Incumbent Peter Roskam is speaking out about our growing deficit.  He has created an entire website to raise alarm around the national debt as well as to raise money for Republican congressional campaigns.

My competitor cares so much about our urgent need to reduce the deficit he helped create during the Bush era (a direct result of ill-conceived wars, tax cuts, and a prescription drug bill) that he votes against extending unemployment for those affected by this economic crisis.  He also publically opposes and then does not vote for emergency aid to the states to help fund Medicaid and save the jobs of teachers like my campaign manager who lost his job this summer because of state funding cuts.

Peter Roskam is willing to make tough calls to cut the budget deficit, at least when it affects the middle class and the poor.  When it threatens to impact the wealth elite, however, he quickly moves in to protect them.

When the Bush-era tax cuts expire at the end of this year, the President wants to renew all the tax cuts except those for the wealthiest 3% of Americans: individuals making more than $200,000 a year or households making more than $250,000 a year.  Peter Roskam states he and his fellow Republicans won’t let Democrats renew any of the tax breaks unless the wealthy 3% also get their tax breaks renewed as well.  And in the meantime, he claims that its the Democrats who are poised to bring us the largest tax hike in history.

This is wrong.  It is wrong to spread misleading and fear-based rhetoric.  Shame on us if we are fooled by it. It is wrong to abandon the poor while protecting the wealthy, especially in tough times like this.  Shame on us if we stay silent.  There is no justice here.  And being a democracy, it falls on us to hold incumbents like Peter Roskam accountable.   We must step up and take responsibility.  This is why I am running, and why I gave up my job to focus full-time on our grassroots campaign to help restore our moral compass to Congress.

[If Peter Roskam honestly cared about the deficit as much as his rhetoric suggests, then he would actually support letting the Bush tax cuts expire for everyone. This would be the consistent position.  According to Farreed Zakaria from the Washington Post:

“The "Bush tax cuts," passed in 2001 and 2003, remain the single largest cause of America's structural deficit -- that is, the deficit not caused by the collapse in tax revenue when the economy goes into recession. The Bush administration inherited budget surpluses from the Clinton administration. What turned these into deficits, even before the recession? There were three fundamental new costs: the tax cuts, the Medicare prescription-drug bill and post-9/11 security spending (including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan). Of these the tax cuts were by far the largest, adding up to $2.3 trillion over 10 years. According to the Congressional Budget Office, nearly half the cost of all legislation enacted from 2001 to 2007 can be attributed to the tax cuts.”

The rest of this good article is here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2010/08/01/AR2010080103287.html ]

Thanks to MoveOn for sending out the following correction earlier today:

Ben sent this letter to the White House yesterday to express our disappointment over the vacations the First Family has been taking:

August 19, 2010

Dear President Obama,

I have  the highest regard for your legislative and political accomplishments since taking office:
- health care reform to provide affordable health care for more Americans, including those most at risk,
- massive economic stimulus to stave off a second Great Depression,
- financial reform to prevent another economic meltdown due to corporate greed,
- withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq …
This is an astounding record of achievement, one that does me proud to be a Democratic candidate for Congress.

Which is why I am all the more puzzled by your choice of family vacations.

This is no trivial matter.  Even if you pay your own personal expenses, there remains the enormous cost of a large security detail, and assorted other travel expenses, charged to the American taxpayer.  With all those American tax dollars going not to boost desperately needy areas within the U.S. — such as the Gulf resorts — but to a foreign country.

As a our leading public figure, yours is, for better or worse, not a private life, a private family, or a private vacation.  You are our role model.  We look to you to be not only our Commander-in-Chief, but also our Advocate-in-Chief.  So when your family takes a vacation in a 5-star resort overseas, or retreats from the struggling Gulf beach resorts for a vacation at a resort among the moneyed elite on Martha’s Vineyard, your constituents – my constituents – wonder whether you have lost touch with our painful struggles.

In the Chicago suburb where I have my office, roughly 25% of the shop fronts are shuttered.  As I walk the neighborhoods of District 06, I meet the hardworking unemployed.  I walk past empty homes, their owners victims of the foreclosure crisis devastating families across our country.  As I knock on doors, I meet people genuinely worried about the burgeoning federal deficit, and deeply concerned about the costs of the new legislative initiatives.  Given your years as a community organizer, I am sure that you remember the poignant struggles of tough people facing tough times.

Mr. President, we do not expect you to live our struggles.  We ask only that you live modestly out of respect for our struggles.

Sincerely,

Ben Lowe
Democratic Candidate for Congress
IL District 06

In a frank admission a year ago, Senator Dick Durbin put it bluntly: “Frankly, the banks run this place.”

Perhaps they deserve to. After all, they pay enough for the privilege.

Last year the finance industry contributed $500 million to political campaigns: that’s $1.4 million dollars a day to grease the skids of American democracy; nearly $1 million per member of Congress.

For that kind of money, they not only run the place, they own it! Bought and paid for!

Have you ever known banks to be pointlessly generous? When was the last time that your bank gave you $100, let alone $1,000,000? (Or, if you are old enough to remember a more innocent time, even a toaster or an electric can opener?)

So what are the banks buying with such spectacular generosity?

What do you think?!

Deregulation.

Obscene profits.

Millions of dollars in executive compensation.

Credit card agreements so complicated and convoluted that you have no hope of reading them, let alone understanding what you read, along with late payment penalties and hidden fees.

The legal right to charge the poor interest at rates competitive with loan sharks (up to 1000% per year for ‘payday lenders,’ which loan to the desperate poor borrowing against upcoming paychecks).

The freedom to provide unsecured, predatory mortgages to people who have no hope of paying, first driving up the price you pay for your house, and then collapsing its value to the point that it makes financial sense just to walk way.

The opportunity to sell newly innovated, unregulated financial products to your pension fund, so that their profits and your losses destroy the nest egg which you depend on to support you in your old age.

And most of all, with their millions in political donations, the financial industry and Wall Street banks buy themselves an stupendous bailout, complete with a ‘get out of jail free’ card.

I don’t need to labor the point. You know what the banks bought with their bucks: they bought your members of Congress.

And they bought the right to squeeze you by the throat.

This is not an issue of blue vs. red or left vs. right; it is an issue of right vs. wrong. And many of our elected officials in Washington have lost their moral compass. Here is what we can do about it:

First, contact your Senators.

In December, the House voted 223-202, approving the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2009 (H.R. 4173), legislation opposed by the banking and finance lobby, but correcting many of the abuses which nearly imploded the U.S. economy in the fall of 2008. (Republican members of Congress – including my competitor, Peter Roskam – unanimously opposed the bill. We must not let such shameful behavior stand unchallenged.)

Now the Senate version – the Restoring American Financial Stability Act – is under debate on the Senate floor. It proposes to create a consumer financial protection agency to protect you from Wall Street speculation and deception, by overseeing the companies that provide credit cards, car loans, mortgages, and other financial products.

The banks and financial industry do not need to defeat the bill; all they need to do is to weaken its provisions. The most effective strategy is to offer an alternative, one that is all talk and no teeth, one with great safeguards but little authority to enforce them.

After the House vote, Edward Yingling, president of the American Bankers Association trade group, said: “Reform is needed, and ABA wants to work with the Congress and the Administration to enact that reform, but the House-passed bill contains provisions that have nothing to do with needed reform and which could make it very difficult for banks to effectively serve their consumer and business customers.” These are the same people who just raped the economy – who just got done sucking up your assets, home, and IRAs – for their company profits and their executive bonuses. And now they offer to write the necessary reforms to prevent them from raping you again. Yeah, right.

So contact your members of Congress, the Representatives who have already voted, and the Senators who are preparing to vote. Under the current electoral system, elected officials depend on two things to keep their jobs: your vote and corporate donations. Let them know that they can have only one. Let them choose which it will be. Over the next six months the banking and finance lobby will remember how they vote, and reward them accordingly. Let your Representative know that you too will remember how they vote, and will reward them accordingly. Let them have the bankers’ money, if that’s what they prefer; but don’t let them have the banks’ money and your vote.

Then, second, follow through on the threat, and vote. Vote out the corporate Representatives who vote for the banks. Support and vote for clean candidates who will protect America’s economy and your savings.

To those in or concerned about the 6th District: My campaign is doing everything we can to hold Peter Roskam accountable for his obstruction and opposition of the common good in favor of special interests. And instituting robust financial reform that will protect our communities and our future is a priority I am resolutely committed to. But we cannot succeed without you. Learn more about our grassroots campaign at www.loweforcongress.com and join us.

Together we can raise our voice to restore our moral compass to Congress and prevent these abuses from happening again.

(See my earlier post for an introduction to why I am walking with colleagues through Appalachia this week, and what it has to do with us in the IL-6th District)

Our group arrived in West Virginia on Friday and met with local residents around Kayford Mountain and Ansted to learn about what the coal industry is doing just up the street from the recent Massey Mine tragedy.

We passed a couple of these billboards while driving in:

Millions of dollars are being spent on these and television ads by the coal industry promoting themselves as Appalachia’s best friend.  The truth of course is that coal is NOT carbon neutral.  The billboard makes no sense because the simple reason coal used for energy generation is precisely because it is made out of carbon.  And burning it releases that carbon into the air as carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. Coal is not carbon neutral, its carbon intensive.

Here is the view that was waiting for us on top of Kayford Mountain:

There used to be a mountain top here…

The grass in the foreground was sprayed on once mining was completed to “reclaim” the land.  Sadly, however, the soil had been depleted of nutrients and heavily contaminated in many places, and will not recover in any of our lifetimes.  What was once one of the most diverse habitats for plants and animals that we have in the United States is gone from this and hundreds of other sites in Appalachia.

Is this really the inheritance we want to pass on to our children?

Coal is a bad short-term answer to a long-term problem, and the coal industry is destroying communities, polluting the environment, and making people sick across Appalachia.

Consider Larry Gibson, a local resident who lives on land at the top of Kayford Mountain that his family has owned for generations.  He has refused to sell his land to coal companies so they can remove what’s left of the coal underneath.  As a result he has come under intense pressure and intimidation, ranging from verbal threats to his life, to almost being run off the road multiple times and having his home vandalized and shot at (we saw the bullet holes).  His family has identified and reported some of the (often drunk) miners involved but he has little hope they will be successfully prosecuted due to local corruption.

I asked Larry how he keeps going on faithfully, even with so much discouragement over many years.  Here is his reply: “Many people ask me how I keep going for so long… well, because I’m right! And if you know you’re right you have to keep going. They call me all sorts of names, threaten me, vandalize my property, and we see little progress on our end. But I’m still right, and so I’ll still keep fighting.”

“Young man, I’m looking at you to change some things when you get into Congress.” Larry said to me as we parted. I told him that when I’m discouraged I often think of him and the other folks working so faithfully and diligently to bring justice and renewal to Appalachia.  I told him that I am committed to doing the same in my district.  And that, like him, I will not give up fighting for what is right.

Me with Allen Johnson from Christians for the Mountains (L) and local landowner Larry Gibson (R)

Also, here’s a short video I put up (on my personal account) of Katheryne, an Ansted resident and community leader who we met with after coming down from Kayford Mountain.  Katheryne has helped lead efforts to hold the coal industry accountable for their local abuses and she shared part of her story to us.

And here’s a link to a blog I wrote a while back challenging my competitor’s irresponsible letter to the EPA opposing regulations for toxic coal waste: http://www.loweforcongress.com/2010/03/03/shortsightedness-today-poisoning-our-children-tomorrow/

More soon!

Early Saturday evening, three friends and I headed out to Chicago for dinner at a favorite restaurant in our old neighborhood (Pilsen). We were discussing (ironically, as it turns out) the recent passage of harsh immigration laws in Arizona, and the possibility that the new legislation will entrench racial profiling and increase harassment of both documented and undocumented minorities. For reasons that will become clear, I note that the other three in the car are Caucasian-Americans, and I am a bi-racial Asian-American, born overseas, citizen by birth.

With I290 jammed with traffic due to construction, we turned off to Rt. 38 (Roosevelt Road) and continued towards the city. What ensued is a timely illustration of why – especially in light of the new Arizona immigration law – we need laws that are more just towards immigrants and minorities and law enforcement officers who are better trained to uphold them.

While driving along Rt. 38 we were pulled over by officers from the Cicero police department. They initially gave no reason for the traffic stop and ignored our requests to both show proper identification and give a reason for our detention. Instead, we were ordered out of our car without explanation, lined up against a police squad car, and searched. Our vehicle was searched as well. When nothing illegal was found, one of the officers explained that we were pulled over because we were “light skinned” and “could have been Hispanic”, and that there are problems with Hispanics trafficking drugs along that road.

They returned our licenses, thanked us for cooperating, and let us go. When I asked for some documentation of our innocence, in case word of the traffic stop and search got out and became political fodder against my campaign for Congress in IL-6, the officers said they would write our driver a ticket for the “probable cause” that justified the stop. Instead, they wrote out a ticket for “failure to wear seat belt required,” even though the driver and all of us had been wearing our seat belts.

The point of the incident is not the inconvenience and humiliation of a roadside stop and search of law-abiding citizens, engaged in no illicit activity, on what was meant to be a pleasant night-out. The point is also not to protest the minor injustice of a bogus traffic ticket.

The point is that even without harsh new Arizona-style legal reform (or is it, ‘deform’), ‘probable cause’ already provides police with excessive liberties to stop and search entirely law-abiding, legal citizens, without any evidence of wrong-doing, or even reasonable suspicion of illegal activity or intention. If suspicion fell on us simply because (a) we are light-skinned, and (b) we were driving through a predominately Hispanic neighborhood, consider the level of harassment that actual Hispanic-Americans must face, even if American-born and completely law-abiding! If we can be stopped and searched on no other grounds than baseless suspicion, who cannot be treated similarly?

Lest there be any doubt, I fully support our law-enforcement officers in their challenging and dangerous work of keeping our communities safe.

Nonetheless, if this sort of incident can occur under the restrictions of ‘probable cause’, we must not lower the legal standard further to ‘reasonable suspicion’, as Arizona has done. What sort of hell will anti-immigrant legislation devise for law-abiding American minorities, simply because of the color of their skin or the paranoia of an arresting officer?

In the aftermath of the shocking evil and unspeakable tragedy of 9/11, many feared a backlash against American minorities, tearing apart the multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-religious tapestry which is the genius of our great nation. Against that backdrop, the Ad Council ran a simple, but incredibly moving, public service announcement entitled, ‘I am an American’ (http://www.adcouncil.org/default.aspx?id=141).

Over the next couple of decades, as our country moves from a Caucasian majority, to a truly heterogeneous, non-majority population, discomfort over the transition could pose a new threat to the character of our American community. Fear of change may produce a wave of new legislation, born less out of legitimate legalities and more of fear, fragmenting the unity-in-diversity which is our national treasure.

E Pluribus Unum; out of many, one. Though deriving from diverse ethnicities, races, skin colors, religions, countries of origin, classes, and orientations, we are one nation, one people.

My campaign is committed to immigration reform which provides justice for all Americans, without oppression of any, and which builds on our national heritage of ‘freedom and justice for all’. Please join us.

The Lowe for Congress campaign celebrated the 40th anniversary of Earth Day with a series of events over the week, focused on highlighting the small but significant steps that everyone in the Illinois 6th district can undertake to make a difference for our planet.

The week began with us volunteering at Wheaton’s recycling extravaganza – organized by the Environmental Improvement Commission – where we helped collect tons of electronic waste products from city residents.  We partnered with high school students and other workers to unload waste onto sorted pallets to be taken away for recycling and safe disposal.

Recycling electronics in Wheaton, IL

On April 21st, I was the keynote speaker at chapel in Chicago’s North Park University, which was heald in beautiful weather outside and followed by a tree-planting ceremony.

Students line up to add soil to a newly planted tree

On earth day itself I went around to public libraries in the 6th district and donated copies of my environmental book, Green Revolution.  I also participated in the Earth Day Celebration at the Glen Ellyn public library later that evening.

Going in to donate my book to the Poplar Creek Library

And finally, on Saturday April 24th, our campaign teamed up with a group of Wheaton College students to clean up the Great Western Trail from Pleasant Hill Ave to Gary in Carol Stream. Here, one of our volunteers demonstrates how the clean-up was done:

Step 1: Identify invasive trash

Step 2: Remove intruding trash

Step 3: Enjoy trash-less natural habitat

Beyond my career as a bridge-builder around environmental issues – bringing together the progressive environmental and conservative Christian communities to help protect the earth – I am a strong supporter of clean energy and green jobs.  I believe that stewardship of the earth is a serious yet joyful responsibility that all of us share, regardless of ideology or party affiliation.  Simply put, environmental stewardship is not a republican vs. democrat or left vs. right issue. It is a moral issue and a common challenge facing all of us. After all, what could be more in the interests of our common good than clean air, safe water, healthy food, and a sustainable environment for future generations?

There are those who make token efforts to look “green” now that it is becoming trendy. Such “green-washing” is part of the problem and not the solution. Instead, we need leaders who can understand that authentic sustainable lifestyle changes and robust clean energy and green jobs legislation enrich our lives and guide us towards a healthy and stable world for future generations. This is the kind of moral leadership we need to see more of from congress.

Trash collected from the Great Western Trail

p.s. Here’s a video of our trail cleanup on Saturday: http://www.youtube.com/user/loweforcongress

Lowe For Congress Press Release:

April 14th, 2010, Wheaton IL. Half a dozen townships held a referendum on whether to include a Clean Elections advisory question in the ballot during the November election of 2010. Grassroots Clean Elections efforts like this one seek to reduce the influence of special interests in political campaigns and would have, according to the official document lent support for, “a system whereby candidates agree to accept limits on campaign contributions and spending in return for public financing of elections”.

Around 200 voters attended the Milton Township meeting and extra rows of chairs had to be set up at the last minute to accommodate the crowd. The referendum was voted down by an overwhelming margin, to spontaneous applause and cheers from its opponents.

Democratic nominee Ben Lowe, who has been publicly in favor and voted yes for the proposed Clean Elections advisory question, responded by stating:

“Clean Elections legislation is a critical step towards restoring out moral compass to politics by promoting a level playing field during elections, one that more fairly raises the voice of the broader community on par with the voice of the wealthy elite and corporations. Unfortunately, in our Milton township vote last night, common sense and the common good lost to partisanship, and the advisory question of ‘clean elections’ will not make it to a majority vote of our community in the upcoming elections.

Numbers clearly show widespread support for ideas like Clean Elections legislation. According to Illinois Ballot Integrity DuPage Chapter, 95% of IL campaign funding comes from corporations and large private sums over $250. A Joyce Foundation poll found 71% or respondents believe “public financing of political candidates would make a difference in helping to make Illinois government work better.”

Even my republican-leaning neighbor who came with me could not understand why the crowd recruited by the Republican Party was afraid of letting the general public vote on their desire to reduce the influence of big money and special interests in campaigns. Though they were able to obstruct efforts this time, I will continue to speak out for sensible campaign finance reform because it is the right thing to do for our community, our integrity, and our common good.”

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