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

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."

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

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

Democrat Rebecca Schneider's October Suprise

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.

Does Arizona Congressman Jeff Flake Have a Drug Problem?

His recent behavior has been highly irregular.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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?

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

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.

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."

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?

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?

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

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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 Arizona Chartreuse Party

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.

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

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. . .