The United States, which once took pride in delivering superior health care to its population, now ranks 47^th among nations in life expectancy. We also rank 43^rd in infant mortality, after Cuba and Slovenia. We are the only wealthy industrialized nation that lacks a universal health care delivery system. This is of critical importance because while nonprofit, public systems such as Medicare spend 97 percent of their budget on actual patient treatment, private, for-profit insurance companies devote as little as 74 percent to delivery of medical care. The rest goes to CEO salaries, administrative costs and profit for investors.

These figures are particularly significant when you realize that countries such as the United Kingdom, which provide national health care, spend less than half the amount per capita and slightly less than half the percentage of Gross National Product as does the United States in delivering medical and preventative services to their populations. And they get better results! If we had single-payer universal health care and could divert 23 percent of current private overhead costs to direct care, imagine how many more people could be treated and live longer, healthier lives.

Attending to one’s health, whether by having appropriate medical screenings, regulating one’s diet, getting sufficient exercise, controlling alcohol, drug and cigarette consumption, is a very private matter. Any medical decision ought properly to be made by the patient (or the patient’s legal representative), in consultation with a physician. No one should be forced to undergo treatment to which one is opposed. No one should be denied competent medical care when it is desired. The decision is private; but the ability to access medical care that is delivered safely, legally and in a dignified manner should be a basic human right.

People who work in the medical field at any level (including developing and manufacturing drugs, medical equipment or providing direct or indirect service) should be fairly compensated for time and energy, and be able to live comfortably. But it seems unconscionable that in a civilized society, anyone could or would profiteer from the illness of others. The cost of educating the providers and developing the drugs and technology could be borne by everyone and the benefits of medical education and discoveries would then be universally available. The federal government already underwrites a great deal of medical research. What if we covered the costs entirely and eliminated patents on lifesaving medications? Generic drugs would be the new normal.

As for paying for such an expanded system, we could easily solve that problem by removing the cap on Medicare payments so that the rich pay the same percentage of their income into the system as the working class. (We should remove the cap on Social Security payroll taxes as well.)

Fortunately, Obamacare (as its opponents love to label the Affordable Health Care for America Act of 2009) has already begun to provide some relief. More children and young adults are covered now than two years ago, preexisting conditions can no longer be used to justify rejection of insurance coverage, and tighter rules on health insurance company expenditures are taking effect this month. Private insurers are now required to spend 80 percent of premium income for actual care. For large group coverage that figure is now 85 percent. S

The Declaration of Independence includes “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” as unalienable rights. One way that our government can and should ensure these rights is to guarantee access to health care for all.

I am the only candidate for congress in North Carolina’s 11th Congressional District, in either party, who has taken strong positions in favor of women, women’s rights and women’s health.

I entered the primary race in March of 2011, when the incumbent Blue Dog Democrat Heath Shuler voted to defund Planned Parenthood. Though I had taken exception to many of Shuler’s votes against our President’s proposals (and continue to be disappointed), his vote against an organization that provides essential health care services to tens of thousands of women in North Carolina alone, and to their families, was my last straw. To add insult to injury, during that same week I learned that Rep. Shuler was co-sponsor of an amendment that would have redefined rape under our health care laws to only include violent rape by a stranger. Date rape, marital rape and incest would no longer qualify.

I had to wonder what planet he came from.

(Note: In September I was honored to serve as the volunteer auctioneer for an art auction to benefit Planned Parenthood here in WNC.)

In a larger sense, my view is that human beings have a right to make their own health care decisions, and only a woman has a right to make reproductive choices for herself. It is a wonderful thing when two parents make those decisions together and the man involved elects to stick around and share responsibilities, but we all know that model fails over and over again.

More than half of the babies born to women under age 30 find themselves in single parent households. And the biological truth is that a man’s involvement in baby-making is very brief. It is the mother who endures nine months of pregnancy with its attendant risks. It is the mother who is almost universally the principal caregiver and nurturer, and often the nutrition source as breast feeding has come back into general popularity. It is the mother to whom courts have historically assigned custody in the event of divorce. (Though the law has swung toward shared custody, in no small part because many men prefer not to pay child support.)

Women must be accorded the full right to determine their future plans. Men should attend to their own responsibilities around baby making and then sit down and shut up. The all-male panel of experts convened by Republican legislators, to testify concerning contraceptives would be laughable if it weren’t so frightening. Old men seem ever eager to tell young women what they can or cannot do. And as a woman I met in Bryson City observed, “If they can prevent you from having an abortion today, they can just as easily force you to have an abortion tomorrow.”

Another of my proposals goes further in the area of valuing families. I believe we should provide a stipend to a mother for the first three years of her first two children’s lives. The parents would be required to participate in self-organized parenting groups (somewhat like current baby-sitting co-ops) in which one of the parents and the children would participate on a regular basis—to share ideas, information and skills. The intent is to permit more time devoted to nurture and interaction during those critical formative years when much of our socialization occurs.

To those who’d argue that this is too expensive, my reply is that it would let one parent step out of the work force, thus opening up employment for the unemployed who are currently receiving benefits. Better socialized children are better students, less likely to disrupt the education of others in their classes, more likely to finish school, and less likely to end up in prison. My argument is that we are shifting the expense to where it actually does some good, instead of simply paying people who are out of work, or paying to imprison people later.

You hear a lot of candidates for public office touting their “family values.” I actually value families.

***

North of the Border
by Cecil Bothwell

In the late 1970s a friend of mine moved to Tucson, Arizona, where he took a job with a roofing contractor. Over the next ten years he became a hot-mop expert, endlessly repeating the process of installing layers of tar paper, steaming liquified asphalt, and gravel. Working on top of buildings in southern Arizona in summer heat, carrying buckets of stinking molten tar and spreading tons of gravel is about as unpleasant a job as I have ever done. And I did it, joining him on a couple of jobs when I traveled there in the early 80s.

When I worked with Terry he told me that I was the first Anglo he had seen on a roofing job other than himself. The Mexicans he worked with, day in and day out, had often commented on that fact as well. At least in those decades, no white person cared to do that work, although it paid well and there were plenty of roofs, new and old, that needed mopping.

This past fall there was news from farms across the country that crops were going unharvested for lack of migrant farm hands. Immigrant workers were in short supply, and farmers asserted that it was fear of federal enforcement that was keeping undocumented agricultural crews away—although the Great Recession may have played a role as well. Other reports indicate that the immigrant tide has shifted during the current employment doldrums.

One onion farmer near Vidalia, Georgia, was quoted to the effect that he tried hiring some field hands through a local temp agency but that none of the people who showed up lasted half a day. The work was too hot and too hard, and his local hires walked off the job.

Some would posit a genetic factor in the willingness or ability of Mexican workers to engage in brutally unpleasant work for pretty meager wages, but that’s obvious nonsense. Human beings who are acclimated to hot weather adopt coping skills, as did Terry, changing diet, water intake and clothing habits. And anyone who needs a job badly enough can drive himself to do what needs to be done, as the temp workers in Vidalia clearly did not.

America needs its immigrant work force. There is simply no getting around that fact. However, politicians of a certain stripe are eager to fan the flames of racial prejudice and nationalism . They pretend that building walls or enlisting more police will solve our nation’s woes, and peddling fear of the “other” is an easy game.

The principal scare tactic is to claim that undocumented workers are stealing jobs. To the extent that this is true, it isn’t because employers prefer non-English-speaking employees, but because they will either do work others will not do, are more expert at the work needing to be done, or … and this is the biggie … will do the work for less money. And the reason those people will work for less is because they are in no position to demand fair wages or safer working conditions, because they are “illegal.”

If one deems this to be unfair, either to the citizens who miss out on jobs due to cheap competition, or to the workers so-employed (and I do, on both counts), the obvious solution is to streamline the path to citizenship.

Meaningful immigration reform must include more work permits for seasonal workers and an expedited process for naturalization. It is beyond crazy that people who live here, work here and raise their families here wait ten and fifteen years to obtain citizenship, and no one whose family arrived on this continent voluntarily in decades or centuries past has any basis for yammering about today’s newcomers. Where did you say you’re from?

The other complaint one hears is that undocumented workers pay no taxes. That argument is fallacious on multiple counts. Low wage workers pay approximately nothing in income taxes. Their tax burden comes from sales and gas taxes, both of which are paid regardless of the card in your wallet. Immigrant workers who offer fake Social Security numbers to employers who then withhold taxes are actually benefitting the rest of us, since they pay into the system with no chance to ever benefit. And those who rent or buy homes contribute property taxes like anyone else.

No fence, no border patrol, no rash of deportation is going to “fix” immigration. And while the hate-mongers spew their invective, our food is rotting in the fields.

***

Economic and Social Justice:

1) How would you differentiate between “free” trade and “fair” trade? What is your position on these differences?

• Free trade as practiced is fraudulent. It empowers corporations and impoverishes workers by allowing free flow of capital across borders while restricting the flow of people. That’s exactly backward. Fair trade policies empower workers, small businesses and communities by ensuring that producers get a reasonable payment for their labor. Fair trade laws would address environmental and labor issues in partner countries so that environmental damage isn’t shifted from wealthy countries to poor and so that unregulated sweat shop labor isn’t put in competition with workers in countries where human rights are protected.

2) What is your broad-outline idea of a fair taxation policy for individuals and corporations in the United States? What is your opinion of a financial transaction tax on securities trades on Wall Street, to fund a job-creation/training program?

• Income taxes should apply equally across the board, regardless of whether income is from labor or capital gain. At minimum, taxes should be equitable across the range from middle to high income. The rich must pay at the same rate as the rest of us.

We need to implement a financial transactions tax to help dampen the tendency toward investment bubbles, as well as to garner income for the government. Government spending is, automatically, a job creation program, so the question becomes what jobs should we create? We should be funding a new WPA and CCC, building high speed rail, nationwide broadband and a smart grid, for starters, as well as putting more teachers in classrooms, more fire fighters in trucks and more health care workers into clinics and hospitals.

3) If elected, what legislation would you sponsor to improve the lives of working people, especially minorities, in the United States?

The “Restore the American Dream Act for the 99 percent” would get my full support. We should ensure that discriminatory lending is punished to the full extent of the law, that civil rights laws are fully enforced and that affirmative action plans are in place wherever a pattern of discrimination has been revealed.

4) Working men and women are under attack by state legislatures over their rights to organize and collectively bargain. As a member of Congress, how will unions play a part in working with you to develop labor policy and legislation? What do you intend to do to protect the rights of working families in the jobs marketplace?

I support Card Check and offer full support for unions. (I am a union member.) Unions inject democracy into the workplace, and I currently look to union leadership on several City issues (despite the fact that North Carolina is about as anti-union a state as exists in this country.)

5) Data from many sources indicate that success in gaining and maintaining full time jobs at decent wages is strongly biased toward levels of education and that levels of academic achievement are strongly biased toward available family income. Especially during the current unemployment siege, these disparities cut across all employment categories, both public and private sector. Yet, budget shortfalls at the national, state and local levels continue to be met by terribly erosive cuts in funding for public education, including jobs and per pupil spending, from pre-school through 16, as well as for post graduate training.  Data also document that privatization “solutions”, overall, have failed to deliver on improving academic achievement, even by methods currently used to assess achievement. If elected, what specific legislative acts would you co-sponsor, or oppose, to ensure access to quality public education for all, independent of race, class, gender or family income?

• I am pro-education. I believe that current strategies (viz: no child left behind) have generally failed. Obama’s race to the top is showing some promise. I’d support deep and significant shifts to programs that are more successful. Local districts, schools and teachers should be accorded more latitiude in creating new paradigms. This country can and should afford free public education from pre-K through four years of college or trade school. I oppose the use of vouchers to divert public money to private schools, and I would encourage adoption of year-round school schedules. (Low income students lose more over the summer than high income students, due to the paucity of enrichment materials and programs in their lives. Year round school plans have been shown to reduce the disparity in learning.)

6) As with all communities, the Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transgender (LGBT) community has a range of complex issues that must be addressed to improve the present and future lives for LGBT people. What steps do you believe should be taken to address the challenges of the homeless problem facing LGBT youth and economic inequality and discrimination in housing and basic sustenance for LGBT people, as well as to educate LGBT youth on their culture and history and foster an appreciation for the LGBT contribution to our society within the larger regional and national community?

• As a member of Asheville City Council I have advanced domestic partner benefits for city employees, created a partnership registry to establish legal relationships, and backed anti-bullying legislation. Homelessness needs to be addressed regardless of gender identification, and the housing-first model seems to be the best. Ultimately, of course, the wealth gap is systemic and needs to be addressed in tax law, investment regulation and via an industrial policy. LGBT humans should be identified as a protected class under civil rights law. I’m not at all clear that gender identification has anything more to do with contribution to our society than race, ethnicity, faith, or country of national origin, or that there is an identifiable separate “culture.” However the story of the gender identity poltical struggle should be taught as part of American history: APA removal of homosexuality from DSM-II, Stonewall Riots, Harvey Milk, DADT, etc.

7) What is your position on current immigration policy: Specifically, what works and what doesn’t work? What would you do to address the root causes that drive millions of people to enter the US illegally? Explain your position on the issue of a program for legal residency and path to citizenship for the 13 plus million undocumented in the U.S.

• Deportation doesn’t work. Immigrants who find jobs should quickly qualify for work permits (green cards) and those who choose to stay should be able to gain citizenship in a reasonable lenght of time—perhaps two years. Employers who hire undocumented workers should thereafter be heavily fined. The reason employers hire undocumented workers is that they will work cheaper and can’t seek redress of grievances. Documented workers will qualify for full protection under our labor laws, will drive up wages, pay taxes and become full members of society in very short order. Of course food will cost more. You get what you pay for.

In what ways would ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment enhance America’s full economic recovery, peace-keeping efforts and global competitiveness in the future? If elected, what priority (Top, Medium, Low) would you give to urging Congress’s removal of any deadline for ERA’s ratification in the final three states needed? How would you publicize your commitment beginning now?

• Support for passage of the ERA has been on my Web site since the beginning of my campaign (and has been my position for decades), so I’ve already been publicizing my support. I believe it should be passed as quickly as possible regardless of its potential effect on any other issue. (Honestly, “economic recovery” is about as overworked as “the peace process” – a phrase that can be bent to support anything or nothing.) I would vote for removal of any deadline in a heartbeat.

War and Peace:

1) Do you believe that the severity of the ongoing economic crisis has created budget shortfalls that require us to reexamine our national spending priorities in regard to the U.S. occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq? If so, what would you cut or reduce from the military budget, and how would you redirect those funds to domestic needs? Would you vote against further funding for these occupations?

• War is beggaring the United States. Exit Afghanistan yesterday, if not sooner. Reduce the number of bases around the globe—we are not and ought not to be the world’s policeman. Eliminate our nuclear weapons program. Eliminate redundancy: it’s fine to have a sufficient Air Force for defense, but we don’t need the Navy to be the second biggest air force in the world. End arms sales to foreign nations—they often end up being used against us or our allies. The truth is that “arms sales” are often paid for by our taxes, in the form of foreign aid (this is particularly true of Israel.)

2) Many people believe that the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan attempts to legitimize a corrupt Karzai government, which is largely viewed as unrepresentative of and unresponsive to the people of Afghanistan. They also believe that the U.S. military presence has not improved security, and, therefore, the poor economy continues to erode. Do you agree or disagree? Please explain your answer and give possible solutions.

• Afghanistan is only a country on an imaginary British map from the era of the Raj. Perhaps in the very long run it will cohere, but it might just as easily become three nations or lose territory to neighbors. Attempting to fashion that collection of tribes and factions into a nation by force is a fool’s errand. We should never have invaded, and we need to execute as swift and orderly a withdrawal as possible. The only (and exceedingly lame) argument for invasion was to bring bin Laden to justice, and there were credible reports that Bush rebuffed Taliban efforts to turn him over to us in order to justify a war of choice. We failed to bring bin Laden to court and assassinated him instead. So the mission is over. Time to pack it in and head home.

3) Many people believe the main obstacle to a fair settlement in the Middle East has been U.S. policies in the region. Specifically, they point to aggressive policies favoring Israel and antagonistic attitudes towards the Arab population, advanced by a U.S. Congress greatly influenced by the Israeli lobby. Please explain your agreement or disagreement with this analysis. Also, have you accepted campaign donations from AIPAC and/or other Israeli lobbies?

• I will not accept donations from AIPAC or any other organization lobbying for any other nation’s interest. (Nor will I accept corporate or corporate PAC donations, but that’s another matter.)

We need to make our aid to Israel contingent on ending expansion of Israeli settlements in occupied territory, recognition of Palestine as a nation, and provision of adequate water to the Palestinian state. (The Six-Day War was principally a water grab.) We must sharply curb our military support for Israel as well. As I mentioned in an answer above, “the peace process” is a meaningless euphemism. As long as Israel is heavily dependent on U.S. aid, we have the leverage and the right to demand a swift resolution of Israeli/Palestinian issues. Obviously, we have not done so to date, or this question would be irrelevant.

4) Given that U.S. military bases in foreign countries may be necessary for strategic and defense purposes, do you believe that we are currently spending too much or too little for military bases all over the world? Do you believe we should maintain bases in Iraq and Afghanistan? What do you think determines “too many” or “too few” bases?

• We could do with far fewer bases for actual defense. Mostly we maintain foreign bases to project our influence, i.e. to impose our will on others. We are spending far too much on that effort. If we look to history, Rome collapsed due to environmental despoliation and its attempt to impose its rule over too broad an area. We should exit Iraq and Afghanistan entirely, except for a normal ambassadorship in each. (Not a mega-embassy posing as “normal.”) We should aim for reduction by half the current 700+ over the next decade. The 38 large bases we maintain for our air and naval forces would probably be sufficient as a final goal. (It’s noteworthy that Rome maintained 37 bases at its peak, and the British empire 38. Neither survived their hubris and overreach.)

Corporate Rule:

1) What would you do to curb the undue influence of corporations on our political process and our society?

• For starters, I will not accept donations from corporations, corporate PACs, or anonymous SuperPACs. I only take donations from real people, within the constraints of federal election law.

We should overturn Citizens United v. FEC via legislation. Pass a constitutional amendment stipulating that a person under the law is only a natural person. Mandate public financing of all elections with no private or corporate funding of any sort. Return to the rules imposed on corporations in the early years of our nation: charters to be renewed every seven years with a requirement that the corporation justify its existence as a matter of public good. We grant immunity from personal liability to corporate owners, we can and should demand public benefit in return.

2) Explain your position on limiting the rights of corporations to participate in our democracy and expanding affirmative rights for people, as well as your opinion of Citizens United v. FEC.

See above.

Healthcare:

1) Do you support a single-payer, Medicare-for-all solution for our health funding and health delivery crises? Why or why not? If not, what do you propose to do at the national level to eliminate the waste, fraud, and abuse of our current for-profit payment model, and to achieve guaranteed high-quality universal healthcare?

• Yes, as my campaign banner has it, “Medicare is the public option that works!” With 3 percent overhead, Medicare has proven its worth vis-a-vis private insurers. We are the only industrial democracy without some version of single-payer and we are falling behind the world in health outcomes. (47th in life expectancy at present) The experimental plan within Medicare to pay for outcomes instead of procedures looks very promising. The mandate under the Affordable Care Act that requires private insurers to pay 80 percent of premium receipts for actual medical care (85 in large group plans) will help push private insurers out of the market and pave the way for single payer. The recently introduced “Restore the American Dream Act for the 99 percent,” includes a public option, and I fully endorse that bill.

2) Given the reality of single-payer campaigns’ making significant headway in numerous states, do you support enabling legislation that will allow states to innovate immediately, bypassing legal challenges emanating from ERISA, and/or states’ capacity to capture Medicare, Medicaid, VA, CHIPS, and other federal dollars to finance state-based “Medicare for All”? Please explain.

• Since I live in a benighted state that hasn’t broached this subject, I am not really up to speed on this one. My immediate reaction is that we’d be better off pushing for a nationwide plan, rather than fragmenting coverage—given the high mobility of American citizens. But I’m open to argument about the benefit of allowing state innovation.

3) Please explain how you intend to preserve Social Security for future generations.

• Raise the cap on Social Security payroll taxes or eliminate it entirely. Implement a further tiering of the system so that people can retire earlier with lower benefits and later with higher benefits. (We already do this, but we could expand the window.) The recently introduced “Restore the American Dream Act for the 99 percent,” includes dropping the cap, and as stated previously, I fully support that bill.

4) Women’s control over their own reproductive health and decisions continues to be threatened by paternalism masquerading as morality. What would you do to protect and strengthen women’s access to reproductive health services, as well as to prevent the further erosion of a woman’s right to choose?

• I am a staunch supporter of women’s absolute control over their own reproductive decisions. (I have been a volunteer escort at our local abortion clinic for many years, both before and after the 1999 bombing.) I am an active supporter of Planned Parenthood. The best way to reduce the number of abortions is through comprehensive sex education and widespread availability of birth control information and methods. I oppose every effort to restrict any woman’s right to control her own body. I oppose any effort to define a fertilized egg as a human being. Independent viability needs to be the test of humanness, and in the event of a medical emergency the life of the mother must be given primacy over the life of an unborn child.

Energy and Environment

1) To many, climate disruption, more commonly and innocuously referred to as Global Warming, is often referenced as the greatest threat civilization has ever faced. Although many currently elected officials campaigned aggressively on this issue—promoting a green economy, alternative energy solutions, carbon emission reductions and carbon tax legislation—there has been little to no action or legislation pushed forward. The earth continues to warm as CO2 concentrations continue to rise. Campaigns to create doubt around climate science are well funded, well organized, and effective. Please share your view on the science of climate disruption, your view on how it should be addressed, and where you would rank this as a personal priority.

• It’s hard to rank climate change versus campaign finance reform, since we probably need the latter before we’ll seriously address the former, but I’d put them both at the very top of my list. The science is incontrovertible and frightening. As a green builder since the 1970s (and one who lived off-the-grid on solar power for over 20 years) I was an early advocate for carbon reduction. Following McKibben’s and Gore’s popularization of the issue around 1990 I became even more active, starting an environmental journal at Warren Wilson College and lecturing at schools and universities about the issue. On City Council I have successfully implemented a plan to reduce city government carbon emissions by 80 percent below 2006 levels by 2020, and am advocating a plan to do the same citywide.

2) Because fossil fuels are the cheapest form of energy, we are burning far more than the Earth’s atmosphere and climate can assimilate. How would you change the economic incentives to discourage fossil fuel use and encourage renewables and efficiency? Does a revenue-neutral carbon tax used to fund cuts in payroll taxes make sense to you? Do you agree with the Defense Department’s recent assessment that global warming poses substantial security threats? How do we get beyond climate science denial?

• Given that much of our global military intrusion is directed at protecting oil supply lines, I would love to shift a substantial portion of military funding to a gas tax (with concommitant reduction in income taxes). Politically more practical would be the bill already advanced in the U.S. Senate for a cap-and-dividend system that would force fossil fuel companies to pay a carbon tax that would be distributed to every American. Fuel prices would go up, but it would be left to the marketplace to adjust use. Left to their own choice, people would radically curb fossil fuel use and alternatives would become relatively much more affordable. As for the security threats outlined in recent DOD studies, well, “doh?” If Lovelock’s calculations are correct, a multi-foot rise in sea level by the end of this century will threaten a lot more than simple “security.” And if the Greenland ice sheet slides off into the Atlantic, it’ll be Katy-bar-the-door on a global scale.

3) In order to meet America’s energy demands, a number of options are utilized. What’s your view on hydro-fracking for natural gas, the development of tar sands and the associated pipeline, mountain-top mining, and building new nuclear power plants (Germany is phasing theirs out in light of the Fukushima disaster) and safely managing the spent fuel that’s already been generated?

• I support fusion energy right where it has always been generated, in our local star. Nuclear power is too expensive to be a viable alternative (absent government subsidy, no one builds nukes.) Hydro-fracking should be banned. The tar sands should be left where they are pending future technology that solves environmental problems associated with extraction and use. (I went to Washington to protest the XL pipeline.)

Per Rocky Mountain Institute: if every state were as efficient as the 10 most efficient states, we could start shutting down power plants tomorrow. My immediate goal in Asheville is to stop the coal trains coming here by reducing the community electrical demand to the point that our coal-fired plant is uneconomical to fire up. Having lived on solar power for decades, I know conservation is the cheapest form of power. We are spendthrift as a nation when it comes to energy use.

Fair and Transparent Elections

1) What are you willing to do to ensure that all registered voters are able to vote without undue obstruction, hardship and expense, and are able to witness and participate in all phases of the election–from voting procedure and protecting the chain of custody for secure transmission of their votes, to counting the votes and reporting the results transparently, accurately and securely?

• I was part of the group that successfully advocated for paper ballots here when our touch screen machines were shown to be fraught with problems. I have voted to extend early voting here as a member of City Council. I am active with Common Cause, NC Voters for Clean Elections and openly advocate for voting rights. I opposed the NC voter I.D. law rammed through our General Assembly by GOP ideologues last session. Voting is a fundamental right and ballot access must be free and fair.

2) Explain your position on the use of taxpayer dollars to finance political campaigns directly and equitably, with some expenditures offset by taxing some of the massive profits derived by broadcast media from their free use of the frequency spectrum owned by the people.

• Yes. That is my position exactly. We must move to public financing of all elections. Currently some judgeships and some members of the Council of State in North Carolina have public financing available, as do legislative candidates in Arizona and Maine. Taxing broadcast media would be a good source for funds, but we’d also save tax money by not funding useless pork barrel projects and mineral subsidies advanced by corporate financiers of our current system.

3) Do you support efforts to end deceptive practices that deliberately mislead or intimidate traditionally disenfranchised communities to include minority voters, Seniors and young people through voter I.D. challenges and other forms of voter intimidation to fraudulently prevent turnout in targeted communities?

• Absolutely. Anyone found guilty of using deceptive practices (like the direct mail that told black voters in Florida that the election was on a different day, etc.) should be jailed, not simply fined. We should welcome U.N. observers to judge the fairness of our electoral practices, in the same way that we insist on outside observers in other nations. We are not above scrutiny, and the level of fraud perpetrated in, for example, Ohio in 2000 and 2004 is intolerable.

“The most galling thing about pundits stating with such certainty that the government cannot create jobs is the implication that the government has no business employing people. In actuality, however, the law requires the government, in particular the President and the Federal Reserve, to create jobs. This legal duty comes from three sources: (1) full employment legislation including the Humphrey Hawkins Full Employment Act of 1978, (2) the 1977 Federal Reserve Act, and (3) the global consensus based on customary international law that all people have a right to a job with favorable remuneration to provide an adequate standard of living.  “

Here’s the link for the full article.

The progressive majority is on the move, and united in a way I can’t remember witnessing in all my years of political activism—dating back to the Civil Rights and Vietnam War protests of the 1960s. The theft of our national wealth by a tiny corporate elite has galvanized the working people of America, and a sea change in politics has begun.

The Tea Party caught some of that populist spirit a couple of years ago, but were sadly misled in their goals by their leaders. Yes, there is a powerful threat to our liberty today, and it must be opposed. But the big money behind the Tea Party was able to convince the grassroots activists that the threat was consolidation of political power, and that President Barack Obama was the enemy. But there has been no consolidation of political power, and in many ways Obama has been rendered powerless by his right wing opponents.

The real threat to our liberty is consolidation of economic power.

And that economic power has subverted the Tea Party and is dragging down our nation. The crooks and gamblers on Wall Street rolled the dice on our economy and won, while the rest of us took the hit. The wealth gap in our nation continues to increase, while millions are out of work, millions have fallen into poverty, hundreds of thousands are hungry, and jobs flow overseas.

The 1 percent who control most of the wealth in this nation are determined to impoverish the other 99 percent.

Congress is hell-bent on making things worse today, pushing forward new “free trade” agreements with Korea, Columbia and Panama that will further hammer American workers, while all the right wing wants to talk about is more tax cuts for the rich.

Jobs, not cuts!

We need federal spending now, on infrastructure, on education, on health care. Don’t believe the liars who want to lead you into economic slavery. America has always borrowed money to fund wars and to climb out of recessions. Debt is not the problem. Jobs, now!

And we need an industrial policy. We are the only nation among the top 20 industrial countries which does not have a dedicated plan to build and expand manufacturing. Manufacturing and the jobs it provides are the basis for all real wealth. We will not regain American leadership among modern, industrial nations until we rebuild our manufacturing base.

End the wars!

Why are we engaged in nation building abroad while America falls apart? The Bush wars of choice have become the Obama wars of choice. Let the Iraqi people and the Afghan people rebuild their own countries. Stop pumping money into the pockets of war profiteers like Halliburton, start building America again!

Health Care for All!

Medicare is the public option missing from the health reforms passed in the last Congress. We should extend the highly successful Medicare program to include every citizen of America. We can do it!

Tax the Rich!

It is inexcusable that people making millions per year pay a lower percentage of taxes than the middle class. It is appalling that I pay more taxes on one month of cell phone service than Verizon pays in a year. We need tax equity. We need higher capital gains taxes. And we need to impose a Financial Transaction Tax, a tiny tax on every stock and bond trade. It will raise $200 billion per year, and slow the growth of Wall Street gambling bubbles—the kind that took down our global economy in 2008.

Education for the future!

Our country is falling behind the rest of the industrial world in education outcomes. We can and must do better to give our children the opportunity to succeed in tomorrow’s world. We need our pre-school, K-12, work-force training and college education to be the best in the world. We owe it to ourselves, to those who made our success possible, and to our kids to do no less!

As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.
As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.
They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage.
They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give Executives exorbitant bonuses.
They have perpetuated inequality and discrimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one’s skin, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation.
They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization.
They have profited off of the torture, confinement, and cruel treatment of countless animals, and actively hide these practices.
They have continuously sought to strip employees of the right to negotiate for better pay and safer working conditions.
They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which is itself a human right.
They have consistently outsourced labor and used that outsourcing as leverage to cut workers’ healthcare and pay.
They have influenced the courts to achieve the same rights as people, with none of the culpability or responsibility.
They have spent millions of dollars on legal teams that look for ways to get them out of contracts in regards to health insurance.
They have sold our privacy as a commodity.
They have used the military and police force to prevent freedom of the press. They have deliberately declined to recall faulty products endangering lives in pursuit of profit.
They determine economic policy, despite the catastrophic failures their policies have produced and continue to produce.
They have donated large sums of money to politicians, who are responsible for regulating them.
They continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil.
They continue to block generic forms of medicine that could save people’s lives or provide relief in order to protect investments that have already turned a substantial profit.
They have purposely covered up oil spills, accidents, faulty bookkeeping, and inactive ingredients in pursuit of profit.
They purposefully keep people misinformed and fearful through their control of the media.
They have accepted private contracts to murder prisoners even when presented with serious doubts about their guilt.
They have perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad. They have participated in the torture and murder of innocent civilians overseas.
They continue to create weapons of mass destruction in order to receive government contracts. *
To the people of the world,
We, the New York City General Assembly occupying Wall Street in Liberty Square, urge you to assert your power.
Exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone.
To all communities that take action and form groups in the spirit of direct democracy, we offer support, documentation, and all of the resources at our disposal.
Join us and make your voices heard!
*These grievances are not all-inclusive.

There’s no question that millions of American jobs have moved to China. The Great Recession has thrown that fact into high relief, as recovery gathers speed around the world and falters here at home.

Globally, one in four jobs lost following the 2008 crash were in the United States, and rehiring here has lagged behind the rest of the industrialized world.

North Carolina ranks third in jobs offshored to China, behind California and Texas. If you’d like to know where the jobs in your community have fled, use this link and type in a city or county name.

To get a state-by-state report on jobs that have gone directly to China, click here.

That gives you a couple of snapshots of the problem we face, but another way to get a feel for the trade problem is to simply read the “Made in” tag on any item you pick up in amost any store in your community.

Our trade deficit with China is approaching $1 billion per day, and that’s the deficit that should be most troubling in Washington, not the trumped up concerns about a debt ceiling or short term borrowing.

The free trade policies adopted by the United States since the Reagan Revolution are the direct cause of our systemic economic woes. The intent of conservative politicians and the special interests they serve has been to hammer American unions, to force direct competition with lower-wage workers around the globe, and to amass more and more wealth to the wealthy. They have been very successful.

To make matters worse, China is cheating. They have kept the value of the yuan (or renminbi) artifically low, through currency manipulation, resulting in a de facto 30 percent tariff on U.S. goods. They and other S.E. Asian nations have pursued a mercantilist trade policy, continuing protectionist manipulation of trade while pretending to participate in a global free trade system.

American manufacturing is crumbling. We have dismantled our steel industry to the point that we can’t even produce the structural material needed to build major projects including bridges and the new skyscraper at the Twin Towers site. Our furniture industry has packed up and moved across the Pacific. Even our much-vaunted solar panel industry has gone offshore.

If we were to attempt mobilization of the economy on the scale required for World War II, today, we would be flat out of luck. We’d have to import steel from the Pacific Rim or Europe in order to build the factories to produce steel here.

Free trade is a scam perpetrated on the American worker and it has to be reformed. We must renegotiate NAFTA, CAFTA and the WTO treaties, or abandon those treaties. And we ought to impose a 5 percent tariff on Chinese goods this year unless they are willing to play by the rules they have already purportedly agreed to follow.Raise that to 10 percent next year, and 15 percent the following year … up to 30 percent, until they decide to play by the rules.

Failing that, we may have to take the stronger step of devaluing the over-valued U.S. dollar. While that would be painful, we have done it twice before in our history to resolve serious financial issues, and it would make U.S. exports competitive on the world market once more.

Doing nothing is not an option.

Imagine a society in which you are completely on your own.
You have a roof over your head only if you can afford to buy or rent one, you eat when you have money in your pocket, you get medical care when you can personally foot the entire bill, and you go to school if and when your family can pay the costs.

When looking for a job, you compete with children who receive little or no pay. If you are injured on the job, no one helps you obtain medical care or pay your regular bills. For those fortunate enough to find a job, there is no health coverage, no safety regulations, no unemployment insurance, no disability insurance, no restrictions to the hours or working conditions your employer can impose, no sick leave or vacations and no provision for retirement. You can be fired without cause at any time.

If you lose your job or retire you have only your own savings on which to depend. Should a relative or friend become ill or homeless, he or she will probably turn to you for food, shelter and medical care. If you refuse, the afflicted person will have little choice but to live on the streets and/or starve to death.

This is pretty much the way life in America worked prior to the passage of FDR’s 1930’s New Deal legislation. It’s also the way things will be if conservative Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats succeed in dismantling government regulation of business and government- guaranteed earned benefit programs and social safety nets.
Those who oppose the existence of social safety nets insist that they cost too much and are not financially sustainable. They are wrong. They also argue for cuts in benefits and in taxes.

But money that the government pays out to maintain the social safety net–unemployment benefits and Medicare— and earned benefit programs—Social Security and Medicare—is immediately spent by recipients. This spending generates income for others and provides revenue for federal, state and local governments in the form of taxes. Implementing the social safety net actually contributes to the growth of the economy.
Reducing taxes for rich people and corporations generates jobs, but not in the United States!

Many American corporations are now multinational behemoths, shifting jobs to countries where they can pay the lowest possible wages and costs. This policy not only deprives Americans of badly needed jobs; it also cheats the government of the tax revenue that would be generated by those jobs if they were held by Americans. Globally, one in four jobs lost following the 2008 economic crash were here in the U.S.A., and the recovery has been faster in much of the industrial world—so foreign workers are going back to work first.

In addition, many multinational corporations also avoid paying taxes to the United States. American businesses have kept more than one trillion dollars in foreign earnings abroad over the past five years. Several giant corporations have offered to repatriate their money only if Congress and the White House lower their 35 percent tax rate to 5.25 percent. Corporate executives label this proposal “the next stimulus.” The Times calls it “extortion.” A tax holiday for corporations was tried in 2004, and it didn’t create jobs, it funded buy-outs and dividends for the rich.

The only way to get out of the financial hole that we have dug for ourselves is to increase taxes on those who can afford to pay them. We must allow the Bush tax cuts to expire at the end of 2012, if not sooner. And we should move to increase the capital gains tax to parity with income taxes. We can impose a Financial Transactions Tax to suppress stock market bubbles, and impose an import tariff on goods from China and other countries which refuse to comply with international trade agreements.

According to a New York Times/CBS News Poll in January 2011, approximately 66 percent of Americans are willing to pay higher taxes rather than see reduced Social Security or Medicare benefits. Currently even the highest wage earners pay taxes for Social Security on only the first $106,800 of income. By eliminating this cap, the government could collect sufficient funds to keep its commitment to seniors in perpetuity.

Nor should we support President Obama’s proposed tax-holiday on Social Security payments which he introduced in his recent “Jobs” speech. It will have the effect of putting a little extra money into people’s pockets in the short term, but will be used by opponents of earned benefit programs to crush them in the not distant future. It is a path downward that should never have been offered.

Prior to FDR’s 1930’s New Deal legislation, which included workmen’s compensation, old age pensions, unemployment benefits, child labor laws, work relief for the unemployed minimum wage legislation, a forty hour work week and other labor reforms, there was no social safety net in America. Thirty years later Medicare and Medicaid programs were signed into law by Lyndon Johnson.

What Presidents Roosevelt and Johnson understood was that as an enlightened, democratic society, Americans have a collective responsibility for the welfare of all our citizens. The only thing that distinguishes civilization from chaos is the existence of a legal system, preferably one that is democratically created and maintained. Whether legally established institutions are run by government authorities or private corporations is actually not the critical issue. It is adequate regulation to ensure the accountability and responsibility of both “the marketplace: and “the government” that is the true measure of a succesful democratic society. Ultimately, the ambition that causes us to be productive must be prevented from deteriorating into the greed that causes exploitation of the helpless, the poor, the sick, the very young and the elderly.

Finally, we have a moral and ethical responsibility toward our fellow-citizens. Those who argue that survival is the task of the individual ignore the fact that we are all vulnerable to the havoc that can be wrought by illness, unscrupulous financiers and business people, natural disasters, war and other dramatic game changers. We need a democratic, well-regulated government to protect us – from foreign enemies, from criminals, from contaminated food and drink, from natural disasters, and sometimes, even from each other. We also need it to provide roads, bridges, sewers, clean water and the safe infrastructure that life in a modern industrial country requires. If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes an entire society and/or country to support the safety, security and well-being of individuals, families and communities.

(Photo by Dorothea Lange, courtesy of the National Archives.)

The plan includes:

1. Rebuild our schools, roads, bridges, ports, water systems

2. Revive manufacturing / stop exporting jobs

3. Create jobs for work that needs to be done (WPA)

4. Help local and state governments avoid layoffs

5. Extend unemployment / help families stay in their homes

6. Reform Wall Street – banks must stop foreclosures and start lending $ to businesses

Trumka said, “The elections this year come down to a choice between leaders who will stand with working people or those whose right-wing agenda will choke off economic recovery and put corporations back in the driver’s seat.”

We American workers need immediate action. Our government can and must put people to work, now. The current recession will only end when unemployment levels are cut in half, and only the U.S. government has the power and obligation to make that happen quickly.

Federal law requires the government, in particular the President and the Federal Reserve, to create jobs. This legal duty comes from three sources: (1) full employment legislation including the Humphrey Hawkins Full Employment Act of 1978, (2) the 1977 Federal Reserve Act, and (3) the global consensus based on customary international law that all people have a right to a job with favorable remuneration to provide an adequate standard of living.

This is not a matter of opinion. It is a matter of law.

It isn’t easy to stand up to the lies and corruption coming from Wall Street, from the multinational corporations, from Fox News and the right-wing noise machine. But we can be heroes and stand up for our families, our neighbors and the future of the American Dream!

There’s a fellow in Burke County who used to work at a furniture factory. He built good furniture and he made pretty good money, $15 per hour plus benefits. He had worked up to two weeks paid vacation, he felt like he was part of a team and together with his wife’s income they’d been able to save and put money down on a house. She was a teaching assistant and she loved both her job and the way her work fit in with her kids’ school schedule.

That fellow’s job has been relocated to China, to a worker who makes 90 cents per hour, while cuts in the NC state budget eliminated his wife’s position in the school. They’re in foreclosure and they aren’t sure what they’ll do or where they’ll go next. The ongoing recession has hit them hard, and even if the economy turned around tomorrow, they’ll be a very long time climbing back.

That story has been repeated across WNC and around the country. One in four jobs lost in the global recession were right here in the United States. We took the big hit.

Our work defines us, enobles us and enables us to participate in the economy. For the great majority of us, the only thing we have to invest in the business world is our muscle and talent and sweat and commitment. That is to say, our lives. We find some sort of work that suits us, or pays enough to convince us that the transaction is worthwhile, and we do it. Day after day, year after year. The bargain with those who pay us is this: Our good work and our loyalty in exchange for your profit and your loyalty. That promise has been broken.

A logger in New Hampshire taught me a phrase, “He used me good.” That says it all. We are used by others for their benefit, and we use others in turn. If the deal is square, we both benefit. We use each other good.

Here in Western North Carolina, workers haven’t always been “used good.” Ninety years ago, some of the cotton mills here were what we’d call sweatshops today, with 12 hour days, child labor, brutal conditions and nowhere near enough pay to make a home and feed a family. Some mill workers lived in dirt-floored shacks, and children were barefoot even in winter. Many were recent immigrants or farmers dispossessed of their land when corporate barons like Vanderbilt swept in and forced them out of small holdings. But the mill owners were getting rich.

In the 1920s, Oliver Max Gardner was governor of North Carolina, and also owner of a cotton mill in Gastonia. He treated his workers fairly and told other employers, “Of course, a man cannot be made to listen to his employees, but he is making a grave mistake if he does not.”

Other employers didn’t listen and labor disputes erupted, with violence on both sides. In McDowell County, in 1929, six strikers were killed by Sheriff’s deputies during a labor dispute and dozens more wounded. That effort to organize workers to stand up for each other and demand fair wages and reasonable treatment was halted dead in its tracks. Literally dead. But the work goes on.

Until engineers invent a completely automated widget-making system, some form of labor will be the critical input for productivity. A business may automate everything from receipt of raw materials to emergence of finished products, but at the barest mnimum, someone has to push the button to start the process. Of course, if no one has enough money to buy a widget, the whole enterprise still grinds to a halt.

Owners of manufacturing facilities are as dependent on their workers as workers are on the business owners, and that’s completely reasonable. One person invests his life savings in a project, hoping for a fair return, and another invests his life in the same project. Those of us who perform labor for a living are well aware that we are trading a day of our lives for whatever day’s pay we obtain in return. That’s a day we can never buy back or monetize in some other way, a day we can’t spend with our families or simply “goin’ fishin’.”

• Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats will tell you that organized labor has hurt American workers by forcing corporations to go overseas. That’s a lie.

Unionization of major industries in America—autos in the midwest, coal mining in the mid-south, steel manufacturing in the northeast, and some weaving and sewing operations in both south and north—lifted millions of Americans out of grinding poverty and abusive working conditions. Union campaigns are the reason we don’t have children working in sweatshops like our competitors in China. They brought us the 40-hour work week, job safety rules, benefits including health care and workmen’s compensation, unemployment insurance, minimum wage laws and more. Today unions in telecommunications, construction, public service, airport security, public safety and other fields continue to defend all of us who labor in whatever sector we find work.

Unions created the best trained, most productive work force in the world, and non-union workers benefited as well. The floor was raised, and both workers and owners benefited from the partnership.

Yes, some unions may have overstepped at times. But so do employers, and by all evidence corporate crooks have hurt all of us, from price gouging in oil and other commodities, to intentional investment bubbles that benefit the few at the expense of the rest. Finger pointing is deserved in both directions. But we have to strike a balance and today it’s the corporate butchers who have a heavy thumb on the scale.

• Blue Dogs and Republicans also tell you that cutting federal spending and taxes is the only way to create new jobs. That’s another lie.

Cutting spending and taxes only puts people out of work, and it does nothing to help recovery. Yes, the deficit is a long-term problem we will need to address, after we are all back to work.

Treasury bonds are paying two percent interest right now. It is a great time for the Fed to borrow money—ask any small business owner who needs capital improvements whether a two percent loan is a good deal! We can and must choose to create public sector jobs today with a reinstatement of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC).

We need high speed rail nationwide—air travel and over-the-road trucking are going to be priced out of the market as oil prices rise in the future. Trains are the answer. And we need multi-modal transit systems that connect us to the trains, to our jobs and to our extended families.

We need teachers and teaching assistants in every school system—Federal money can make this happen fast. America is falling behind our world competitors in both achievement and college matriculation.

We need to provide scholarships for those who are out of work and want to continue their education—just as we had the GI Bill after WWII. After a decade of unnecesssary wars and collapse of our economy, we need to prepare citizens for the 21st Century.

We need water conservation projects—we are facing permanent drought both globally and here at home as we run out of fresh water supplies. (Small scale farms should get the same water conservation subsidies currently enjoyed by the corporate giants.)

We need energy conservation projects—retrofitting homes and businesses with energy saving technologies “creates” more energy at a lower cost than any form of energy production. The cheapest energy is the energy we don’t use.

There is work that needs to be done and people who need jobs, now!

We can do no less for America’s future.