435 races every two years makes it impossible for one to stay up on all the happenings but there are some truly stellar candidates each cycle. One of the unheralded sleazeballs of this cycle is David Schweikert, who funds his campaign against Harry Mitchell by yanking the rug out from under struggling home owners.
Let's take a peak at a man in the running for Arizona's most loathsome Republican, a hotly contested honor, but I believe he has a shot at it.
Arizona stands with Florida and California as the pinnacle of a real estate market gone nuts. Housing values went up up UP and an arid sort of Tulip Mania took hold. Prices have tumbled about 40% since the peak in 2006 and Housing Doom chronicles the unwinding of a situation that sensible regulation never would have permitted in the first place.
A sociopathic opportunist (is that redundant?) David Schweikert has found a way to profit from the instability and misery it brings the residents of Arizona District 5. The banks drag their feet on loan modifications and Schweikert slips in, buying homes at auction and evicting home owners with a scant five days notice, some times even after their modification is in process. They try to fight back, but it's a complex muddle of rules with lobbyists' sticky paw prints all over it – another rigged game of the sort popularized during the Bush years.
Renters, perhaps already evicted once due to foreclosure, get a second bomb dropped on them, with dawn deliveries of eviction notices, in one instance being handed to a twelve year old instead of an adult in the house. Families that might have made it get nicked for an extra thousand in moving expenses, they don't get their deposit back even if they've been perfect tenants since the house has been seized from their former landlord, and the tsunami of homelessness has them. Shelter life grinds away at one's time and peace of mind, and soon the working adults in the household are troubled and under the watchful eye of a manager who is under the gun to cut costs.
Stepping back from Schweikert as he slithers around Arizona 5, this sort of conduct is emblematic of the breakdown of our society. Instead of rewarding productive behavior and prudent investing we arranged it so that idle speculators could gamble away the core of our economy for paper profits. What do you think will happen if a man like this makes it to Congress?
ANSWER: He'll create more messes so his fellow predators can continue the thievery of the Bush years, and they'll figure out a way to slip him a cut.
What's the alternative? Harry Mitchell. Centrist. Votes the right way on the important stuff. Americans for Prosperity, a tentacle of the degenerate Koch Brothers, just dropped $500k into this district. He's been in office since we took the House back in 2006. He isn't a Progressive Caucus member and he never will be, but he tends to the people of his district in a way that they find pleasing and he is an asset for the Democratic party.
This is an easy place for us to lend a hand – people find out about their politicians by using Google. If we loft a few diaries about this guy onto the rec list it'll ensure that the truth about him is readily apparent to all – being a large, ancient blog Google really trusts Kossacks when they talk about political figures.
I get on the rec list about once a month and it's kind of cool, but I'm more concerned that the job get done. If you've never been up there and you'd like to help take out a guy like Schweikert just drop me a note and we'll talk about the steps we can take to get you your fifteen minutes of fame.