DFA holds elected
officials accountable. If elected, what are your top three policy goals while
in office? How will you achieve them? How have you worked to achieve them in
the past, both in and out of office? (500 word limit)
My top 3 goals are improved education, improved immigration
and reform of existing marijuana laws. While I have many ideas of things I
would passionately like to advance (including desalinization projects, rural
solar electrification, community arts support, prisoner rights, a
Constitutional amendment to end corporate personhood, and so on), these 3 are
the areas I have the most experience in and have already been making progress
on. In education, as a former lead teacher w a Master in Secondary Ed
Instruction, I am profoundly aware of the mess politics has made of our educational
system in the last 20 yrs. Class sizes are exploding, course variety and
richness has been sacrificed for test driven monotony, amenities are
sacrificed, student culture is decidedly anti-educational and declining faster
than ever before.
I propose scrapping test driven education and returning to
creating whole humans, strong citizens. We can start by at last fully funding
federal mandates that cripple school district budgets. Restore electives and
vocational ed classes, provide increased nutritional and counseling assistance
and stop trying to run education as a for-profit industry. Education is for the
good of the public. America is on a crash course w chaos if we don’t
turn the future of education around.
America is a land of immigrants and in the wake of 20th
century disastrous military, environmental and business practices, the 21st
century world is awash in refugees. The upswing in international refugees is
global condition that is just beginning to trend. America is going to have to
have a sensible policy for dealing w refugees. We need modern sensible border
checkpoints to be able to process refugees the way Ellis Island once did and
the professional class who currently are allowed to immigrate also need
increased efficiency. Our history of exploiting undocumented immigrants and
workers in general is a continuing record of unspoken slavery. Lincoln was
right, a country cannot exist half slave and half free. Our 14 Amendment
guarantees the rights of “any person,” citizen or no, to equal protection and
due process. Immigrants create jobs as consumers, and workers take on the unpleasant
work many laborers avoid. I call for a new vision on immigration: if you want
to stop illegal immigration, make immigration legal.
Lastly on the issue of cannabis reform, as executive
director of my state’s cannabis reform PAC, I am already working day and night
to end the horrific cannabis prohibition that has created so much social havoc over
the past 80 yrs. The laws were the hatemongering product of crony capitalism at
its worst, the preponderance of evidence of the therapeutic use of cannabis is
irrefutable and thoroughly researched no matter what the Right will tell you.
The social misery caused at home and abroad over America’s War on Drugs is
incalculable. It’s time to bring 10s of millions of Americans out of the
shadows, embrace “Green Rush” innovation and revenue it promises and halt the
momentum of America’s prison-industrial complex, before our government becomes everyone’s
jailers.
DFA believes that we
have to unite people behind our shared values of community, security and
liberty (see Our Values). We must rally behind candidates and causes that share
these values and work together to create a more fair and equal society. How
will your campaign embody the values of community, security and liberty? (500
word limit)
As an artist, activist and educator, my entire adult life
has been about community. Well, the past 25 years of it, anyway. Just before
turning 30, after years of dead-end jobs as a construction worker, I joined a
food co-op, King Harvest Food Co-op in Springfield, IL and my life was
profoundly changed. I had felt a kinship w the activists I had seen on TV, but,
having grown up in a rural conservative community, I had not personally met
many. As a member of a food co-op, a retail whole foods/health food/new age
fashion/activist meeting space, I was exposed to a host of great ideas and
exciting lifestyles. Before long I became so involved in the co-op that, during
a time when it fell into crisis, I stepped up and took the helm as the co-op
store manager. For two years, every member was my boss and each month the will
of the board of directors shaped the direction of the storefront and the
organization’s activism. This job was the most completely community focused
career one could imagine. Our idealism shaped our purpose, we purchased the
things we value and took actions on the causes we supported. After two years in
this heady milieu, at 30, I left the manager position to return to college to
learn how to accomplish even more for the greater good. Later I worked as the
volunteer coordinator for a homeless shelter that provided overnight services
to 30 people a night and was in part staffed by a cadre of 100+ volunteers.
Again the focus was on the community both as a resource and as a need. Then for
the past dozen years in Arizona I have again built my life around serving a
community’s needs as a teacher and as an arts organizer, I have spent my life
imagining what advances the greater good and then focusing on the ground-level
nuts and bolts mechanics of turning ideas into action. I wanted to preface my
remarks in that context.
The famed anecdote of Franklin aside, security and liberty
are not mutually exclusive. They are
both among the promised goals of our American government, insuring domestic
tranquility and providing for the common defense are the explicit definitions of
national defense and social services. Securing our liberty for now and for the
ages is only possible in a world that promotes the general welfare and ensures
domestic tranquility. For all people. The truth we see of our current crisis of
income inequality is that stripping the masses of their wealth to further
enrich the plutocrats does not advance either our security or liberty. Turning
our nation into a failed state for off-shored corporate profit does not make
America safer.
But calling out the robber barons and rallying the
opposition will, just as Americans once rebuffed England’s economically based
oppressions. We will all be more secure when we start advancing the good of the
public over the profits of predators.
How do you plan to
engage the progressive grassroots? Please provide two examples of outreach to
the progressive community that your campaign has conducted thus far and
elaborate on how you plan to build from there. (500 word limit)
When I filled out this application in 2012 I got to present
a couple of rather profound examples of the grassroots enthusiasm we’d built in
that cycle. I’m not sure I can top the
disabled guy hitchhiking 35 miles to joining a campaign trip, but one clear way
to show the magnitude that our campaign has now reached when it comes to
grassroots organizing is to look at my campaign website’s year end blog for
2013. The acknowledgments section includes over 300 names all over the state
and the nation. Even my fundraising shows the grassroots nature of my campaign.
Though I have admittedly raised under $10,000 last quarter, I have dozens of
small dollar donors.
But my favorite example of the grassroots impact I have had
in Arizona politics happened just last week. While in Phoenix on other
business, I decided to drop in on the monthly DFA meeting. A different
congressional candidate was the feature and yet another was already on hand
when I arrived. But still when I entered someone called my name and a sustained
applause and cheer went up. I have never felt so validated.
Understand, I live 200 miles from PHX and, since moving to
AZ in 200, I have always been the little country mouse trying to keep in touch
w the politics of the big city, the folks in the know. I have felt like the
ambassador from the rural venturing to the city to bring back ideas and
resources. I had felt like the small guy at the table trying to watch how the
big boys do it. But that applause and cheering showed me that my work on the
state level inspires the people who inspire me as well. I want my campaign to
be the nexus where rural and urban interests meet for our state. I travel 3-5
days out of every week connecting the local activists to each other and to the
state wide Democratic party as well PDA and DFA. Last quarter alone I drove
well over ten thousand miles, with only one out of state trip. In May, my
district wide final canvass of the petition gathering season lasted 8 days,
covered 1224 miles and collected signatures in 22 cities for myself as well as
7 statewide candidates, 8 legislative district candidates and 13 PCs in seven
different counties. And we are continuing to work w these candidates and local
parties to make the whole movement bigger. AZ can turn blue if we join forces
to fix it. Every day we are expanding the circle of activists that attract to
our efforts and join our cause by advancing their own personal campaigns for
change. That’s about as grassroots as you can get.
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