This show was recorded 10-31-2006.
11:00 AM
Green Party candidate Bob Fitrakis.
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Moderator
Ohio Gubernatorial Debate in Cincinatti, Ohio
The Cincinnati Beacon
1 hr 7 min 27 sec – Oct 14, 2006
See also:
Fitrakis, Live! Greens in Cincinnati
The Cincinnati Beacon
44 min 59 sec – Jul 31, 2006
And lastly
Bob Fitrakis Speaks
The Cincinnati Beacon
15 min 15 sec – Mar 5, 2006
Thanks to:
www.cincinnatibeacon.com
Moderator
School funding:
School funding should be equalized with each child getting the same amount of money regardless of whether their parents own a mansion or rent a shack. Vouchers for private schools should end, but publicly chartered voucher schools under school districts should be encouraged. The prison budget should be cut back dramatically by medicalizing drug addiction and ending the senseless war on drugs, and shifting the savings into the school budget.
Key factors for Ohio jobs:
Providing universal health care for all Ohio workers, developing new high-tech and green industries, and going back to the future by building trains, trams and trollies to improve our mass transit system and freight rail and to create jobs.
Why best candidate?
I am more interested in changing the culture of corruption in Ohio than being a player in one of the major political parties. The two major parties are incapable of ending the pay-to-play system in Ohio. Only an outside independent force can restore integrity in Ohio politics. My background as a political scientist, investigative reporter and attorney, I have the skills to bring back honest government to the people of Ohio. I want to see Ohio become a place known for green alternative energies, convenient mass transit, clean air and water, great college and universities, and a place where the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution in enforced.
Appropriate role:
Government should rein in the large trans-national corporations when they engage in anti-social practices such as polluting our environment. Government should encourage the relocalization of small entrepreneurial businesses throughout Ohio. It is illegal for government to spy on U.S. citizens without a warrant. Federal officials who engage in such practices should be arrested. Government should move out of people’s bedrooms and quit enforcing an insane racist and class-based war on drugs. There should be a separation of church and state.
The Ohio Republican Party’s plan to stimulate economic growth in Ohio through their lackeys at the Ohio EPA – Every Polluter’s Friend – is to import more garbage from New York state. While Ohio lags behind the developed world in passenger train and mass transit rolling stock, the EPA is more than willing to keep the trains running on time with New York trash.
Since, by some measurements, we are already the most polluted state in the country, the Republicans see it as a growth industry – particularly for their political action committees. The fact that certain elements of the waste management field has long ties to organized crime doesn’t seem to bother the Ohio EPA. But, as Tony Soprano said in the last episode of the Sopranos, hey, there’s enough garbage to go around.
Of course instead of importing garbage, we could become a green, self-sustaining state cleaning up our water and air and promoting tourism in our Appalachian hills. We might start by doing what Michigan did back in the 70s, passing a bottle bill and this should include cans and plastic bottles as well. It works right now Maine, California and Hawaii.
So, instead of letting the Republicans make Ohio the armpit of the nation, why not take pride and go Green?
Representatives of the Blue-Green Alliance were in Columbus Wednesday preaching the gospel of good jobs, a clean environment and a safer world. The Alliance is a partnership between the United Steelworkers and the Sierra Club. As they say, “Historic times demand historic responses.” The Alliance offers “visionary solutions” understanding that the new jobs must come, not from the race to the bottom to be the filthiest society, but from embracing new clean technology that creates jobs for the 21st century.
The reality is that creating a green environment and curbing greenhouse gases will create a generation of new high-tech domestic manufacturing jobs. Synergetically, these jobs will make our planet more sustainable and healthy by reducing global warming and cleaning our air. There’s at least a generation of work for steelworkers and other laborers by rebuilding our public transportation system and creating new solar and wind powered energy systems. The Alliance estimates that a commitment to green technology would create more than 1.4 million new well-paying jobs.
Currently, Bush, Blackwell and the Republican Party aided by their junior partners the New Democrats, embrace reactionary free trade policy that promotes environmental destruction and worker degradation. The trade policy not only produces toxics, but is poison to the vast majority of people on this planet.
The debate in this year’s Ohio gubernatorial election should be how we can both create a greener Ohio and produce new high-tech jobs. The Blue-Green Alliance understands that and they understand the need to create renewable energies, re-energized “cool cities,” and revive the American Dream.
Ohio lags behind the states of the northeast in our commitment to clean energy. By November 15, 2004, nine Northeastern US states – Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Delaware and Pennsylvania – committed to the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) RGGI. These states established emission capping and trading programs to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions.
As governor, I will make sure that Ohio joins these states, as well as California and Oregon, in embracing the Kyoto Protocol in reducing greenhouse gases. Already, four cities in Ohio support the Kyoto Protocol: Brooklyn, Dayton, Garfield Heights, and Toledo. It’s a shame that none of Ohio’s three major cities, Columbus-Cincinnati-Cleveland, have adopted this position.
Democrat Ted Strickland has made apolitical decision to support what he calls “clean coal technologies.” This makes political sense given that he currently represents coal-mining regions of Ohio as a U.S. representative. Environmentally, his plan is unsound. First, the gasification of coal, of course, involves coal mining which is and remains an environmental nightmare – rubblizing hills, destroying forests, and polluting watersheds, rivers and streams. Also, coal gasification is a largely untested and unproven technology and the cost will be astronomical. It’s actually more expensive than dirty coal and far more expensive than wind and solar energy. Coal gasification will be a major pork-barrel project by the government. Sure, contractors and contributors to Strickland will get rich off these contracts, but it will do nothing to improve the environment of Ohio in the long run. Capturing huge amounts of CO2 gas and pumping it back into the earth on a long-term basis is what makes “clean coal” clean. The capturing of CO2 gas, which is both technically feasible and plausible, still raises the question of the viability of underground storage systems.
So, what Strickland is offering is an incredibly expensive, political solution that will cost more than solar and wind energy and one that will destroy our hills and valleys. Instead, every public building that is built in the state of Ohio should be a green building. We should be integrating green landscaping into every construction project as well as solar panels and fuel efficient power systems that can sell energy to surrounding communities. As a Green, I seek real environmental solutions, not politically expedient solutions that are designed to please special interests.
In “An Inconvenient Truth,” former Vice President Al Gore tells us that we only have a decade to turn around the destruction by global warming to our planet. What we would be entering into has been called “the birth of death” if we continue in our non-sustainable ways. The only way to clean up Ohio, one of the most polluted states in the country – with Columbus recently voted the least sustainable major city – is to elect a governor who is a real Green. Not one who has his photo taken in a canoe or who claims to be Green. I’ve been deeply involved in the environmental movement since the 1970s when I was an undergraduate. Let me briefly recap my actual grassroots Green activist experience.
As an undergraduate, I followed nuclear waste trucks from a plant in Traverse City, Michigan as part of a report on safety and security for PIRG and I also collected signatures to put a bottle bill on the ballot. In the last 20 years, I’ve engaged in a lot of grassroots campaigns and investigative reporting that directly challenged the corporate polluters:
I spoke at the Hemp Festival tonight at Ohio State University, sponsored by the Students for a Sensible Drug Policy. I’ve never been able to understand why you would outlaw a miracle plant like hemp – that doesn’t even get you high — just because it’s the male cousin of marijuana. It’s a bit like outlawing corn because somebody can make cornmash from it during Prohibition. Or outlawing barley because it’s used to make beer. The famous but ignored Popular Mechanics article from the 1930s called hemp “the wonder product” and talked about 25,000 products that can be made from it. Hemp can be used for multiple purposes: fuel, food products, oils, clothing, paper products or a whole car, as Henry Ford demonstrated.
The war on drugs that Reagan pushed was really targeted against marijuana, after all, the CIA’s assets (like the Contras) were bringing in cocaine by the carload and the Reagan administration told the CIA that they didn’t have to report it to the DEA. Read more
A Columbus Dispatch op-ed today by Jonah Goldberg, editor of the National Review online, trots out the absurd claim that global warming is nothing more than a “green scare.” Goldberg goes on to attack Al Gore as a “scaremonger” and the local Dispatch editors chime in to attack Gore with the headline “Gore’s Green Scare Conveniently Avoids Facts.” Well, here’s a fact for you. The Dispatch has not endorsed a Democratic President since Woodrow Wilson in 1916 and the paper is owned by a prominent Republican family that owns the local Republican Party and rents the Democrats as needed.
But getting down to facts, Goldberg belittles Vanity Fair for saying that global warming is a “threat greater than terrorism.” Goldberg also dismisses the National Review’s old Cold War Red Scare partners at Time magazine for being worried about global warming.
Here’s a fact you won’t hear from the Dispatch, Goldberg or the National Review: George W. Bush’s own Department of Defense Security Planner Andrew Marshall led a team of risk assessment experts who found global warming to be a greater threat to U.S. national security than al Qaeda in the next 20 years. Marshall drafted Peter Schwartz, the former head of planning at Royal Dutch Shell Group, among other conservative forces, and they came up this fact: that the climate change “should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a U.S. national security concern.” The Bush administration has done everything to suppress the secret report by its own risk assessment team at the Pentagon. Read more
Today I spent seven hours at the Cleveland Zoo for an Earth Day event. Not only did we collect hundreds of signatures, but we got some of the most politically educated and active people in the state of Ohio.
I am more convinced than ever that we are at a tipping point in Ohio and the United States. People see clearly that we need to develop alternative energy and build urban transit systems and light rail throughout our great state. There are plenty of solutions out there to make this a green and sustainable state. Our problem isn’t with our people. It’s with two decrepit and corrupt political parties that are wedded to the status quo and to the special interests that pollute and poison our planet.
I was asked whether I believed a two-party system can work. Generally, I believe no. We need to hear from many alternative parties and voices on the ballot. But, perhaps if those two parties were the Greens and Libertarians, we’d have a much better chance than the same old ruthless Republicans and spineless Democrats.