Asheville Democracy for America endorses Jones and Bothwell for county commission

The members of Asheville Democracy for America have voted to endorse Holly Jones and Cecil Bothwell in the race for Buncombe County Commission.

In the end, the two candidates were endorsed in a near-unanimous vote by DFA-Asheville members, far surpassing the 60% threshold the group had set to ensure that they would focus their efforts only on the candidates who had the members' most enthusiastic support.

The vote came after an open process that began in December, when members were polled about how they wanted to go about endorsing candidates. In February, members were solicited for questions to ask candidates. Then in March the candidates' responses to the group's questionnaire were posted on the DFA-Asheville blog, and members got to talk directly to the candidates in a public meeting.

"We strive to be a member-driven organization," said Doug Gibson, one of DFA-Asheville's volunteer organizers. "And throughout this process we took pains to make sure our members had a say in how we did things as well as an opportunity to weigh in on the endorsements themselves."

The group plans to support Bothwell and Jones through independent advertising and grassroots efforts. They see their independent role as especially crucial this year, when many acknowledge that Buncombe County is at a crossroads with regards to development, and after recent controversies like the Progress Energy power plant have brought attention to open government and energy issues.

Says Gibson, "pro-development groups poured more than $40,000 into last year's Asheville elections, and more than half of it came from organizations based outside Buncombe County. The same forces will be in play in this year's county commission race, and we want to be a voice for people living here who are concerned about out future."

DFA Asheville is a local group associated with Democracy for America, a national organization dedicated to electing socially progressive, fiscally responsible candidates at all levels of government. To find out more about DFA Asheville, visit www.ashevilledemocracyforamerica.org

Endorsement process for statewide and state legislative candidates

In January, our members voted to support candidates running for state offices outside of Buncombe who sought our help. So starting today, Asheville Democracy for America invites candidates running in Democratic primaries for statewide and state legislative offices to apply for our endorsement. The process will follow these steps:

1. DFA Asheville will not formally invite anyone to start the endorsement process. Instead, candidates must seek our endorsement, though individual members may encourage their preferred candidates to apply. Candidates seeking our endorsement should contact Doug Gibson as soon as possible.

2. All Democratic candidates for Buncombe county commission seeking our endorsement must a) contact Doug Gibson by midnight on April 2, b) complete and return a brief questionnaire by midnight on Sunday, April 6, and b) attend, or send a representative to, our April meeting - 7pm, April 9, at the North Asheville Public Library. (Due to the variety of offices under consideration, questionnaires will be tailored to each applicant, and will be sent via e-mail to candidates expressing interest.)

3. We also encourage candidates to prepare a brief (2-3 minute) video appeal for those members who can't make the April meeting and wish to participate online. We ask candidates to make them available as YouTube videos (and send us a link) several days before April 9 so we can post them on our group blog.

4. A separate vote will be taken for each candidate seeking our endorsement. Only DFA-Link members who joined before March 5, 2008 will be able to vote. Members will be able to vote at the April meeting and then via e-mail for a week afterward.

5. To receive our endorsement, a candidate must receive at least 3/5 of the total votes cast at the meeting and via e-mail.

Please note that until May 6, we will only endorse candidates running in contested primaries. At that point we will provide information on our process for endorsing candidates in the general election.

Why state government matters. Part one . . .

. . . of what is likely to be an extremely long series.

After the disaster that was the 2000 election and its sequels in Florida and at the Supreme Court, some of us still held out hope that things were not going to be quite as bad as we feared. But one of the first signs that things were actually going to be worse came just after Congress convened.

One of the first acts of the all-new, all-Republican Congress (this was in the pre-Jim Jeffords days) was to repeal regulations put in place the previous year by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration that would have required employers to take account of ergonomics when setting up their workplaces. We're not talking about wrist pads and seat height here (though those sorts of items would have been covered): we're talking about, for example, not requiring poultry workers to repeatedly reach into awkward positions in near-freezing temperatures to clean up meat for packaging. In other words, the regulations sought to mitigate problems that can permanently disable people and set the stage for even more horrific accidents and injuries.

So the Republican Congress, as expected, took those new protections away from American workers before they even had a chance to enjoy them. Before there could be any accurate accounting of how much the new rules might cost employers, and before there could be any accurate accounting of how much the new rules might save the public - how many fewer lives might be ruined, how many more able-bodied people could stay in their jobs, how much less money communities paid in medical costs and disability programs.

Here in North Carolina, fortunately, we had our own ergonomics rules. But of course in the 2000 elections Democrats lost one seat on the council of state - Cherie Berry, a Republican, had eked out a victory over Democrat Doug Berger after taking 62% of her campaign donations from the very industries she would be regulating - including $10,000 from the House of Raeford, a poultry processor and one of the worst violators of workplace standards in the state. So it should also come as no surprise that within months of taking office, Berry threw out North Carolina's ergonomics standards. And so one election wiped out protections for millions of workers and gave special interests a victory at both the state and national level.

Absent some historic shift in voting patterns, Berry is likely to win reelection this year. But in 2012 reformers hope to include the Commissioner of Labor race in the state's public financing program, which might make Berry more vulnerable. Which is a good thing. Because whatever happens in DC, state labor departments are largely responsible for the enforcement of federal labor standards. And that means 2008 could be a banner year for Democrats nationally without improving the fortunes of North Carolina workers.

On the board at last.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post detailing the extreme difficulty I had had in finding grassroots Hillary supporters. Now it turns out that Clinton folks will have their first meetup in Buncombe County this coming Thursday at 7pm, at the Atlanta Bread Company on Merrimon Ave. Checking on the Hillary '08 site, I see that groups are up and - well - starting to run across the state. North Carolina's primary could get contentious, apparently.

Now, the fact that Obama folks have been meeting for months doesn't mean that they're better organized, or will be by the time the primary rolls around. And better organization doesn't always translate into victory, anyway. But Hillary supporters will have a lot of ground to make up, and a lot of hard work to pack into six weeks. Good luck, guys, and welcome to the grassroots!

What the media can do to a candidate.

There's a great post right now on Daily Kos pointing out that, for whatever reason, the media has gone in search of a controversy to feed their audiences and found Reverend Wright.

The poster, TocqueDeville, illustrates what's happening now to Barack Obama with a compelling parallel: what happened to Howard Dean after Iowa. This is old history, of course, and I'm only posting because I hadn't seen this clip before. But if you'll listen carefully about 1:13 in, you'll hear what eyewitnesses would have told you they heard on the night of the infamous "Dean Scream." The difference between what you hear on this recording and what was played everywhere in the news - well, it's just symbolic of the difference between the substance of the Wright controversy and the way the media has played it up.

What's ironic to me is the way Democrats at the time mocked Dean and questioned his judgement, his media savvy. And the most common retort of those of us supporting the governor was, "just you wait. Whoever gets nominated - no matter how savvy they are - the media will do exactly the same to them." We were right. And it's happening again to the party's presumptive nominee. I don't know what to do about it. But there it is.

This way we could insure some parents, maybe.

Forgive the snark - after all, it's wonderful that we're doing so much to fund children's health care. But good as SCHIP is, there are plenty of adults who need health care, too. Over the past couple of years, North Carolina has taken some steps to provide more adults with health insurance: in 2006, the state passed a tax credit which allowed employers to take a deduction of $250 for every employee enrolled in a company health plan. Of course there were conditions - the employee couldn't make more than $40,000, the company had to be paying 50 percent of the employee's insurance costs, and the law only covered employers with 25 or fewer employees. But hey - a step forward is a step forward.

Then last year, North Carolina became the 35th (35th? Why does that sound familiar?) state to find the money to pay for a high risk insurance pool - subsidizing insurance premiums for North Carolinians whose medical conditions made it difficult to find affordable plans. There was a catch here, too: even with the subsidy, people who got this coverage were expected to pay 2/3 of a premium that could be 50% or 100% more than what a healthy person might pay. But it was another step forward.

So when I received my most recent Statside Dispatch from the folks at the Progressive States Network, I found what they had to say very interesting. Apparently some states are using Medicaid and SCHIP funds to pay some or all of the premiums of employed workers on Medicaid. In other words, some state governments are paying private premiums for the working poor.

This has a number of benefits: It provides the kind of positive employment incentive our welfare system has had less and less of since welfare "reform." It can increase the number of employees that a company insures, possibly allowing the employer to purchase insurance less expensively. It subsidizes private insurance, which can lower everyone's insurance costs. And it's another opportunity to work toward the main goal - insuring everyone, including adults - without a frontal assault on private insurors (though that's going to have to happen sometime).

It's not a foolproof system - there's always a chance that these kinds of policy initiatives will get twisted away from their original lofty goals, and some states are seeing low levels of participation. And of course it means that taxpayers are continuing to subsidize the inefficient private health insurance companies when they'd be better off just paying directly for medical care. But when you're in a state like North Carolina, where only incremental change seems possible, and social policies apparently have to allow the wealthy to feel good about themselves, it's good to have another piece of the puzzle handy in case there's an opportunity to put it in.

The Flat Tax: An Idea Whose Time Has Come

No, really.

Rob Schofield at NC Policy Watch has a weekly briefing up on a new report from the NC Budget and Tax Center. In 2007, as it turns out, the lowest 20% of households in North Carolina - with an average income of $10,000 - paid about 11% of their income in state and local taxes. The top 1% of households - with an average income of $970,000 a year - paid about 7% of their income in state and local taxes.

That discrepancy says a lot about North Carolina tax policy. Schofield, for some reason, takes pains to point out taxes aren't as regressive here as they are in other states - which is true, especially when you consider states that don't have income taxes at all, but rather rely entirely on property and sales taxes to raise revenue.

But our state tax system is still regressive - it still relies too heavily on the sales tax, for example, and the sales tax is in turn made even more regressive by the fact that the state doesn't impose it on a number of personal services. And as we're beginning to see in Buncombe County, the property taxes that local governments rely on don't take account of the fact that many of us are "land poor," that is, in possession of land that's valued much more highly than it's worth to the owners - and that imposes a crushing tax burden on the elderly and others with fixed incomes.

The report suggests a number of remedies: making the income tax system more progressive, putting a sales tax on services, and providing tax credits for property taxes paid by those with low incomes. And if we took these steps, we could even up the score, creating a system whereby the poorest and the richest paid an equal portion of their income in taxes. The state would also begin collecting more revenue - enough to start making progress on other pockets of injustice, like our mental health system, or the shortfalls in the affordable housing fund, or the skyrocketing tuitions at our state universities - just to name a very few of the challenges we face.

That would be something, wouldn't it? So let's have that flat tax - as long as the goal is "justice," and not "helping the rich avoid paying their share by ignoring property and sales taxes," who could say no?