Candidate for
Member of the State Assembly; District 9

"Responsibility - Fiscal, Social, Environmental, Personal."

Visions of Our Children's Children's Future

In 1974, when I was a college student in San Diego, I attended an eight week lecture series, "Earth 2020, Visions of Our Children's Children's Future." This free series traveled to the major cities of the U.S. and featured different presenters each week discussing diferent topics. People discussed population control, climate change, resource depletion, recycling, someday mining landfills for metals, and natural limiting factors to economic growth.

But the most colorful speaker was an urban designer from Boston, originally from Scotland, Ian McHargue. McHargue had a full curly brown beard and wore a double breasted suite. In a thick Scottish brogue he reviled the "captains of industry" - "ambulatory putrrresence" he called them, rolling his Rs. As he described how they were befouling the earth, you could almost see them leaving blue-green footprints that glowed in the dark.

But he had a plan to re-educate these despoilers. Each would be sent into earth orbit in his own space capsule. The capsule would be powered by solar panels. Inside the capsule would be lights, and a vat of water and algae, measured out to the weight of the occupant. When the captain was thirsty he'd sip the water, through a filter, and when he was hungry he'd eat the algae. The algae would grow from solar energy and his body wastes, which were recycled through the vat.

The captain would stay in orbit until he came to the realization that everything that had once been in his body was now in the vat, and everything that had once been in the vat was now in his body. Only then would he be let back down to earth, presumably a wiser and more responsible industrialist.

Turn the space capsule inside-out, and we have a simplified model of earth's life-support system. Earth is the mother ship and our life-support system is ailing and in peril. There is plenty of evidence of this.

Dysfunctional Economics

The human economic system is a wholly dependent subsystem of the natural economic system, the ecosystem. But the models and equations on which our economic system is based are fundamentally flawed because the natural resources on which the economy depends are not factored in. So long as economic growth depends on the increased extraction and consumption of natural resources, that economic growth is limited and must eventually collapse.

But for Democratic and Republican politicians in the California legislature, it's business as usual. Their mantra is "growth, growth, growth." Our economy is booming now for many (but surely not for all) because we are living off of the world's inheritance of natural resources. We are drawing down the savings account of natural capital passed down over the ages, spending our children's and their children's future.

The "bottom line" values that allow for and foster the exploitation and degradation of the world's natural resources also allow for and foster the exploitation and degradation of "human resources," people.

Two Parties - One System

Our two-party political system is one system, the corporate interest system. From Sacramento city hall to the halls of Congress, Democrats work with Republicans to further the corporate agenda at the expense of people and the environment. Only when there is a large public backlash against corporate irresponsibility and excess, as is happening with the tobacco and HMO industries, does the two-party system stand up to corporate interests.

For example, the three part series by Donald Barlette and James Steele on corporate welfare, beginning in the Nov. 9, 1998 Time magazine, shows how Democrats and Republicans, from local governments and state capitols to Congress, work together to give public resources to large corporations.

My campaign for the state assembly is about educating and informing people that we need better government than we are getting from the two-party system. For example, the Green Party advocates a single-payor universal health care system which includes mental health care, not the piecemeal band-aide programs we have now.

Natural Economics, Serving Human Needs

California has the world's seventh largest economy. We need to be a leader in restructuring our economy from a "take, make, waste" system into what some people call "natural economics, " based on ecological principles. According to it's proponents, natural economics will be more efficient and help restore the ecosystem, can be much more profitable for businesses, and will employ more people in useful work at good wages.

The technology needed for this restructuring already exists. The change should be fostered by government by phasing out laws and programs that support and subsidize the current "take, make, waste" system. But for Democrats and Republicans, it's business as usual as they preach "free markets" and "free-trade" while practicing corporate welfare.

The issue is not free markets and trade versus regulated markets and trade - all markets and trading have rules and regulations. The real issue is who makes the rules for whose benefit. Thus, we need to restructure our political institutions and democratic processes to ensure that the rules of the new economy serve all people.

In their book, America: Who Really Pays the Taxes, Pulitzer Prize winning reporters Donald Barlette and James Steele show who doesn't pay the taxes and how Democrats and Republicans work together to dole out huge tax breaks to rich people and large corporations and then lie about how their tax reform will help the rest of us. This process is duplicated in the California legislature. This alone should be enough to make you want to bury the two-party system.

Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, recommends the book When Corporations Rule the World as a "must read." In this book, economist David C. Korten discusses what he calls corporate colonialism, the process by which corporations turn public resources and public institutions to work for corporate profit. Corporations have thoroughly colonized the public airwaves and most of the major media, as well as the two-party system.

They are colonizing public schools with so-called partnerships, sponsorships, and marketing ploys like Channel One, turning classrooms into profit centers. They are even working on local governments, all with the help of corporate interest politicians.

Reclaiming public resources for public purposes

Replacing this system with true multi-party democracy will probably first require substantial political campaign reform - not just public funding of candidates so they can spend it on the kinds of ads we detest, but also reducing the costs of campaigns by reclaiming the public airways, and other media regulated as public utilities, for public purposes.

There is a day care center where I work, called the Poppy Patch. I pass by the outdoor play area on my way out to the light rail stop. It is a joy at the end of the day to hear all those little voices screaming and yelling and laughing and giggling and having fun outdoors. They are innocents in this world.

In their book, "Natural Capitalism," Paul Hawken and Amory and Hunter Lovins say that we have inherited a 3.8 billion-years' store of natural resources. "At present rates of use and degradation," they say, "there will be little left by the end of the" 21st century.

After appearing on a local TV show to discuss our economy's dysfunctions, the producer suggested I get my own show. After pondering what I might call my show, I came up with the working title, "Surviving the 21st Century." That is what my campaign for state assembly and the Green Party, are about, surviving the next century - for the Poppy Patch kids and their children's children's future.