U.S. House of RepresentativesCandidate for District 5

I have a vision, only its not just my vision. It is a vision shared by millions of Americans, and even more millions worldwide. It is a vision of a better future, a future with no more wars-for-profit or regime change. A future where corporations and the very wealthy do not run politics, and cannot buy their way out of legal troubles with bribery or high priced attorneys. A future where the common person and the very wealthy are subject to the same rule of law and justice as everyone else – where no one gets off lightly for their crimes just because of their wealth; and no one faces stricter punishments or scrutiny by the law because of their skin color. A future in which children that want to go to college can go to college, and without being gouged by student loans. I’m talking about a future where no one ever decides not to go to the doctor or go to a hospital because they can’t afford the bill. And the entire country is running on 100% renewable energy.   Establishment politicians from both sides of the 2 party duopoly will tell you that these things are impossible, but we find more and more that the politicians that are telling us these things are impossible are the same people that are blocking our progress. The same officials that will tell you that only people with military experience are qualified for office, the implication being that they won’t send your kids off to war lightly, are the very people voting again and again to go to war over oil pipelines and profits, or to increase the funding for said wars. But we, the people are realizing that both “major parties” are really 2 wings of the same party, with different variations of the same failed policies. And that is why I have joined with the Progressive Movement, to take back our government from moneyed interests and bring power back to the people. It was Malcolm X that said “You put them first and they put you last, cause you’re a chump.”   Establishment politicians will tell you that our progressive agenda is all impossible, but that’s not true. That’s their donors’ money speaking. Voting out establishment politicians and replacing them with progressives is not only possible, I believe it is the future. America has simply become far too corporatized, from politics to education to medicine to the foods we eat. This cannot be allowed to persist. And that is why I’ve decided to run for the 5th Congressional District seat in California. It is time to vote out candidates that refuse to turn away from corporate money. We cannot allow our elected officials to place us behind insurance companies or the alcohol lobby, when it comes to making important decisions about tax rates or the laws that govern us anymore. Enough is enough! We need to get money out of politics and give power to the people now! This campaign is of the people, by the people and for the people, and not funded by billionaires or corporate donors. I hope I can count on your endorsement and your vote. Thank you,
Jason Kishineff

Hello, Jason Kishineff here. I am a Congressional candidate in California's 5th district. I write this on the eve of Christmas, and I don't intend to publish this on Christmas Day, because I want you all to enjoy the warmth of your families' love and the homes that you share. Tomorrow, the struggle continues, however, and not everyone can be with their families and not everyone has homes to keep them warm. Even many who do have homes cannot afford to fully heat their homes, or struggle to pay their gas and electric bill.

Today, in America, being short on money seems to many of us to have been criminalized. And that's not just a dramatic term. Homelessness abounds in this nation. More and more do we see people standing in intersections asking for spare change, or outside of parking lots. Many of these people are mentally ill or are otherwise disabled, some are immigrants, some have fled domestic violence, many are people who just lost their jobs and fell into the spiral of not being able to pay their bills, then losing their home and never recovering from that loss.

More and more we are seeing cities evicting homeless populations from areas, or installing spikes in doorways to prevent someone from sleeping there. People who want to evict homeless often say they feel unsafe, or they are concerned about their business being hurt somehow. In reality, they are being reminded of something that their subconscious has been trying like the dickens not to think about. People who can afford to live comfortably want to believe that everything is fine, they want to be unaware of the growing problems in this country, and in this world.  And with Mary laying there, alongside her pile of belongings or basket of belongings, they can't not think about it anymore.

 

But there is more to the topic of poverty than just homelessness. Former Deputy Attorney-General Sally Yates write, "In Georgia, where I served as U.S. attorney,  the state had a system in which people were being fined for low-level misdemeanor offenses such as traffic violations or public nuisance citations.  Due to a law passed in 2000, private probation companies supervised these people and set monthly or weekly payment amounts that were much higher than necessary to collect funds owed during their probationary term.  In some cases, probationers were expected to pay all court fines and surcharges, as well as provider supervision fees, in less than half of the term.  Many of these private probation providers failed to consider whether probationers had the ability to meet their financial obligations.  And some of these private companies would unlawfully extend the probation term, improperly allocate probationer payments to themselves instead of the court, or obtain arrest warrants for failure to pay.  One can see how this system was not only unfair, but could easily trap low-income individuals into a cycle of poverty through the series of cascading events they set in motion. " I am afraid that Georgia is not the only state where you can go to jail for not being able to afford the fine on a traffic citation. This happens all over our country.

After you get arrested for something- anything, now you have to check that box on job applications. Now there are jobs that you will never get hired for. If you are a felon, in many cases, you can no longer vote to change things for the better. Committing a crime should not take away your right to vote for what you think is the best direction for this country. Additionally some of these jails actually charge a fee to stay in their jail, such as the Mason County Detention Center, in Kentucky, which charges $25 a day to stay there, as well as a $20 booking fee and a $5 release fee. Some jails charge for toilet paper or the required clothing. This is debt that follows people after their release, and further holds people in poverty.

Corporate prisons, as we know, employ inmates to perform tasks for a fraction of the salary they would pay a worker on the outside. On the surface this might seem like a win-win situation. The corporations get cheaper labor and the inmates get out of their cell for a time and get to do something which takes their focus off their incarceration. I get it. But in the bigger picture, this system is massively abused, with officers looking for any excuse they can possibly come up with to arrest someone in order to fill the prison labor quotas. And this couldn't go any other way. Corporate prisons were a very bad idea, from the get-go, the natural evolution of economic slavery that grew out of slavery, black codes, sharecropping, chain gangs and Jim Crowe laws.

I thought that, since our campaign slogan is "Fighting For Justice", I would write a little bit about the injustice that I believe we should be fighting. When our government claims imminent domain over Native American lands, so that we can build a hotel over an archaeological dig, that is injustice, or when pipelines are forcibly installed through Native lands, that is the kind of injustice that everyone should be fighting. When immigrants who have been living here for years are removed to detention facilities, in conditions worse than our prisons, that is a grave injustice that must be stopped. And when a black person sees a police officer behind them and has to wonder if today is the day they are going to be beaten or die, there is a serious injustice. We must have reform, and now! This kind of racial inequality is not the kind of issue that is okay when our corporate duopoly talks about incremental change or says maybe in 20 or 40 years. The underlying racism in our system has gone on for far too long. It has got to stop.

We have known about global warming for some time, and while some members of the corporate duopoly say some good things, we find that the standards- the real standards- have actually gotten worse. Instead of just oil, now we're pumping millions of gallons of very hazardous acids into the ground, to frack oil from sand. This acid is going into water systems and poisoning people, and we are experiencing earthquakes where there are no fault lines. This fracked oil, being heavier than regular oil, sinks to the bottom of our waterways when it spills, so it is much more difficult to clean, and often goes uncleaned. We have been able to develop automobiles with higher and higher standards, but we have failed to raise the minimum standards, so that trucks and SUVs aren't really getting much better gas mileage than they got 30 years ago. Our Earth is crying out for justice, but our people have no real say in what is done with their planet. Companies are allowed to grossly pollute one area and plant a few trees in another area thousands of miles away, and our government considers the planet even. Well its not even. Our planet is facing very grave injustice, and its going to cost all of us if we don't rise up and stop  it. We need to convert to 100% renewable energy immediately. We need 100% electric cars and much higher fuel standards until we get there. 15 mpg is simply not acceptable.

 

"No one who works 40 hours a week should have to live in poverty". Bernie Sanders said that. He's not the only one to say that, but like him or hate him, he was right. The minimum wage has not been allowed to keep up with inflation, nor have the amounts given to people of government assistance. Why? Because the wealthy people that influence our officials are forcibly keeping the wage floor down to save themselves money. Another example of this are the international trade deals, which force workers in the U.S. to compete against workers in less developed countries. Our trade surplus with Mexico, alone, in the 4 years after NAFTA passed went from a gain of $5.4 billion to a deficit of $16.2 billion. And in Mexico, small farmers have been driven out of business by our corporate farms. Who profits? The very wealthy, that's who. Because cross-system trade requires evening factors and standards, such as safety standards for workers. Even the factories that have not relocated to Mexico, have been able to use the threat of moving to fight unionization or to forcibly keep wages low. This is not justice.

 

Where is the justice, when the U.S. bombs a Muslim country, that doesn't support terrorism and has not threatened us, and says it is fighting terrorism? Who exactly is the terrorist in this situation? Why do we have soldiers in Niger? We frequently call these wars-for-profit, but they really are is piracy, thievery or terrorism. Give us your oil, your uranium, your gold or other minerals or we'll bomb your country to rubble. There is no justice when the good women and men of our military are deployed in such an irresponsible manner. We are creating more of what we term terrorism than we are stopping by recklessly bombing civilians and calling them "military targets". As citizens, we are to believe that these efforts are humanitarian- that we are only in Syria because Bashar el-Assad is such a bad guy. We were only in Libya to protect Libyans from Gaddafi (by the way, Libya had the highest standard of living in Africa before the U.S. got there). I do not know these leaders. I've never met anyone from the Taliban, but you know what these people are? None of our business. It is very hard to believe that we care so much for people in oil rich nations and nations rich in uranium or gold, but we have done nothing to help the Rohingya. We did nothing to help Rwandans or Sudanese, but when oil is concerned, we are altruistic humanitarians, we're Johnny-on-the-spot. Our "military aid", throughout the decades has meant supporting death squads, dictatorships, drug lords and strongmen. We even supported apartheid until it wasn't profitable. Our foreign policy is rife with injustice. We need new leadership, or rather, the rest of the world needs us to have new leadership. And I'm not talking about Donald Trump, or even Obama, who was just another rich man's sock puppet. We need to replace our corporate duopoly. We need decisions to be made by people, not corporations.