Montgomery County, MD Green Party Blog

A growing number of SUV owners, stuck with rising gas prices and “upside-down” loans–where they owe more than the car is worth–are resorting to arson for hire to rescue themselves.

Investigators found the arson-for-hire ring involved a new-car dealership in Cerritos, California. Debt-weary SUV owners contacted the finance manager, hoping to trade in their gas-guzzler for something cheaper. They were then put in touch with an arsonist who told them to leave the keys in the ignition and $300 cash in the glovebox. An arsonist would then take the car to a remote location and set it afire. After the car was torched, the owners would then contact their insurance company and report their vehicle stolen, expecting their debt to be cancelled. Instead, they were investigated for insurance fraud.

Some SUVs have been sold with 84 month loans, no money down.  Faced with $3 a gallon on top of outrageous monthly payments, and getting gas milage in single digits, many owners are getting desperate.

The growing incidence of auto arson is an early warning signal that the U.S. lifestyle is becoming unstable.

While some greens may secretly cheer the thought of burning SUVs, it is an incredibly wasteful and polluting thing to do.

These owners should secretly give the cars to scrap metal dealers to recycle the metals.  The catalytic converters alone, contain over $100 of platinum and palladium.  Recyclers could get more money from the car than the measely $300 arsonists get.  And have you priced replacement parts lately?

 Such a waste! There ought to be a law against it.

President Bush’s anounced goal of returning men to the moon by 2020 has caused the cancelation of satellites that would have given scientists critical information on earth’s changing climate. Almost every planned earth studying mission, all of which contribute to our understanding of global warming, has been effected.

Berrien Moore III, director of the Institute for the study of Earth, Oceans, and Space at the University of New Hampshire charges that;

Today, when the need for information about the planet is more important than ever, this process of building understanding through increasingly powerful observations . . . is at risk of collapse … NASA has canceled, scaled back, or delayed all of the planned earth observing missions.”

NASA has canceled a satellite designed to measure soil moisture, a key factor in understanding the impact of global warming and prediction of droughts and floods.  The Deep Space Climate Observatory, already built, was cancelled earlier this year.  The Global Precipitation Measurement mission, and the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System have been delayed.  In addition the research and analysis budget has been cut by 20 percent.

At a time when we are seeing record storms, glacial melting, and droughts, these budget cuts–in the name of sending men back to the moon–are remarkably, incomprehensively shortsighted.

This administration has gone beyond that old army acronym FUBAR.  We need a whole new acronym to describe the Bush administration–BUBAR: BUshwacked Beyond All Recognition.

In California’s June 6 primary, Humboldt County voters passed a ballot initiative that affirmed that corporations do not have the same rights as citizens when it comes to participating in local political campaigns.  Out of town corporations can now be barred from contributing to local campaigns.  The measure, which passed by 55-45, was spearheaded by the local Green Party.

The initiative grew out of campaigns by Walmart which spent $250,000 in 1999 to change the city of Eureka’s zoning laws to allow one of their stores to be built, and by Maxxam Inc., a forest products company which spent $300,000 to engineer a recall campaign against an attorney general who tried to enforce regulations on its operations.

 Kaitlin Sopoci-Belknap, a leader of the ballot initiative effort said that;

Every person has the right to sign petition recalls and to contribute money to political campaigns. Measure T will not affect these individual rights.  But individuals hold these political rights by virtue of their status as humans in a democracy and, simply put, a corporation is not a person.

Sopoci-Belknap called Tuesday’s vote nothing less than the beginning of “the process of reclaiming our county” from the “tyranny” of concentrated economic and political power.

Greens around the country would do well to look closely at the results.  This is an important issue that can be raised in other states as well.

During the month of May, the Maryland Green Party locals conducted primary votes for the state’s Governor/Lieutenant Governor, and U.S. Senator races.  The results were announced at the State Assembly on Saturday, June 3.

 Ed Boyd was nominated for Governor.  Ed is a veteran who served in the Navy from 1979 to 1987.  After he left the service he did outreach work for homeless veterans in Washington, D.C., working with the Community for Creative Non-Violence.  He subsequently worked at the Maryland Center for Veterans Education and Training, and at Volunteers for Peace in Vermont.

The Boyd campaign is focusing on the 70% rate increase that has been proposed by the Baltimore Gas and Electric Co., calling for the conversion of BGE into a publicly owned utility.  Public utilities are a growing phenomenon, with over 2,000 now existing in the U.S.  But the Democrats and Republicans, whose campaign chests are stuffed with utility company money, won’t talk about the issue.

Kevin Zeese was nominated for U.S. Senate.  Kevin is running a unity campaign, having already received the nomination of the Libertarian Party, and expecting to win the nomination of the Populist Party.  Kevin will only appear on the Green Party ballot line, however.

Kevin is running because the two major parties no longer represent the interests of most Americans, citing a recent poll that showed that only 17% of voters felt that their elected officials represented their priorities. Kevin is the only candidate in the race who is clearly against the war in Iraq.  A longtime opponent of the war on drugs, Kevin supports the decriminalization of most drugs.  And he has been in the forefront of the effort to ensure a paper trail for all election machines.

In addition, the Maryland has a growing slate of candidates for other state races:

For Congress:
Steve Warner, District 5
Gerard Giblin, District 8
For State Assembly:
Chris Bush, District 10
David Kiasi, District 25
Brandy Baker, District 43
Elsey Marquez, District 39
Joseph Sanchez, District 36
County Councils:
Joe Horgan, Montgomery County Council
Robb Tufts, Anne Arundel County Council
Brian Bittner, Hartford County Council
Judicial:
Nick DelPizzo, Baltimore City
Arthur Frank, Baltimore County

In an upcoming issue of Rolling Stone, Robert Kennedy Jr. charges that Republicans struck 3 million votes from the tally, and that 90 percent of these votes were by people of color. Four methods were used to scrub these votes.

Step 1: “Spoiling” ballots — 1,389,231 of them. In the vote-count game, these are called “undervotes” and “overvotes.” You can recognize these lost ballots by their hanging chads, punch cards without punches (an Ohio specialty), paper ballots eaten by scanners, and touch screens that didn’t know you touched them.

Step 2: Rejecting “provisional ballots”– 1,090,729 in this pile. Voters finding themselves at the “wrong” precinct, or wrongly “scrubbed” from voter rolls get these back-of-the-bus ballots first inaugurated in 2002. In ‘04, provisional ballots were passed out like candy to voters in the poorest precincts. They handed them out — then threw them away — one million dumped in all. In Ohio, Republican Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell changed state rules, allowing him to toss out the ballots of legal voters who cast ballots in the wrong precinct although these citizens were told their vote would count after confirming their registration.

Step 3: Not counting absentee ballots — 526,420 of them. At least, that’s what we figure from official stats. But it’s anyone’s guess how many mailed-in votes were dumped. (However, in one case, in Palm Beach, Florida, Jeb Bush’s candidate for Elections Supervisor, Theresa LaPore, counted more absentee votes than absentee ballots mailed in. Not the brightest bulb in the vote-fix biz, that Theresa.)

Step 4: Scrub’m, Purge’m, Block’m. These are the voters who never got to vote at all. This group includes those who found their registrations were never entered on the voter rolls. In Ohio, about one-fourth of those registered by Jesse Jackson’s 2004 voter drive, found their registrations delayed beyond the election date or lost.

Two million votes were cast but not counted in 2000, three million in 2004. The Republicans are going to be looking for four or five million in 2008.

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