Will The Establishment's Culture Of Corruption Defeat The #GreenNewDeal?

Everybody does it... except those who don't. Yesterday PhilosophRob, a vegetarian, ran two Open Secrets-based lists of how much money some of the presidential candidates in Congress took from hedge fund managers and from lobbyists so far this cycle. It's easy to talk about cleaning up the corruption in Congress at the root of all the county's problems. But who is willing to walk the walk? Hint: look down at the bottom of the two lists. Not everyone is the same.

Another list: the probable chairs of the House committees starting January 3:

• Agriculture- Collin Peterson (Blue Dog-MN)
• Appropriations- Nita Lowey (D-NY)
• Armed Services- Adam Smith (New Dem-WA)
• Budget- John Yarmuth (D-KY)
• Education and Labor- Bobby Scott (D-VA)
• Energy and Commerce- Frank Pallone (D-NJ)
• Ethics- Ted Deutch (D-FL)
• Financial Services- Maxine Waters (D-CA)
• Foreign Affairs- Eliot Engel (New Dem-Israel)
• Homeland Security- Bennie Thompson (D-MS)
• House Administration- Zoe Lofgren (D-CA)
• Judiciary- Jerry Nadler (D-NY)
• National Resources- Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ)
• Oversight and Government Reform- Elijah Cummings (D-MD)
• Rules- Jim McGovern- (D-MA)
• Science, Space and Technology- Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX)
• Small Business- Nydia Velázquez (D-NY)
• Transportation and Infrastructure- Pete DeFazio (D-OR)
• Veterans Affairs- Mark Takano (D-CA)
• Ways and Means- Richard Neal (D-MA)
• Human Rights- Jim McGovern (D-MA)
• Intelligence- Adam Schiff (New Dem-CA)

Now, in light of Pelosi's much ballyhooed H.R. 1 (which I totally support, even though it doesn't go nearly far enough towards reform), keep these logical and pretty obvious words from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in mind:

I took a look at who the biggest contributors are to each of the incoming chairmen to see if there is any connection to favors they could do as chairs of their committees. And, there were. We've been talking about how corrupt and deceitful New Jersey hack, Frank Pallone, is blocking the creation of a Climate Change Committee, or at least blocking the idea of the committee having any power at all. It's a turf war based on the bribes he gets from Oil and Gas. We'll get back to him in a moment.

A reminder: certain committees are honey pots for corrupt members looking for cash. Generally speaking, congress members flocking to the Financial Services Committee, for example, are looking for bribes from Wall Street. Ditto for the House Ways and Means Committee. The Agriculture Committee is also a get-rich-quick scheme. Same with Armed Services and the notorious Energy and Commerce Committee. I should mention there are also members who go to those committees in order to reform them00 but not many. Let's start with Agriculture, which Collin Peterson-- a super-corrupt Blue Dog-- has ruin before and used as a meeting ground for Blue Dogs interested in his quid pro quo way of dealing with Agribusiness. What businesses have been most generous to Mr. Peterson? Well, this cycle the top half dozen in order of generosity: Crop Production & Basic Processing, Agricultural Services/Products, Food Processing & Sales, Securities & Investment, Dairy and Forestry & Forest Products. Overall this quarter, his top sector for collecting bribes as... Agribusiness and he took $533,825, a nice haul. At the height of his chairman glory days (2006), Agribusiness paid off Peterson to the tune of $393,586. Since 2000, Peterson has gobbled up over $4 million from Agribusiness. During a time period when the sector has given almost double to Republicans ($204,052,583) than Democrats ($107,213,690) Peterson has done very well for himself. He is a living case study for bribery in Congress. It's a disgrace that at the same time Pelosi is introducing H.R. 1, she is also giving Collin Peterson back the chair of the Agriculture Committee, making a mockery of her call for reform.

A half dozen who should be rotting in prison cells

Let me take the 4 committees involved with money-- Appropriations (Nita Lowey), Budget (John Yarmuth), Financial Services (Maxine Waters) and Ways and Means (Richard Neal) in one shot. In way of comparison, let me start by showing you how much the out-going Republican chairs have taken from the Finance Sector (since 2000):

Appropriations- Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-NJ)- $1,714,880
Budget- Steve Womack (R-AR)- $681,143
Financial Services- Jeb Hensarling (R-TX)- $7,916,748
Ways and Means- Kevin Brady (R-TX)- $4,160,535

OK, now let's look at the incoming Democratic chairs, who you might think are less corrupt than the Republicans. Mixed bag on that one:

• Appropriations- Nita Lowey (D-NY)- $5,215,043
• Budget- John Yarmuth (D-KY)- $689,012
• Financial Services- Maxine Waters (D-CA)- $1,826,285
• Ways and Means- Richard Neal (D-MA)- $5,481,179

Let's just look at the current cycle. Lowey's top sector for contributions: Finance ($323,030). Yarmuth's top sector: Labor ($141,000). Waters' top sector: Finance ($412,579). And Neal's top sector: Finance ($894,530). Certainly Lowey, Waters and Neal will all be in, let's say, awkward ethical situations when considering and writing legislation on banks, investments, insurance, real estate, taxes, etc.

Let's move to Armed Services. Adam Smith is considered a friend of the Military Industrial Complex. This cycle his biggest sector for bribes was, of course, Defense ($206,950). His #1 industry-- Defense Aerospace; among his top half dozen: Defense Electronics, Electronics Manufacturing and Equipment, Miscellaneous Defense. Career long he's taken $1,140,050 from the Defense sector. The current chairman, Mac Thornberry (R-TX) has taken $1,562,150. No doubt Smith will quickly surpass him.

Bobby Scott (D-VA) will chair the Education and Labor Committee. His top sector this cycle was-- no surprise-- labor ($136,000). Among his contributors, the half dozen industries that forked over the most: #1- Public Sector Unions, #2- Building Trade Unions, #4- Education, #5- Industrial Unions. Since 2000, unions have contributed $1,437,250 to Scott's campaigns. Education isn't one of the high rolling sectors but the sector contributed $20,400 to his campaign this cycle (and $120,254 career-long).

Energy and Commerce has it's fingers in a lot of pies-- as does the incoming chairman, Frank Pallone. This cycle his 5 biggest contributing cycles were sectors his committee writes legislation for:

• Health- $724,700
• Communications/Electronics- $333,451
• Finance- $214,450
• Labor- $187,525
• Energy and Natural Resources- $178,199

His biggest industries this cycle were health professionals, Pharmaceuticals and Telecom services, industries he will be writing legislation for in the next Congress. but career-long, this is what he's gotten from the sectors that are most eagle to influence him:

• Health- $6,067,900, the most of any member of the House, past or present!
• Communications/Electronics- $1,536,862
• Finance- $2,179,885
• Labor- $2,891,945
• Energy and Natural Resources- $862,516

I think I'm going to stick with Pallone and what he's up to in terms of the turf war he's waging against Alexandria Ocasio, or against her proposal to establish a select committee to deal with the #GreenNewDeal. Some of the other chairs are screaming bloody murder over this as well, since if an effective committee was re-authorized-- the Dems had one in 2007-11 but Boehner immediately abolished it upon the GOP victory in 2010-- it could have jurisdiction or co-jurisdiction in many areas and threaten the ability of committees to squeeze bribes out of almost every industry.

First off, Pelosi, who faced this in 2007 when she first established a Select Committee on Climate Change. She compromised and made it into more of an investigative committee with no real powers and it is likely that she will do the same thing because of Pallone's squawking and temper tantrums. The Sunrise Movement and other progressive groups are working to pressure Pelosi to make it stronger and more strategic than what it turned out to be in 2007. The pressure on her will mount as more members sign up as supporters. Right now there are 35 congressmembers who are on board. These:

So where are all the freshmen who just campaigned on the #GreenNewDeal issues? The only freshmen so far are Mike Levin (D-CA), Joe Neguse (D-CO), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Chris Pappas (D-NH), Deb Haaland (D-NM) and, of course, Alexandria Ocasio (D-NY), who is helping the Sunrise Movement with their efforts in Congress.

Yesterday, author Ellen Brown, in an OpEd for TruthDig, This Radical Plan to Fund the 'Green New Deal' Just Might Work, explained how the Green New Deal could transform the country and why the arguments by conservatives against it can all be overcome. "With what author and activist Naomi Klein calls 'galloping momentum,' the Green New Deal promoted by Representative-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) appears to be forging a political pathway for solving all of the ills of society and the planet in one fell swoop," she wrote. "Her plan would give a House select committee 'a mandate that connects the dots' between energy, transportation, housing, health care, living wages, a jobs guarantee and more. But even to critics on the left, it is merely political theater, because 'everyone knows' a program of that scope cannot be funded without a massive redistribution of wealth and slashing of other programs (notably the military), which is not politically feasible." Brown doesn't believe that and neither do I.

That may be the case, but Ocasio-Cortez and the 22 35 representatives joining her in calling for a select committee also are proposing a novel way to fund the program, one that could actually work. The resolution says funding will come primarily from the federal government, “using a combination of the Federal Reserve, a new public bank or system of regional and specialized public banks, public venture funds and such other vehicles or structures that the select committee deems appropriate, in order to ensure that interest and other investment returns generated from public investments made in connection with the Plan will be returned to the treasury, reduce taxpayer burden and allow for more investment.”

A network of public banks could fund the Green New Deal in the same way President Franklin Roosevelt funded the original New Deal. At a time when the banks were bankrupt, he used the publicly owned Reconstruction Finance Corporation as a public infrastructure bank. The Federal Reserve could also fund any program Congress wanted, if mandated to do so. Congress wrote the Federal Reserve Act and can amend it. Or the Treasury itself could do it, without the need to even change any laws. The Constitution authorizes Congress to “coin money” and “regulate the value thereof,” and that power has been delegated to the Treasury. It could mint a few trillion-dollar platinum coins, put them in its bank account and start writing checks against them. What stops legislators from exercising those constitutional powers is simply that “everyone knows” Zimbabwe-style hyperinflation will result. But will it? Compelling historical precedent shows that this need not be the case.

Michael Hudson, professor of economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, has studied the hyperinflation question extensively. He writes that disasters such as Zimbabwe’s fiscal troubles were not due to the government printing money to stimulate the economy. Rather, “Every hyperinflation in history has been caused by foreign debt service collapsing the exchange rate. The problem almost always has resulted from wartime foreign currency strains, not domestic spending.”

As long as workers and materials are available and the money is added in a way that reaches consumers, adding money will create the demand necessary to prompt producers to create more supply. Supply and demand will rise together and prices will remain stable. The reverse is also true. If demand (money) is not increased, supply and gross domestic product (GDP) will not go up. New demand needs to precede new supply.

The Public Bank Option: The Precedent of Roosevelt’s New Deal

Infrastructure projects of the sort proposed in the Green New Deal are “self-funding,” generating resources and fees that can repay the loans. For these loans, advancing funds through a network of publicly owned banks would not require taxpayer money and could actually generate a profit for the government. That was how the original New Deal rebuilt the country in the 1930s at a time when the economy was desperately short of money.

The publicly owned Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) was a remarkable publicly owned credit machine that allowed the government to finance the New Deal and World War II without turning to Congress or the taxpayers for appropriations. First instituted in 1932 by President Herbert Hoover, the RFC was not called an infrastructure bank and was not even a bank, but it served the same basic functions. It was continually enlarged and modified by Roosevelt to meet the crisis of the times, until it became America’s largest corporation and the world’s largest financial organization. Its semi-independent status let it work quickly, allowing New Deal agencies to be financed as the need arose.

The Reconstruction Finance Corporation Act of 1932 provided the financial organization with capital stock of $500 million and the authority to extend credit up to $1.5 billion (subsequently increased several times). The initial capital came from a stock sale to the U.S. Treasury. With those resources, from 1932 to 1957 the RFC loaned or invested more than $40 billion. A small part of this came from its initial capitalization. The rest was borrowed, chiefly from the government itself. Bonds were sold to the Treasury, some of which were then sold to the public, although most were held by the Treasury. All in all, the RFC ended up borrowing a total of $51.3 billion from the Treasury and $3.1 billion from the public.

In this arrangement, the Treasury was therefore the lender, not the borrower. As the self-funding loans were repaid, so were the bonds that were sold to the Treasury, leaving the RFC with a net profit. The financial organization was the lender for thousands of infrastructure and small-business projects that revitalized the economy, and these loans produced a total net income of $690,017,232 on the RFC’s “normal” lending functions (omitting such things as extraordinary grants for wartime). The RFC financed roads, bridges, dams, post offices, universities, electrical power, mortgages, farms and much more, and it funded all this while generating income for the government.

The Central Bank Option: How Japan Is Funding Abenomics with Quantitative Easing

The Federal Reserve is another Green New Deal funding option. The Fed showed what it can do with “quantitative easing” when it created the funds to buy $2.46 trillion in federal debt and $1.77 trillion in mortgage-backed securities, all without inflating consumer prices. The Fed could use the same tool to buy bonds earmarked for a Green New Deal, and because it returns its profits to the Treasury after deducting its costs, the bonds would be nearly interest-free. If they were rolled over from year to year, the government, in effect, would be issuing new money.

What if Trump heard about from his pal, Abe?

This is not just theory. Japan is actually doing it, without creating even the modest 2 percent inflation the government is aiming for. “Abenomics,” the economic agenda of Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, combines central bank quantitative easing with fiscal stimulus (large-scale increases in government spending). Since Abe came into power in 2012, Japan has seen steady economic growth, and its unemployment rate has fallen by nearly half, yet inflation remains very low, at 0.7 percent. Social Security-related expenses accounted for 55 percent of general expenditure in Japan’s 2018 federal budget, and a universal health care insurance system is maintained for all citizens. Nominal GDP is up 11 percent since the end of the first quarter of 2013, a much better record than during the prior two decades of Japanese stagnation, and the Nikkei stock market is at levels not seen since the early 1990s, driven by improved company earnings. Growth remains below targeted levels, but according to Finacial Times this is because fiscal stimulus has actually been too small. While spending with the left hand, the government has been taking the money back with the right, increasing the sales tax from 5 percent to 8 percent.

Abenomics has been declared a success even by the once-critical International Monetary Fund. After Abe crushed his opponents in 2017, Noah Smith wrote in Bloomberg, “Japan’s long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party has figured out a novel and interesting way to stay in power—govern pragmatically, focus on the economy and give people what they want.” Smith said everyone who wanted a job had one, small and midsize businesses were doing well; and the Bank of Japan’s unprecedented program of monetary easing had provided easy credit for corporate restructuring without generating inflation. Abe had also vowed to make both preschool and college free.

Not that all is idyllic in Japan. Forty percent of Japanese workers lack secure full-time employment and adequate pensions. But the point underscored here is that large-scale digital money-printing by the central bank to buy back the government’s debt, combined with fiscal stimulus by the government (spending on “what the people want”), has not inflated Japanese prices, the alleged concern preventing other countries from doing the same.

Abe’s novel economic program has done more than just stimulate growth. By selling its debt to its own central bank, which returns the interest to the government, the Japanese government has, in effect, been canceling its debt. Until recently, it was doing this at the rate of a whopping $720 billion per year. According to fund manager Eric Lonergan in a February 2017 article:

The Bank of Japan is in the process of owning most of the outstanding government debt of Japan (it currently owns around 40%). BOJ holdings are part of the consolidated government balance sheet. So its holdings are in fact the accounting equivalent of a debt cancellation. If I buy back my own mortgage, I don’t have a mortgage.

If the Federal Reserve followed suit and bought 40 percent of the U.S. national debt, it would be holding $8 trillion in federal securities, three times its current holdings from its quantitative easing programs. Yet liquidating a full 40 percent of Japan’s government debt has not triggered price inflation.

Filling the Gap Between Wages, Debt and GDP

Rather than stepping up its bond-buying, the Federal Reserve is now bent on “quantitative tightening,” raising interest rates and reducing the money supply by selling its bonds into the market in anticipation of “full employment” driving up prices. “Full employment” is considered to be 4.7 percent unemployment, taking into account the “natural rate of unemployment” of people between jobs or voluntarily out of work. But the economy has now hit that level and prices are not in the danger zone, despite nearly 10 years of “accommodative” monetary policy. In fact, the economy is not near true full employment nor full productive capacity, with GDP remaining well below both the long-run trend and the level predicted by forecasters a decade ago. In 2016, real per capita GDP was 10 percent below the 2006 forecast of the Congressional Budget Office, and it shows no signs of returning to the predicted level.

In 2017, U.S. GDP was $19.4 trillion. Assuming that sum is 10 percent below full productive capacity, the money circulating in the economy needs to be increased by another $2 trillion to create the demand to bring it up to full capacity. That means $2 trillion could be injected into the economy every year without creating price inflation. New supply would just be generated to meet the new demand, bringing GDP to full capacity while keeping prices stable.

UPDATE: Jumpin' The Fence

Allow me to include some of Kurt Bardella's fascinating weekend essay for USA Today, even though the connection is somewhat tenuous. Last year he switched parties and announced he was becoming a Democrat. He seems happy to have done so... more or less. "My first year as a Democrat," he wrote, "has given me an appreciation of the gulf between the world views of Republicans and Democrats. Even how we digest and process information is so different. In the decade I spent working in Republican politics here in Washington, I don’t think I ever heard climate change come up as a serious topic of social conversation."

Shocking as it may be to learn, Republicans do not sit around and talk about the environment. As a Democrat, I feel like this topic is a consistent focal point of social conversations. In fact, I’ve found the same thing to be true about gun-law reform, racial inequality, social injustice and sexism. As a Republican, I just never talked about these things, but as a Democrat, I talk about them all the time.

I’ll tell you, being a Democrat is a heck of a lot more emotionally exhausting than being a Republican was, because I care about a lot more things than I used to. There must be some wisdom in the old saying that “ignorance is bliss.” It’s funny, because I remember as a Republican, we would often mock “bleeding-heart liberals” who are always “caring” so much. I think to myself now, what the hell is wrong with these Republicans who don’t seem to care about anything at all?

On a personal level, one of the biggest changes for me has been how I view issues of race. I’ve spent the bulk of my life avoiding race. My first name is German, my last name is Italian and I was born in Seoul, South Korea-- I’m adopted. I grew up in a very rough part of upstate New York where I was taunted and at times beat up by kids because I was (and looked) different. On some level, I was conditioned through this treatment to believe that being different was a bad thing and so I avoided it.

I’ve spent the bulk of my life rejecting my Asian-American heritage. Quite frankly, as a Republican, this was very easy to do. The Republican Party’s attitude toward anyone who isn’t white speaks for itself. Why would I want to even pursue an association as a “minority” in a political party that spouts hateful rhetoric about minorities and pushes policies that discriminate against anyone who isn’t white? It was a pretty cowardly attitude considering how many have brave enough to take a stand and fight for minority rights and confront social injustice.

But once I stepped away from the Republican Party, its efforts to promote racism through rhetoric and policies offended me on a very personal level. I began engaging in these issues and exploring what it means to be a minority in America. One of my favorite moments of this year was participating in a panel at Politi-con called “Crazy Political Asians.” At one point, the moderator, MSNBC’s Richard Lui, asked our panel what year each of us owned up to being a member of the Asian-American Pacific Islander community. Most people gave answers like kindergarten or middle school. My response was “2018.” It may seem like a small thing, but saying this in public for the first time was a big deal for me.

...Relief that I was finally able to speak my truth. For the better part of two years, I had felt like a fraud still calling myself a “Republican.” I guess on some level, I had hoped that the cancer that is Trumpism would be isolated to a smaller segment of the Republican Party. Instead, it spread to infect the entire GOP with so-called “leaders” like House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell becoming the biggest enablers and defenders of Trump’s unique brand of toxicity.

Their refusal to forge a different identity within the Republican Party divorced from Trumpism forced me to confront a reality I had tried to avoid-- that there really was no virtue in trying to be a sane voice within the GOP, and it was time to embrace a different way.

Remember When Trump Mocked Chinese And Japanese Accents? Chinese And Japanese Americans Do

In 2012, Asian-Americans were huge Obama supporters. In the end the very diverse group only gave 31% of it's vote to Romney. It didn't matter in states like California, New York, Illinois and Texas, with their massive Asian-American population. California, New York, and Illinois were going big for Obama anyway and Texas was in the pocket for Romney no matter how many Laotians and Vietnamese voted for Obama. But in swing states like Nevada, Virginia and North Carolina, Asian-American votes are vital in putting together a winning coalition. Trump has managed to alienate Asian-American voters without understanding that. As we explained after he insulted Filipino-Americans, a socially conservative group that has always been strong for the GOP, voters are utterly turned off by Trump's racism, bullying, xenophobia and his fingers and immature foreign policies.

The just-released National Asian American Survey shows Hillary ahead of him by a 43-point margin among registered Asian-American voters. The polling was done between August 10 and September 29-- in 11 languages. Just half the number of voters who backed Romney plan to vote for Trump. Hillary leads him 59-16%. Karthick Ramakrishnan, the survey's director, said that the big defection from the GOP this year was all about Trump. "Trump's unfavorables," he emphasized, "are like nothing we've seen before." He leads Clinton in unfavorables 67-36%.

Nevada is a swing state with 6 electoral votes that Trump desperately needs. But the presidential race isn't all that's going on there. There's a crucial Senate race and 2 Republicans congressional incumbents are struggling to fight off strong Democratic challenges. It isn't likely that loud Trump backers Cresent Hardy and Mark Amodei (Trump's Nevada campaign chairman) will survive November and the open seat south of Vegas (Henderson and below) will probably go from red to blue as well. Asian-Americans are part of the good news for Democrats in the state.

On paper at least, Asian-Americans seem like perfect Republicans. Many are small-business owners. Their communities tend to be more culturally conservative. And a lot of them, having fled oppressive communist governments, found comfort in the Republican Party’s aggressive anti-communist policies.

But in what could be a significant realignment of political allegiance, Asian-Americans are identifying as Democrats at a quicker pace than any other racial group. And many Republicans worry this election will only accelerate that trend, damaging their party for years to come with what is now the fastest-growing minority in the country.

The Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, is not helping. His attacks on the Chinese-- which he has sometimes delivered in a crude, mocking accent-- are a feature of his populist campaign. He has suggested cutting off immigration from the Philippines, citing fears that the longtime U.S. ally poses the same national security threat as countries like Syria and Afghanistan.

Trump’s talk of deporting millions of undocumented immigrants has also stirred up painful memories among a group that has been singled out under U.S. law before, whether by the Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred the immigration of Chinese laborers until 1943, or by the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

“It’s like we’re going back in time,” said Marc Matsuo of Las Vegas, who grew up in Hawaii with parents of Japanese ancestry and recalled how his family used to feel uncomfortable expressing their heritage, to the point they would not speak Japanese. He now helps register Asian-Americans to vote. “I was always brought up that you don’t talk about religion, you don’t talk about politics. Not anymore.”

Though Asian-Americans are still just 4 percent of the overall eligible voting population, their political power is concentrated in important swing states like Nevada and Virginia, where both parties have been building on their efforts to reach out.

In and around Las Vegas, home to one of the country’s largest Asian populations, this means printing campaign leaflets in Korean, having a Vietnamese translator on standby at speeches, publishing op-ed articles in the local Filipino newspaper and hiring employees who know enough Mandarin to recruit voters at the Chinatown seafood market.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign has a resident staff member in Las Vegas dedicated to Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders. Staff members and volunteers here speak Chinese, Korean, Hindi and Tagalog, the Filipino language. The campaign has recently been conducting native language training on how to use voting machines in a local Chinese cultural center. Volunteers are sent to court supporters in Buddhist temples.

Though Trump’s campaign announced a new Asian Pacific American Advisory Committee last week, a Republican National Committee spokesman, Ninio Fetalvo, said Trump’s outreach to Asian-American voters had been coordinated until now mainly through two staff members at the party’s Washington headquarters. The party, he added, has also printed materials in a variety of Asian languages in cities like Las Vegas.

Republicans’ difficulties with Asian-Americans are similar to those the party has faced with most minority groups. A sense that the party is hostile to immigrants and minorities has driven more Asian-American voters into the Democratic Party lately, political scientists and community leaders said. And if Republicans do not make more of an effort, those voting shifts could harden, just as Hispanics’ voting patterns have.

...As Asian-Americans have replaced Hispanics as the nation’s fastest growing racial group, Nevada has become the center of their emerging political class. Asian-Americans are now about 7 percent of the electorate in the state, a figure that is expected to double by 2060.

Democrats and Republicans have concluded that winning in closely divided Nevada requires performing strongly among Asian-Americans: The state’s Republican senator, Dean Heller, carried Asian-Americans when he narrowly won in 2012. And Harry Reid, the state’s long-serving Democratic senator who is retiring, performed even better with them than he did among Hispanics in his 2010 election.

None of which is lost on the two candidates vying to succeed Reid: Rep. Joe Heck, the Republican, employs an aide who speaks Mandarin and has made Kamayan dinners-- traditional Filipino banquets-- as much a campaign staple as marching in parades. And Catherine Cortez Masto, the Democrat, grew up in the Las Vegas neighborhood that has since become the city’s Chinatown, with Korean barbecue restaurants, Vietnamese noodle bars, foot spas and Chinese arches. When she attended a lunar celebration last month, she spoke in English as someone translated her words into Vietnamese.

As much as Trump’s positions seem to be driving Asian-Americans into the Democratic Party, the group defies easy political categorization. Many Koreans are evangelical Christians. Filipinos overwhelmingly belong to the Roman Catholic Church. Many Vietnamese who emigrated during the war identify closely with the Republican Party’s anti-communism.

“In general, Asian values are very much in line with Republican values: family, education, the country needs to be stable,” said James Yu, a member of the Las Vegas Asian Chamber of Commerce, which has endorsed Heck in the Senate race. Notably, it has not backed Trump.

By November, about 9.3 million Asian-Americans will be able to vote nationally, or 4 percent of the eligible voting population. That is up from 8 million in 2012. And that growth has spawned new civic organizations, like the nonpartisan Asian Community Development Council in Las Vegas, which aims to boost the group’s low voter turnout. Only 47 percent of eligible Asian-Americans voted in 2012.

Vida Chan Lin, the group’s founder, said that her message each time she goes out to register Asian-Americans to vote-- in casinos’ employee lunchrooms, in Chinatown shopping malls and at employee orientations for businesses like the Panda Express fast-food chain-- is that they have to harness the power of their growing numbers.

“We’ve got to get them to vote,” Lin said in her office, which was humming with volunteers planning registration drives, as well as follow-up calls as reminders to vote.

One positive consequence of Trump’s divisiveness, she said, was that interest in the election is like nothing she has ever seen. And the chatter about it follows her everywhere, she added: “When I went to China, they were talking about it.”

Hardy-- always channeling the hatred and bigotry

One of the congressional districts where there are lots of Asian-American voters is NV-04, where primitive, bigioted Trump-fanatic Cresent Hardy was accidentally elected in 2014. Blue America has endorsed his progressive opponent, state Senator Ruben Kihuen-- you can contribute to his campaign here-- and, as one of the leaders of the Democrats in the state legislature, he's very aware of the contributions Asian-Americans, almost 5% of the district's population, have made in Nevada. "The Asian American Pacific Islander community," he told me today, "is the fastest growing voter block in Nevada and will be critical for our success this election. Trump and Hardy's hateful, racist rhetoric and policies offend many AAPI voters to the core. Democrats can't just count on the anti-Trump vote among AAPI voters but it offers a golden opportunity for us to make our case and provide a brighter vision for all Americans."

Certainly, all over the country, Chinese-Americans are well-aware that Fox is the mouthpiece of the Republican Party. Many were offended by the Jesse Watters piece from Bill O'Reilly's show a couple days ago. The foremost Chinese-American member of Congress, Ted Lieu (D-CA) told us that "When the GOP Presidential nominee and his enablers run a racist and bigoted campaign, guess what, Americans notice, including Asian Americans. The GOP mantra to Asian Americans that we want you to join us but first we want to deport your children doesn't actually work well as a message. Asian Americans are now a sizable and critical swing vote in battleground states such as Nevada and Virginia. That's one reason Donald Trump will lose those states."

Is Bernie's Secret Weapon Asian Americans?

A couple years ago, when Blue America endorsed Ted Lieu for Congress, it wasn't because he was Asian-American any more than it was because he was a male or because he was in the Air Force Reserve. It was because he was the most progressive candidate in the race and because he had an eye-popping record of accomplishment in the state legislature as the most creative, effective and member dedicated to working families. This cycle Blue America didn't endorse Bao Nguyen because is Asian-American, nor did we endorse Pramila Jayapal because she is Asian-American. We endorsed the Bao, who has Vietnamese heritage and Pramila, whose family heralds from Kerala in southwest India, because they are, like Ted Lieu, dedicated and effective progressives who will be able to make significant contributions into turning the dysfunctional cesspool known as the U.S. House of Representatives into a tool for working families. Primal proved herself in the Washington state legislature and Bao proved himself as the mayor of Garden Grove in Orange County.

That said, the Pew Research Center reports that Asian Americans are the highest-income, best-educated and fastest-growing racial group in the U.S., with Asians now surpassing Hispanics as the largest group of new immigrants. The kind of Know Nothing xenophobia and racial stereotyping and scapegoating that have taken hold in the GOP are viewed with great alarm and Asian-American groups have massively migrated to the Democratic Party in the last few years. And, according to Floridian Ricky Ly, writing for Asia Trend, "a recent Gallup poll showed that Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders enjoys the highest level of popularity for any major candidate of either party among Asian-Americans."

Both of Blue America's Asian-American House challengers this cycle, Bao and Pramila, have endorsed Bernie. Ly explains that "economic opportunity, education, immigration, and social justice are all important issues" for him and that "working hard, opportunities for growth, the pursuit of happiness are all American values [Asian Americans] cherish." The more he learned about Bernie, the more enamored of his program and his "movement that seeks to revolutionize our political system to be more of a government that is by the people, for the people" he became.

Asian Americans are acutely aware of what happens when people give into their darkest fears and hatreds, how the government and even our own fellow citizens can act out, sometimes in violence, in misplaced anger and frustration against those who look, speak, or act differently.

From the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1885, the Japanese American Internment Camps during World War II, the death of Vincent Chin, to the targeting of Muslims and South Asians after 9/11, Asian Americans have through American history been unjustly and unfairly targeted in hate crimes when prejudices go unchecked. Senator Sanders has stood up to discrimination and supported civil rights and human rights time after time.

...Recently on CNBC’s Fast Money, Asher Edelman, a former Wall Street corporate raider, who the character Gordon Gekko from the film Wall Street was based upon-- stated that Bernie Sanders is the strongest presidential candidate.

"Well, I think it’s quite simple,” he began. “If you look at something called 'velocity of money'-- you guys know what that is, I presume—that means how much gets spent and turns around. When you have the top one percent getting money, they spend five, 10 percent of what they earn. When you have the lower end of the economy getting money, they spend 100, or 110 percent of what they earn. As you’ve had a transfer of wealth to the top, and a transfer of income to the top, you have a shrinking consumer base, basically, and you have a shrinking velocity of money. Bernie is the only person out there who I think is talking at all about both fiscal stimulation and banking rules that will get the banks to begin to generate lending again as opposed to speculation. So from an economic point of view, it’s straightforward."

Senator Sanders as a democratic socialist believes in capitalism but with humanity, where corporate greed is checked, where the government is by the people, for the people. Many governments in the world operate successfully with a democratic socialist government from Norway to Sweden, where people enjoy universal healthcare, high levels of education, and high satisfaction of life ratings while still having world class and competitive businesses and companies.

On education, Bernie Sanders proposes to reign in on corporate welfare while providing free public college tuition to all. In this age of technology, a high school diploma no longer cuts it for graduates who want to be competitive in the new global economy. As an Asian-American, education is valued as a way to move up the socio-economic ladder and we believe the more highly educated our country is, the greater our country will be.

On jobs, today, hundreds of thousands of American manufacturing jobs have been shipped overseas through disastrous trade policies like NAFTA and will most likely worsen with the upcoming TransPacific Partnership agreement, pitting American workers with those in the third world making 60 cents an hour, accelerating a race to the bottom for all. Bernie Sanders voted against NAFTA and opposes TPP, working for fair trade with policies written by the people rather than by corporations.

On small businesses, Bernie Sanders has worked hard to push for policies that help small businesses, encourage entrepreneurship, and foster innovation. Among these, he has supported loans for small businesses, pushed for reforming intellectual property regimes, and advocated for giving the entrepreneurs of tomorrow access to good education. Bernie wants to make sure that small businesses have access to low-interest loans and other forms of support, so that they can thrive. The United States has long been a world leader in entrepreneurship and innovation, which in turn are the engines that drive our economy. To continue this tradition of leadership and growth, Bernie has supported increasing access to education and training, and opposing intellectual property regimes.

On the environment, Senator Sanders believes that we can no longer ignore the ramifications of human activity on climate change, whose evidence is supported by 98% of the scientific community, and the disastrous effect of our energy policy on our environment. Climate change has been cited by many countries around the world as the number one security concern even above ISIS, above terrorism, because many of their agricultural industries depend on the environment to sustain food supplies and security. We have to start developing sustainable, clean energy alternatives before it’s too late for our planet.

On foreign policy, Senator Sanders believes that war should be the last option after all diplomatic efforts have failed. As a child of the Vietnam War, the needless deaths of millions of innocents is something that should be avoided at all costs. Senator Sanders voted against the Iraq War in 2002, accurately predicting that the war would be a huge cost on our nation both in blood and treasure, as well as the lack of a strategy to fill the power vacuum once Saddam Hussein was ousted from office which would lead to the disastrous insurgent rise of a terrorist group like ISIS. On veterans issues, Senator Sanders worked to co-sponsor the most comprehensive bill to improve veteran care and access in recent history. He believes that just as weapons are a cost of war, so is taking care of the people we sent to fight. Veterans must receive the health care and benefits they have earned, and the respect that they deserve.

“If you can’t afford to take care of your veterans, then don’t go to war.”

U.S. Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, a combat veteran as well as the first American Samoan and first Hindu American member of the U.S. Congress, cited these reasons for her support for Senator Sanders for President. She resigned from her position as vice-chair of the Democratic National Committee.

“The choice before us is this,” Gabbard said recently at a rally in Kissimmee, Florida. “We can vote for Hillary Clinton and … get more of these interventionist, regime-change wars that have cost us so much, or we can vote for and support Bernie Sanders, end these counterproductive, costly interventionist wars and invest here at home, because we cannot afford to do both.”

“No one understands more how important peace is than those who’ve actually been there and experienced that high cost of war firsthand,” Gabbard said. “During my first deployment to Iraq, I served in a medical unit where every single day that high human cost stared me back in the face.”

Rapper and Bernie supporter Killer Mike said that “Bernie Sanders is the only politician who has consistently, for 50 years, taken that social justice platform into politics. And right now, we have an opportunity to elect someone who is directly out of the philosophy of [Martin Luther] King-ian non-violence. We can directly elect someone who cares about poor people; cares about women, gay, black rights; cares about lives that don’t look like his. This opportunity in history is not going to come in another 20 years.”

He’s just one human being. He won’t be able to achieve all of this on his own, but together, when we all stand together, America will always win.

That is why I support Senator Bernie Sanders for President of the United States.

Bao has been clear with Orange County voters that he is "working to reduce inequality and restore a government of the people, not of the special interests. Donald Trump has condoned violence against his dissenters time after time, and made scapegoats of our fellow Americans based on race and religion. So much airtime is devoted to outrageous soundbites instead of the real issues. We cannot waste time turning our democracy into reality TV, when climate change threatens our economy and environment, and when families still struggle to make ends meet or save for their children to attend college."

Bao is in a tightly contested race that includes more than just Garden Grove. The district includes most of Santa Ana, Orange and Anaheim. Over 60% of the votes last time were for Obama, a figure expected to grow for the Democrats in November. His two main competitors in the race, scandal-tarred ex-assemblyman and ex-state senator Lou Correa and ex-state senator Joe Dunn, have been furiously battling it out. However, last week the Orange County Register revealed what many had long suspected, that Dunn was "fired from his job as executive director of the State Bar of California was justified because he misled board members and failed to provide them with key information." So now Bao is competing with two corrupt opponents.

Due north in Seattle Pramila Jayapal, another progressive Asian-American congressional candidate who has endorsed Bernie, is the top candidate in a crowded field. Right after she announced, Daffany Chan wrote that "Jayapal's unique platform is a reflection of her own personal story. The state senator came to America after her parents raised enough money to send her from India at 16, when she attended Georgetown University. Since then, Jayapal has been heavily involved in civil rights causes and activism, including founding the immigrants' rights organization OneAmerica.

Though this is Jayapal's first bid for Congress, she's already made a name for herself in her hometown of Seattle. The state senator is known for her tenacity-- and in the tough world of politics, she's got the thick skin necessary and isn't about to give up a fight. "I'm a bold progressive fighter who will stand up for Seattle's values," Jayapal said in her announcement speech at Seattle Central College. "I'm running for Congress because our system is rigged for corporations and the wealthy. The time has come to tackle this inequality."

Below is the interview Marianne Williamson did with Pramila as part of the on-going Blue America/Sister Giant Progressive Summit that runs at SisterGiant.com and features progressive luminaries like Alan Grayson (FL), Carol Shea-Porter (NH), Ted Lieu (CA) and Keith Ellison (MN) as well as up-and-comers like Tim Canova (FL), Jamie Raskin (MD), Eric Kingson (NY), Pat Murphy (IA), Paul Clements (MI), Alex Law (NJ), John Fetterman (PA), Nanette Barragan and a growing list of the men and women who are going to help shape the progressive agenda for the country.

Hispanics Aren't The Only Group Turned Off By Right-wing Racism And Xenophobia-- Asian-Americans Have Given Up On The GOP

Tuesday night had some special significance for Asian-Americans. Philadelphians didn't just elect their first Asian-American woman to the City Council, they gave public education advocate Helen Gym the highest vote of the 7 at-large victors. I expect that in a few years she will be on the national stage. And in Lewiston, Maine, progressive activist Ben Chin came in first in the 5-way race for mayor. Chin was considerably ahead of conservative Republican incumbent Robert Macdonald, 44.08% to 37.29%, but because he didn't get 50%, there will be a run-off in December. Racist right-wing signs saying "Don’t vote for Ho Chi Chin" appear to have not hurt Chin's efforts towards ousting Macdonald. But this kind of knee-jerk racism from Republicans has hurt their party with Asian-American voters across the country.

As Los Angeles Congressman Ted Lieu told us today, "The close-minded, xenophobic comments by leading Republican presidential candidates such as Donald Trump and Jeb Bush send the following message to all minorities, including Asian Americans: YOU ARE NOT WELCOME. The message from GOP hardliners to Latinos and Asian Americans that 'we want you to join our party but we also want to deport your children and family members,' is not a message that has resonated, or ever will, resonate. America is witnessing the last gasps of an unsustainable viewpoint. A recent PEW study showed that 80% of America's population growth in the coming decades will be from immigrants, and that by 2055 the largest share will be from Asian American immigrants. The one fact that no one can change is that with every passing day, the rest of America looks more like California."

This week, Cecelia Hyunjung Mo, writing for the New Republic looked into why Asian Americans don't vote Republican. Obama took 73% of the Asian-American vote-- which exceeded his support among traditional Democratic Party constituencies like Hispanics (71%) and women (55%)-- and that is a complete turn-around from just two decades ago when Asian-Americans were favoring Republicans. "The Democratic presidential vote share, among Asian Americans," she wrote, "has steadily increased from 36 percent in 1992, to 64 percent in the 2008 election to 73 percent in 2012... No other group has shifted so dramatically in their party identification within such a short time period. Some are calling it the “GOP’s Asian erosion.”

Asian Americans as a group have a number of attributes that would usually predict an affinity for the Republican Party.

American Enterprise Institute’s notes:

“If you’re looking for a natural Republican constituency, Asians should define ‘natural' … And yet something has happened to define conservatism in the minds of Asians as deeply unattractive.”

As shown by Andrew Gelman and his coauthors in their book Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do, income is a powerful driver of political party preferences. Generally, richer voters are more likely to vote Republican.

Asian Americans' income is, on average, higher than any other ethnic group in the United States. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2009, the median Asian household had a higher income (US$65,469) than the median white household ($51,863). Median black and Hispanic household incomes were $32,584 and $38,039, respectively.

So why are Asian Americans leaning left instead of right?

My research with Alexander Kuo and Neil Malhotra offers one explanation. The feeling of social exclusion stemming from their ethnic background might be pushing Asian Americans away from the Republican Party.

Asian Americans are regularly made to feel like foreigners in their own country through “innocent” racial microaggressions. Microaggressions are “everyday insults, indignities and demeaning messages sent to people of color by well-intentioned white people who are unaware of the hidden messages being sent.” An example is being asked “Where are you really from?”-- after answering the question “Where are you from?” with a location within the United States. Another is being complimented on one’s great English-speaking skills. In both cases, the underlying assumption is that Asian Americans are outsiders.

According to a 2005 study by Sapna Cheryan and Benoit Monin, Asian Americans are right to feel excluded. The study shows Asian Americans are seen as less American than other Americans.

...[R]hetoric from Republicans insinuating that nonwhite “takers” are taking away from white “makers,” as well as their strong anti-immigrant positions, has cultivated a perception that the Republican Party is less welcoming of minorities. Since the Democratic Party is seen as less exclusionary, we find that triggering feelings of social exclusion makes Asian Americans favor Democrats.

...When we examined the 2008 National Asian American Survey (NAAS), a nationally representative sample of over 5,000 Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, we found that self-reported racial discrimination, a proxy for feelings of social exclusion, was positively correlated with identification with the Democratic Party over the Republican Party.

Analyzing the NAAS data, we find that racial discrimination is not rare. Nearly 40 percent of Asian Americans suffered at least one of the following forms of racial discrimination in their lifetime:

• being unfairly denied a job or fired
• being unfairly denied a promotion at work
• being unfairly treated by the police
• being unfairly prevented from renting or buying a home
• treated unfairly at a restaurant or other place of service
• being a victim of a hate crime.

Understanding Asian American political behavior has important electoral ramifications. According to a 2013 U.S. Census report, while Asian Americans are only 5 percent of the US population and about 4 percent of voters, in some states they make up a considerably higher proportion of the electorate. Asian Americans make of 12 percent of likely voters in California. They are projected to become 9 percent of the overall US population by 2015.

Since 1996, the number of Asian Americans who cast votes has increased by 105 percent, in contrast to a 13 percent increase among white voters. Additionally, while the lion share of Asian American votes are going to Democratic candidates, according to Zoltan Hajnal and Taeku Lee, the majority of Asian Americans are not officially affiliated with any party. That means they’re “gettable” by either party.

So what can the GOP do to win the Asian American vote?

The short answer is, not what they are currently doing.

As long as Republicans appear unwelcoming of minorities, our findings suggest, they will struggle to get Asian Americans’ electoral support.

Recent rhetoric around immigration reform from leading Republican presidential candidates goes beyond subtle racial microaggressions. The current Republican candidates are being explicitly exclusionary. Donald Trump and Ben Carson are doubling down on anti-immigrant sentiments, stating sweeping and offensive stereotypes of immigrants.

Jeb Bush, rather than apologizing for the use of the offensive term “anchor babies,” defended the use of the term by redirecting the conversation away from Latino immigrants to Asian immigrants.

Our study suggests that the increasing salience of issues like immigration that implicitly or explicitly offend minority groups coupled with exclusionary rhetoric from prominent leaders of the Republican Party will continue to push Asian Americans to the Democratic Party.

The Blue America-backed candidate running in CA-46 (Orange County), progressive Garden Grove Mayor Bao Nguyen, a Vietnamese refugee born in Thailand and a California resident since infancy, told us that "[s]ometimes, people tell me that I speak English 'very good,' and I know they meant 'very well.' What defines America isn't the language we prefer to speak or from where we have come, but how we advance our democracy by ensuring that all people of our great nation have the same rights and privileges granted by our constitution."

Aside from the election Tuesday night, many Asian-Americans were probably fascinated by the long-anticipated PBS showing of a documentary from ProPublica, Terror In Little Saigon (video below). It's a horrific story about right-wing domestic terrorism directed at Vietnamese-American journalists. It is the 1980s story of 5 murdered journalists, from Houston to Garden Grove by a shadowy right-wing group preying on and extorting the Vietnamese community with impunity.

ProPublica's A.C. Thompson, an investigative journalist interviewed the families of the victims and former members of the Front. His work, published here, was the basis of Tuesday night's Frontline report.

FBI agents came to believe that the journalists’ killings, along with an array of fire-bombings and beatings, were terrorist acts ordered by an organization called the National United Front for the Liberation of Vietnam, a prominent group led by former military commanders from South Vietnam. Agents theorized that the Front was intimidating or executing those who defied it, FBI documents show, and even sometimes those simply sympathetic to the victorious Communists in Vietnam. But the FBI never made a single arrest for the killings or terror crimes, and the case was formally closed two decades ago.

...The Front openly raised money in America to restart the Vietnam War, even launching three failed invasions from the borders of Thailand and Laos. Our reporting shows that officials at the State Department, the Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency and the FBI knew about the Front’s military operations in Southeast Asia. But federal authorities never acted to enforce the Neutrality Act, which bars residents and citizens of this country from efforts to overthrow a foreign government... Terror in Little Saigon tells the story of a reign of intimidation and murder for which no one has been held to account.

UPDATE: Wrongful Indictments Against Asian-Americans

Reacting to some pretty horrific cases, Ted Lieu, Judy Chu and Keith Ellison sent a letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch requesting that the Department of Justice open a full investigation into whether race, ethnicity or national origin played a part in recent instances where Asian Americans have been wrongfully arrested and indicted for alleged espionage only to have those charges later dropped. Lieu wants to know why there appears to be an ongoing pattern and practice of people of color being singled out by federal law enforcement and prosecutors.

 

Bao Nguyen: GOP Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric Is Despicable And Divisive

With Loretta Sanchez running for the U.S. Senate, Orange County's 46th Congressional District is be an open seat in 2016. It's a solidly blue district (D+9), and Obama won it with 59% in 2008 and with 61% in 2012. The district includes Santa Ana, Anaheim and Orange, and the voters are overwhelmingly Hispanic-American and Asian-American. Although there may be as many as 10 Democrats interested in running, Blue America has endorsed the most progressive of the lot, Garden Grove Mayor Bao Nguyen, an openly gay Vietnamese immigrant who arrived in this country when he was just three months old. 

I asked him what he made of the anti-immigrant mania sweeping the Republican presidential race. This is what he had to say.

As an American immigrant it disgusts me when I hear how Donald Trump, Jeb Bush, and the other Republican Presidential candidates have been talking about immigrants. It’s despicable, and disgraceful. Immigrants are the backbone of this country. They built this country and continue to add to it in so many ways. I was born in a refugee camp, and came to this country when I was three months old. We didn’t have much-- let’s be honest, we were just poor. But we found a welcoming and supportive community of all nationalities and backgrounds, and with help and hard work, I was able to build a life here in California. But my story is no different from that of millions of immigrants who came to America in search of a better life-- who knew they needed to work hard and play by the rules in order to get a fair shot at the American Dream. We need to celebrate the accomplishments of our immigrant neighbors, and we need to bring everyone out of the shadows, so they can be full participants in the American Dream.

But instead, Trump and the rest of the GOP Primary Clown car have started to bang the drums of fear and hate to alienate and divide our nation and it's CITIZENS. As the discourse has gone more and more into the gutter, even the relatively ‘moderate’ GOP candidates have joined this chorus of hate. You may have heard the derogatory term "anchor babies" returning again, as it has in past debates about immigrations. Sadly, Republicans have resorted to an age old tactic to galvanize the extremist fringe of their party, by calling for stricter crackdowns on undocumented immigrants, primarily from Latin America, who they claim are trying to take advantage of America's policy of birthright citizenship under the 14th amendment.

Recently the party favorite, Jeb Bush was criticized for using the term "anchor babies" during a conservative radio interview. Governor Jeb Bush has doubled down, telling reporters that he does not believe the term is offensive. "Nothing about what I've said should be viewed as derogatory towards immigrants at all," he said Monday in McAllen, Texas. "I think we need to take a step back and chill out a little bit."

I just want to restate, an "anchor baby" is a term to used to define an undocumented immigrant, coming to America with the intention having a baby specifically to take advantage of the Constitution-- it IS a disgusting and derogatory term, period.

Bush clarified further, saying that he used the term "anchor babies" specifically to refer to fraud in a "specific targeted kind of case" involving mothers who travel to the U.S. only to win citizenship for their unborn children.

"Frankly, it's more Asian people."

I know that Jeb is just trying to back track his xenophobic statement and not lose the elusive Latino demographic his party hopes to gain in the general election. Let me give some clear and direct advice, all Americans, no mater if their ancestors came from, Latin America, Western Europe, and yes Americans of Asian descent, find your divisive rhetoric abhorrent-- no matter which group of people you are slinging mud at for your own political gains. This is exactly why we need to bring  more people to Washington who can tell the story of the very people that Jeb Bush and Donald Trump are trying to silence. I hope you will support me in my campaign to be that voice.

Bao, who is trilingual in English, Spanish and Vietnamese, earned a B.A. from the University of California Irvine and while attending college interned for the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. He also holds a master’s degree in Indo-Tibetan Buddhist studies from Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, and has a certification in mediation from the Dispute Resolution Program of the Orange County Human Relations Commission. He will offer a unique and valuable perspective on Capitol Hill. 

When I asked him about the Iran deal, he told us he would vote for it.

From what I have seen this is the only option on the table that keeps Iran from developing a nuclear weapon and at the same time keeps American lives out of harms way. If this deal fails there are fewer non-military options since the international sanctions that were in place are no longer available to us. Frankly, I am disappointed with Republicans who only continue with their policy of opposing anything supported by Obama with no response to what they would do other than sending more Americans to war in the Middle East.

Please consider helping Bao get his grassroots campaign into position to win this race. One thing I can assure you about him-- he will never be a wishy-washy Democrat. He's a fighter and, truth be told, reminds me in some ways of Alan Grayson! Even Joe Scarborough is laughing at the Republican racists!