Jerry McNerney (D-CA) is locked in a very tough battle with one of the most extreme Republicans imaginable-- David Harmer who wants to (in his words) "abolish public schools"-- and that's just the beginning...
JERRY MCNERNEY—ALONE IN THE WIND?
By Don C. Reed
U.S. Representative Jerry McNerney (California, D-11) is a quiet, common-sense sort of Democrat: not a great speech-maker, just somebody you can rely on to get the job done. But he supports renewable energy, including the beautiful windmills that brighten some California hills—and that puts him in conflict with the well-oiled fossil fuels industry.
I met him in 2006, when he first ran for office. He was holding a sparsely attended press conference to announce his support for stem cell research. His campaign was an uphill battle and the oddsmakers were giving him very little chance.
He was running against the incredibly wealthy Republican Richard Pombo. Pombo is-- how can I say this delicately—an anti-environmentalist? He was basically a Tea Party person before the phrase was coined, heavily-funded, extreme in his views, and opposed to anything "environmental" other than the unregulated exploitation of the earth.
McNerney beat him.
And now Jerry McNerney, still competent, still quiet, is caught up in another battle with an extremist.
Republican candidate David Harmer has staggeringly extreme views on education. He not only wants to eliminate the Education department in Washington—including removing all federal funding for disabled students-- he also wants to abolish public schools altogether!
The idea may sound wacko, hard to believe at all, let alone take seriously.
But it is no idle threat. The smilingly personable Harmer has a history of trying to remove public funding from schools.
This is the man who wrote Proposition 174, an attempt to transfer public education tax dollars to private schools.
Every teacher in California in 1993 remembers Prop 174. This was the infamous voucher experiment with children’s lives.
Prop 174 would have been a huge giveaway to the rich, anyone who already had their kids in private school—for them it was a tax cut. For everybody else, it would only have diminished the school their kids were in. I was a school teacher then, and Prop 174 was terrifying. Already, our classes were jam-packed, supplies hard to come by, even the use of the copy machine was an expense to worry about. To have our school’s funding reduced still more, maybe by half? How huge would our classes be? Fifty kids? Sixty? The approach of Harmer’s Prop 174 felt like being shoved toward the edge of a cliff.
Fortunately, once the voters got a good look at what Prop 174 actually meant, they wanted nothing to do with it. Prop 174 was defeated more than 2-1. (1.5 million yes, 3.5 million no--Ballotpedia)
Working for the conservative think-tank Heritage Foundation, Mr. Harmer has written his plans to "Abolish public schools..." (taking) government out of the business of running and funding schools....out of the business of educating our children..." (He is) "100% committed to the...complete privatization of education..." (see bottom of page for more)
He also wants to privatize Social Security, thinks global warming is a "religion, not a science", opposes gay rights, supports expanding offshore oil drilling, wants more fences built along the California/Mexico border to keep illegal immigrants out, etc, etc..
He wants to end all federal support for welfare by transferring it to the states—which would effectively end it, as the states could not afford such huge new expenses.
Interestingly, although he opposes government bailouts and welfare for others, he appears to have no problem about accepting government help for himself personally. When the free market ended his job in the credit card department of Washington Mutual, he turned to the government for assistance, accepting unemployment insurance checks.
His publicly-posted tax returns for 2009 show he received a severance check of $84,586, as well as a salary check of $26,075, and a bonus check of $75,406—and an unemployment check for $2,345. ((The preceding year he had made a salary of $219,714, as well as $80,880 bonus))–David Harmer/Ask.com Encyclopedia, http://www.ask.com/...
Nothing wrong with taking an unemployment check when you are out of work and need the money to stay afloat and feed the family. But it does seem strange that a person so strongly opposed to welfare and bailouts for others would take them for himself— especially when he had already made over $175,000 that year. Did he really need that unemployment check?
And then, being unemployed, he naturally decides to runs for office, apparently intending to disassemble the government and replace it with the unregulated free enterprise which just ended his own job?
Sounds like he opposes government assistance for others, but has no objections to accepting it himself.
Harmer has always advocated positions of extreme and untested change, that would benefit the privileged few at the expense of most of the rest of us.
When he first ran for office (in Utah, 1996) he opposed the entire Federal income tax, wanting to replace it with a sales tax increase. This would of course have been very nice for the millionaires and billionaires, and ruinous on the rest of us. Can you imagine the price increases from a sales tax like that? What would it take to finance just the Defense Department alone? (He also recommended removing the Department of Education, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.).
If the folks in his district really knew Harmer’s extremist positions, I doubt they would support him. Instead, I believe they would turn out in droves to oppose him— and to work for his opponent.
So how do we spread the word about crucial contests like McNerney vs. Harmer? Share this article with friends, do the social networking that younger people than me find so easy and effective-- and consider sending a couple bucks to candidates you support.
For instance, I just visited the McNerney website, http://www.jerrymcnerney.org/... and contributed $25. This amazing sum is actually more than I can afford right now, and will undoubtedly get me in a great deal of trouble with Mrs. Reed, if she reads the credit card statement.
But we must do whatever we can: large ways and small, supporting those who support our beliefs.
Or leave good people like Jerry McNerney standing in the wind-- alone.
PRESS RELEASE
McNerney for Congress
California’s 11th Congressional District
For Immediate Release
October 18, 2010
DAVID HARMER’S PLAN TO ABOLISH PUBLIC SCHOOLS: IN HIS OWN WORDS
Dublin, CA – Voters in California’s 11th Congressional District deserve to know the full truth about embattled Congressional candidate David Harmer’s radical plan to abolish public schools. As Harmer scrambles to come up with a plausible defense for his extreme plan to end the public school system – outlined in a San Francisco Chronicle column he penned called "Abolish the Public Schools" and a similar column he co-authored for the Cato Institute – his campaign has resorted to false and misleading statements about his views.
Harmer’s extreme views on education have made national headlines over the last week, generating coverage by news outlets such as Mother Jones, AOL News, and Vanity Fair as well as national television coverage on MSNBC. Despite the Harmer campaign’s deception, the truth about David Harmer’s extreme plan to eliminate public schools is clear. Selected quotes from Harmer’s two articles advocating the complete end of public schools follow:
Quotes from "Abolish the Public Schools" by David Harmer:
"In the freest and most prosperous country on Earth, in the midst of the information age, government ownership and operation of the schools is a counterproductive anachronism."
"To attain quantum leaps in educational quality and opportunity, however, we need to separate school and state entirely. Government should exit the business of running and funding schools."
"This is no utopian ideal; it's the way things worked through the first century of American nationhood... Schooling then was typically funded by parents or other family members responsible for the student, who paid modest tuition. If they couldn't afford it, trade guilds, benevolent associations, fraternal organizations, churches and charities helped"
Quotes from Cato Policy Analysis No. 269
"The authors are 100 percent committed to getting government out of the business of educating our children."
"We see vouchers as a major step toward the complete privatization of schooling. In fact, after careful study, we have come to the conclusion that they are the only way to dismantle the current socialist regime."
"Because we know how the government schools perpetuate themselves, we can design a plan to dismantle them."