Election fund-raising leader breaks ,000 mark

Election fund-raising leader breaks $85,000 mark

Empire Land gives one-fifth of all campaign donations; Leonard receives more firefighter donations

The most expensive political campaign in Hesperia’s history has broken the $85,000 mark, while a rival campaign, primarily funded by a firefighter union contribution, received another such donation, although smaller.

Incumbent Councilman Dennis Nowicki has raised at least $85,149 in campaign donations. He picked up a total of $9,196 between October 1 and October 16, the period covered by the latest campaign disclosure statements. Donations over $1,000 after that date must be reported to the Hesperia City Clerk’s office within 24 hours, and Nowicki received one such donation last Monday.
The previous record for a Hesperia city council race was set in 2000, when Bill Jensen spent $30,685 in an unsuccessful reelection bid.

Meanwhile, Nowicki’s closest rival, political newcomer Mike Leonard, saw his war chest grow to $36,111, including a $5,000 contribution from the San Bernardino County Firefighters Political Action Fund. Leonard, a 26-year-veteran of the Hesperia and San Bernardino County fire departments, previously received a $15,297 check from the now-defunct Hesperia firefighters political action fund. He raised a total of $11,488 in the latest reporting period.

The other incumbent in the race, Mayor Tad Honeycutt, raised almost as much as Nowicki and Leonard combined in the first two weeks of October, $20,478, in a last-minute infusion of cash. Like Nowicki, he received another large donation last Monday, bringing his total to $52,733.
Write-in candidate Alan Bird did not raise any funds during the period, and has indicated he did not intend to do any serious fundraising, if he does any at all, by Election Day.

The largest donor in the campaign is real estate development firm Empire Land, trailed by firefighter political action funds.

Empire Land, through the company’s political action committee, Taxpayers for Good Government, gave Nowicki an additional $4,825 by October 16 and an additional $6,292 on October 25. Combined with direct donations in previous reporting periods, this brings Empire Land’s total donation to Nowicki’s campaign to $18,617, or more than one dollar for every five in his campaign fund. Taxpayers for Good Government also gave Honeycutt $13,825 by October 16 and an additional $6,292 on October 25, bringing their total contribution to his campaign to $20,117. Thirty-eight percent of Honeycutt’s campaign fund is Empire Land money.

Out of a total $173,993 raised in this campaign by three candidates, $38,734, or 22 percent of it, is Empire Land money. (In contrast, Victorville’s city council race has five candidates vying for two seats, with a total of $110,607 raised by October 16.)

Leonard, the sole recipient of fire department money this campaign season - council members Ed Pack and Rita Vogler have previously received Hesperia fire department PAC funds - has received a total of $20,297 from the Hesperia and San Bernardino County fire departments. He worked for the city fire department for more than 25 years, until it was folded by a council vote this year, and its members picked up by the county fire department. Fifty-six percent of Leonard’s campaign contribution dollars come from fire department political action funds.

Leonard’s only other major contributor this period was Palm Springs resident Barbara Harrison, who gave $1,500 to his campaign committee. Nowicki’s other major contributor was Newport Beach real estate broker Rene J. Jacober, who gave a $1,000 donation to his committee. Honeycutt, who almost doubled his campaign funds in the two weeks of the reporting period, received a major donation from the Victorville-based San Bernardino County Central Committee, a fund for incumbent Republican politicians in the county, in the amount of $2,500. He also received a $1,000 donation from Rancho Cucamonga-based Willowbrook Residential.

Although funds raised in the last two weeks of the campaign over $1,000 per donation have to be declared within 24 hours of the campaign committee receiving the money, a full accounting of last-minute donations won’t be seen until well after the election. The next set of disclosures, covering from October 16 through December 31, will be released at the end of January.

Beau Yarbrough can be reached at beau@hesperiastar.com or 956-7108.

In fact, the law's restrictions on "soft" money have helped make the parties more reliant on smaller donors. According to the center, individual contributions will total $2.5 billion by the end of the current election cycle. That's a big jump over the $1.5 billion in individual contributions raised in 2000.

And the political parties managed to raise record amounts of money in spite of the law's centerpiece - which bans parties and candidates from accepting unlimited, unregulated soft dollars from corporations, unions, and individuals - and in spite of widespread predictions that the McCain-Feingold law would mean the demise of the parties.

The two parties also have had to develop stronger grassroots fundraising efforts - healthy for democracy in that the more individuals involved in the political process, the better. And, perhaps most important, big donors were better kept at arm's length from direct solicitation by parties and candidates.

Still, big-money donors managed to make use of a large loophole in the law to bolster both Democratic and Republican campaign efforts, and more needs to be done to keep in check such fundraising and spending in future elections.

An estimated $460 million in soft money has been funneled to so-called 527 independent advocacy groups. Unfortunately, those groups were the principal source of a barrage of harsh attack ads against both Bush and Kerry (recall the Swift Vets and POWs for Truth ads helped by rich Texas donors such as T. Boone Pickens and Harold Simmons, or MoveOn.org's efforts, funded largely by billionaires George Soros and Peter Lewis) along with massive voter registration drives (including some whose tactics already have been questioned).

527s fed by emotional fervor

Frequently more vitriolic in their approach than the candidates themselves, many 527 ads also grossly distorted the opposing candidate's central campaign messages, bringing campaign negativity to troubling new levels.

Obviously, 527s need better managing in ways that also preserve free speech, and that's no small task. These groups gave an outsized political voice to those with deep pockets. At least 46 people contributed $1 million or more to 527s, according to PoliticalMoneyLine, which also tracks campaign finance - hardly a wide public sampling.

Like the parties and the campaigns, 527s need contribution limits. Sen. John McCain and others in Congress recently filed legislation to do just that, rightly putting a $5,000 cap on individual contributions to a 527.

Under the campaign finance law, 527s can't coordinate their activities with campaigns (still, they're often run by former party officials). And federal officeholders can't directly solicit donations for them. But the Federal Election Commission recently allowed loopholes in both provisions. And while a judge threw most of the loopholes out in September, the move wasn't in time to affect this year's races.

Congress needs to seriously consider further reform efforts, such as reining in 527s, and should quickly move to address the ineffectiveness of a highly partisan FEC so that campaign fundraising and spending can find more reasonable balances.

When the Supreme Court upheld McCain-Feingold in December 2003, clearly it was suggesting the Constitution's free speech protections didn't preclude sensible campaign-finance regulation. Creating modest restrictions on 527s furthers that worthy aim, and helps demonstrate that a few individuals can't buy a president.

www.csmonitor.com | Copyright © 2004 The Christian Science Monitor

Issue Date:  November 5, 2004

A Catholic response to Catholic Answers

By STEVEN P. MILLIES

I have a question for Karl Keating: Why do we need you?

For those who do not know, Karl Keating is the president of Catholic Answers, which describes itself as “the largest Catholic apologetics and evangelization organization in the U.S.” I would not dispute that description, unless we include the Roman Catholic church as a Catholic apologetics and evangelization organization. I suppose that I would include the church, and the fact that Mr. Keating does not may point us toward his answer to my question. More on that in a moment.

I recently received a fundraising appeal from Mr. Keating’s organization, and his pitch was simple: “Help us make sure Catholic voters STOP voting for pro-abortion, pro-euthanasia, and pro-homosexual politicians.” (I have preserved Keating’s own anxious emphasis in this essay, adding none of my own.) I quickly dismissed a mental picture of goons hired by Keating to tackle Catholic Democrats as they approach the ballot box. In fact, Keating’s plan is almost as elegant. He wants to publish a “Voter’s Guide for Serious Catholics” to “educate Catholic voters on the key moral issues of our time and show them how to vote the Catholic way.” Those key moral issues, according to Keating, are in ranked order: 1) abortion; 2) euthanasia; 3) fetal stem cell research; 4) human cloning; and 5) homosexual marriage. Those are “five ‘nonnegotiable’ issues that all Catholics need to understand and to vote against if we are to keep America from collapsing.”

Mr. Keating offers statistics to demonstrate the need for his voter’s guide. “Catholics make up 26 percent of the electorate,” but “Catholics are more likely to vote for ‘liberal’ candidates” (note that the voter’s guide “does not endorse any particular candidate or political party”). In the face of these statistics, Keating’s goal is a modest one. Keating foresees a time when America’s 65 million Catholics will vote “in harmony with church teaching” to “change the face of American politics.”

I will admit that I do not lead a Catholic apologetics and evangelization organization, so I may lack some of Mr. Keating’s sophistication in these matters. But “chang[ing] the face of American politics” seems like a very strange goal for a Catholic apologetics and evangelization organization. I readily can understand a desire to win souls or to stop abortions by winning souls. I have a bit more trouble understanding why the things of Caesar -- “the face of American politics” -- occupy such expensive real estate in Mr. Keating’s world.

I have to wonder as well at his ranked list of “nonnegotiable” moral issues. It is not so much that I do not understand why he has included those five as much as I do not understand why he has excluded others. In the midst of a war that has no relationship to “legitimate defense” and under a president who, as governor of Texas, signed off on more executions faster than any other governor in the nation, the exclusion of those issues is interesting. Could “bloodless means” not have been “sufficient to defend human lives,” as the Catechism requires, in every one of those 152 cases where Gov. Bush signed a death warrant? Is the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay or the pursuit of an unprovoked war a negotiable moral issue?

The voter’s guide, Mr. Keating assures me, “can be given to anybody, not just Catholics,” because even “non-Catholics will see the consistency of Catholic moral teaching, and they’ll find that consistency attractive.” I am at a disadvantage here as well, since I have been a Catholic all of my life. Even so, I always have found the “consistency” of Catholic moral teaching attractive. Perhaps that is why I find Mr. Keating’s inconsistency a bit disturbing.

I should return to my original question: Why do we need Karl Keating? Perhaps Mr. Keating proposes that the church has failed us, and that Catholic Answers can spread the message of the Gospel more effectively and win more followers than the church herself. Popes and bishops have proclaimed the message of the Gospel for generations, and the result has been the absence of unified, Catholic, political action that Mr. Keating laments. Certainly, if we follow Mr. Keating’s logic of “wayward” and “authentic” Catholics, the church has done a very bad job and an organization like Catholic Answers might be just the thing to take its place. This is an interesting proposition, and one worth considering.

But perhaps the better answer is that we do not need him -- or, to be more precise, his organization -- at all because the universality of the church must admit to more than one political perspective. This is why even Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger has described “proportionate reasons” for supporting candidates who happen to be pro-choice. This also is why the church has inveighed against mixing politics with the faith since the earliest period of Christianity. We must not allow the view of our ultimate goal to become clouded by the temporal and obviously partisan cares of this world.

So, Mr. Keating, I regret that I cannot support your organization, and neither can I abide by your voting instructions. I will maintain my membership in a Catholic apologetics and evangelization organization older than yours, however. Perhaps, one day, you will support us.

Steven P. Millies is assistant professor of political science at the University of South Carolina-Aiken.

National Catholic Reporter, November 5, 2004

Reflections on David McReynolds' Reflections on the Election by Mark Dunlea www.dissidentvoice.org November 1, 2004 (Article in Response to The Truth is Always Concrete by David McReynolds)

It has been a pleasure to have spent the last few months working with David McReynolds. One of the positive benefits of green political campaigns is getting to know better the individuals you are supporting. As I have driven David around the state the last few weeks I have been able to get my own McReynolds history lesson.

As David is fond of telling the audience at campaign stops -- often waking me from my restful repose to add a few words of balance -- we disagree on the issue of the 2004 Presidential election and the lesser-of-two-evils. While David may be tired of hearing that the lesser-of-two-evils is still evil, it unfortunately is still true

And there is little that Kerry offers that I would view as reflective of the green vision of the world.

His environmental record, which draws high marks from the big 10 DC-based national groups, is reflective of the agenda of trying to reduce the level of pollution, not of creating a sustainable environmental-economic system that does not use up our planet's resources faster than we can replace him. And I hear no urgent call from him to end human impact on global warming.

David has agreed that he will read the Avocado Declaration by Peter Camejo that provides an historical overview of the similarity of the two major parties over the last 130 years. Unfortunately, David has not had time to read it before the election.

David does trot out the bogeyman of the Supreme Court nominations. I do remind him that Clinton's appointments to the federal bench were generally similar in political and judicial philosophy to those of Reagan and Bush. The one main difference being on economic issues, in which Clinton's judicial appointments were more conservative.

I think judicial appointments are reflective of the different orientation of the two major parties. Democrats tend to appoint judges, especially Supreme Court judges, that they believe will be acceptable to the most reactionary members of the Republican Senate (e.g, for decades, Strom Thurmond). The Republicans tend to nominate judges that are more reflective of their own beliefs. I do remind David that bad Supreme Court nominees - and indeed, any bad policies at all - can not be approved without Democratic agreement, since 60 votes are needed to break a filibuster in the Senate and that the bad ones were all approved with Democratic votes.

(And if it was pro-life, boy would I be annoyed about how the Republicans have crassly manipulated this issue for the last twenty years to get my vote but have done so little to reverse it despite having swept to power nationally.)

I think we also see the difference on the issue of impeachment. The Republicans gleefully welcomed the opportunity to impeach Clinton over lying about oral sex. The Democrats refused to push impeachment when Bush lied about the invasion of Iraq; they apparently didn't want to look too partisan or extreme. Of course, the national Democratic party leadership supports war and the military-industrial complex, so they wouldn't want to be seen as opposing war.

I always cite an op ed by David Brower that appeared in my local corporate paper in 1996. Brower is considered by many the grandfather of the environmental movement. Brower, in endorsing Nader, pointed out that Clinton and Gore in their first four years had managed to do more damage to the environment (e.g., NAFTA, salvage timber ride, Everglades destruction) than Reagan and Bush had managed to inflict in twelve. Now Reagan and Bush wanted to do more damage. Clinton and Gore did it more to reward their corporate campaign contributors. The other big difference was the while the big national environmental groups used Reagan and Watts to drive their direct mail fundraising operations, they were unwilling to attack the worse policies of Clinton due to the desire not to "reduce their access" to the Clinton cocktail parties.

In case you missed it, the Democrats long ago stopped talking about the poor (read, people of color) as a core constituency. As someone who has spent thirty years as an anti-poverty organizer, I am quite aware -- as are our members -- that we are no longer part of the democratic call to arms. We now have Working Families instead (and the Dems don't define raising children as work). Clinton of course ended welfare as we know it -- getting rid of the principal child anti-poverty New Deal program. Income inequality has increased in our country regardless of whether a Democrat or Republican is President. It was actually very striking how much even Jesse Jackson dropped the poor in his second run for president.

Yes, it it is true that many important constituencies and groups reside in the Democratic Party. That is perhaps the biggest difference within the two parties - who they make a show of consulting before deciding to do what their corporate backers want. But the corporate backers always win - the difference mainly being what crumbs they dispense to their alleged followers.

There is a course also some difference between the two parties on foreign policy. The Republicans believe that America has the right to unilaterally use our economic and military power to impose their vision of a corporate American global empire. The Democrats believe that we should consult Europe and Japan in implementing the corporate American global empire.

The differences are not worth my vote.

Mark Dunlea is a cofounder and former chair of the Green Party of New York State. He is the author of Madame President: The Unauthorized Biography of the First Green Party President (http://nys.greens.org/rachel)

* Some Highlights of the Avocado Declaration
(Read full Declaration)

The Green Party is at a crossroads. The 2004 elections place before us a clear and unavoidable choice. On one side, we can continue on the path of political independence, building a party of, by and for the people by running our own campaign for President of the United States. The other choice is the well-trodden path of lesser-evil politics, sacrificing our own voice and independence to support whoever the Democrats nominate in order, we are told, to defeat Bush.

The difference is not over whether to "defeat Bush" - understanding that to mean the program of corporate globalization and the wars and trampling of the Constitution that come with it - but rather how to do it. We do not believe it is possible to defeat the "greater" evil by supporting a shamefaced version of the same evil. We believe it is precisely by openly and sharply confronting the two major parties that the policies of the corporate interests these parties represent can be set back and defeated.

ORIGINS OF THE PRESENT TWO-PARTY SYSTEM

History shows that the Democrats and Republicans are not two counterpoised forces, but rather complementary halves of a single two-party system: "one animal with two heads that feed from the same trough," as Chicano leader Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzalez explained.

Since the Civil War a peculiar two-party political system has dominated the United States. Prior to the Civil War a two-party system existed which reflected opposing economic platforms. Since the Civil War a shift occurred. A two-party system remained in place but no longer had differing economic orientation. Since the Civil War the two parties show differences in their image, role, social base and some policies but in the last analysis, they both support essentially similar economic platforms.

This development can be clearly dated to the split in the Republican Party of 1872 where one wing merged with the "New Departure" Democrats that had already shifted towards the Republican platform, which was pro-finance and industrial business. Prior to the Civil War, the Democratic Party, controlled by the slaveocracy, favored agricultural business interests and developed an alliance with small farmers in conflict with industrial and some commercial interests. That division ended with the Civil War. Both parties supported financial and industrial business as the core of their programmatic outlook.

For over 130 years the two major parties have been extremely effective in preventing the emergence of any mass political formations that could challenge their political monopoly. Most attempts to build political alternatives have been efforts to represent the interests of the average person, the working people. These efforts have been unable to develop. Both major parties have been dominated by moneyed interests and today reflect the historic period of corporate rule.

In this sense United States history has been different from that of any other advanced industrial nation. In all other countries multi-party systems have appeared and to one degree or another these countries have more democratic electoral laws and better political representation. In most other countries, there exist political parties ostensibly based on or promoting the interest of non-corporate sectors such as working people.

In spite of this pro-corporate political monopoly, mass struggles for social progress, struggles to expand democracy and civil rights have periodically exploded throughout United States history.

Every major gain in our history, even pre-Civil War struggles --such as the battles for the Bill of Rights, to end slavery, and to establish free public education-- as well as those after the Civil War have been the product of direct action by movements independent of the two major parties and in opposition to them.

Since the Civil War, without exception, the Democratic Party has opposed all mass struggles for democracy and social justice. These include the struggle for ballot reform, for the right of African Americans to vote and against American apartheid ("Jim Crow"), for the right to form unions, for the right of women to vote, against the war in Vietnam, the struggle to make lynching illegal, the fight against the death penalty, the struggle for universal health care, the fight for gay and lesbian rights, and endless others. Many of these struggles were initiated by or helped by the existence of small third parties.