U.S. House of RepresentativesCandidate for District 12

Before any candidate that runs a campaign on fear and paranoia deceptively calls for increased national security, they should first be asked to clarify specifically what the term means to them. Tragically, the phrase national security has been almost entirely co-opted by an overly militaristic faction of our government and warped until it no longer remotely represents the literal security of our nation, but the strength and size of our military industrial complex.

To be clear, the United States ought to continue to maintain a strong standing military, however we are in desperate need of a massive policy shift aimed at truly improving the security of our nation - which will have to include reigning in our military’s autonomy within government and immunity from the Constitution. Despite what most Republicans and some hawkish Democrats would have us believe, blindly throwing money at our already massive military-surveillance state is not the solution to our nation’s anxieties.

The reason people in this country feel less secure than they did a half century ago isn’t because radical Islam poses a genuine existential threat to our union, nor is it because we have failed to project adequate power on the global stage in the post-Cold War order. In fact, the opposite is true: as a result of a hyper-focus on our military, our politicians have neglected key domestic factors that have greatly diminished the security of our union and create a collective sense of anxiety.

Rather than putting forward practical, innovative solutions to curb the trends of opioid addiction which has killed over half a million Americans since 2000, gun violence which kills almost 12,000 Americans a year, or automobile deaths which kill over 35,000 Americans a year, Republicans came to power scapegoating foreign nationals as an excuse to maintain a state of perpetual war in the Middle East.

It’s time for the Democratic Party to take an uncompromising, progressive position when it comes to protecting the security of our nation. We cannot compromise on our values, and we owe it to the people who employ us to defend their security from all threats based on an accurate analysis of actual risk level. Congress has the power to make the military work for the people, if they have the courage to stand up and refuse to fund wars the American people don’t support and use their Constitutional authority to demand increased transparency.

As the extent of military and surveillance state’s capabilities have expanded exponentially with the rise of the internet and the proliferation of personal digital devices, various leaks and news reports have revealed the gross violations of human and Constitutional rights our tax dollars are funding both abroad and domestically. In an embarrassing chapter of our history, we have been caught spying on allies, citizens, and everyone in between, revealing an astonishing degree of both paranoid insecurity and perceived immunity within our military and surveillance state.

This is not only legally unacceptable, it is an unacceptable precedent to set that grants the President dangerous and unconstitutional authorities. If Congress wants to ensure that these troubling trends don’t continue, they will need to repeal the Patriot Act and pass air-tight whistleblower protections that provide proper channels and protection for individuals who wish to report violations of the Constitution, like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning. Additionally, they will need to stop approving completely opaque military “black budgets,” which have given intelligence agencies hundreds of billions in blank checks with no accountability since 9/11.

Further, we need to reframe the entire issue and put an appropriate emphasis on the degree to which domestic policy is essential to creating a secure nation. We need to tell people in the clearest terms possible that there are, in fact, numerous threats to their well-being, many of which have been exacerbated by Republican policies.

Only once we are willing to invest in federally guaranteed, locally accessible drug rehabilitation services will we see fewer than 91 people die of an opioid overdose every day. Only when we commit to pursuing creative, effective, common-sense gun safety legislation will we finally see fewer than 93 people shot and killed every day. Only by guaranteeing health care as a right, not a privilege, can we catch up to the rest of the developed world and achieve universal coverage.

Sadly, some of the most well-established common denominators that determine the security of a society have been neglected by our politicians for the better part of a century. It has always been the case that access to education, employment, and transportation are some of the most significant determining factors in assessing a country’s overall health. As Senator Sanders described it, our, “crumbling infrastructure,” is more than just a logistical hassle, it hinders our ability to live happy, secure, free lives.

It’s time to shave a chunk off the top of the money Congress sends overseas, and start spending it here at home to invest in a quality education system and a modern infrastructure. The jobs necessary to build out a 21st century infrastructure of renewable energy sources, high speed railways, and autonomous vehicle networks will employ a significant sector of the American workforce left behind by today’s top-heavy economy. With more money invested in our families, we can increase the financial security of a generation and open up countless opportunities for the next. If our goal is a free, peaceful world, the only way to lead is by example, and it’s up to Congress to take these crucial first steps toward a healthier, more secure nation.

Of course, many of the threats to our security come not from structural flaws or foreign threats, but from an increasingly erratic climate which we’ve irreversibly altered after decades of polluting the planet and spewing emissions into the atmosphere. As an altered atmosphere exacerbates existing weather patterns, we learn the hard way just how unprepared we are. With families uprooted in Houston struggling to rebuild and most in Puerto Rico still without power, we are finally coming to appreciate the scale, and unpredictability of the threat we face. These disasters will continue to catch us off guard and cripple us for years unless we divert large amounts of funding into FEMA and greatly expand our response capabilities.

After several centuries of burning coal, emitting fossil fuel fumes, mining limited minerals, and permanently polluting the water and air of our Earth, we are beginning to feel the effects of the climate change that we have brought upon ourselves. Deadly hurricanes that strike land, destroy communities, and take lives have historically been fewer and farther between compared to recent storms, which have killed scores of Americans in 2017 alone.

Wildfires have burned out of control around the world from California to Italy, and historic droughts have left tens of millions starving in East Africa. We are currently confronting the brutal reality of the ways in which our unsustainable industrialization has permanently altered our biosphere. According to new research, we are living in the sixth mass extinction event in the history of the planet. Species that have lived on this Earth far longer than humans are going extinct at alarming rates, and if we are going to survive we will have to learn to live in a world without many of the resources or much of the stability we take for granted.

Thanks to a coordinated, well-funded misinformation campaign that persists to this day in the form of a president who undermined the only meaningful international effort to reduce global emissions, the United States has failed to take leadership on the single most important issue for the future of humanity. Climate change and mass extinction pose nothing short of an existential threat to humanity, and unless we can work together to build a future of sustainable development, we may not survive the consequences of our actions.

Proposal: If we want to minimize the harm climate change has already done to humanity, we need to invest in local food and water sustainability, flood and fire protection, and seawalls to protect low lying population centers from rising seas. Though it will be a difficult undertaking, we are also long overdue for an underground electrical grid that will be safer and more resistant to the elements. As one of the first nations to benefit from the power of coal and fossil fuels and one of the world’s leading carbon emitters, we have a moral obligation to lead the charge to save our planet.

By investing in an entirely renewable national energy infrastructure, we will create green jobs and revitalize American manufacturing. It’s time to return to the table and lead the international community by example, reducing emissions domestically via a national carbon tax and incentivizing other nations to reduce their emissions. The national carbon tax will fund job training programs that prioritize Americans working in the non-renewable energy sector by helping develop new skills to gain employment in the renewable energy sector.

It’s time to have another great international race with China, Russia, India, the E.U., and every other nation: a race to zero net carbon emissions.

Of all the undervalued public goods in the United States, there is no question that none have been as thoroughly hollowed out, ignored, and abandoned as our public education system. Today, we live in a country where the quality of a child’s education is determined by where they’re born, and an immeasurable amount of human potential is lost in a tragic, unnecessary cycle of poverty. Public schools are funded largely based on local property taxes, and different states spend drastically different amounts per student.

This rigged system was created by the rich, for the rich, who send their children to private schools and publicly funded, privately operated charter schools that are unavailable to the vast majority of American students. The result is that despite desegregating our laws, we have not desegregated our classrooms - a student’s ethnicity and their income are still the two largest factors that determine the quality of education they receive. On average, California, Oklahoma, and Nevada spend only half as much money per student as New York, Alaska and Wyoming. In roughly half of America’s 100 largest cities, the majority of Latino and African American students attend schools where over three-quarters of students live in poverty. Currently, the United States students rank 23rd in science, 24th in reading, and 37th in math among the international community.

Upward mobility has stalled so severely, that for the first time in our country’s history, children are less likely to earn more money than their parents. Now, Trump’s proposed budget would cut the Department of Education’s budget by about $9 billion, eliminate funding for afterschool and summer programs, and training for teachers. Besides using the money they’d save to give tax breaks to the rich and increase military spending, our Secretary of Education would also like to spend another $250 million subsidizing private schools, and $168 million funding privately operated charter schools.

Proposal: In order to ensure that all children have access to quality education, we need a massive overhaul of our public funding mechanisms. We need to set a standard goal for every state to spend per student, and commit to desegregating classrooms by federally subsidizing public schools in districts with the lowest property values, and lowest spending per student. We need to allocate more funding in our budget to not only pay our teachers more, but to hire more of them so we can decrease the average classroom size. Teachers are tasked with one of the most important jobs in our country, that of building our future leaders. Our government does them a disservice by the way they treat them.

Further, we need public education to begin at a younger age, and end at a later age. Research shows that children who receive a pre-k education are better prepared for the rest of their educational careers, and that students who graduate from community college earn more than those with a high school diploma alone. If the United States is going to catch up to the rest of the world, we need to level the playing field for those who have been left behind by guaranteeing two years of pre-k education and two years of community college to every citizen, free of charge, regardless of their income.

Only once we provide a generation with the tools they need to contribute to our economy can we increase upward mobility and recapture the American dream for every student. Additionally, Congress needs to pass a comprehensive student loan reform and forgiveness bill. Graduates need the flexibility and freedom to find the job that is right for them in today’s rapidly changing economy, and our student loan system is hopelessly out of date. Loan payments should only kick in once graduates begin earning over a particular salary, and predatory interest rates on federal loans should be lowered.

Additionally, those who decide to commit to lifelong careers in government or the nonprofit sector should have their loans completely forgiven by a certain date, after a series of low interest payments adjusted to their salaries. By guaranteeing schools and students the tools they need to succeed, we can pave the way for the next step in this vision - four years of public college for all.