Monday, August 31, 2020

Message to Progressives and Environmentalists in Lake County, Illinois Regarding My Campaign


     What follows are excerpts from posts which I made to the Facebook Groups “Lake County IL Environmentalists”, “Clean Air Lake County Community Support”, “Northern Illinois Progressive Candidates, Electeds, and Activists”, and “Illinois Against the TPP” on August 29th, 2020.


     Hi everyone. I'm running as a write-in candidate for U.S. Representative from Illinois's 10th district (the northeast corner of the state).
     I support peace, a fair and free economy, taxing destruction and waste instead of harmless productive activity, and balancing budgets through reducing unnecessary military expenditures not necessary to our defense.
     I also support promoting local solutions to environmental problems, to guard against the risk that the E.P.A. could continue to be put up for sale to corporate and pro-pollution interests.
     Furthermore, fixing our economy will make it easier to decrease our national debt. I also support amending the 13th Amendment to get rid of as many forms of involuntary servitude (i.e., slavery) as possible, both within the criminal justice system and outside of it.

     I want to reform taxes so that they focus on environmental issues. I will promote Land Value Taxation, one of the two revenue sourcing systems which Howie Hawkins has proposed for funding the Green New Deal. The other revenue sourcing system, the Negative Income Tax, is also a step in the right direction as far as improving income taxes goes, but I'd eventually like to eliminate all taxes on earned income (unearned income is a different issue though).
     With Land Value Taxation, local governments would be urged to increase natural resource extraction fees, and increase taxes on land degradation and blight (as well as vacant land, abandoned properties, land hoarding), while reducing taxes on income, sales, consumption, and building value).
     Additionally, I support Community Land Trusts (C.L.T.s) as well as community air trusts and community water trusts. C.L.T.s should be created, in each county in America, as voluntary associations which are non-profit and untaxed. They would be untaxed because they would be the entities doing the taxing of land; charging land occupancy fees and land degradation fees. C.L.T.s would help align each community's economic future with its future need for ecological sustainability. 
     I believe in dual federalism, triple federalism, and subsidiarism: the most local authority possible, should handle environmental issues, as long as that authority is competent enough to handle the issue. Not all environmental problems are nationwide issues; some of them are local. Furthermore, no county would willingly allow itself to be polluted. That is why we must ensure that the federal government never has the right to determine which areas may be polluted, or have nuclear materials stored, without that community's consent, and without proper compensation for the adverse health effects. Federal environmental standards can help, but having environmental standards is not SO important, that such standards should OVERRIDE local and state environmental regulations, if those regulations can be better than the nationwide standard. That is why localities must be free to set higher environmental standards than the national standard.
     For each community to have a C.L.T. (a non-profit, untaxed voluntary association which help guard against the risk of the E.P.A. continuing to be bought and sold by pro-pollution interests. I would align myself with environmental conservationists, and also the decentralists within the Green Party, but I would also promote C.L.T.s as a quasi-"private", somewhat property-rights-oriented solution to environmental problems (because they would be non-profit and untaxed, and therefore unaffiliated with the state and federal governments).

     I also support bioregionalism, the idea behind the Cascadia independence project. I believe that bioregionalism will help prevent unnecessary federal intrusion into local environmental problems, and restore local rights without allowing states to use states' rights as a justification to dismantle environmental protections.
     If I am elected to Congress, I will spread awareness of Land Value Taxation, Community Land Trusts, and bioregionalism on a national level. This will help the current generation of environmental law students, and other voters, get a free education about these little-known ideas, and start a conversation about what needs to become an important topic in American political discourse: ENVIRONMENTAL TAXATION.
     These ideas are important because they could reduce unemployment, reduce waste of land, decrease economic inequality, and reduce environmental degradation, all at the same time.

     I want to help create a free and fair economy by building a Mutualist Party, while offering new and unique alternatives to traditional neo-liberal policies like those of my opponent Brad Schneider, like re-orienting taxation to focus on environmental issues (such as the need to tax blight and land degradation).
     On trade issues, I support "alter-globalization", in which we would have 1) localized social safety nets, alongside 2) open and fair trade, not unregulated free trade, and 3) free movement of people. We would also have 4) cultural and economic globalization, but not global government; and 5 & 6) the consumer would have the right to fully boycott (and unionize) and refuse to purchase all products (repeal Taft-Hartley).
      Please consider writing-me in against Democrat Brad Schneider and Republican Valerie Ramirez-Mukherjee. Read sections 13 and 14 of my platform to learn more about my views on the environment and Land Value Taxation (which is also part of my plan to balance budgets, lower prices on goods, and increase the purchasing power of the dollar).




     See this link to learn more: http://www.facebook.com/groups/586988188625917/






Written as separate posts on August 29th, 2020

Edited together and published on August 31st, 2020

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