her husband’s hours have been cut by 15 percent, leaving her family of five behind on water and credit card bills — more or less on everything except the house and car payment. She teaches art, but that’s not much in demand.

“I say to myself ‘This can’t be happening to us: We saved, we worked hard and we’re under tremendous stress,’ ” Ms. Wheaton says. “My husband is a very hard-working man but for the first time, he’s having real trouble.”

Arizona’s poverty rate has jumped to 19.6 percent, the second-highest in the nation after Mississippi. The Association of Arizona Food Banks says demand has nearly doubled in the last 18 months.

Elliott D. Pollack, one of Arizona’s foremost economic forecasters, said: “You had an implosion of every sector needed to survive. That’s not going to get better fast.”

To wander exurban Pinal County, which is where Florence is located, is to find that the unemployment rate tells just half the story. Everywhere, subdivisions sit in the desert, some half-built and some dreamy wisps, like the emerald green putting green sitting amid acres of scrub and cacti. Signs offer discounts, distress sales and rent with the first and second month free.

Discounts do not help if your income is cut in half. Construction workers speak of stringing together 20-hour weeks with odd jobs, and a 45-year-old woman who was a real estate agent talks of her job making minimum wage bathing elderly patients. Many live close to the poverty line, without the conveniences they once took for granted. Pinal’s unemployment rate, like that of Arizona, stands at 9.7 percent, but state officials say that the real rate rises closer to 20 percent when part-timers and those who have stopped looking for work are added in.

At an elementary school near Ms. Wheaton’s home, an expansion of the school’s water supply was under way until thieves sneaked in at night and tore the copper pipes out of the ground to sell for scrap.

Five miles southwest, in Coolidge, a desert town within view of the distant Superstition Mountains, demand has tripled at Tom Hunt’s food pantry. Some days he runs out.

Henry Alejandrez, 60, is a roofer who migrated from Texas looking for work. “It’s gotten real bad,” he says. “I’m a citizen, and you’re lucky if you get minimum wage.”

Mary Sepeda, his sister, nods. She used to drive two hours to clean newly constructed homes before they were sold. That job evaporated with the housing market. (Arizona issued 62,500 housing permits several years ago; it gave out 8,400 last year.)

“It’s getting crazy,” she says, holding up a white plastic bag of pantry food. “How does this end?”

You put that question to Mr. Pollack, the forecaster. “We won’t recover until we absorb 80,000 empty houses and office buildings and people can borrow again,” he says.

When will that be?

“I’m forecasting recovery by 2013 to 2015,” he says.

Hmm, Jeff Flake will be his seventh or eighth term in Congress by then. Till that time, he'll continue his crusade against any government spending to stimulate the economy, he'll continue voting against unemployment insurance and any "safety net" for the middle class-turned-poor, and he'll continue his fight to make sure that comfortable millionaires and billionaires pay no taxes.

And of course he'll take credit for the eventual economic recovery although he did everything he could -- deregulate and let the money men run wild on Wall Street -- to create the Great Recession.

And of course you, the asshole voters of the Sixth Congressional District, will just keep voting for him and the other right-wing Republicans.

Democrat Rebecca Schneider's October Suprise

2010-10-11T16:47:00.000-07:00

We're running a totally untraditional and unconventional campaign here at Richard Grayson Green Party AZ-06 HQ, so we're turning this post over to our fellow opponent of Jeff Flake, the Democratic candidate in Arizona's Sixth Congressional District, Rebecca Schneider. Here'a an email we got from her campaign today:

Please join Rebecca at a very important press conference tomorrow at 1pm in front of the State Capitol Building in Phoenix. (1700 W. Washington St. Phoenix, AZ 85007).

It is here that she will be making two very big announcements:

1) If she is elected as your representative in Congress, Rebecca will donate 50% of her net congressional salary to local organizations dedicated to getting the people of this district back to work. She will continue to personally fund these efforts throughout her first year in office.

Many political candidates make promises to improve our economy or "bring jobs to Arizona." Rebecca is willing to go a step further and put her money where her mouth is. She will work to improve our economy. She will bring jobs to the East Valley - and she will put her paycheck on the line to do it.

2) We have a great new series of videos called "Flakeville" that show what our district might be like if Jeff Flake gets another two years in office.

Here's the first episode, "The Lay-off," of Flakeville at Democratic candidate Rebecca Schneider's website,

and you can catch the subsequent nine episodes here.

We Need to Smash the Traitorous Tyranny of Ass-Backwards Ideologue Jeff Flake's Dead Ideas

2010-10-11T15:52:00.000-07:00

In The Tyranny of Dead Ideas, published last year, Matt Miller laid out some of the ways we're constrained by ideas that are supposedly "common wisdom" among ass-backwards fools like Congressman Jeff Flake, an ideologue as wedded to his outmoded, outdated and totally wrong philosophy as Fidel Castro is to his.

Chapter 4 of the book relates to nutjob Jeff Flake's bête noire: taxes. It's titled with the Flakean fallacy, "Taxes Hurt the Economy (And They're Always Too High)." It begins with an explanation of Wagner's Law:

In 1883, Adolf Wagner, a combative forty-eight-year-old German economist, was puzzling over the way modern societies evolved. It had been two years since Otto von Bismarck had persuaded the emperor William I to send an extraordinary message to parliament that by decade's end would lead to the creation of the first modern system of social security. "The healing of social wrongs must be sought...by positively advancing the well-being of the workers," William wrote, with uncharacteristic empathy. "Those who are disabled from work by age and invalidity have a well-grounded claim to care from the state." Bismarck, as canny and brutal a statesman as existed in the nineteenth century, was hardly a softheaded liberal, but he came under vicious attack from the right for promoting such left-wing ideas. "Call it socialism or anything you like," Bismarck sputtered at his critics, who didn't grasp his plan to blunt the more radical agenda of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. "It is all the same to me."

The whole controversy got Wagner thinking. As people grew more affluent, he reasoned, they'd want more of what only government could provide—a strong military, public order, good schools, and assorted welfare benefits, services that private citizens would have trouble arranging for on their own. As a result of these desires, Wagner predicted, the development of an industrial economy would be accompanied by an increased share of public expenditure in gross national product. This simple insight, known as Wagner's Law to economists today, explains much that we've observed in the century or so since. Industrial nations have much higher taxes, measured as a percentage of their economy, than do poorer nations, and similarly they have higher spending on health care, schools, pensions, police, and so forth. As it turns out, no one sent the memo about Wagner's Law to the modern Republican Party. Which is roughly how a Reagan foot soldier named Bruce Bartlett came to be excommunicated from the conservative movement in 2003.

In the fall of that year, Bartlett was stumped. A former economic aide in the Reagan White House and a Treasury official under George H. W. Bush, Bartlett was a libertarian, small-government think tank scholar who had watched with amusement as the debate raged over adding a prescription drug benefit to Medicare. He presumed that President George W. Bush's support for the bill was insincere; the sausage the Republican Congress was cooking up would be such an unprecedented budget-buster, costing trillions in the decades ahead, that Bush had to be playing his part in a classic Washington minuet. Everyone knew the drill: the Senate and House would pass different versions of the measure that couldn't possibly be reconciled; the drug bill would thus die an unavoidable but "regretted" death; all sides would claim credit for having supported fresh aid for America's seniors; they'd return to fight the good fight another day. This had to be what was going on, Bartlett reckoned, because the White House was sending signals that it would sign any bill that passed. No president could be that fiscally reckless, Bartlett knew.

But President Bush, who wanted to be reelected in 2004, saw things differently. Bush knew in his political gut that Adolf Wagner was right, and that the moment had come to give struggling seniors the public help they sought for costly medicines. "I suddenly realized, this wasn't a game at all," Bartlett recalls. "They wanted to get this thing passed and they didn't care what was in it. It was like a cold slap in the face." Like many conservatives, Bartlett was outraged when the president signed the pricey new benefit into law. Then, like any good policy wonk, he sat down to think through what it all meant.

The government already faced about $40 trillion in unfunded liabilities for programs such as Social Security and Medicare. Bush and the Republican Party had just put their imprimatur on trillions more. Bartlett's conclusion was merely mathematical. "We cannot avoid a massive tax increase sometime in the near future," he recalls realizing. For a Republican to think such a thought was bad enough. Then Bartlett committed his real crime. He began laying out this thinking in public, first in his syndicated column and then in magazine articles. Bartlett argued that it was now clear beyond disputing that the Republican Party, despite its rhetoric, would never slow spending growth: after all, it had just enacted the biggest new health care entitlement since the 1960s, even as it balked at cutting a few billion dollars from the next trillion in planned Medicaid spending for the poor. Since tax increases would therefore be necessary before long to avoid untenable and debilitating deficits, the country needed to think about how to raise new revenue in ways that would be least distorting for the economy. To Bartlett, that meant it was time for an American version of the national sales tax favored by many European governments: a value added tax, or VAT.

Conservative Washington went berserk. Bartlett was summoned to a meeting at the Heritage Foundation, where several right-wing analysts castigated him for his heresy. Why are you endorsing tax increases, they demanded to know. To Bartlett the accusation was surreal. I'm not endorsing tax increases, he replied; I'm forecasting them. You know the facts as well as I do. "They simply refused to accept those realities," Bartlett recalls. "They refused to confront the numbers as they exist." Before long, Bartlett became persona non grata on the right, a man without a party. His banishment stood as a warning to others not to stray from the party line on taxes, no matter how detached from reality the orthodoxy became.

"I'm not in favor of higher taxes," Bartlett told me several years later, still smarting. "I'd be all in favor of slashing government so that it was not necessary. But I'm not stupid. I can see that we're not going to do that. We're not going to cut tens of trillions of dollars out of future spending from large constituencies of voters who are dependent upon these programs. It just isn't going to happen. And anybody who thinks it is, is living in a dream world."

The emphasis at the end is ours, and it means you, fanatic ideologue Jeff Flake. You don't believe in Social Security or Medicare or Medicaid. You think they're unconstitutional, "socialism," and you want to get rid of them. But you won't be able to even if there's a Republican president and an overwhelming majority of right-wing Republicans in Congress. (You can read the rest of Chapter 4 in Matt Miller's Tyranny of Dead Ideas here.) The answer's simple:

East Valley conservatives support Social Security and Medicare, as well as other vital programs like unemployment benefits and food stamps. These programs benefit the middle class, the rich and the poor alike. They are the fruits of a civilized society, and these programs will be funded, one way or another, through higher taxes.

Of course even President Obama pretends we can keep the Bush tax cuts on the non-super-rich. And he, like the right-wingers, is wrong. It's arithmetic.

By the way, the taxes we currently pay are a smaller percentage of gross domestic product than any time since I was an infant, and I'll be 60 next year. When the top marginal income taxes were at their highest, in the 1950s and 1960s -- and I can remember the prosperity -- Americans' incomes and standards of living rose more quickly and more sustainedly than they ever have since, especially since the morons like Jeff Flake gained the power they're so loath to give up even after decades of failure.

So even though Jeff Flake will win this election -- as he has with ease every election he's ever faced -- he has to lose the war. In his case, his war against reasonable taxes might as well be the First Punic War. He's that out of touch with his times and the nation he so hates and so badly misunderstands.

Election Day Foretold: Backward-Looking Jeff Flake and His Right-Wing Buddies Will Attempt a Repeal of the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries

2010-10-11T02:49:00.000-07:00

There's no doubt Jeff Flake will overwhelmingly win re-election against his opponents. Everyone knows that. His right-wing Republican buddies will surely take control over the House, possibly by a large margin, and they'll very likely take control of the Senate, too. Voters are angry and not very smart about whom to blame for the terrible economy. And they're fed all the crappy misinformation by Fox News and other fear-mongering, paranoid sources funded by billionaires and special interests.

Timothy Egan, in his New York Times blog on American life and politics from a Western perspective, last week wrote a post, "Election Day Foretold," which pretty much states what's going to happen.

You won! What a nice run of the House, with a big enough Republican cushion to free the more pumped-up partisans to hold investigations of Obama’s birth certificate. Let them throw steak scraps at the base, while the rest of you restore Wall Street, the insurance industry and Karl Rove to their rightful places in power.

Speaker-elect Boehner, take a bow. When health care passed, you warned of Armageddon. Now, bring it on. So many promises to keep.

But first, an apology to BP, this time without the retraction. As Congressman Joe Barton tried to say, he’s really sorry that BP is being forced to pay for the human and environmental costs of the biggest oil spill in American history. Your man Barton, a good Texan who’s received more money from the oil, coal and natural gas industry than just about any serving member of the House, is in line to become the next chairman of the committee that oversees energy. Mind you, he’s term-limited in that leadership role — in theory. Just get Boehner to bend the rules, and then gavel in the groveling, baby.

Next up, repeal the health care law. Tell those 20-something deadbeats living at home that they can no longer stay on their parents’ coverage. And give the all-clear signal to insurance companies. Whew. That was close.

With health care repeal, insurers can go back to dropping people when they get sick. Even better, they won’t have to cover those costly whiners with pre-existing conditions, as the new law mandates.

And of course, 30 million Americans who stood to get health care from the market exchanges that were to be phased in can always use the hospital emergency room, as before.

Climate change. Such a myth. A giant conspiracy. The biggest scientific hoax of our time, as Senator James Inhofe has tried to explain. Now, seize the day. You can do something about it — not the hothouse we find ourselves trapped in, but the people who are studying global warming, those elitist scientists.

Sure, it was 113 degrees in Los Angeles the other day, forests in Russia were aflame all summer, and the first eight months of this year set a pace to tie 1998 as the warmest year on record. Time for an investigation: and Congressman James Sensenbrenner, the ranking Republican on the global warming committee, has one ginned up and ready to go. He wants to look at the “science,” wink, wink. So many questions; it’ll be just like when he guided the House through the impeachment of President Clinton.

Speaking of investigations, Rep. Darrell Issa, Republican of California, wants to make good on his promise to double the investigative staff of the government oversight committee and start trolling through the White House for minor scandals. Give that man a fistful of subpoenas and unleash him.

Issa’s committee would be a good place to park a rookie congressman who needs to shake his callow youth reputation — Ben Quayle, Republican of Arizona. The former vice president’s kid had some trouble with the fake family he used on his ads, and wrote for something called “Dirty Scottsdale.” Maybe it takes dirty to know dirty. After calling Obama “the worst president in history,” young Mr. Quayle said, “Somebody has to go to Washington and knock the hell out of the place.”

Along the way, don’t forget to make a run at the federal minimum wage, food and drug regulations, unemployment benefits, even Social Security. All of them are unconstitutional, as many of your candidates said on the trail.

Then, it’s on to the big enchilada, the reason to get back into power: more tax cuts. Some people think this election was a big sporting event, like Game Day on ESPN. They thought it was about rankings and scores, upsets and game-changers. Hah!

The federal deficit is approaching $1.5 trillion. But you promised to make sure that millionaire households get their extension of the Bush tax cuts, though it is likely to add another $700 billion to the deficit over the next decade. It’s in the Pledge to America. A promise is a promise.

Will bigger deficits breathe life into a still-gasping economy? Will giving another couple hundred bucks to households earning more than $250,000 allow the 20 million or so facing foreclosure to stay in their homes? Will investigating earth scientists or Obama’s political appointments make the lives of average Americans easier?

Next question. You trounced the Democrats because of the wretched economy. Voters’ financial lives are fragile, the prospects bleak. Hope turned to empty calories. Reforming Wall Street and health care did nothing to budge the unemployment numbers, a shattering reset for a bruised middle class.

If you make all those companies sitting on piles of cash start hiring people, you’ll be returned to power, perhaps rewarded in an even bigger way in two years. If not, you’ll be remembered for the sideshow: air-guitar legislative attempts to roll back the modern age.

Does Arizona Congressman Jeff Flake Have a Drug Problem?

2010-10-10T22:10:00.000-07:00

His recent behavior has been highly irregular.

Selfish, Small-Minded Skinflint Congressman Jeff Flake Hates America; This Petty, Penny-Pinching Panderer Wants to Destroy Our Nation's Future

2010-10-08T04:09:00.000-07:00

In his New York Times column today rightfully excoriating New Jersey Governor Chris Christie's monumentally moronic decision to cancel the second tunnel under the Hudson River, Paul Krugman discusses how America has declined because of right-wing nuts like Christie and selfish, small-minded skinflints like our own congressman, do-nothing Jeff Flake. Here's the money quote:

It was a destructive and incredibly foolish decision on multiple levels. But it shouldn’t have been all that surprising. We are no longer the nation that used to amaze the world with its visionary projects. We have become, instead, a nation whose politicians seem to compete over who can show the least vision, the least concern about the future and the greatest willingness to pander to short-term, narrow-minded selfishness. . .

So here’s how you should think about the decision to kill the tunnel: It’s a terrible thing in itself, but, beyond that, it’s a perfect symbol of how America has lost its way. By refusing to pay for essential investment, politicians are both perpetuating unemployment and sacrificing long-run growth. And why not? After all, this seems to be a winning electoral strategy. All vision of a better future seems to have been lost, replaced with a refusal to look beyond the narrowest, most shortsighted notion of self-interest.

That's Jeff Flake all right: petty, pandering, penny-pinching Jeff Flake, unable to see past this latest five-figure campaign donation from the billionaire Koch Brothers, his corporate masters. Jeff Flake's hatred for America knows no bounds except his own greed.

If he'd been in Congress before, we wouldn't have the Hoover Dam, Erie Canal, Interstate Highway System or much of a country. Re-elect Jeff Flake and assure that our nation will be left in the dust by the Europe, East Asia and the emerging economies of the nations more concerned about the future than today's conservative Republicans will ever be. Jeff Flake is all about the past.

Re-Electing Family-Hating Professional Politician Jeff Flake Means Bigger Budget Deficits and Fewer Jobs for American Workers

2010-10-07T03:38:00.000-07:00

At Newsweek's blog The Gaggle, Andrew Romano points out why re-electing family-hating professional politician Jeff Flake and his GOP cronies will just make things a lot worse in the country that crumbs like Flake seemed to determined to destroy:

Nothing is more important to Republican politicians these days than jobs and the deficit—at least according to Republican politicians. As House Minority Leader John Boehner put it in a "major economic address" on Tuesday, President Obama is "doing everything possible to prevent jobs from being created" while refusing to do anything at all "about bringing down the deficits that threaten our economy." Elect Republicans in November, Boehner assured his audience, and we will put an end to this insanity.

There's only one problem with Boehner's message: so far, the things that Republicans have said they want to do won't actually boost employment or reduce deficits. In fact, much the opposite. By combing through a variety of studies and projections from nonpartisan economic sources, we here at Gaggle headquarters have found that if Republicans were in charge from January 2009 onward—and if they were now given carte blanche to enact the proposals they want to—the projected 2010–2020 deficits would be larger than they are under Obama, and fewer people would probably be employed.

The math is pretty straightforward. Let's start with the deficit. According to the Congressional Budget Office, Obama's stimulus plan is projected to increase budget deficits over the next decade by $814 billion. That's a big number. But Republicans opposed the legislation refused to provide an alternative, and now insist that it's been a total failure. So let's be generous and subtract it from their side of the equation. The Obama deficit: $814 billion. The GOP deficit: $0.

Next up is health-care reform. Obama passed it; Republicans want to repeal it "lock, stock, and barrel." The reason, as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell explained in July, is that "we all know that it's going to increase the deficit." Unfortunately for the GOP, though, nonpartisan experts tend to disagree. Just this Tuesday, for example, the CBO released a letter saying that Obama's health-care-reform legislation would "reduce the projected budget deficit by $30 billion over the next 10 years,” while repealing the law would generate "an increase in deficits ... of $455 billion ... over that [same] period." Factor those figures into the equation and the Obama deficit falls to $784 billion. The GOP deficit, meanwhile, rises to $455 billion. Getting warmer.

The final piece of the puzzle is the Bush tax cuts. Obama wants to extend them for the 95 percent of taxpayers making less than $250,000 a year; Republicans want to extend them for everybody. How will these extensions affect the deficit? Glad you asked. According to data compiled by The Washington Post, "the Democratic proposal would add about $3 trillion to the deficit during the next decade, while the GOP plan would cost $3.7 trillion." That brings the total Obama deficit to $3.784 trillion over 10 years, and its GOP counterpart to—drumroll, please—$4.155 trillion.

That's right. Even if we assume that the Republicans would've spent $0 to stimulate the economy in the wake of the largest economic collapse since the Great Depression—an unlikely scenario, given the very real risks of inaction—their proposed policies would still produce a deficit $371 billion larger than President Obama's.

(Or $335 billion; Boehner also says he'd like to freeze nondefense discretionary spending at 2008 levels, which would save a grand total of $36 billion.)

On jobs, it's a similar story. So far, Republicans have only said they'd do—or that they would've done—two large-scale things the Democrats haven't: (1) scrap the stimulus, and (2) extend the Bush tax cuts for Americans earning more than $250,000 so as not to (in Boehner's words) "impose job-killing tax hikes on families and small businesses."

How would these measures affect employment? Regarding the stimulus, the answer is pretty clear. In a report out this week, the CBO estimates that between 1.4 million and 3.3 million fewer people would be employed right now if the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act had never made it through Congress. Split the difference, and the pro-stimulus Obama moves ahead of the anti-stimulus GOP by about 2.35 million jobs. (A more dramatic estimate by the economists Alan Blinder and Mark Zandi [a McCain 2008 adviser] puts the number at 2.7 million, but we'll stick with the CBO stats for now.)

The effect of tax cuts on job creation is a little trickier to tally. Extending all of them, according to the CBO, would lower unemployment by 0.3 to 0.8 percent over the next year or so; extending them solely for people making less than $250,000 would produce a somewhat smaller effect, for a difference of roughly 200,000 to 500,000 people. The problem, as economist William G. Gale of the Brookings Institution has noted, is that "of 11 potential stimulus policies the CBO recently examined, an extension of all of the Bush tax cuts ties for lowest bang for the buck." In fact, he continues, "letting the high-income tax cuts expire and using the money for aid to the states, extensions of unemployment insurance benefits, [or] tax credits favoring job creation ... would have about three times the impact ... as continuing the Bush tax cuts."

In addition, it's unlikely that extending the cuts for the richest Americans would have much of an effect on small-business hiring, which is a claim that Republicans make with some regularity. Why? Because of the taxpayers that report running small businesses on their taxes, only 2 percent fall into the top two income brackets.* The other 98 percent of small-business owners make less than $250,000 a year and wouldn't pay higher taxes under Obama's plan.

History isn't on the GOP's side, either. If keeping the top marginal tax rate at 35 percent—the rate under Bush, and the rate that Republicans are fighting to preserve—spurs so much hiring, why didn't America experience any job growth at all during Bush's time in office? And if a top marginal tax rate of 39.6 percent—the rate under Bill Clinton, and the rate that Democrats are fighting to restore—is such a job killer, why did payrolls grow by 20 percent during the 1990s?

The implication here isn't that higher tax rates equal more jobs. Far from it. But there's simply no evidence, either in the history books or the latest projections, to suggest that extending all of the Bush tax cuts would provide an employment boost large enough to offset the number of jobs that would've been lost if the GOP had succeeded in blocking the stimulus—let alone lasting enough to justify adding another $700 billion to the deficit.

The bottom line, then, is that recent GOP proposals would produce fewer jobs and far larger deficits than the plans Obama has already passed or currently wants to pass.

If You Believe That TARP and the 2008 Bailout Was a Complete Failure, You're a Typical East Valley Idiot and a Typical Ignorant Jeff Flake Voter

2010-10-06T02:36:00.000-07:00

Americans are dumb, Arizonans are even dumber, and the majority of voters in the East Valley's Sixth Congressional District are the dumbest of the dumb: the willfully ignorant Republicans who will vote like robot morons for the sleazy professional politician Jeff Flake, who's done nothing for eight years but serve the interests of the billionaire corporate CEOs and special interests whose lackey he is.

Take TARP, the Trouble Assets Relief Program, passed in the Bush administration in the wake of the financial collapse in the fall of 2008. You hate "bailouts" and are glad that do-nothing Jeff Flake voted no because you believe it was a failure and a tremendous waste of money that made the economy worse.

That's because you're a fucking idiot. National Public Radio listeners know better, having heard this yesterday on All Things Considered:

ROBERT SIEGEL, host: The Troubled Asset Relief Program - most commonly known as the TARP -officially expired two days ago. Congress passed the massive $700 billion bailout back in October 2008 at the height of the financial panic when the stock markets were tanking and credit markets were freezing and the threat of another Great Depression loomed large.

At the time, the TARP was passed with bipartisan support. Many economists agree that the program, in large part, has been a success. And yet, as described by Herb Allison, TARP has become such a dirty word in our nation's discourse, few terms elicit such anger from voters or from politicians.

Herb Allison oversaw TARP at the Treasury Department for the last 15 months, and he joins us now from our bureau in New York. Welcome to the program.

Mr. HERB ALLISON (Former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Financial Stability): Thank you very much, Robert. Great to be here.

SIEGEL: This program is being vilified in this political campaign season by both Democrats and Republicans, and yet, by most accounts, it's been a financial success. How do you reconcile those two things?

Mr. ALLISON: Well, first of all, no one liked to bail out the big banks, and it's been described as a moral hazard that the taxpayers' money was put to work to protect the interests of the few in the banking industry. But, as a matter of fact, Robert, there was really no alternative at the time given the depth of the crisis. It was a true national emergency, and there was really no alternative.

And I think that, you know, it's hard to prove a negative. It's hard to really demonstrate what the economy would have been like if TARP had not been created. It kind of reminds me, though, of the movie "It's a Wonderful Life" because, as you recall, in the movie, George Bailey is shown what his hometown would have looked like had he not lived, and things were pretty tough.

SIEGEL: Do you think America would have been reduced to a national Potterville or Pottersville if there have been no TARP?

Mr. ALLISON: It might well have. In fact, there is an attempt to illustrate what the country might have looked like without TARP, and that's the study done by Alan Blinder and Mark Zandi where they indicated without TARP and some associated programs, you might have seen unemployment at 16 percent or more, and the economy literally grinding to a halt.

SIEGEL: Let's talk about the actual numbers here. The original $700 billion, that amount was never actually spent. It was capped at $475 billion, is that right?

Mr. ALLISON: Yes. And, in fact, only about $387 billion was actually invested. And I'm very pleased that at this point we've already recovered more than half of the funds that were invested. We're now down to about $180 billion. And three-fourths of the money that was invested in banks has been returned, and the government - the taxpayer in other words - will earn a profit on the money that was invested in banks.

SIEGEL: Eighty-two billion dollars went to the auto industry, to Chrysler and GM. Money also went to their financial arms and to auto suppliers. How much of that money will be recouped ultimately?

Mr. ALLISON: Well, we've already received some of that money back to taxpayers. And, as you know, GM has announced it intends to do its initial public offering as a new company in November, and that will pave the way for the government to sell its common stock ownership in GM over the next several years. And we expect that we'll recover the large portion of that funds, if not perhaps all the funds, over a period of time.

SIEGEL: Although at the moment, the GM public offering, it hasn't yet taken place, but it looks like the value of the company is a little bit less than had been hoped for.

Mr. ALLISON: That could be. We'll see what the market is like when the actual offering takes place, but we're hopeful that the public will receive most of the money back and perhaps all of it.

SIEGEL: Again, the biggest share of the money went to the banks, but there was also $70 billion that went to the insurance giant AIG. Any hope of actually seeing that money back?

Mr. ALLISON: Well, as we're reporting today in a two-year retrospective on the TARP program, if you valued our stake in the company at the current market value of the firm, we ought to get back all of the money on behalf of taxpayers and perhaps earn a profit.

SIEGEL: I've seen it claimed that perhaps the real net cost to taxpayers from all this, it's far from that original $700 billion that was never spent, it's more like $50 billion?

Mr. ALLISON: Yes. And if you look at the Treasury's overall holdings, including TARP and some other holdings with AIG, the total cost to Treasury may be as low as $30 billion.

SIEGEL: What do you make of this? I mean, you, first of all, I should point out, you were a holdover from the Bush administration. You were a former financial chair for John McCain's first presidential run. You're not a partisan Democrat by any means. Do you think part of the problem was that the big banks seemed to recover all too quickly? That is, given the size of the effort, they were, within a matter of a few months, How is it that you could say for 30 billion or almost $50 billion spared the country the risk of a huge depression with 16 percent unemployment. And if you went out there and tried to campaign for a seat in Congress on that right now right there you could knock 10 points off your showing. Why is this so unpopular?

Mr. ALLISON: Well, again, I think people were outraged that their tax money was being put to use to so-called bail out financial institutions. But I think we have to look more deeply at what was the real moral hazard that caused this problem. It certainly wasn't TARP. TARP was part of the solution.

The real moral hazard was evident during the height of the boom when banks were acting with extreme recklessness. And when things eventually collapsed -because they were almost bound to - it was the public that paid the price in terms of the value of their stockholdings falling about 50 percent. They lost 50 percent of the equity in their homes. And unemployment rose from about 4 percent to close to 10 percent.

People were outraged. They felt betrayed by the system. They couldn't understand why the government would prop up the very system that had caused the problem. But, again, there was really no choice at that time.

Hateful Words Fired Like Bullets Destroy Our Families, and Arizona Republican Politicians Like Jeff Flake Stand By and Say Nothing

2010-10-05T17:24:00.000-07:00

Richard Cohen has a great column, "On the Right, Hateful Words are Fired Like Bullets," in today's Washington Post, discussing in part the 1970 Kent State massacre, something some of us remember as if it were yesterday and not over forty years ago:

I still ride a bike. I do 12 miles, several days a week, and as I do so I listen to music -- the Pandora service on my iPhone. I have created a station that plays folk rock. Lately, it has repeatedly played the Neil Young song "Ohio": "What if you knew her and found her dead on the ground?" On the bike, I have to repress a tear.

"Ohio" has been around for 40 years, and I have heard it over and over again. It's about the 1970 killing of four students at Kent State University during a demonstration against the Vietnam War. The killers were the equally young men of the Ohio National Guard. I was in the National Guard myself once. How did this happen? "This summer I hear the drumming. Four dead in Ohio."

The hills slow me. I grind at them, going so slowly that when the song comes on I can listen intently to the lyrics. The line about the woman dead on the ground hits with concussive force. I feel I knew her. One of the four killed was Allison Krause, and she went to school in the Washington area. Her father, Arthur Krause, sometimes called me. Arthur had devoted himself to seeking justice for his daughter. He should have known better. He was a Holocaust survivor.

Saturday, on the bike, I listened hard: "Tin soldiers and Nixon coming. We're finally on our own. This summer I hear the drumming. Four dead in Ohio."

I had been a reporter back when the killings occurred and it was a huge story to me. I longed for a chance to cover it, but I was young and raw, and the journalistic sluggers whooshed out of the newsroom, hailed a cab, jumped a plane and wrote the story -- the story. The story will keep you sane.

But it is a story no more and so, on the bike, the full horror of it came through: My God, American soldiers had shot American college students. This was not China, not Tiananmen Square, and not Iran and the pro-democracy rallies of last year -- not any of those places. This was America, just yesterday (take my word for it) and yet it had happened. How? I thought hard and then I remembered. Bullets had killed those kids, sure -- but they were fired, in a way, from the mouths of politicians.

The governor of Ohio, James Rhodes, demonized the war protesters. They were "worse than the Brownshirts and the communist element. . . . We will use whatever force necessary to drive them out of Kent."

That was the language of that time. And now it is the language of our time. It is the language of Glenn Beck, who fetishizes about liberals and calls Barack Obama a racist. It is the language of rage that fuels too much of the Tea Party and is the sum total of gubernatorial hopeful Carl Paladino's campaign message in New York. It is all this talk about "taking back America" (from whom?) and this inchoate fury at immigrants and, of course, this raw anger at Muslims, stoked by politicians such as Newt Gingrich and Rick Lazio, the latter having lost the GOP primary to Paladino for, among other things, not being sufficiently angry. "I'm going to take them out," Paladino vowed at a Tea Party rally in Ithaca, N.Y.

Back in the Vietnam War era, the left also used ugly language and resorted to violence. But the right, as is its wont, stripped the antiwar movement of its citizenship. It turned dissent into treason, which, in a way, was the worst treason of all. It made dissidents into the storied "other" who had nothing in common with the rest of us. They were not opponents; they were the enemy: Fire!

On my bike, I recalled those days and wondered if they have not returned. Sticks and stones may break bones, but words -- that singsong rebuttal notwithstanding -- can kill. We lose presidents to words and civil rights leaders to words -- homosexuals and immigrants and abortion providers, too. Richard Nixon is named in the song because he was the president at the time and because his words were ugly. He was enthralled by toughness, violence.

I hear the song more clearly now than I ever did. It is a distant sound from our not-so-distant past, but a clear warning about our future. Four dead in Ohio. Not just a song. A lesson.

Pinal County Greens Endorse Linda Macias for State Representative in District 21

2010-10-04T16:59:00.000-07:00

Today the Pinal County Greens posted this on their website:

Apache Junction, Ariz., Oct. 4, 2010 -

The Pinal County Greens, a group of members of the Green Party in Pinal County, today endorsed Linda Macias, Green Party candidate for Arizona State Representative in District 21, which includes most of Chandler and portions of west Mesa, Gilbert and Queen Creek.

"We strongly urge all voters in District 21, whatever their political party, to support the candidacy of Linda Macias, who is by far the best person running in this legislative district," the Pinal Greens statement said. "She is the only candidate who can truly represent the needs of all citizens. Linda Macias will bring integrity, sanity, and a high degree of competence to this position -- something her opponents cannot come close to matching."

Why Third Parties Like the Green Party Are Important and Why Jeff Flake Voters Will All Go Fuck Themselves

2010-10-03T02:23:00.000-07:00

As a third-party candidate, I found today's New York Times column, "Third Party Rising," by Thomas L. Friedman relevant (emphasis ours):

A friend in the U.S. military sent me an e-mail last week with a quote from the historian Lewis Mumford’s book, “The Condition of Man,” about the development of civilization. Mumford was describing Rome’s decline: “Everyone aimed at security: no one accepted responsibility. What was plainly lacking, long before the barbarian invasions had done their work, long before economic dislocations became serious, was an inner go. Rome’s life was now an imitation of life: a mere holding on. Security was the watchword — as if life knew any other stability than through constant change, or any form of security except through a constant willingness to take risks.”

It was one of those history passages that echo so loudly in the present that it sends a shiver down my spine — way, way too close for comfort.

I’ve just spent a week in Silicon Valley, talking with technologists from Apple, Twitter, LinkedIn, Intel, Cisco and SRI and can definitively report that this region has not lost its “inner go.” But in talks here and elsewhere I continue to be astounded by the level of disgust with Washington, D.C., and our two-party system — so much so that I am ready to hazard a prediction: Barring a transformation of the Democratic and Republican Parties, there is going to be a serious third party candidate in 2012, with a serious political movement behind him or her — one definitely big enough to impact the election’s outcome.

There is a revolution brewing in the country, and it is not just on the right wing but in the radical center. I know of at least two serious groups, one on the East Coast and one on the West Coast, developing “third parties” to challenge our stagnating two-party duopoly that has been presiding over our nation’s steady incremental decline.
President Obama has not been a do-nothing failure. He has some real accomplishments. He passed a health care expansion, a financial regulation expansion, stabilized the economy, started a national education reform initiative and has conducted a smart and tough war on Al Qaeda.

But there is another angle on the last two years: a president who won a sweeping political mandate, propelled by an energized youth movement and with control of both the House and the Senate — about as much power as any president could ever hope to muster in peacetime — was only able to pass an expansion of health care that is a suboptimal amalgam of tortured compromises that no one is certain will work or that we can afford (and doesn’t deal with the cost or quality problems), a limited stimulus that has not relieved unemployment or fixed our infrastructure, and a financial regulation bill that still needs to be interpreted by regulators because no one could agree on crucial provisions. Plus, Obama had to abandon an energy-climate bill altogether, and if the G.O.P. takes back the House, we may not have an energy bill until 2013.

Obama probably did the best he could do, and that’s the point. The best our current two parties can produce today — in the wake of the worst existential crisis in our economy and environment in a century — is suboptimal, even when one party had a huge majority. Suboptimal is O.K. for ordinary times, but these are not ordinary times. We need to stop waiting for Superman and start building a superconsensus to do the superhard stuff we must do now. Pretty good is not even close to good enough today.

“We basically have two bankrupt parties bankrupting the country,” said the Stanford University political scientist Larry Diamond. Indeed, our two-party system is ossified; it lacks integrity and creativity and any sense of courage or high-aspiration in confronting our problems. We simply will not be able to do the things we need to do as a country to move forward “with all the vested interests that have accrued around these two parties,” added Diamond. “They cannot think about the overall public good and the longer term anymore because both parties are trapped in short-term, zero-sum calculations,” where each one’s gains are seen as the other’s losses.

We have to rip open this two-party duopoly and have it challenged by a serious third party that will talk about education reform, without worrying about offending unions; financial reform, without worrying about losing donations from Wall Street; corporate tax reductions to stimulate jobs, without worrying about offending the far left; energy and climate reform, without worrying about offending the far right and coal-state Democrats; and proper health care reform, without worrying about offending insurers and drug companies.

“If competition is good for our economy,” asks Diamond, “why isn’t it good for our politics?”

We need a third party on the stage of the next presidential debate to look Americans in the eye and say: “These two parties are lying to you. They can’t tell you the truth because they are each trapped in decades of special interests. I am not going to tell you what you want to hear. I am going to tell you what you need to hear if we want to be the world’s leaders, not the new Romans.”

The Arizona Green Party's incompetent and small-minded bosses, of course, have made the party a laughingstock with their poor planning and Keystone Kops strategies, but it's still a valuable vehicle for candidates like myself as a ballot line alternative for progressives dissatisfied with Democrats and Republicans.

As Dan Cantor of the Working Families Party has stated,
Most days of the year, money triumphs over all things in our society. Except on Election Day, when we're all citizens and we get to vote. There are two conceptions wrestling with each other in America right now: The tea party is saying government is a waste, or evil, even. Our view is that government will be as good as we make it, by electing people who stand for a certain set of values we all share about decency and equality and opportunity...

America had the first great middle-class society, and it was made by two things: unions pushing up and high marginal tax rates pushing down, from the fifties through the seventies. That was a great thing, [but] we’ve abandoned that for, "You need rich people to be really happy so they’ll invest and maybe good things will happen!"...There’s been a growth in low-wage jobs and a growth in extremely high-wage stuff. So the middle is being squeezed.

Millionaire free-market fanatic Jeff Flake is contemptuous of or indifferent to the struggles of those in-the-middle struggling working families. He's done nothing for you in eight years and now he wants to eliminate Medicare, Social Security, unemployment benefits, student loans and every other federal program that lends a helping hand not just to the poor but to the middle class.

When you re-elect Jeff Flake, you're cutting your own throats. But since most of you in the East Valley are dumber than posts, you'll do it, won't you? You Jeff Flake voters can all go fuck yourselves, and on Election Day, you will.

Ultra-Conservative Congressman Jeff Flake Calls for Lowering Minimum Wage to Zero; Claims Change Will Boost Employment

2010-10-02T13:54:00.001-07:00

This newswire story got buried this week, but we wanted to call it to your attention:

A Republican congressman from Arizona today called for lowering the minimum wage to zero -- in order, he said, to boost hiring and reduce high levels of unemployment.

Asked about Connecticut Senate candidate Linda McMahon's proposal to lower the minimum wage, Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) said he would prefer that the minimum wage be lowered to zero.

"It's an assault on freedom to force employers to pay their workers a certain level of salary," Flake told a Capitol Hill news conference on the eve of the congressional recess for the election campaign. "Further, the minimum wage is definitely a culprit in our high unemployment rate. It discourages corporations and small business owners from hiring more people at low -- or even no -- wages."

Flake said that the minimum wage was clearly unconstitutional as contemplated by the founding fathers. "People like Washington, Jefferson and Madison certainly didn't intend this as a legitimate role for government. It's a kind of slavery they surely wouldn't approve of. It's too bad that we strayed so far from their principles."

The Arizona congressman said he will introduce a bill in the next session of Congress to lower the minimum wage to nothing. His own re-election is considered a foregone conclusion.

AZ-06 Green Party Candidate Richard Grayson Announces That, If Elected, He Will Not Take His Oath of Office on the Bible But on the Book of Mormon

2010-09-29T02:58:00.000-07:00

The Richard Grayson Green Party AZ-06 congressional campaign yesterday issued the following press release:

In 2006, newly-elected Congressman Keith Ellison of Minnesota ignited a controversy when he said he would not take his oath of office on the Bible but on the Qur'an.

Today Richard Grayson, Green Party candidate for the U.S. House seat for Arizona's Sixth Congressional District, announced that, in the unlikely event of his election, he would also not take his oath of office on the Bible but on The Book of Mormon.

"I want to recognize the beliefs of many of my constituents and the traditions I myself follow," Grayson said.

Grayson, not a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is best known as the author of numerous books of fiction.

Congressional Democrats, Profiles in Timidity, Need to Let Tax Cuts for Jeff Flake's Billionaire Buddies Expire

2010-09-28T15:05:00.001-07:00

Today's lead editorial in the New York Times rightfully calls out the Congressional Democrats on their timidity in not doing the right thing:

We are starting to wonder whether Congressional Democrats lack the courage of their convictions, or simply lack convictions.

Last week, Senate Democrats did not even bother to schedule a debate, let alone a vote, on the expiring Bush tax cuts. This week, House Democrats appear poised to follow suit. The idea is to spare incumbents from having to vote before Nov. 2 on whether to let the rich go on paying less taxes than the nation needs them to pay.

This particular failure to act was not about Republican obstructionism, of which there has been plenty. This was about Democrats failing to seize an opportunity to do the right thing and at the same time draw a sharp distinction between themselves and the Republicans.

President Obama has been steadfast — and basically correct — in calling to extend the Bush tax cuts for 98 percent of taxpayers and to let them expire for the top 2 percent. But by postponing a vote on the cuts, Democrats are increasing the likelihood of an eventual cave-in to Republicans, who are pushing for an extension of all the tax cuts, including the high-end ones.

We presume that Democrats, especially those in more conservative districts, are doing this in response to the anti-Washington insurgency on the right. But it’s hard to imagine that conservative voters will confuse them for Republicans, and punting on the tax cuts won’t score them any points with the Democratic base.

As the politics of the tax-cut fight move to center stage, far more important issues are being pushed into the background. Letting the high-end tax cuts expire, for instance, is a crucial step in the long process of reducing the federal budget deficit. Extending them will add $700 billion more to the debt over the next decade than under the Obama administration’s tax proposal — and for what? To bolster the weak economy, the money would be better spent in any of several more demonstrably effective ways, like payroll tax cuts, infrastructure spending or state aid to hire more teachers and police.

Letting the high-end cuts expire would also be a strong signal to the nation’s creditors that Congress has the political will to cut deficits and, by extension, to prudently service debts. Delaying a vote on the tax cuts leaves that message hopelessly muddled.

To their credit, 46 House Democrats sent a letter recently urging Speaker Nancy Pelosi to hold a vote on the tax cuts before the election. But 31 other Democrats — many of them self-described deficit hawks — also sent a letter urging that the high-end tax cuts be extended.

The American public is right to be confused and distrustful of its elected representatives.

Their focus on the well-being of the richest Americans is eclipsing the needs and concerns of vulnerable Americans. A roughly $1 billion pro-work program in last year’s stimulus law that has provided jobs to 250,000 low-income workers is scheduled to expire at the end of September. But with less than a week to go before adjourning, Democrats have been unable to get Republican support to extend the program or, it seems, to make the Republicans pay a political price for being the Party of No.

This program is a model of the welfare-to-work initiatives long championed by the Republican Party. But Republican lawmakers would prefer to end it than to let the Obama stimulus package be seen as helpful. So deep is their desire to thwart Mr. Obama and the Democrats, that they are ignoring Republican governors who have called for the program’s continuation. And they have indicated they would vote down a must-pass spending bill and other last-minute legislation if Democrats attach a provision to extend the program to those bills.

That is pure obstructionism, but it leaves Democrats still struggling to challenge the Republicans’ ability to define the terms of the political debate this election season, while Americans who really need the help go without.

As Roger Cohen in London wrote in the International Herald Tribune, comparing the U.S. to other nations moving ahead [italics in original]:

Britain has similar post-binge economic problems — of personal and national debt and spiraling deficits. But Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron and his Liberal Democrat partners have actually put bipartisanship to work — did any Republicans notice? They are looking to lock in five years of stability through a new law and push through painful cuts across government departments.

Five years is a decent stretch. In America today, quarter-to-quarter concerns hem in even a visionary chief executive.

The policy debate in the United States is head-spinning. Nobody knows if there’s going to be more fiscal stimulus, after the first $787 billion, or how a row over taxes will end. Under an Obama proposal, Bush-era tax cuts are due to expire at year-end for affluent couples and small business owners earning over $250,000. Republicans are digging in, saying it’s crazy to raise taxes in a faltering economy.

It’s not crazy. Ending the tax cuts for the rich is a minimum signal for a divided land, a statement that the two Americas are acquainted with each other.

But with Obama facing a stinging midterm defeat, it looks like a long shot. What is needed above all is some clarity and sense of direction — the kind Cameron has given in London and booming China consistently applies.

Why the Fanatic Free-Market Fundamentalism of Jeff Flake and the Tea Party Is a Global Laughingstock

2010-09-27T14:57:00.000-07:00

Anatole Kaletsky, the chief economist of a Hong Kong-based investment advisory fim and the author of Capitalism 4.0: The Birth of a New Economy in the Aftermath of Crisis, has a compelling op-ed piece in today's New York Times, "Blaming China Won't Help the Economy."

After discussing why Japan last week chose to ignore U.S. pleas and decided, like China, to manipulate its currency -- the value of the yen fell drastically after Japanese government market intervention -- Kaletsky goes on to say [emphasis ours]:

Japan’s action suggests that, in the aftermath of the recent financial crisis, the dominance of free-market thinking in international economic management is over. Washington must understand this, or find itself constantly outmaneuvered in dealings with the rest of the world. Instead of obsessing over China’s currency manipulation as if it were a unique exception in a world of untrammeled market forces, the United States must adapt to an environment where exchange rates and trade imbalances are managed consciously and have become a legitimate subject for debate in international forums like the Group of 20.

Market fundamentalists [this means you, Jeff Flake] who feel that government interference with free markets is anathema should be reminded that, by today’s dogmatic standards, Ronald Reagan is one of the great manipulators of all time. He presided over two of the biggest currency interventions in history: the Plaza agreement, which devalued the dollar in 1985, and the Louvre accord of 1987, which brought this devaluation to an end.

The fact is that the rules of global capitalism have changed irrevocably since Lehman Brothers collapsed two years ago — and if the United States refuses to accept this, it will find its global leadership slipping away. The near collapse of the financial system was an “Emperor’s New Clothes” moment of revelation.

In this climate, the market fundamentalism now represented by the Tea Party, based on instinctive aversion to government and a faith that “the market is always right,” is a global laughingstock. Yet more moderate figures from both parties largely hold the same view: a measure to punish China over its currency passed the House Ways and Means committee on Friday with bipartisan support.

Outside America, however, a strong conviction now exists that some new version of global capitalism must evolve to replace what the economist John Williamson coined the “Washington consensus.”

If market forces cannot do something as simple as financing home mortgages, can markets be trusted to restore and maintain full employment, reduce global imbalances or prevent the destruction of the environment and prepare for a future without fossil fuels? This is the question that policymakers outside America, especially in Asia, are now asking. And the answer, as so often in economics, is “yes and no.”

Yes, because markets are the best mechanism for allocating scarce resources. No, because market investors are often short-sighted, fail to reflect widely held social objectives and sometimes make catastrophic mistakes. There are times, therefore, when governments must deliberately shape market incentives to achieve objectives that are determined by politics and not by the markets themselves, including financial stability, environmental protection, energy independence and poverty relief.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that governments get bigger. The new model of capitalism evolving in Asia and parts of Europe generally requires government to be smaller, but more effective. Many activities taken for granted in America as prerogatives of government have long since been privatized in foreign nations — even in what so many Americans view as socialistic Europe.

In France, Germany, Japan and Sweden, water supplies, highways, airports and even postal services are increasingly run by the private sector. For home mortgages to be backed by government guarantees would be unthinkable anywhere in Asia or Europe. Tax systems, too, are in some ways less redistributionist in Europe and Asia than they are in the United States. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the proportion of income tax raised from the richest tenth of the population is 45 percent in America, compared with only 28 percent in France and 27 percent in Sweden. These countries raise money for public services mainly from middle-class voters, through consumption and energy taxes, not by soaking the rich.

AS a result, these nations’ budgets are more stable and their governments have more ability to support their economies in times of crisis. They are also better positioned to manage their currencies and their trade relations, subsidize long-term investment in nuclear and solar energy, and spend money on infrastructure, job retraining and education. In America, by contrast, the tax system’s dependence on revenues from the richest citizens means that the social safety net and long-term goals like energy independence can be achieved only if the rich keep getting richer.

Which brings us back to Delaware. What if America decides to ignore the global reinvention of capitalism and opts instead for a nostalgic rerun of the experiment in market fundamentalism? This would not prevent the rest of the world from changing course.

Rather, it would make it likely that the newly dominant economic model will not be a product of democratic capitalism, based on Western values and American leadership. Instead, it will be an authoritarian state-led capitalism inspired by Asian values. If America opts, for the first time in history, for nostalgia and ideology instead of pragmatism and progress, then the new model of capitalism will probably be made in China, like so much else in the world these days.

The free market is not the solution to our problems. Neither is government - as a twenty-first century liberal, I know that. However, effectively using government to manage the market when necessary, as is being done so well by China - a country that is also leading the world in green technology as well as a state-of-the-art national infrastructure - is what we need after the collapse of our financial system two years ago.

But Jeff Flake is partying like it's still 1979.

Out-of-touch, living-in-the-past Jeff Flake will do all he can to put China ahead of the United States by the time his thirty or forty years in Congress are finally over.

China couldn't ask for a better American congressman than free-market fanatic Jeff Flake. He's doing a lot more for Guangdong and Shanghai than he's ever done -- or ever will do -- for Mesa and Gilbert.

Politics-As-Usual Jeff Flake: After Eight Years in Congress, He Wants Another Term to Destroy an America He Detests

2010-09-26T03:59:00.000-07:00

For eight years, politics-as-usual congressman Jeff Flake has slashed taxes on the rich, turned a surplus into a crushing deficit, and helped unleash the financial crisis that has thrown millions of Americans out of their jobs and their homes.

Now this sleazy politico wants another term for a chance to finish the job destroying an America whose longstanding strengths and virtues he reviles.

Will you give it to him?

Pinal County Greens Endorse Dave Ewoldt, Green Independent Candidate for State Senate in District 28

2010-09-25T11:31:00.000-07:00

Yesterday the Pinal County Greens issued the following statement on their website:

Apache Junction, Ariz., Sept. 24, 2010 -

Today the Pinal County Greens, a group of Arizona Green Party members in Pinal County, announced its endorsement of State Senate candidate Dave Ewoldt in Distict 24. A former Arizona Green Party member who fought the party's bosses in Pima County, Ewoldt is now running as an independent.

"There is no official Green Party member running for the State Senate in District 28," said the Pinal County Greens in its statement, "and it's only because the party bosses are vindictive that they are not supporting Dave Ewoldt, who embodies the Green Party's Ten Key Values better than most of the so-called 'endorsed' Arizona Green Party legislative candidates."

"Dave Ewoldt is by far the best and only choice for Green Party voters for the State Senate in central Tucson's District 28," the Pinal Greens' statement concluded.

Crabby, Constipated Congressman Jeff Flake Calls These Generous, Patriotic Alabama Schoolchildren "A Bunch of Little Jerks"

2010-09-25T03:35:00.000-07:00

Congressman Jeff Flake's perverted values were on full display in yesterday's New York Times, in an article on how patriotic Americans like the Montgomery, Alabama, sixth-graders above, are donating to help pay down the national debt:

PARKERSBURG, W.Va. — In a fifth-floor cubicle in a federal office building here is a wire-frame basket labeled “Gifts.”

Every few days, an envelope arrives, and a Treasury Department employee opens it. Inside, usually, is a check, often with a letter explaining why the sender wants to do his or her part to help reduce the federal debt of the United States.

A very small part, to be sure.

Last year, the Bureau of the Public Debt recorded $3.1 million in gifts, more than has been usual since the government began accepting such donations in 1961. At that rate, it would take millions of years to retire the $13.4 trillion the country owes its creditors, foreign and domestic.

While concerns about the economy, especially taxes and spending, have dominated the midterm election, it is hard to find officials who have made voluntary contributions to improve the nation’s balance sheet.

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner has not pulled out his checkbook, and fiscal conservatives, for whom the record debt is a rallying cry, have hardly mentioned the idea of giving.

Since the program began, Americans have given about $80 million. Recent donors include a class of Alabama sixth graders who raised $324.50 by selling cookies; a Maryland man who learned of the program in an evening accounting class; and Margaret E. Taylor, 98, of Findlay, Ohio, who died in 2006 and bequeathed $1.1 million to the cause.

“I get mixed reactions,” said John W. Krupansky, 56, a software developer in Midtown Manhattan who started reading about economics during the dot-com crash a decade ago, and has blogged about his tax deductible gifts, nine so far, of $25 each. “Some people are annoyed; they think the right thing to do is complain about the debt, not actually do something about it. Other people are amused that anyone would waste their time to do such a thing.”

This fiscal year, through July, the bureau has logged $2.7 million, about 9 percent less than at the same point last year.

Donors can send in a check or money order, or give online using a credit or debit card. The government does not advertise the program, and officials avoid drawing attention to it. The program tends to come up, they said, only when journalists ask about it.

Van Zeck, the commissioner of the bureau, oversees sales of Treasury securities and savings bonds; accounts for the debt to the penny; and ensures that the debt does not exceed the statutory limit, which Congress raised in February to $14.3 trillion.

Asked why the program was little known, he said soliciting donations might “seem straightforward and benign” but could rub taxpayers the wrong way.

“Whether to advocate that people do more financially to help the government than they already do — that’s not the kind of question that’s mine to answer,” he said.

The program was the idea of Representative Charles E. Bennett, a Florida Democrat who served 44 years in the House. Mr. Bennett, who died in 2003 at age 92, also wrote the law requiring that currency bear the motto “In God We Trust.”

He was known for public spiritedness. A World War II veteran, he returned his military disability and Social Security checks to the government. When he retired, he gave most of his campaign funds to charity and the Treasury.

Mr. Bennett’s law helped clarify the government’s authority to accept gifts dedicated to debt reduction.

While the White House believed that “such authority almost certainly already exists,” the legislation was “intended to encourage such gifts” and to create a way to accept them, according to a 1961 memorandum, now in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston.

But although the memorandum confirms that the gifts are counted toward debt reduction, the amount of giving has no real impact on government spending and borrowing.

“There does not appear to be any intention to put control of the actual level of the debt in private hands, although those who make such gifts may be under the impression that they are exercising such control,” Phillip S. Hughes, an assistant budget director, wrote in advising President Kennedy to sign the bill.

For some people, that makes the program toothless.

“It’s just good money after bad,” said Representative Jeff Flake, who with Senator John McCain, a fellow Arizona Republican, has introduced legislation that would let taxpayers designate up to 10 percent of their federal income tax for debt reduction and require Congress to come up with an equal amount in spending cuts.

Mr. Flake said he had only a “vague recollection” of the gifts program, but that he did not support it. “I don’t think taxpayers should be on the hook more,” he said. “We already pay enough.”

But contributors have argued that shared sacrifice is what is most needed to revive the economy.

Teri Gisi, a teacher at Dalraida Elementary School in Montgomery, Ala., who coordinated the bake sale that sixth graders held last year after learning about the debt in class, said the recession was on their minds.

“We’ve had some students who’ve had to move in with their grandparents, students who’ve lost their homes to foreclosure,” she said. “Some of them didn’t even have new shoes for the start of school.”

Despite hardships, the students made debt reduction their cause. “Three hundred dollars to them is a large amount,” Ms. Gisi said. Even when a math teacher explained how large the debt was — “he showed them all the zeros,” she said — “they didn’t get discouraged.”

Treasury officials said they were prohibited from identifying donors. But in Parkersburg, a few employees shared stories.

A widow turned over the estate of her late husband, who had made regular gifts to express patriotism. Naturalized citizens, thankful for the opportunities afforded immigrants, have contributed. A man sent in a trove of rare coins, which were auctioned for far more than their face value.

Many taxpayers have simply signed over and mailed in their rebate checks, including members of Amish and Mennonite communities who have explained that their religious beliefs do not permit them to accept government assistance.

The bureau tries to make donors feel appreciated. Anyone who mails a check receives a thank-you form letter from Sherlyn West, a manager here.

“Your contribution will help ensure that we do not burden future generations with a huge debt,” it says.

As a little boy, I remember hearing a dispute between my millionaire grandfather - my father's father - and my millionaire great-grandfather, my mother's mother's father. They were bragging about who paid the most taxes and which one thus gave more support to the country they both loved.

They would have honored the Alabama schoolkids and spit in Congressman Jeff Flake's smug, self-satisfed, selfish face.

Jeff Flake is so un-American and has such crabbed, constipated values, he thinks he has nothing to give to his country. But he takes plenty, living the high life of a millionaire in Washington on his Congressional salary. He's selfish, just like most of you voters in the district who grew up learning how to be morons like Jeff Flake. That's why Nate Silver's blog Five Thirty Eight lists Jeff Flake as having a 100% chance for election.

America would be better off if there were more members of Congress who were Alabama sixth-graders than comfortable, I'm-all-right-Jack jerks like Jeff Flake.

Why the Tea Party Is Nothing But a Scam and Why Jeff Flake and His Cronies Are Un-American

2010-09-23T08:03:00.000-07:00

E.J. Dionne, writing in today's Washington Post, explains correctly why the Tea Party is a total scam and not just a collection of elderly white assholes:

Is the Tea Party one of the most successful scams in American political history?

Before you dismiss the question, note that word "successful." Judge the Tea Party purely on the grounds of effectiveness and you have to admire how a very small group has shaken American political life and seized the microphone offered by the media, including the so-called liberal media.

But it's equally important to recognize that the Tea Party constitutes a sliver of opinion on the extreme end of politics receiving attention out of all proportion with its numbers.

Yes, there is a lot of discontent in America. But that discontent is better represented by the moderate voters who expressed quiet disillusionment to President Obama at the CNBC town hall meeting on Monday than by Tea Party ideologues who proclaim the unconstitutionality of the New Deal and everything since.

The Tea Party drowns out such voices because it has money -- some of it from un-populist corporate sources, as Jane Mayer documented last month in the New Yorker -- and has used modest numbers strategically in small states to magnify its impact.

Just recently, Tea Party victories in the Alaska and Delaware Senate primaries shook the nation. In Delaware, Christine O'Donnell received 30,563 votes in the Republican primary, 3,542 votes more than moderate Rep. Mike Castle. In Alaska, Joe Miller won 55,878 votes for a margin of 2,006 over incumbent Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who is now running as a write-in candidate.

Do the math. For weeks now, our national political conversation has been driven by 86,441 voters and a margin of 5,548 votes. A bit of perspective: When John McCain lost in the 2008 presidential race, he received 59.9 million votes.

Earlier this year, much was made of the defeat of Sen. Bob Bennett, a Utah conservative insufficiently conservative for the Tea Party. Bennett lost not in a primary but at a Republican convention attended by all of 3,500 delegates.

Even in larger states, the Tea Party's triumphs were built on small shares of the electorate. Rand Paul received 206,986 votes in Kentucky, where there are more than 1 million registered Republicans and nearly 2.9 million registered voters. Sharron Angle won with 70,452 votes in Nevada, a state with more than 1 million registered voters.

The media have given substantial coverage to Tea Party rallies and even small demonstrations. But how many people are actually involved in this movement?

Last April, a New York Times-CBS News poll found that 18 percent of Americans identified as supporters of the Tea Party movement, but slightly less than a fifth of these sympathizers said they had attended a Tea Party rally or meeting. That means just over 3 percent of Americans can be characterized as Tea Party activists. A more recent poll by Democracy Corps, just before Labor Day, found that 6 percent of voters said they had attended a Tea Party rally or meeting.

The Tea Party is not the only small group in history to wield more power than you'd expect from its numbers. In 2008, Barack Obama did very well in party caucuses, which draw far fewer voters than primaries. And it was Lenin who offered the classic definition of a vanguard party as involving "people who make revolutionary activity their profession" in organizations that "must perforce not be very extensive."

But something is haywire in our media and our politics. Jill Lepore, a Harvard historian whose new book is "The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle Over American History," observed in an interview that there is a "hall of mirrors" effect created by the rise of "niche" opinion media. They magnify small movements into powerhouses, while old-fashioned journalism, which is supposed to put such movements in perspective, reacts to the same niche incentives.

There is also the decline of alternative forces in politics. The Republican establishment, such as it is, has long depended far more on big money than on troops in the field. In search of new battalions, GOP leaders stoked the Tea Party, stood largely mute in the face of its more outrageous untruths about Obama -- and now has to defend candidates such as O'Donnell and Angle.

And where are the progressives? Sulking is not an alternative to organizing, and weary resignation is the first step toward capitulation. The Tea Party may be pulling a fast one on the country and the media. But if it has more audacity than everyone else, it will, I am sorry to say, deserve to get away with it.

In the same Washington Post, Harold Meyerson explains the un-American, distorted thinking of people like right-wing fanatic Rep. Jeff Flake and his Tea Party cronies:

There are un-Americans among us. They don't share our values, yet they control the most powerful offices in the land. We must rid ourselves of this fifth-column menace.

That's pretty much the Republican and Tea Party line these days. When a right-wing talk show host interviewing Sharron Angle, now the Republican senatorial candidate in Nevada, told her last year that "we have domestic enemies" and that some of them worked within "the walls of the Senate and the Congress," Angle chirped up, "I think you're right."

The Tea Partyers aren't wrong about the growing influence of un-Americans in high places. They've just misidentified who those un-Americans are.

As the right-wingers see it, even President Obama's more conventional ideas have no place or precedent in the American experience. Ending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, Dinesh D'Souza reasons in his summa idiotica currently on the cover of Forbes magazine, cannot be explained within the confines of American political thought. However, he writes, "if Obama shares his father's anticolonial crusade, that would explain why he wants people who are already paying close to 50% of their income to pay even more."

I'd like to see D'Souza explain why the highest tax brackets during the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower took 90 percent of people's incomes.

This ascription of all things Obama to alien ideologies and religions -- he's a Muslim, a European socialist, an anti-colonial African Marxist -- has a basis not in empirical fact, of course, but in political logic. It speaks, in powerful metaphoric terms, to that large group of white Americans who see their country slipping away. With each passing year, America grows less white, less powerful and less prosperous, at least from the perspective of all but the rich. There's no correlation between the demographic change and our economic slump, but millions of Americans believe and fear that there is. And for many of those millions, Obama has become the object of their fear and rage that their America is being lost.

In fact, a good deal of American prosperity is being lost, but if there are homegrown agents of this decline, they're not in the administration.

Consider the debate in Congress about whether to impose tariffs on Chinese imports if China continues to depress the value of its currency. Roughly 150 House members, including 45 Republicans, have authored a bill to do just that, and the Ways and Means Committee will take up the bill on Friday. Unions and some domestic manufacturers support the bill. But a large number of American businesses, in a campaign coordinated by the U.S.-China Business Council, oppose it.

Now, there's nothing un-American in opposing the legislation as such -- far from it. Support for and opposition to tariffs are both as American as apple pie. The question here is whether the 220 corporations that belong to the council -- household names such as Coca-Cola, Bank of America, Ford, GM, Wal-Mart, Intel, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, J.P. Morgan Chase, Chevron, Exxon Mobil and Boeing -- are already so deeply invested in China as manufacturers, marketers or retailers that buy goods there to sell them here that their interests are more closely aligned with China's than with America's. Revaluing China's currency would be helpful to domestic U.S. manufacturers, their employees and the communities where those employees live and work, but America's largest companies have long since ceased to be domestic.

Given the explosive growth of the Chinese economy, it's a safe bet that every major U.S. corporation will devote greater resources to building, buying and selling there. But China, unlike the Obama administration, truly is guided by an ideology alien to most Americans -- Leninism -- and wields far greater control over what U.S. corporations can and can't do there than the U.S. government does over what corporations can and can't do here. Our leading companies' economic interests, and those of their Chinese hosts, whom they cross at their peril, are increasing likely to pit them against proposals that diminish China's edge, however obtained, in global competition.

As the Tea Partyers contend, there are un-Americans among us. They hold some of the most powerful offices in the land.

Like Congressman from Arizona's Sixth Congressional District.

Pinal County Greens Endorse Democrat Terry Goddard for Governor, Oppose the "Anti-Green" Green Party Candidate Larry Gist

2010-09-22T15:44:00.000-07:00

Earlier today, the Pinal County Greens, which previously endorsed our candidacy, had this press release on its website:

Apache Junction, Ariz., September 22, 2010 - The Pinal County Greens, a political organization made up of members of the Arizona Green Party in Pinal County, today announced its endorsement of Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry Goddard, whom it called "the only progressive candidate for governor and the only alternative for Green Party members who support our ten key values."

At the same time, the Pinal Greens announced that they were opposing the candidacy of Larry Gist, the phony Green Party candidate who got on the primary ballot but who does not endorse the Green Party platform.

"Larry Gist is just another right-wing wacko Arizona politician," the Pinal Greens said. "The only thing truly green about him is the money he used to buy his way onto the ballot by paying people to get his petitions signed."

"We urge all progressive voters to avoid even accidentally supporting the right-wing wacko Larry Gist," the Pinal Greens said. "Don't be fooled by the 'GRN' after his name. He is a Green in name only. Terry Goddard's positions are much closer to those of the Green Party's Ten Key Values, and he's the best choice by far to replace the failed governorship of the incompetent Jan Brewer."

The Pinal Greens also censured the Arizona Green Party for not having a true Green candidate running for Governor. "If the Arizona Green Party bosses had thought things through," the Pinal Greens' statement said, "they would have made sure we had a gubernatorial candidate who supported the party's Ten Key Values before getting enough signatures to get the party on the ballot in 2010."

Noting that if its candidate for governor gets at least 50,000 votes, the Arizona Green Party would get permanent ballot status in future elections, the Pinal Greens said, "we should have at least tried to get someone our members and other progressive voters could have supported. Now the Arizona Green Party is in the ludicrous position of opposing the head of its own ticket."

The Arizona Green Party has gone on record as opposing Gist. So far only the Pinal County Greens have endorsed Democrat Terry Goddard.

Flatulent Rep. Jeff Flake's Foul-Smelling Farts Raise "Big Stink" on Capitol Hill; Recess Called to Clear the Air as Legislators Rise on Point of Odor

2010-09-22T13:36:00.000-07:00

Congress Should Pass the DREAM Act Now and Enact Comprehensive Immigration Reform

2010-09-20T15:03:00.000-07:00

Congressman Jeff Flake Is Salivating Over the Prospect of Getting His Hands on Your Young Daughter's Body. And His Intentions Are Anything But Good.

2010-09-20T13:59:00.000-07:00

If he has his way, right-wing Congressman Jeff Flake will get his government mitts on the precious bodies of your young daughters and deny them the reproductive rights adult women have treasured for generations.

While claiming that government can do nothing to help people and masquerading as a so-called "libertarian," fanatic Jeff Flake wants to give the government control of women's bodies.

Jeff Flake's NARAL Pro-Choice America rating: zero.

Jeff Flake's Planned Parenthood Action Fund rating: zero.

Flake supports a constitutional amendment to ban abortion and turn American girls and women and their doctors criminals.

Flake believes fetuses have more rights than girls or women do.

Flake would deny women both rich and poor access to abortions.

Flake wants to make sure that your teenage daughters don't have access to information about sexuality and reproduction.

Flake wants to ban mifepristone (formerly RU-486).

Flake wants to take away all reproductive rights for our brave women in the military service.

Flake voted to end funding for family planning programs worldwide.

Flake voted for the odious "global gag rule."

Flake voted to deny government workers medical insurance that would cover reproductive health and contraception.

Make no mistake about it. If he has his way, Jeff Flake will be controlling your daughter's body every day of his life. He's salivating at the prospect of gaining control.

On the other hand, I fully support a woman's right to choose and have for over forty years when, pre-Roe, I went to my first demonstration supporting abortion rights.

Democratic candidate Rebecca Schneider also is a strong supporter of a woman's right to choose.

Jeff Flake wants to control the choices your daughter can make. Don't let him!

Jeff Flake Tells Jobless Over-50 Workers: "Tough Luck. Not My Problem. In Fact, I'll Take Away Your Unemployment Benefits. The Rich Need Tax Cuts."

2010-09-20T07:43:00.000-07:00

What does Jeff Flake tell the many East Valley residents and other Americans who have worked all their lives until the Great Recession but now find themselves among the long-term unemployed and who fear, because they are over 50 and no longer in demand, that they may never work again?

"Tough shit, ladies and gentlemen," Jeff Flake tells them. "It's not my problem. It's not the job of the federal government to help you in any way - not in a market economy. You lazy bastards shouldn't even be getting unemployment insurance benefits or food stamps or anything. My role is to make sure millionaires and billionaires pay less taxes."

That about sums up what the fanatic free-market extremist Congressman tells people like the ones highlighted in a front-page New York Times story about older workers who've been laid off and can't find jobs no matter how desperately they try and who are scared and desperate:

For the Unemployed Over 50, Fears of Never Working Again

By Motoko Rich

VASHON ISLAND, Wash. — Patricia Reid is not in her 70s, an age when many Americans continue to work. She is not even in her 60s. She is just 57.

But four years after losing her job she cannot, in her darkest moments, escape a nagging thought: she may never work again.

College educated, with a degree in business administration, she is experienced, having worked for two decades as an internal auditor and analyst at Boeing before losing that job.

But that does not seem to matter, not for her and not for a growing number of people in their 50s and 60s who desperately want or need to work to pay for retirement and who are starting to worry that they may be discarded from the work force — forever.

Since the economic collapse, there are not enough jobs being created for the population as a whole, much less for those in the twilight of their careers.

Of the 14.9 million unemployed, more than 2.2 million are 55 or older. Nearly half of them have been unemployed six months or longer, according to the Labor Department. The unemployment rate in the group — 7.3 percent — is at a record, more than double what it was at the beginning of the latest recession.

After other recent downturns, older people who lost jobs fretted about how long it would take to return to the work force and worried that they might never recover their former incomes. But today, because it will take years to absorb the giant pool of unemployed at the economy’s recent pace, many of these older people may simply age out of the labor force before their luck changes.

For Ms. Reid, it has been four years of hunting — without a single job offer. She buzzes energetically as she describes the countless applications she has lobbed through the Internet, as well as the online courses she is taking to burnish her software skills.

Still, when she is pressed, her can-do spirit falters.

“There are these fears in the background, and they are suppressed,” said Ms. Reid, who is now selling some of her jewelry and clothes online and is late on some credit card payments. “I have had nightmares about becoming a bag lady,” she said. “It could happen to anyone. So many people are so close to it, and they don’t even realize it.”

Being unemployed at any age can be crushing. But older workers suspect their résumés often get shoved aside in favor of those from younger workers. Others discover that their job-seeking skills — as well as some technical skills sought by employers — are rusty after years of working for the same company.

Many had in fact anticipated working past conventional retirement ages to gird themselves financially for longer life spans, expensive health care and reduced pension guarantees.

The most recent recession has increased the need to extend working life. Home values, often a family’s most important asset, have been battered. Stock portfolios are only now starting to recover. According to a Gallup poll in April, more than a third of people not yet retired plan to work beyond age 65, compared with just 12 percent in 1995.

Older workers who lose their jobs could pose a policy problem if they lose their ability to be self-sufficient. “That’s what we should be worrying about,” said Carl E. Van Horn, professor of public policy and director of the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University, “what it means to this class of the new unemployables, people who have been cast adrift at a very vulnerable part of their career and their life.”

Forced early retirement imposes an intense financial strain, particularly for those at lower incomes. The recession and its aftermath have already pushed down some older workers. In figures released last week by the Census Bureau, the poverty rate among those 55 to 64 increased to 9.4 percent in 2009, from 8.6 percent in 2007.

But even middle-class people who might skate by on savings or a spouse’s income are jarred by an abrupt end to working life and to a secure retirement.

“That’s what I spent my whole life in pursuit of, was security,” Ms. Reid said. “Until the last few years, I felt very secure in my job.”

As an auditor, Ms. Reid loved figuring out the kinks in a manufacturing or parts delivery process. But after more than 20 years of commuting across Puget Sound to Boeing, Ms. Reid was exhausted when she was let go from her $80,000-a-year job.

Stunned and depressed, she sent out résumés, but figured she had a little time to recover. So she took vacations to Turkey and Thailand with her husband, who is a home repairman. She sought chiropractic treatments for a neck injury and helped nurse a priest dying of cancer.

Most of her days now are spent in front of a laptop, holed up in a lighthouse garret atop the house that her husband, Denny Mielock, built in the 1990s on a breathtaking piece of property overlooking the sound.

As she browses the job listings that clog her e-mail in-box, she refuses to give in to her fears. “If I let myself think like that all the time,” she said, “I could not even bear getting out of bed in the morning.”

With her husband’s home repair business pummeled by the housing downturn, the bills are mounting. Although the couple do not have a mortgage on their 3,000-square-foot house, they pay close to $7,000 a year in property taxes. The roof is leaking. Their utility bills can be $300 a month in the winter, even though they often keep the thermostat turned down to 50 degrees.

They could try to sell their home, but given the depressed housing market, they are reluctant.

“We are circling the drain here, and I am bailing like hell,” said Ms. Reid, emitting an incongruous cackle, as if laughter is the only response to her plight. “But the boat is still sinking.”

It is not just the finances that have destabilized her life.

Her husband worries that she isolates herself and that she does not socialize enough. “We’ve both been hard workers our whole lives,” said Mr. Mielock, 59. Ms. Reid sometimes rose just after 3 a.m. to make the hourlong commute to Boeing’s data center in Bellevue and attended night school to earn a master’s in management information systems.

“A job is more than a job, you know,” Mr. Mielock said. “It’s where you fit in society.”

Here in the greater Seattle area, a fifth of those claiming extended unemployment benefits are 55 and older.

To help seniors polish their job-seeking skills, WorkSource, a local consortium of government and nonprofit groups, recently began offering seminars. On a recent morning, 14 people gathered in a windowless conference room at a local community college to get tips on how to age-proof their résumés and deflect questions about being overqualified.

Motivational posters hung on one wall, bearing slogans like “Failure is the path of least persistence.”

Using PowerPoint slides, Liz Howland, the chipper but no-nonsense session leader, projected some common myths about older job-seekers on a screen: “Older workers are less capable of evaluating information, making decisions and problem-solving” or “Older workers are rigid and inflexible and have trouble adapting to change.”

Ms. Howland, 61, ticked off the reasons those statements were inaccurate. But a clear undercurrent of anxiety ran through the room. “Is it really true that if you have the energy and the passion that they will overlook the age factor?” asked a 61-year-old man who had been laid off from a furniture maker last October.

Gallows humor reigned. As Ms. Howland — who suggested that applicants remove any dates older than 15 years from their résumé — advised the group on how to finesse interview questions like “When did you have the job that helped you develop that skill?” one out-of-work journalist deadpanned: “How about ‘during the 20th century?’ ”

During a break, Anne Richard, who declined to give her age, confessed she was afraid she would not be able to work again after losing her contract as a house director at a University of Washington sorority in June. Although she had 20 years of experience as an office clerk in Chattanooga, Tenn., she feared her technology skills had fallen behind.

“I don’t feel like I can compete with kids who have been on computers all their lives,” said Ms. Richard, who was sleeping on the couch of a couple she had met at church and contemplating imminent homelessness.

Older people who lose their jobs take longer to find work. In August, the average time unemployed for those 55 and older was slightly more than 39 weeks, according to the Labor Department, the longest of any age group. That is much worse than in August 1983, also after a deep recession, when someone unemployed in that age group spent an average of 27.5 weeks finding work.

At this year’s pace of an average of 82,000 new jobs a month, it will take at least eight more years to create the 8 million positions lost during the recession. And that does not even allow for population growth.

Advocates for the elderly worry that younger people are more likely to fill the new jobs as well.

Rep. Jeff Flake's attitude is shameful to people like me and his Democratic opponent Rebecca Schneider. Liberals believe that governmment should help those who have been thrown out of work and are facing desperate times through no fault of their own.

Just as in the Great Depression, the current Great Recession requires strong government intervention to help those who are suffering because of the inequities of the free market that Jeff Flake believes is working perfectly, even now.

Why, Jeff Flake doesn't believe in even the safety net of unemployment insurance benefits we've had since the 1930s. He's voted against them 23 times. If he and his right-wing buddies take control of Congress -- something he was crowing about this morning on National Public Radio's "Morning Edition" -- he plans to eliminate unemployment benefits entirely, as well as end the food stamp program, take away Medicare from seniors, end Social Security.

You see, Jeff Flake believes the only job in a free market is to make sure millionaires and billionaires pay nothing in taxes. Well, that's reasonable - if you're Jeff Flake and corrupt billionaires like the Koch brothers have bankrolled your cushy political career for a decade.

If you're unemployed -- or you have a loved one who is -- or maybe you fear you might lose your job and find it hard to get another one, maybe you should think about voting for someone other than the billionaires' best friend and the enemy of decent hard-working families, four-term Congressman Jeff Flake.

Green Party Candidate for Congress AZ-06 Richard Grayson Poll: SHOULD ARIZONA BE KICKED OUT OF THE UNITED STATES?

2010-09-19T14:35:00.000-07:00

Many supporters have suggested that, in the highly unlikely situation that I do get elected to Congress, the first piece of legislation I introduce should be one to eliminate my job -- and those of John McCain, John Kyl, and the other Arizona members of the U.S. House of Representatives. In other words, they want me to sponsor a bill that would kick Arizona out of the union. This would eliminate the state that's dead last in job creation and education and which comes in second in the percentage of its residents living in poverty.

They say Arizona's anti-American attitudes -- its racism, xenophobia, crazy right-wing nativist tea-party wacko majority's weirdo beliefs -- make it so sucky that the Cactus State needs to be given the boot. The residents seem to hate the federal government anyway.

Miss Wit, aka Deborah Goldstein, designed this t-shirt that shows a map of the proposed improved Arizona-less United States ("Piece Out, Arizona"). We'd like to ask those who stop by our website here to vote in the poll at right over the next week and tell us what you think: Do you think Arizona should be thrown out of the Union?

Three Justice League Members - Green Lantern, Green Arrow and Martian Manhunter - Endorse Arizona Green Party Congressional Candidate Richard Grayson

2010-09-17T15:20:00.000-07:00

"In darkest day, in brightest night, no evil shall escape Richard Grayson's sight."

* * *

"Richard Grayson will be a straight-arrow representative of the people."

* * *

"Richard Grayson favors a path to citizenship for illegal aliens."

All Jeff Flake Supporters and Other East Valley Republicans Should Join the October 30 D.C. March to Keep Fear Alive

2010-09-17T14:55:00.001-07:00

Maybe there'll be a hurricane or freak snowstorm or something that will keep you grounded in Washington so you can't come back for Tuesday, November 2, Election Day.

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

March to Keep Fear Alive

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

2010 Election

Fox News

And remember: it was socialists who pioneered early voting.

Why Does Millionaire Congressman Jeff Flake Hate Arizona's Hard-Working Middle-Class Families?

2010-09-17T09:03:00.000-07:00

If you're part of a hard-working middle class family in Arizona, millionaire Congressman Jeff Flake hates you.

While your family has been struggling over the past eight years, Jeff Flake has been doing nothing in Congress but trying to get his made-up face and supercilious sound bites on camera and making sure that he and his millionaire and billionaire buddies and campaign donors have made out like bandits.

He's interested in the rich, not struggling middle-class families. His votes show that. Today the Wall Street Journal's front page cries out, "LOST DECADE FOR AMERICAN INCOME":

The inflation-adjusted income of the median household — smack in the middle of the populace — fell 4.8% between 2000 and 2009, even worse than the 1970s, when median income rose 1.9% despite high unemployment and inflation. Between 2007 and 2009, incomes fell 4.2%.

The data, released Thursday, underscore the extent to which U.S. households relied on government benefits — and each other — to weather the recession and how living standards at the middle of the middle class have stalled. The recession has been particularly hard on young workers and young families. Younger workers have a harder time qualifying for unemployment benefits because they have a shorter work history.

That has prompted many young adults to move in with family, or put off leaving home in the first place. The number of 25-to-34-year-olds living with their parents rose 8.4% to 5.5 million in 2010 from 2008. Within that age group, 42.8% fell below the poverty threshold—$11,161 for an individual.

The Census snapshot indicated that the gap between the best-off and worst-off Americans widened a bit more in 2009, a long-standing trend.

But corporate lackey Jeff Flake votes against every government program that would help hard-working middle-class families. He doesn't believe they're worthwhile. That's why he wants to eliminate unemployment insurance, social security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps. He believes in social Darwinism, the law of the jungle, that the free market will take care of everyone - even though history has proven him an asshole again and again.

Hey, you may be a struggling East Valley middle-class family, but you're going to vote to re-elect Jeff Flake, aren't you? To give him and his fat-cat Republican buddies another chance to lower your income? Jeff Flake counts on schmucks like you to give him another two years to keep screwing you while he laughs all the way to the bank. Otherwise you'd be voting for me or Democrat Rebecca Schneider.

Over One-Fifth of Arizonans Live in Poverty, and Rep. Jeff Flake Does Nothing But Laugh and Say, "Go Fuck Yourselves, Poor People!"

2010-09-17T05:16:00.000-07:00

According to the latest report, more than one-fifth of Arizonans live in poverty, a figure higher than anywhere else in the nation except Mississippi.

Figures Thursday from the U.S. Census Bureau show nearly 1.4 million Arizonans in households earning less than the federal poverty level - about 21.2 percent.

As Howard Fischer wrote for Capitol Media Services,

The new report shows that even with a sluggish national economy, there is an increasing disparity between Arizonans and those living everywhere else.

In 2007, for example, before the economy tanked, Arizona's poverty rate was 14.3 percent, compared with the national rate of 12.5 percent. That put Arizona at 14th-highest in nation.

By 2008, the percentage of Arizonans living in poverty rose to 18 percent, while the national figure rose to 13.2 percent. That ranked Arizona fourth-highest in the U.S. And the current 21.2 percent number is approaching a level one and a half times the national average.

What has Rep. Jeff Flake ever done for Arizona's poor people? Nothing. Nada. Zero. Zilch. Bupkis.

Oh wait, with his votes, he's laughed at their poverty and told them to go fuck themselves.

You're on your own, poor people, Jeff Flake says with a smile as he votes against unemployment benefits, food stamps, government aid to children, for housing, for education.

Jeff Flake doesn't give a shit about poor people, and that's one reason he needs to be replaced.

But, you, the dopey assholes who make up the most of the voters in the East Valley's Sixth Congressional District, don't give a shit about your poor neighbors, either, and that's why Jeff Flake is a shoo-in for re-election.

He doesn't have to worry about opponents who actually would try to help poor people like Democrat Rebecca Schneider or myself.

Those Arizonans who live in poverty deserve better representation in Congress than do-nothing, care-nothing, fuck-the-poor free-market fanatic Jeff Flake and his equally disgusting Republican colleagues.

Why Anti-Government Fanatics Like Jeff Flake Will Ruin America If They Get in Charge of Things

2010-09-14T04:07:00.001-07:00

Even conservative columnist David Brooks, writing today at the New York Times, scolds the kind of anti-government, vote-no-on-everything fanaticism of Jeff Flake and his nutty ideological soulmates:

Every political movement has a story. The surging Republican Party has a story, too. It is a story of virtue betrayed and innocence threatened.

Through most of its history, the narrative begins, the United States was a limited government nation, with restrained central power and an independent citizenry. But over the years, forces have arisen that seek to change America’s essential nature. These forces would replace America’s traditional free enterprise system with a European-style cradle-to-grave social democracy.

These statist forces are more powerful than ever in the age of Obama. So it is the duty for those who believe in the traditional American system to stand up and defend the Constitution. There is no middle ground. Every small new government program puts us on the slippery slope toward a smothering nanny state.

As Paul Ryan and Arthur Brooks put it in The Wall Street Journal on Monday, “The road to serfdom in America does not involve a knock in the night or a jack-booted thug. It starts with smooth-talking politicians offering seemingly innocuous compromises, and an opportunistic leadership that chooses not to stand up for America’s enduring principles of freedom and entrepreneurship.”

Ryan and Brooks are two of the most important conservative thinkers today. Ryan is the leading Republican policy entrepreneur in the House. Brooks is president of the highly influential American Enterprise Institute and a much-cited author. My admiration for both is unbounded.

Yet the story Republicans are telling each other, which Ryan and Brooks have reinforced, is an oversimplified version of American history, with dangerous implications.

The fact is, the American story is not just the story of limited governments; it is the story of limited but energetic governments that used aggressive federal power to promote growth and social mobility. George Washington used industrial policy, trade policy and federal research dollars to build a manufacturing economy alongside the agricultural one. The Whig Party used federal dollars to promote a development project called the American System.

Abraham Lincoln supported state-sponsored banks to encourage development, lavish infrastructure projects, increased spending on public education. Franklin Roosevelt provided basic security so people were freer to move and dare. The Republican sponsors of welfare reform increased regulations and government spending — demanding work in exchange for dollars.

Throughout American history, in other words, there have been leaders who regarded government like fire — a useful tool when used judiciously and a dangerous menace when it gets out of control. They didn’t build their political philosophy on whether government was big or not. Government is a means, not an end. They built their philosophy on making America virtuous, dynamic and great. They supported government action when it furthered those ends and opposed it when it didn’t.

If the current Republican Party regards every new bit of government action as a step on the road to serfdom, then the party will be taking this long, mainstream American tradition and exiling it from the G.O.P.

That will be a political tragedy. There are millions of voters who, while alarmed by the Democrats’ lavish spending, still look to government to play some positive role. They fled the G.O.P. after the government shutdown of 1995, and they would do so again.

It would be a fiscal tragedy. Over the next decade there will have to be spending cuts and tax increases. If Republicans decide that even the smallest tax increases put us on the road to serfdom, then there will never be a deal, and the country will careen toward bankruptcy.

It would also be a policy tragedy. Republicans are right to oppose the current concentration of power in Washington. But once that is halted, America faces a series of problems that can’t be addressed simply by getting government out of the way.

The social fabric is fraying. Human capital is being squandered. Society is segmenting. The labor markets are ill. Wages are lagging. Inequality is increasing. The nation is overconsuming and underinnovating. China and India are surging. Not all of these challenges can be addressed by the spontaneous healing powers of the market.

Most important, it would be an intellectual tragedy. Conservatism is supposed to be nonideological and context-driven. If all government action is automatically dismissed as quasi socialist, then there is no need to think. A pall of dogmatism will settle over the right.

Republicans are riding a wave of revulsion about what is happening in Washington. But it is also time to start talking about the day after tomorrow, after the centralizing forces are thwarted. I hope that as Arthur Brooks and Paul Ryan lead a resurgent conservatism, they’ll think about the limited-but-energetic government tradition, which stands between Barry Goldwater and François Mitterrand, but at the heart of the American experience.

Jeff Flake's anti-government fanaticism will make sure he takes away everything good that the federal government has ever done. He'll end your Social Security, Medicare, and even support for interstate highways. He's a menace to America, a threat to our way of life. Jeff Flake's plans to destroy the America he so despises must be opposed by all patriots.

Pinal County Greens Endorse Rodney Glassman for U.S. Senate, Oppose the "Siphongate" Green Party Candidate Jerry Joslyn

2010-09-14T03:40:00.000-07:00

On their website, the Pinal County Greens, who previously endorsed our campaign for the House, made this announcement:

Apache Junction, Ariz., September 13, 2010 - The Pinal County Greens, a political organization made up of members of the Arizona Green Party in Pinal County, today announced its endorsement of Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Rodney Glassman, whom it called "a good man, excellent on Green Party issues, and someone who actually has a chance to unseat John McCain."

At the same time, the Pinal Greens announced that they were opposing the candidacy of Jerry Joslyn, the phony Green Party candidate who was put on the ballot as part of a scheme to siphon liberal votes from the Democrats and re-elect Republican John McCain.

"Jerry Joslyn pretty much announced that he's part of the vote-siphoning scheme," the Pinal Greens said. "At his campaign website he said he wanted to beat Rodney Glassman, not beat John McCain."

"We urge all progressive voters to shun Jerry Joslyn, who advocates the same kind of flat tax put forth by right-wingers like Steve Forbes," the Pinal Greens said. "For progressive unity, we want Rodney Glassman in the U.S. Senate."

RICHARD GRAYSON FOR CONGRESS AZ-06: THE LIBERAL/PROGRESSIVE OUTSIDER WHO FOUGHT AND BEAT THE ARIZONA GREEN PARTY BOSSES TO STAY ON THE BALLOT

2010-09-11T17:37:00.000-07:00

Now that I'm indisputably going to be on the November ballot as the Green Party candidate for Congress in Arizona's Sixth Congressional District, I've added a new description to this campaign website, "the liberal/progressive outsider who fought and beat the Arizona Green Party bosses to stay on the ballot."

And to those who keep asking if I was "recruited" by Steve May, the answer's a definite no. I'm twenty years older than Steve and was gay in the '60s before he was even born.

Stop Jan Brewer before it's too late! "28 Days Later" (in Arizona) Parody

2010-09-10T17:15:00.000-07:00

To prevent "28 Days Later in Arizona," please make sure you vote for the great Democratic candidate for Governor, Terry Goddard. I certainly will.

Thoughts on Rosh Hashona, Eid al-Fitr and 9/11 from Green Party AZ-06 Congressional Candidate Richard Grayson

2010-09-10T13:12:00.000-07:00

I'm celebrating Rosh Hashona again today by having to read in The East Valley Tribune about my alleged Nazi sympathies due to lies and mischaracterizations of me by Arizona Green Party attorneys in federal court yesterday. I would like to wish all Muslims a wonderful Eid al-Fitr as well. L'shanah tovah! Eid mubarak!

Nobody is currently sure what will happen tomorrow, the ninth anniversary of 9/11 - which I thought a lot about yesterday - in Gainesville, Florida, where I lived for six years from 1991 to 1997 as a law student and staff attorney in social policy at the University of Florida College of Law and as a teacher at Santa Fe Community College - and where a hateful pastor is planning a book burning redolent of the repulsive Nazis.

While in Gainesville, I got involved in 1994 working against anti-gay referenda and in support of gay rights. I later served on the board of directors of the North Central Florida Human Rights Council alongside many people, including my friend Craig Lowe, currently doing a great job as Mayor of Gainesville.

In the light of the current controversy, I'd like to reprint part of Craig's letter to the people of Gainesville, a wonderful city I will always love:

As I have stated on numerous occasions, I condemn the offensive behavior that has been directedat our Muslim neighbors and those of the Islamic faith worldwide. The Dove World OutreachCenter is a tiny fringe group and an embarrassment to our community. They are opposed to Gainesville’s true character.

We may be of different religions, sexual orientations, races, genders, national origins or ages, butall are welcome here in our efforts to build a better community both locally and globally. There will be those who seek to create anger instead of reason, but Gainesville values a sense of community that is inclusive rather than exclusive and thrives on the contributions of people ofgood will from a myriad of backgrounds.

I hope that every citizen of our city will join me in continuing to assert our community’s truecharacter.

Arizona Green Party Candidate for Congress in Sixth Congressional District Richard Grayson Reaffirms His Longtime Support for Party's Ten Key Values

2010-09-09T20:24:00.000-07:00

I don't know how many times I have to keep repeating this to counter the lies put forward in newspapers, blogs, and in courtrooms, but I, Richard Grayson, the official candidate of the Green Party in Arizona's Sixth Congressional District, hereby reaffirm my unqualified support for and endorsement of the Arizona Green Party's Ten Key Values:

GRASSROOTS DEMOCRACY

Every human being deserves a say in the decisions that affect their lives and not be subject to the will of another. Therefore, we will work to increase public participation at every level of government and to ensure that our public representatives are fully accountable to the people who elect them. We will also work to create new types of political organizations which expand the process of participatory democracy by directly including citizens in the decision-making process.

SOCIAL JUSTICE AND EQUAL OPPORTUNITY

All persons should have the rights and opportunity to benefit equally from the resources afforded us by society and the environment. We must consciously confront in ourselves, our organizations, and society at large, barriers such as racism and class oppression, sexism and homophobia, ageism and disability, which act to deny fair treatment and equal justice under the law.

ECOLOGICAL WISDOM

Human societies must operate with the understanding that we are part of nature, not separate from nature. We must maintain an ecological balance and live within the ecological and resource limits of our communities and our planet. We support a sustainable society which utilizes resources in such a way that future generations will benefit and not suffer from the practices of our generation. To this end we must practice agriculture which replenishes the soil; move to an energy efficient economy; and live in ways that respect the integrity of natural systems.

NON-VIOLENCE

It is essential that we develop effective alternatives to society’s current patterns of violence. We will work to demilitarize, and eliminate weapons of mass destruction, without being naive about the intentions of other governments. We recognize the need for self-defense and the defense of others who are in helpless situations. We promote non-violent methods to oppose practices and policies with which we disagree, and will guide our actions toward lasting personal, community and global peace.

DECENTRALIZATION

Centralization of wealth and power contributes to social and economic injustice, environmental destruction, and militarization. Therefore, we support a restructuring of social, political and economic institutions away from a system which is controlled by and mostly benefits the powerful few, to a democratic, less bureaucratic system. Decision-making should, as much as possible, remain at the individual and local level, while assuring that civil rights are protected for all citizens.

COMMUNITY-BASED ECONOMICS AND ECONOMIC JUSTICE

We recognize it is essential to create a vibrant and sustainable economic system, one that can create jobs and provide a decent standard of living for all people while maintaining a healthy ecological balance. A successful economic system will offer meaningful work with dignity, while paying a “living wage” which reflects the real value of a person’s work. Local communities must look to economic development that assures protection of the environment and workers’ rights; broad citizen participation in planning; and enhancement of our “quality of life.” We support independently owned and operated companies which are socially responsible, as well as co-operatives and public enterprises that distribute resources and control to more people through democratic participation.

FEMINISM AND GENDER EQUITY

We have inherited a social system based on male domination of politics and economics. We call for the replacement of the cultural ethics of domination and control with more cooperative ways of interacting that respect differences of opinion and gender. Human values such as equity between the sexes, interpersonal responsibility, and honesty must be developed with moral conscience. We should remember that the process that determines our decisions and actions is just as important as achieving the outcome we want.

RESPECT FOR DIVERSITY
We believe it is important to value cultural, ethnic, racial, sexual, religious and spiritual diversity, and to promote the development of respectful relationships across these lines. We believe that the many diverse elements of society should be reflected in our organizations and decision-making bodies, and we support the leadership of people who have been traditionally closed out of leadership roles. We acknowledge and encourage respect for other life forms than our own and the preservation of biodiversity.

PERSONAL AND GLOBAL RESPONSIBILITY

We encourage individuals to act to improve their personal well-being and, at the same time, to enhance ecological balance and social harmony. We seek to join with people and organizations around the world to foster peace, economic justice, and the health of the planet.

FUTURE FOCUS AND SUSTAINABILITY

Our actions and policies should be motivated by long-term goals. We seek to protect valuable natural resources, safely disposing of or “unmaking” all waste we create, while developing a sustainable economics that does not depend on continual expansion for survival. We must counterbalance the drive for short-term profits by assuring that economic development, new technologies, and fiscal policies are responsible to future generations who will inherit the results of our actions.

The Ten Key Values of the Green Party of the United States vary slightly, but I wholeheartedly endorse those as well. My positions on issues are informed by my unreserved support for these values. I am proud to advocate them in the November general election as a Congressional candidate of the Arizona Green Party.

It is too bad that the bosses of the party do not live up to these fine values. I'll try to do better than them at supporting the Ten Key Values.

Shonda!: On Rosh Hashona, Arizona Green Party Lawyer Misleads Court By Saying Jewish Congressional Candidate Richard Grayson Is A Nazi!

2010-09-09T20:00:00.001-07:00

Leonard Clark posted this as a comment on Ballot Access News (much thanks, Leonard; we will call you soon):

Richard, this is Leonard Clark. I agree with much of what you say. Today, the plaintiff’s lawyer tried to mis-lead the judge by stating in court to the effect that you weren’t a real Green because of a swastika posted on your site without telling the judge that this was posted to show not that you were a fascist but that you were saying Arizona was red and fascist! This was B.S. and I’m sorry that they misrepresented you.

This is especially upsetting to find out on a day when I've been to shul, on Rosh Hashona. To that shyster representing the Arizona Green Party bosses, this is for you:
Es zol dir farshporn fun fornt un fun hintn!

Breaking News: Judge Rules in Favor of Us Ballot-Qualified Arizona Green Party Candidates!

2010-09-09T19:36:00.000-07:00

The first report of the ruling:

Judge won't kick Green Party candidates off ballot

By JONATHAN J. COOPER
Associated Press Writer
© 2010 The Associated Press
Sept. 9, 2010, 9:31PM

PHOENIX — A federal judge has denied a request by the Arizona Green Party to kick a majority of the party's candidates off the November ballot.

U.S. District Judge David G. Campbell made the ruling late Thursday, hours after hearing arguments in the case.

AZ-03 Green Party Congressional Candidate Leonard Clark Describes Sickening Conduct by Arizona Green Party at Today's Federal Court Hearing

2010-09-09T18:10:00.000-07:00

Our fellow Green Party candidate for Congress in District 3, Leonard Clark - who was not named as a defendant in the flawed lawsuit by Arizona Green Party bosses against us and other outsider candidates - eloquently described the scene at today's hearing at the AZCentral website:

I have to tell you I felt sickened today by what I saw taking place in the federal court room in Phoenix, Arizona and no it wasn't the Tuna salad I had for lunch but instead it could have been "the rotten fish in Denmark" whose odor I was smelling wafting through the court room as the lawyers for the Green paty (of which I am a member) we're trying to subvert the rights in concert with the democrat party of the "Grandpa candidate, who has been in the news over the last month or so. I watched this hard working man harangued and insulted by the Green party lawyer over and over !
At the end of the hearing, I went up to Grandpa, the candidate and told him how much I disagreed with what the leadership of my party was doing and that in my opinion it was a subversion of his civil rights. Outside, I hugged Grandpa and told him: "Welcome to the Green party brother."
I have to say, that due to my being homeless in the past and having to work my a** off, I felt respect and sympathy for this older man called Grandpa and really infuriated at how his rights were being spat upon ! I was surprised to see Paul Charlton in court to represent him and I must say he did a good job showing what a despicable action our party leadership is taking in concert with the democrat party.

Folks, this is not the right message to be sending. We are a "Big Tent" party and should be welcoming and inclusive. In my opinion, this violates at least three tenets of our own party's ten key values: 1.) Grass Roots Democracy 2.) Decentralization and 3.) Social Justice and Equal Oppurtunity
For more information on these Ten Key Values and where our party stands please go to: azgp.org
I could also smell the stench of hypocricy coming from the lawyers for my Green party as I thought of how the Republicans stole the 2000 elections by judicial coup and how Gore tried to throw out the overseas ballots of my fellow American soldiers also in that 2000 contest.
Politics may be dirty but that doesn't mean we in the Green party have to constantly let the Republican and Democrat gangs make us copy their undemocratic subversion of votes and candidates who disagree with us and scare us !

I make this pledge to myself and to all of you now: If Grandpa is kicked off the ballot and therefore has his civil rights to vote and run for office arbitrarily taken away than I Leonard Clark, Arizona Endorsed candidate for the 3rd Congressional district will withdraw from this race because I will not stand by while one man is unfairly denied his civil rights by the democrat and leadership of the Green parties and I...am unfairly allowed to run as a write in for the Green Party of Arizona.
Leonard Clark
Arizona Endorsed Green party candidate Congressional district #3
9-9-10

We are very proud of our fellow Green Party congressional candidate, Leonard Clark - a real mensch.

Federal Judge to Rule on County Defendants' Motion to Dismiss Flawed Arizona Green Party Suit Against Qualified Candidates

2010-09-09T12:46:00.000-07:00

Very soon, Federal District Judge David G. Campbell will be ruling on a motion to dismiss in the case of Arizona Green Party v. Bennett, et al., in which we are defendants.

The motion has been filed by Maricopa, Greenlee, Mohave, Navajo, and Yuma Counties. It asks that the case be dismissed on grounds of laches.

This essentially means that the plaintiffs sat on their rights for far too long and filed this eleventh-hour suit at an unreasonably late time when the deadline for printing ballots is early tomorrow morning.

As the motion states, the Arizona Green Party knew by July 15 who had filed as write-in candidates for Green Party primary elections. Yet they did nothing.

In my case, as the Secretary of State's records show, I filed as a candidate for Arizona's Sixth Congressional District Green Party primary on May 28, 2010. I know that date well because it was my parents' 61st wedding anniversary. Yet the Arizona Green Party did nothing to challenge me.

In fact, they gave me access to their Yahoo Groups listserv of candidates and party documents; allowed me to vote at a party meeting on endorsement of other candidates; and interviewed me.

Yet their complaint filed with federal court lists me with ten other "sham" candidates and says we all registered with the party just a few days before filing, which they contradict in my case in another part of the document, though the complaint admits it doesn't actually know when I registered as a Green voter. In fact, all the other candidates' registration changes are listed as exhibits, but mine is curiously missing.

Anyway, back to the motion to dismiss. It goes on to say that the Arizona Green Party had notice of all they are alleging regarding the qualified (not "sham") candidates were by mid-July, but they did nothing. You can see that in that document I posted here back on August from Claudia Ellquist, one of the plaintiffs.

As the motion states, "Though the plaintiffs were well aware of these candidates before and up to the Primary Election, the Plaintiffs waited two weeks, till September 6, 2010, to file their Complaint. and motion for TRO [temporary restraining order], all on the eve of the General Election ballot. This delay will create significant problems for Maricopa County and the other counties if the Court orders deletion of these candidates from the General Election ballot.

Then it explains the difficulties, which some stupid people are oblivious to or ignorant of.

The motion says the complaint must be dismissed under the doctrine of laches, something every first-year law student learns. (And we've taught plenty.)

It quotes an Arizona Supreme Court case that says "a party's failure to diligently prosecute an election appeal may in future cases result in a dismissal for laches," then says:

This is one of those 'future cases.' See also McClung v. Bennett, 235 P.3d 1037, 1040 (Ariz. 2010) (Arizona 2010) (Arizona Supreme Court rules that dilatory conduct which unnecessarily accelerated litigation and jeopardized election officials' timely compliance with statutory deadlines, supported dismissal of the appeal)

Laches generally bars a claim when the delay is unreasonable and results in prejudice to the opposing party. . .

In this case, the Plaintiffs offer no justification for their delay. They had ample advance knowledge of the write-in status of the challenged candidates by at least mid-July, of their nominee status since August 24, 2010. However, they failed to file their Complaint for two weeks, a large and critical time period that will prejudice the Counties, given the printing deadlines and other statutorily mandated deadlines. . .

Further, the record reflects that while Plaintiffs have had many weeks to prepare, research, and perfect their lengthy Complaint and motion for TRO [our comment: not enough to catch the misstatements of facts or pure lies contained in it], the County defendants have been afforded less than two days (September 7 and 8) to review the Plaintiff's lengthy pleadings and the record, and to draft their Response - at the same time their clients are attempting to finalize the ballots on a timely basis. . .

Plaintiffs let these issues languish for weeks and months (as early as mid-July) before bringing it to the Court's attention. They should not be rewarded for their delay.

That was filed yesterday. Just this morning an answer to the Arizona Green Party complaint was filed by Laura Dean-Lytle, in her official capacity as Recorder for Pinal County, and Bryan Martyn, Pete Rios and David Snider, in their official capacity as members of the Board of Supervisors for Pinal County (hereinafter "Pinal County Defendants").

The Pinal County Defendants stated they were "without sufficient to form a belief as to the truthfulness" of most of the allegations, specifically including the allegations about my own party registration as a Pinal County Voter, and thus were denying the allegations.

Richard Grayson Certified as Nominee of Green Party in Arizona's Sixth Congressional District

2010-09-08T15:26:00.000-07:00

Thanks so much to Arizona Secretary of State and his legal staff, as well as to attorneys at the American Civil Liberties Union, for helping us in our quest to be officially recognized as the duly-elected nominee of the Green Party for the Sixth Congressional District of Arizona.

L'shanah tovah to everyone else who is celebrating the Jewish New Year.

Arizona Green Party Suing Some Write-In Candidates Who Won Primaries to Kick Them Off the Ballot While Trying to Keep Other Write-in Primary Winners

2010-09-08T02:33:00.001-07:00

In response to being sued by the Arizona Green Party, which I joined in 2008, I wrote the following comment on the fine blog Random Musings:

I would like to know how the AZGP distinguishes between two write-in candidates, both of whom won congressional primaries with a handful of votes.

According to the state canvass, Leonard Clark won the CD-3 primary with five write-in votes and I won the CD-6 primary with six write-in votes.

Yet I'm among the large number of defendants in the suit filed by the Arizona Green Party but Mr. Clark is not:

Arizona Green Party et al v. Bennett et al

Plaintiffs: Arizona Green Party and Claudia Ellquist

Defendants: Ken Bennett , LeNora Johnson, Jim Claw, R John Lee, Tom White, Jr., Ryan Blackman, Richard Grayson, Christopher Campbell, Anthony Goshorn, Matthew Shusta, Clint Clement, Andrew Blischak, Michelle Lochmann, Thomas Meadows, Theodore Gomez, Benjamin Pearcy, Christine Rhodes, Patrick Call, Ann English, Richard Searle, Candace Owens, Elizabeth Archuleta, Lena Fowler, Mandy Metzger, Matt Ryan, Carl Taylor, Sadie Dalton, Shirley Dawson, Tommie Martin, Michael Pastor, Wendy John, Chip Davis, Greg Ferguson, Russell McCloud, Kathryn Prochaska, Marco Reyes, Carol Springer, Robyn Stallworth-Pouquette, Lenore Stuart, Thomas Thurman, Ana Wayman-Trujillo, Shelly Baker, Fulton Brock, John Drum, David Gomez, Mark Herrington, Holly Irwin, Drew John, Andrew Kunasek, Richard Lunt, Berta Manuz, James Palmer, Sandy Pierce, Helen Purcell, Hector Ruedas, Don Stapley, Mary Rose Wilcox, Max Wilson, Jerry Brownlow, J R DeSpain, Buster Johnson, Laurette Justman, Carol Meier, Jonathan Nez, Tom Sockwell, David Tenney, Jesse Thompson, Gary Watson, Sharon Bronson, Raymond Carroll, Ann Day, Laura Dean-Lytle, Richard Elias, F Ann Rodriguez, Ramon Valadez, Bryan Martyn, Pete Rios, Suzanne Sainz, David Snider, John Maynard, Jr., Rudy Molera and Manuel Ruiz

I fail to see how Mr. Clark and I are situated differently except that after an August 22 AZGP meeting - at which I was asked to vote on the endorsement of other candidates, including Mr. Clark, whom I supported - Mr. Clark was "endorsed" by the party but I was not.

If the AZGP were trying to kick off the ballot [by maintaining the write-in statute treating it differently from other parties violates equal protection] all the write-in candidates, it would be one thing, but the party is attempting to keep on the ballot write-in candidates they "endorsed."

This itself seems to violate equal protection. Parties cannot pick and choose which of their primary winners they will allow on the ballot, right?

Richard Grayson, Registered Member of Arizona Green Party Since 2008, Wins Green Primary for Congress, Then Sued for Being "Sham" Candidate

2010-09-07T14:48:00.000-07:00

Two apparent developments in this electoral comedy caused by the lack of due diligence on the part of the Arizona Green Party, in which I have been a registered voter in Apache Junction, Pinal County, since 2008 (longer than some of the candidates "endorsed" by the party):

(1) I've apparently "won" the primary for the Sixth Congressional District Green nomination with six write-in votes (more than any other congressional or legislative Green write-in candidate, including those "endorsed" by the Arizona Green Party).

See the official state canvass of the primary, released a few hours ago.

(2) I am apparently being targeted in an Arizona Green Party lawsuit against "sham" Green party candidates along with those who registered just before filing their write-in candidacies in July. (See this Arizona Republic article by Mary Jo Pitzl.)

This despite my two-year membership in the Arizona Green Party, my public adherence to the Green Party Ten Key Values, and the Arizona Green Party's vetting me and interviewing me at a party meeting over a phone conference on Sunday, August 22 (at which time they allowed me to vote on the endorsement of other candidates) and the AZGP's statement the following day that, unlike in the cases of the other candidates, they were not "opposing" me, just "not endorsing" me and they would reconsider endorsing me pending the results of the primary.

I was called at my house and told a subpoena is on its way. I still represent the Green Party's values and platforms, whatever anyone else thinks.

Make of this what you will. Stay tuned for more.

New York Times Covers Arizona Green Party Write-In Candidates

2010-09-07T03:24:00.000-07:00

As we wait for today's canvass of the primary election two weeks ago to see if we made the November ballot as the Green Party candidate in Arizona's Sixth Congressional District, we felt a moment of pride when we picked up the New York Times from our stoop early this morning and saw that the national newspaper of record is covering us Arizona Green Party write-in candidates:

Republican Runs Street People on Green Ticket

By Marc Lacey

TEMPE, Ariz. — Benjamin Pearcy, a candidate for statewide office in Arizona, lists his campaign office as a Starbucks. The small business he refers to in his campaign statement is him strumming his guitar on the street. The internal debate he is having in advance of his coming televised debate is whether he ought to gel his hair into his trademark faux Mohawk.

[We say go with the faux, Benjamin!]

Mr. Pearcy, 20, is running for a seat on the Arizona Corporation Commission, which oversees public utilities, railroad safety and securities regulation. Although Mr. Pearcy says he is taking his first run for public office seriously, the political establishment here views him as nothing more than a political dirty trick.

Mr. Pearcy and other drifters and homeless people were recruited onto the Green Party ballot by a Republican political operative who freely admits that their candidacies may siphon some support from the Democrats. Arizona’s Democratic Party has filed a formal complaint with local, state and federal prosecutors in an effort to have the candidates removed from the ballot, and the Green Party has urged its supporters to steer clear of the rogue candidates.

[Note: We are not homeless and in fact have more than one home: a ranch house in Apache Junction and a townhouse in fashionable Williamsburg, Brooklyn, from where we are writing this.]

“These are people who are not serious and who were recruited as part of a cynical manipulation of the process,” said Paul Eckstein, a lawyer representing the Democrats. “They don’t know Green from red.”

[We bet if you test them trying to walk across Mill Avenue, it will be readily apparent that this last charge is false.]

But Steve May, the Republican operative who signed up some of the candidates along Mill Avenue, a bohemian commercial strip next to Arizona State University, insists that a real political movement has been stirred up that has nothing to do with subterfuge.

“Did I recruit candidates? Yes,” said Mr. May, who is himself a candidate for the State Legislature, on the Republican ticket.

[Steve, the one thing gay people like you and me have never done is recruit, but your Republican buddies are the ones that keep charging this.]

“Are they fake candidates? No way.”

To make his point, Mr. May went by Starbucks, the gathering spot of the Mill Rats, as the frequenters of Mill Avenue are known.

“Are you fake, Benjamin?” he yelled out to Mr. Pearcy, who cried out “No,” with an expletive attached.

“Are you fake, Thomas?” Mr. May shouted in the direction of Thomas Meadows, 27, a tarot card reader with less than a dollar to his name who is running for state treasurer. He similarly disagreed.

“Are you fake, Grandpa?” he said to Anthony Goshorn, 53, a candidate for the State Senate whose bushy white beard and paternal manner have earned him that nickname on the streets. “I’m real,” he replied.

[He proved his point to our satisfaction. These are not fictional characters. Neither are we, though we've created many.]

Gathered around was a motley crew of people who were down on their luck, including a one-armed pregnant woman named Roxie whom Mr. May befriended sometime back and who introduced him to the rest.

The Democratic Party is fuming over Mr. May’s tactics and those of at least two other Republicans who helped recruit candidates to the Green Party, which does not have the resources to put candidates on ballots around the state and thus creates the opportunity for write-in contenders like the Mill Rats to easily win primaries and get their names on the ballot for November. Complaints about spurious candidates have cropped up often before, though never involving an entire roster of candidates drawn from a group of street people.

[Disclaimer: our candidacy is entirely unspurious. But for some reason, we are just as not endorsed by the fiasco-creating Arizona Green Party poohbahs as these guys. Maybe it's that we have a sense of Yuma?]

“It’s unbelievable. It’s not right. It’s deceitful,” said Jackie Thrasher, a former Democratic legislator in northwest Phoenix who lost re-election in 2008 after a Green Party candidate with possible links to the Republicans joined the race. “If these candidates were interested in the democratic process, they should connect with the party they are interested in. What’s happening here just doesn’t wash. It doesn’t pass the smell test.”

Arizona, where Democrats, Republicans and independents each represent about a third of the populace, is known for its political hardball. Challenging nominating petitions is common. Election-related lawsuits are filed with regularity. This is not the first election in which a party has accused another of putting forth candidates to hoodwink voters.

[There was one in the Republican primary, too. By the name of McCain, we think.]

Besides the Mill Rat candidates, the Democrats smell a rat in other races, including one in which a roommate of a Republican legislator’s daughter ran as a Green Party candidate in a competitive contest for the State Senate. They cite a variety of state and federal election laws that the Republicans may have violated in putting forward “sham” candidates for the Green Party.

The view, though, is different along Mill Avenue, where the first-time candidates appear to have been emboldened by the exercise, as Mr. Pearcy’s street corner campaign speech last Thursday night attests. Dressed up spiffily, he described himself as the illegitimate son of a stripper who had had run-ins with the law and a tough childhood but who had pulled his life together.

“I’ve been homeless,” he said, his eyes darting back and forth. “I got a place. Anyone can do it. We’re all good enough.”

[The first of the Ten Key Values of the Arizona Green Party is Grassroots Democracy, which begins, "Every human being deserves a say in the decisions that affect their lives and not be subject to the will of another."]

There was nodding all around, more than when he went into his pitch to solve the budget deficit through the installation of solar panels. As Mr. Pearcy went on, Mr. May whispered “focus, focus, focus” into his ear to get him back on track and help prepare him for a debate in early October, which will be televised across the state.

Reading tarot cards has taught Mr. Meadows, who is known for his purple and green jester hat, to talk a good game. “This is not the land of the free,” he told the loungers on the sidewalk, pitching himself for treasurer. “It’s the land of what’s for sale.”

Grandpa, widely known in the area through the pedicab he drives for hire, is against higher taxes and for God in the classroom. The other night, he was supposed to debate his Democratic and Republican rivals in the race but after seeing only the Democrat on stage, he decided to watch from the back. “I got a bad vibe,” he said.

[We got the same bad vibe watching Gov. Jan Brewer debate.]

Mr. May, who served as a Republican legislator from 1998 to 2002, said, “Even if I wanted to control these guys, they’re uncontrollable.”

[Steve strikes us as more into submission than dominance, anyway.]

We are proud to be a member of the Arizona Green Party, providing lots of laughs and chuckles to all Americans in an otherwise bleak election year.

Why the Failed Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan Must Lead to an End to Our State of Permanent War

2010-09-05T07:22:00.001-07:00

One of the Ten Key Values of the Green Party is nonviolence, which says in part, "We will work to demilitarize..." In the wake of the failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a state of perpetual war that has lasted my entire lifetime. Last fall I taught a course in Cold War Literature at City College of New York and while our last book was from the 1970s and the Cold War ended in 1989, not much really changed and within two years we were back in a full-scale war in Iraq, the first Gulf War.

I have no illusions that if I make the ballot, I have any chance of being elected to Congress. Even in the most progressive district, no Green Party candidate has ever come close to getting elected (and only one Green has even ever been elected to a state legislature). Indeed, there hasn't been a U.S. House member from a third party since my Fort Lauderdale neighbor and fellow adjunct professor at Nova Southeastern University, Leo Isacson, won a special election in the Bronx in 1948 on the American Labor Party ticket. (Vito Marcantanio also was an ALP congressman earlier from East Harlem.)

In his year in office, Leo Isacson tried to stop the militarization of the United States: he opposed the Marshall Plan and the peacetime draft and was one of three Congressmen to oppose legislation to increase the size of the Air Force. Perhaps he was extreme, but we do need to stop being the giantic fortress America national security state championed by hawks from Curtis LeMay to Dick Cheney.

Writing in his column in the New York Times today, Frank Rich notes, speaking of President Obama's tone-deaf Oval Office speech on Iraq (Freudian slip: I started to type "Vietnam"):

Of all the commentators on the debacle, few speak with more eloquence or credibility than Andrew Bacevich, a professor of history and international relations at Boston University who as a West Point-trained officer served in Vietnam and the first gulf war and whose son, also an Army officer, was killed in Iraq in 2007. Writing in The New Republic after Obama’s speech, he decimated many of the war’s lingering myths, starting with the fallacy, reignited by the hawks taking a preposterous victory lap last week, that “the surge” did anything other than stanch the bleeding from the catastrophic American blundering that preceded it. As Bacevich concluded: “The surge, now remembered as an epic feat of arms, functions chiefly as a smokescreen, obscuring a vast panorama of recklessness, miscalculation and waste that politicians, generals, and sundry warmongers are keen to forget.”

Bacevich also wrote that “common decency demands that we reflect on all that has occurred in bringing us to this moment.” Americans’ common future demands it too. The war’s corrosive effect on the home front is no less egregious than its undermining of our image and national security interests abroad. As the Pentagon rebrands Operation Iraqi Freedom as Operation New Dawn — a “name suggesting a skin cream or dishwashing liquid,” Bacevich aptly writes — the whitewashing of our recent history is well under way. The price will be to keep repeating it.

We can’t afford to forget now that the single biggest legacy of the Iraq war at home was to codify the illusion that Americans can have it all at no cost. We willed ourselves to believe Paul Wolfowitz when he made the absurd prediction that Iraq’s oil wealth would foot America’s post-invasion bills. We were delighted to accept tax cuts, borrow other countries’ money, and run up the federal deficit long after the lure of a self-financing war was unmasked as a hoax. The cultural synergy between the heedless irresponsibility we practiced in Iraq and our economic collapse at home could not be more naked. The housing bubble, inflated by no-money-down mortgage holders on Main Street and high-risk gamblers on Wall Street, was fueled by the same greedy disregard for the laws of fiscal gravity that governed the fight-now-pay-later war.

Our attitude toward the war’s human cost was no less cavalier. We were all too content to let a volunteer army fight our battles out of sight and out of mind, on a fictional pretext yoked to a military strategy premised on a cakewalk. For too long we looked the other way as the coffins arrived in Dover off camera in the shroud of night, as the maimed endured inhumane treatment in military hospitals at home, and as the Iraqi refugees who aided Operation Iraqi Freedom at their own peril were denied the freedom to seek a safe haven in our country.

Both President Obama and Glenn Beck, in his “Restoring Honor” rally in Washington last weekend, were fulsome in their praise of the troops, as well they should have been. But the disconnect between the civilian public, including the war’s die-hard advocates on the right, and those doing the fighting remains as large today as ever. As one Iraq war vet e-mailed to me after hearing Beck’s patriotic sermons: “What does gathering in D.C. do for the troops?” He was appalled at the self-regard of those who thought their jingoistic rally would help returning troops abandoned by the military’s “criminally poor mental health care” or save any soldier who was “two seconds away from getting his leg blown off by an I.E.D.”

The other American casualties of Iraq include the credibility of both political parties, neither of which strenuously questioned the rush to war and both of which are still haunted by that failure, and of the news media, which barely challenged the White House’s propaganda about Saddam’s imminent mushroom clouds. Many pundits, quite a few of them liberals, stoked the war fever as well.

It's important to reiterate that both Democrats and Republicans were wrong about the war. The Green Party was not.

The same theme of two-party delusion is discussed in a review of Bacevich's book Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War in today's New York Times Book Review. An excerpt from the review by Gary J. Bass:

From Harry S. Truman’s presidency to today, Bacevich argues, Americans have trumpeted the credo that they alone must “lead, save, liberate and ultimately transform the world.” That crusading mission is implemented by what Bacevich caustically calls “the sacred trinity”: “U.S. military power, the Pentagon’s global footprint and an American penchant for intervention.” This threatening posture might have made some sense in 1945, he says, but it is catastrophic today. It relegates America to “a condition of permanent national security crisis.”

Bacevich has two main targets in his sights. The first are the commissars of the national security establishment, who perpetuate these “Washington rules” of global dominance. By Washington, he means not just the federal government, but also a host of satraps who gain power, cash or prestige from this perpetual state of emergency: defense contractors, corporations, big banks, interest groups, think tanks, universities, television networks and The New York Times. He complains that an unthinking Washington consensus on global belligerence is just as strong among mainstream Democrats as among mainstream Republicans. Those who step outside this monolithic view, like Dennis Kucinich or Ron Paul, are quickly dismissed as crackpots, Bacevich says. This leaves no serious checks or balances against the overweening national security state. [emphasis ours]

Bacevich’s second target is the sleepwalking American public. He says that they notice foreign policy only in the depths of a disaster that, like Vietnam or Iraq, is too colossal to ignore. As he puts it, “The citizens of the United States have essentially forfeited any capacity to ask first-order questions about the fundamentals of national security policy.”

Bacevich is singularly withering on American public willingness to ignore those who do their fighting for them. He warns of “the evisceration of civic culture that results when a small praetorian guard shoulders the burden of waging perpetual war, while the great majority of citizens purport to revere its members, even as they ignore or profit from their service.” Here he has a particular right to be heard: on May 13, 2007, his son Andrew J. Bacevich Jr., an Army first lieutenant, was killed on combat patrol in Iraq. Bacevich does not discuss his tragic loss here, but wrote devastatingly about it at the time in The Washington Post: “Memorial Day orators will say that a G.I.’s life is priceless. Don’t believe it. I know what value the U.S. government assigns to a soldier’s life: I’ve been handed the check.”

Bacevich is less interested in foreign policy here (he offers only cursory remarks about the objectives and capabilities of countries like China, Russia, North Korea and Iran) than in the way he thinks militarism has corrupted America. In his acid account of the inexorable growth of the national security state, he emphasizes not presidents, who come and go, but the architects of the system that envelops them: Allen W. Dulles, who built up the C.I.A., and Curtis E. LeMay, who did the same for the Strategic Air Command. Both of them, Bacevich says, would get memorials on the Mall in Washington if we were honest about how the capital really works.

The mandarins thrived under John F. Kennedy, whose administration “was fixating on Fidel Castro with the same feverish intensity as the Bush administration exactly 40 years later was to fixate on Saddam Hussein — and with as little strategic logic.” The Washington consensualists were thrown badly off balance by defeat in Vietnam but, Bacevich says, soon regained their stride under Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton — setting the stage for George W. Bush. Barack Obama campaigned on change and getting out of Iraq, but when it comes to the war in Afghanistan or military budgets, he is, Bacevich insists, just another cat’s-paw for the Washington establishment: “Obama would not challenge the tradition that Curtis LeMay and Allen Dulles had done so much to erect.”

Bacevich sometimes overdoes the high dudgeon. He writes, “The folly and hubris of the policy makers who heedlessly thrust the nation into an ill-defined and open-ended ‘global war on terror’ without the foggiest notion of what victory would look like, how it would be won and what it might cost approached standards hitherto achieved only by slightly mad German warlords.” Which slightly mad German warlords exactly? Bacevich, an erudite historian, could mean some princelings or perhaps Kaiser Wilhelm II, but the standard reading will be Hitler.

And he underplays some of the ways in which Americans have resisted militarism. The all-volunteer force, for all its deep inequities, is a testament to American horror at conscription. He never mentions Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the great New York senator who fought government secrecy and quixotically tried to abolish the C.I.A. after the end of the cold war. Although Bacevich admires Dwight D. Eisenhower for his farewell address warning against the forces of the “military-industrial complex,” he slams Eisenhower for enabling those same forces as president. Yet the political scientist Aaron L. Friedberg and other scholars credit Eisenhower for resisting demands for huge boosts in defense spending.

Bacevich, in his own populist way, sees himself as updating a tradition — from George Washington and John Quincy Adams to J. William Fulbright and Martin Luther King Jr. — that calls on America to exemplify freedom but not actively to spread it. It isn’t every American’s tradition (and it offers pretty cold comfort to Poles, Rwandans and Congolese), but it’s one that’s necessary to keep the country from going off the rails. As foreign policy debates in the run-up to the November elections degenerate into Muslim-bashing bombast, the country is lucky to have a fierce, smart peacemonger like Bacevich.

If elected to Congress (I know: in my dreams or your nightmares), I'd try to be that kind of fierce, smart peacemonger.

Luckily, with his recent vote against further funding of the Afghanistan War, Rep. Jeff Flake - who unquestionably will win re-election, no matter what I or the Democratic or Libertarian candidates do - at least seems to be one of the few Republicans who can see beyond the bipartisan militarism.

On this issue, as on most, we need new Washington rules.

Richard Grayson Green Party AZ-06 Campaign for Congress Endorsed by Pinal County Greens

2010-09-04T07:12:00.000-07:00

As we wait to hear if we have made the November ballot, we are happy to accept the support of the Pinal County Greens, who today endorsed our candidacy for Congress against Rep. Jeff Flake in Arizona's Sixth Congressional District. We will always stand by the Ten Key Values of the Arizona Green Party and we will try to do our best to live up to the Pinal County Greens' faith in our campaign.

How to Fix Our Jobs Crisis and Why Jeff Flake, Hopelessly Drunk on Dime-Store Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand, Will Do Nothing to Help You

2010-09-03T03:34:00.000-07:00

Rep. Jeff Flake is a hopeless drunk.

No, not on alcohol. Like us, we assume he's a teetotaler. What he's been drunk on all his adult life is dime-store Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand. Now like us, Friedman and Rand were Jews who didn't believe in God, so we admire their intelligence. But they need to be taken along with a heavy dose of critical thinking and skepticism. They got a lot of things wrong.

That said, since we're teetering on the verge of 1990s Japanese-style deflation, we hope Jeff Flake remembers Milton Friedman's cure for that: a helicopter drop of money over our citizens. That means the government has to spend some money.

But Jeff Flake forgets that part of Friedman because, well, he's just a fanatic far to the right of Friedman. He believes government can do nothing, nothing, nothing. That's why he wants to be elected to his fifth term in Congress (after getting elected promising to term-limit himself): he's not through doing nothing.

Oh, we forgot about Flake's cutting taxes for very, very rich people.

Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, in an op-ed in today's New York Times, "How to End the Great Recession," explains how we got here and some possible ways out (emphasis ours):

This promises to be the worst Labor Day in the memory of most Americans. Organized labor is down to about 7 percent of the private work force. Members of non-organized labor — most of the rest of us — are unemployed, underemployed or underwater. Friday’s jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics will almost surely show fewer new jobs created in August than the 125,000 needed just to keep up with growth of the potential work force.

The national economy isn’t escaping the gravitational pull of the Great Recession. None of the standard booster rockets are working: near-zero short-term interest rates from the Fed, almost record-low borrowing costs in the bond market, a giant stimulus package and tax credits for small businesses that hire the long-term unemployed have all failed to do enough.

That’s because the real problem has to do with the structure of the economy, not the business cycle. No booster rocket can work unless consumers are able, at some point, to keep the economy moving on their own. But consumers no longer have the purchasing power to buy the goods and services they produce as workers; for some time now, their means haven’t kept up with what the growing economy could and should have been able to provide them.

This crisis began decades ago when a new wave of technology — things like satellite communications, container ships, computers and eventually the Internet — made it cheaper for American employers to use low-wage labor abroad or labor-replacing software here at home than to continue paying the typical worker a middle-class wage. Even though the American economy kept growing, hourly wages flattened. The median male worker earns less today, adjusted for inflation, than he did 30 years ago.

But for years American families kept spending as if their incomes were keeping pace with overall economic growth. And their spending fueled continued growth. How did families manage this trick? First, women streamed into the paid work force. By the late 1990s, more than 60 percent of mothers with young children worked outside the home (in 1966, only 24 percent did).

Second, everyone put in more hours. What families didn’t receive in wage increases they made up for in work increases. By the mid-2000s, the typical male worker was putting in roughly 100 hours more each year than two decades before, and the typical female worker about 200 hours more.

When American families couldn’t squeeze any more income out of these two coping mechanisms, they embarked on a third: going ever deeper into debt. This seemed painless — as long as home prices were soaring. From 2002 to 2007, American households extracted $2.3 trillion from their homes.

Eventually, of course, the debt bubble burst — and with it, the last coping mechanism. Now we’re left to deal with the underlying problem that we’ve avoided for decades. Even if nearly everyone was employed, the vast middle class still wouldn’t have enough money to buy what the economy is capable of producing.

Where have all the economic gains gone? Mostly to the top. The economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty examined tax returns from 1913 to 2008. They discovered an interesting pattern. In the late 1970s, the richest 1 percent of American families took in about 9 percent of the nation’s total income; by 2007, the top 1 percent took in 23.5 percent of total income.

It’s no coincidence that the last time income was this concentrated was in 1928. I do not mean to suggest that such astonishing consolidations of income at the top directly cause sharp economic declines. The connection is more subtle.

The rich spend a much smaller proportion of their incomes than the rest of us. So when they get a disproportionate share of total income, the economy is robbed of the demand it needs to keep growing and creating jobs.

What’s more, the rich don’t necessarily invest their earnings and savings in the American economy; they send them anywhere around the globe where they’ll summon the highest returns — sometimes that’s here, but often it’s the Cayman Islands, China or elsewhere. The rich also put their money into assets most likely to attract other big investors (commodities, stocks, dot-coms or real estate), which can become wildly inflated as a result.

Meanwhile, as the economy grows, the vast majority in the middle naturally want to live better. Their consequent spending fuels continued growth and creates enough jobs for almost everyone, at least for a time. But because this situation can’t be sustained, at some point — 1929 and 2008 offer ready examples — the bill comes due.

This time around, policymakers had knowledge their counterparts didn’t have in 1929; they knew they could avoid immediate financial calamity by flooding the economy with money. But, paradoxically, averting another Great Depression-like calamity removed political pressure for more fundamental reform. We’re left instead with a long and seemingly endless Great Jobs Recession.

THE Great Depression and its aftermath demonstrate that there is only one way back to full recovery: through more widely shared prosperity. In the 1930s, the American economy was completely restructured. New Deal measures — Social Security, a 40-hour work week with time-and-a-half overtime, unemployment insurance, the right to form unions and bargain collectively, the minimum wage — leveled the playing field.

In the decades after World War II, legislation like the G.I. Bill, a vast expansion of public higher education and civil rights and voting rights laws further reduced economic inequality. Much of this was paid for with a 70 percent to 90 percent marginal income tax on the highest incomes. And as America’s middle class shared more of the economy’s gains, it was able to buy more of the goods and services the economy could provide. The result: rapid growth and more jobs.

By contrast, little has been done since 2008 to widen the circle of prosperity. Health-care reform is an important step forward but it’s not nearly enough.

What else could be done to raise wages and thereby spur the economy? We might consider, for example, extending the earned income tax credit all the way up through the middle class, and paying for it with a tax on carbon. Or exempting the first $20,000 of income from payroll taxes and paying for it with a payroll tax on incomes over $250,000.

In the longer term, Americans must be better prepared to succeed in the global, high-tech economy. Early childhood education should be more widely available, paid for by a small 0.5 percent fee on all financial transactions. Public universities should be free; in return, graduates would then be required to pay back 10 percent of their first 10 years of full-time income.

Another step: workers who lose their jobs and have to settle for positions that pay less could qualify for “earnings insurance” that would pay half the salary difference for two years; such a program would probably prove less expensive than extended unemployment benefits. These measures would not enlarge the budget deficit because they would be paid for. In fact, such moves would help reduce the long-term deficits by getting more Americans back to work and the economy growing again.

Policies that generate more widely shared prosperity lead to stronger and more sustainable economic growth — and that’s good for everyone. The rich are better off with a smaller percentage of a fast-growing economy than a larger share of an economy that’s barely moving. That’s the Labor Day lesson we learned decades ago; until we remember it again, we’ll be stuck in the Great Recession.

Jeff Flake has already said he won't do a thing to help you if your family is struggling economically.

But you live in the East Valley and are an asshole. That's why you and most of your moronic neighbors will vote to re-elect him. You and your congressman deserve each other.

Richard Grayson Green Party AZ-06 Campaign for Congress Endorsed by Arizona Chartreuse Party

2010-09-02T03:35:00.000-07:00

While we're waiting to hear if we made the November ballot as the Green Party candidate in Arizona's Sixth Congressional District, we're proud to accept the endorsement of the progressive Arizona Chartreuse Party. We will do our best to live up their endorsement.

Why the Right Kind of Tax Cut Can Provide the Economic Stimulus We Need

2010-09-01T09:12:00.000-07:00

It's becoming clear that if present trends continue, Republicans will not only capture more than fifty House seats to gain a majority in that chamber, but mostly likely win the ten Senate seats needed to gain a majority in both houses of Congress.

That will lead to even more paralysis to combat the Great Recession (for many a Depression) than we currently have. It's imperative, given the political indicators and the economic ones that we get a huge second stimulus ASAP. Ben Bernanke and the Fed can't do enough on their own at this point, even if they try their hardest (which they probably won't.

In today's New York Times, David Leonhardt discusses the kind of tax cuts that would (and wouldn't) provide a boost to the economy. We agree and excerpt his column here (highlighting ours):

The great historical lesson of financial crises is that governments are usually not aggressive enough in responding. That was Japan’s mistake in 1990s, Herbert Hoover’s in the early 1930s and even Franklin Roosevelt’s in the mid-1930s.

In 2008 and 2009, political leaders looked as if they had learned this lesson. In 2010, they seem to have forgotten it.

Sometime in the next four months, Congress will have to decide what to do about Mr. Bush’s original tax cuts, because they are set to expire Dec. 31. Most Democrats favor extending the cuts for households making less than $250,000 a year. Republicans want to make all the cuts permanent, including those for households making more than $250,000.

Republicans argue that a permanent cut in tax rates is the best form of stimulus. Allowing any of the Bush cuts to expire, John Boehner, the top House Republican, said in a speech last week laying out the party’s economic agenda, is “a recipe for disaster.”

As theories go, this isn’t a bad one. You can certainly imagine how a tax increase on the affluent could hurt the economy or how a tax cut for them would lift growth. Theories aside, though, consider what has actually happened in the last three decades.

Mr. Bush signed his original tax cut in June 2001, when the economy had been losing jobs for four months. It then shed jobs for two more years. In the decade that followed the tax cut, economic growth was slower than in any decade since World War II.

If the goal is short-term stimulus, even Ronald Reagan’s much-lauded 1981 tax cut doesn’t appear to have worked. After he signed it, the economy lost jobs for 16 straight months. It didn’t start gaining jobs until after he had raised taxes, to reduce the deficit, in late 1982.

What explains this pattern? Tax rates matter, but people don’t make most decisions based primarily on their marginal tax rates. Mr. Bush’s and Mr. Reagan’s tax cuts were just not powerful enough to overcome the economic headwinds at the time.

Consumers and executives didn’t rush out to spend more money in part because they understood their tax rate would still be lower months or years later. That the Reagan and Bush tax cuts went disproportionately to high-income households, which save more of their income, did not help, either.

In fact, simply sending rebate checks to most households seems to have more punch. . . consumer spending bounced back in both the second quarter of 2008 (temporarily) and the third quarter of 2009. Those happen to be the quarters when the Treasury Department finished sending the one-time cuts from Bush and Obama.

Based partly on this history, Moody’s Analytics estimates that a new rebate would have about three times as large an effect on growth next year as would making all the 2001 tax cuts permanent.

Yet a rebate still isn’t the best solution, according to the Moody’s analysis or, for that matter, common sense. Some households will surely put their rebate into a savings account or use it to pay down debt.

That is why the ideal solution tries to leverage government dollars with private dollars. The cash-for-clunkers program did precisely this last year, causing a jump in vehicle sales. So did a 2009 tax break for corporate investment, leading to an end-of-year spike in spending.

The tension with such tax cuts is between targeting and simplicity. Targeted ones can avoid showering too much money on households and businesses that were going to spend anyway.

One possibility is an expanded tax credit for new clean energy projects, which is favored by the White House and by at least two Republican senators, Orrin Hatch and Richard Lugar. Another is an expansion of the tax credit for businesses that increase their work force, like the one sponsored by Mr. Hatch and Charles Schumer, the New York Democrat. This time, though, it would not have to be restricted to companies hiring the long-term unemployed.

The disadvantage of these programs is that people have to figure out if they’re eligible and then fill out forms. A simpler approach — but a less targeted one — would temporarily cut the payroll tax, which finances Social Security and Medicare and is paid by both businesses and workers. By suspending the part that applies to businesses for a few months, Washington could lower the cost of keeping or hiring workers.

Either way, a couple of tax cuts along these lines could make good additions to a bill extending the Bush tax cuts for households making less than $250,000 a year. Economically, the extra cuts would have a bigger impact than an extension of all the Bush cuts. Politically, this kind of bill would force opponents to explain why they instead wanted smaller tax cuts for middle-class families and businesses and a bigger one for the affluent.

Of course, no temporary tax cut will solve the economy’s long-run problems. That’s a harder project, one that involves upgrading the skills of the work force, slowing the growth of health costs, reducing the deficit, lifting exports, restarting healthy wage growth and, yes, simplifying the tax code.

But we won’t make any of those tasks easier by falling into a double-dip recession or enduring months more of halting growth. The aftermath of a financial crisis is usually difficult. It’s not yet time to declare victory.

Richard Grayson Green Party for Congress AZ-06 Campaign Supports the Arizona Green Party's Ten Key Values

2010-09-01T04:14:00.000-07:00

For those voters brought here by today's Arizona Republic article on Green Party write-in candidates, we'd like to reaffirm our unqualified support for and endorsement of the Arizona Green Party's Ten Key Values:

GRASSROOTS DEMOCRACY

Every human being deserves a say in the decisions that affect their lives and not be subject to the will of another. Therefore, we will work to increase public participation at every level of government and to ensure that our public representatives are fully accountable to the people who elect them. We will also work to create new types of political organizations which expand the process of participatory democracy by directly including citizens in the decision-making process.

SOCIAL JUSTICE AND EQUAL OPPORTUNITY

All persons should have the rights and opportunity to benefit equally from the resources afforded us by society and the environment. We must consciously confront in ourselves, our organizations, and society at large, barriers such as racism and class oppression, sexism and homophobia, ageism and disability, which act to deny fair treatment and equal justice under the law.

ECOLOGICAL WISDOM

Human societies must operate with the understanding that we are part of nature, not separate from nature. We must maintain an ecological balance and live within the ecological and resource limits of our communities and our planet. We support a sustainable society which utilizes resources in such a way that future generations will benefit and not suffer from the practices of our generation. To this end we must practice agriculture which replenishes the soil; move to an energy efficient economy; and live in ways that respect the integrity of natural systems.

NON-VIOLENCE

It is essential that we develop effective alternatives to society’s current patterns of violence. We will work to demilitarize, and eliminate weapons of mass destruction, without being naive about the intentions of other governments. We recognize the need for self-defense and the defense of others who are in helpless situations. We promote non-violent methods to oppose practices and policies with which we disagree, and will guide our actions toward lasting personal, community and global peace.

DECENTRALIZATION

Centralization of wealth and power contributes to social and economic injustice, environmental destruction, and militarization. Therefore, we support a restructuring of social, political and economic institutions away from a system which is controlled by and mostly benefits the powerful few, to a democratic, less bureaucratic system. Decision-making should, as much as possible, remain at the individual and local level, while assuring that civil rights are protected for all citizens.

COMMUNITY-BASED ECONOMICS AND ECONOMIC JUSTICE

We recognize it is essential to create a vibrant and sustainable economic system, one that can create jobs and provide a decent standard of living for all people while maintaining a healthy ecological balance. A successful economic system will offer meaningful work with dignity, while paying a “living wage” which reflects the real value of a person’s work. Local communities must look to economic development that assures protection of the environment and workers’ rights; broad citizen participation in planning; and enhancement of our “quality of life.” We support independently owned and operated companies which are socially responsible, as well as co-operatives and public enterprises that distribute resources and control to more people through democratic participation.

FEMINISM AND GENDER EQUITY

We have inherited a social system based on male domination of politics and economics. We call for the replacement of the cultural ethics of domination and control with more cooperative ways of interacting that respect differences of opinion and gender. Human values such as equity between the sexes, interpersonal responsibility, and honesty must be developed with moral conscience. We should remember that the process that determines our decisions and actions is just as important as achieving the outcome we want.

RESPECT FOR DIVERSITY
We believe it is important to value cultural, ethnic, racial, sexual, religious and spiritual diversity, and to promote the development of respectful relationships across these lines. We believe that the many diverse elements of society should be reflected in our organizations and decision-making bodies, and we support the leadership of people who have been traditionally closed out of leadership roles. We acknowledge and encourage respect for other life forms than our own and the preservation of biodiversity.

PERSONAL AND GLOBAL RESPONSIBILITY

We encourage individuals to act to improve their personal well-being and, at the same time, to enhance ecological balance and social harmony. We seek to join with people and organizations around the world to foster peace, economic justice, and the health of the planet.

FUTURE FOCUS AND SUSTAINABILITY

Our actions and policies should be motivated by long-term goals. We seek to protect valuable natural resources, safely disposing of or “unmaking” all waste we create, while developing a sustainable economics that does not depend on continual expansion for survival. We must counterbalance the drive for short-term profits by assuring that economic development, new technologies, and fiscal policies are responsible to future generations who will inherit the results of our actions.

The Ten Key Values of the Green Party of the United States vary slightly, but we wholeheartedly endorse those as well. Our positions on issues are informed by our unreserved support for these values.

* * *

According to an article today in The Arizona Daily Star about the Democrats' complaint regarding write-in Green Party candidates, we noticed this:

The Green Party is supporting the Democratic effort, said Erik Andersen, a spokesman for the party. Andersen said he would have preferred to get the candidates off the ballot instead of launching a criminal investigation. The ballot, however, will be printed soon after Sept. 7, said Matt Benson, secretary of state spokesman.

The concern, Andersen said, "is that it will confuse the voter. If they run as Green candidates and their platforms are 360 degrees from the party they're claiming to represent, then it makes the party look bad."

The party released a list of endorsed candidates, which it said will ensure voters that "these candidates have met our standards and are not carpetbaggers or opportunists trying to hijack our ballot line."

Um, 360 degrees? We guess our platform is 360 degrees from the party we're claiming to represent because it's exactly the same as the Green Party's.

No wonder they haven't endorsed us. They couldn't do the math.

Arizona Republic article discusses Richard Grayson's Green Party campaign for Congress in AZ-06

2010-09-01T01:37:00.000-07:00

Today's Arizona Republic has an article that discusses our campaign for Congress in Arizona's Sixth Congressional District. Relevant portions highlighted:

Green Party is opposing 12 primary
write-in hopefuls

by Mary Jo Pitzl

Green Party candidates who won their party's primary last week say they don't want to be confused with a slate of write-in candidates being dismissed as "sham" candidates.

The Green Party is actively opposing 12 write-in candidates from last week's ballot. They include candidates for secretary of state and treasurer as well as seven legislative candidates. These candidates switched their party registration just before the filing deadline for the primary and have been called out by the Arizona Democratic Party in a complaint seeking a voter-fraud investigation. Many of the candidates were Republicans until mid-July; one was a Democrat, another was a Libertarian and two others were not registered.

Democrats argue that the candidates are not standard-bearers for the Green Party and could attract the support of Democrat-leaning voters.

"We strongly advise all registered Arizona voters to not waste their votes on these individuals," party co-chairman Claudia Ellquist wrote on the Green Party's blog.

But the party has backed a slate of candidates, including Leonard Clark, who won a spot on the Congressional District 5 ballot as a write-in candidate.

Clark said he switched his voter registration from Democrat to Green at the beginning of the year, disenchanted with the Democratic Party, and does not want to be confused with the so-called "sham" candidates.

Richard Grayson, a write-in candidate for Congressional District 6, might still win the Green Party's seal of approval. Party officials said they vetted him but decided to withhold an endorsement decision until they see if he qualifies for the Nov. 2 election. It took only one vote to qualify, under a provision of Arizona election law, so if Grayson voted for himself, his name will be on the November ballot. Candidates are not certified for the general-election ballot until the state does its canvass Tuesday.

The Arizona Republican Party ridiculed the Democrats' request, claiming the party is trying to limit voter choice. . .

Why Democracy Needs People with Humility and Chutzpah

2010-08-31T04:12:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-30T06:39:00.000-07:00

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

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

2010-08-30T02:21:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-29T15:18:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-28T19:30:00.000-07:00

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!

2010-08-27T04:38:00.000-07:00

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