Before you cast your vote today, please remember that:

When Martin O’Malley was asked publicly in early 2009 to support a moratorium on foreclosures, he refused.  Many of us knew that banks were engaged in fraud and yet it wasn’t until a few weeks ago, during an election season and after it was safe to do so, that Martin O’Malley said he supported a moratorium.  Too late, Martin!

As BGE ratepayers continue to struggle to pay some of the highest electricity rates in the country, neither Robert Ehrlich nor Martin O’Malley will lift a finger to help us.  Neither supports reregulation or negotiations to secure significant rate concessions.  They stand with Constellation Energy, not with the people of Maryland.

Martin O’Malley found $2.5 billion to build the Intercounty Connector but can’t find the money to create a viable system of mass transit which this state needs.  More money for road construction by favored contractors, not for mass transit that works – that’s the Republicans and Democrats.

Neither Robert Ehrlich nor Martin O’Malley supports establishing a state-owned bank to nurture our small businesses, move Maryland toward a new green manufacturing sector and bringing renewable energy to mass market.  They’d rather keep our taxpayer money in the big banks that have caused the worst economic catastrophe in our lifetimes!

Neither Martin O’Malley nor Robert Ehrlich support a Medicare for All health care system that will ensure everyone has the health care they need and eliminate the insurance companies from our health care decisions.

Time to leave the Democrats and Republicans in the dust and be a part of creating a new state where the peoples’ needs come first.

Vote Green today!

It’s time to stop voting for the lesser of two evils and vote for what you want.

The Sun and other mainstream media outlets would have you believe this race is only between Martin O’Malley and Robert Ehrlich, but many of you know better.  You have a real choice today: whether to hold your nose and vote for someone who has done nothing to make your life better or you can vote for the candidate who will make your life better, who will transform our communities and who will stand up to the corporate and special interests that have controlled our government for far too long.

You do have a choice today.  You can vote for me, Maria Allwine, for governor.

Today, this election day, is your time, your opportunity to tell the powerful, the wealthy special interests and those who use the power of the corporation to keep us struggling and voiceless, that you will not let them win.

Today is the day you win!  Today is the day our communities win!

If you want:

A state-owned bank to create a new green manufacturing sector, invest in small locally owned businesses and move Maryland toward renewable sources of energy,

A new public works jobs program to put Marylanders back to work and repair our infrastructure,

Progressive and fair taxes,
Closing corporate tax loopholes,
Higher earners paying their fair share,

An internal, independent audit of all state agencies to uncover waste and fraud,

BGE Reregulation,

Medicare for All,

Policies to nurture and develop small sustainable farms, not industrial farms,

Fully funded and strengthened public education with no increase in college tuition,

Marriage equality for all Marylanders,

An end to the death penalty,

No profiling of immigrants and other groups,

An end to the “war on drugs” and a sane drug policy,

A governor who believes that people and communities must come first, who has the will and courage to oppose the corporate and special interests that really control our government, that the role of government is to protect all of us from the excesses of corporate greed and that we the people must be restored to the heart of representative democracy:

VOTE GREEN PARTY TOMORROW!

If you believe the Democratic and Republican parties have failed us and will continue to fail us and that we can no longer continue to live on the crumbs they throw us:

VOTE GREEN PARTY TOMORROW!

I am a community organizer and activist who fights for us and for our communities and for all those who have been left out and left behind.

I ask for your vote tomorrow, November 2.

BGE and Constellation Energy are still ripping us off, all the hype about a $16 savings on our bill notwithstanding. I know most of you reading today’s Sun article about BGE are laughing and crying at the same time over the outrageous insult that we are supposed to be happy about a $16 savings when they have been stealing millions from us under deregulation and continue to demand rate increases from the PSC.

BGE ratepayers still pay some of the highest electricity prices in the country and that is the fault of Martin O’Malley, Robert Ehrlich and the Maryland legislature.

I continue to stand on the side of working and poor people, those of us hit the hardest with BGE bills we cannot possibly pay. Those bills for hundreds of dollars every month have nothing to do with the real price of electricity and everything to do with what both Democrats and Republicans in this state have done to us – allowed a powerful corporation to steal from us so it can make ever more profits on our backs.

Some of the hard-working members of the MD Coalition for BGE Reregulation protested outside the office of the PSC this past Wednesday.  Watch the video here and then you decide who’s really on your side.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbQeJrKJSFc

Raise your hand if you’re able to afford your rent.  I suspect many of you still have your hand on the mouse.  Now raise your hand if you think you’re paying too much or you’re worried that your rent will go up.  I see your hands up now!

Baltimore city and many parts of Maryland used to be relatively inexpensive places to live, and working and lower income folks were able to afford the rents in most neighborhoods.  Now with rents in Baltimore city often $1500/month and reaching to $2500 and $3000, affordable housing in Baltimore has become a thing of the past.  It’s increasingly difficult for working people, whose incomes have fallen drastically, to afford a decent place.  For poor people, it’s a cycle of moving constantly because they cannot pay the rent and must move from place to place as landlords become more insistent. They can never get ahead.

Baltimore is not the only jurisdiction where rents reach into the stratosphere.  Who can afford to live in Annapolis and many of the DC suburbs?  Even the Cockeysville (northern Baltimore county) apartment where I lived in the early 70s has gone from $250 to over $950.  I was stunned when a friend recently told me his Dundalk apartment, while very nice, was $1200/month!  Rents have gone up astronomically while our incomes have shrunk to the point where we cannot make ends meet.

Like health care, housing is a human right.  We all have the right to a decent affordable place to live.  Over the past decades, certainly since Baltimore’s rent control charter amendment was struck down as unconstitutional in 1979, elected officials have done nothing to control the increasing costs and unsafe conditions of many units.  They are not interested in alleviating the horrendous conditions many people are forced to live in and would rather worry about the “rights” of unscrupulous landlords to charge whatever they want in the “free market” than the rights of those who are being exploited.

Affordable decent housing is becoming scarce for all except the wealthy.  The middle class, struggling to survive in the worst economic catastrophe of our lives, is facing foreclosure in record numbers and has been steadily seeing more of its income used for housing costs.  The working poor and poor have always had to struggle to pay rent and are often prey to unscrupulous landlords who should be in jail, not extorting money from people who have few or no options.

And the gentrification of neighborhoods over the past 20-30 years has crowded out long-time residents who cannot afford the new rents.

It’s time for Maryland to pass rent control and rent stabilization legislation.  Lawmakers and Maryland’s next governor owe it to all the citizens of this state.

When politicians and their parties take campaign cash from corporations, PACs and special interests they are stealing our government from us.  That money buys access and legislation.  You know it and I know it.  And they know it too.  This corrupt system continues because we tolerate it. We can live in a different state, one in which we all work together to solve our problems and meet our collective needs.  But whether that comes to pass is ultimately up to you.

It is past time for you the voters of Maryland to stop voting for the lesser of two evils and vote for what you really want.

It is past time for the voters the Democratic party takes for granted year after year after year to leave that party in the dust where it belongs.   That party lost its soul when it began taking campaign cash to compete with the Republicans.  For those of you still clinging to the Republican Party because you think it’s the party of “fiscal responsibility” – think again because those days are long gone.  George W. Bush and Robert Ehrlich were big spenders extraordinaire. Any party that screams about entitlements (you know, Medicare and Social Security that people over a certain age need to live) but hands out our tax dollars by the trillions to fund wars without end doesn’t have a leg to stand on.

Martin O’Malley and Robert Ehrlich ask for our votes and lie to us about Moving Maryland Forward and More Jobs, Less Taxes as if slogans will improve our lives and the lives of our children and take the place of real leaders of substance who know what it means to serve people and our communities.

The deregulation of our utilities was not a move forward, it was a colossal step backward.  Many states which were considering deregulation decided to keep their utilities regulated, protecting their ratepayers – which is exactly what government is supposed to do.  Why not Maryland?  Martin O’Malley promised to stop the rate hikes and he did no such thing. Why does Constellation Energy and its well-paid CEO, Mayo Shattuck ($20 million compensation package) continue to shaft BGE ratepayers with nary a peep from either O’Malley or Ehrlich?

And how exactly will Robert Ehrlich create jobs and cut taxes?  Whose taxes will he cut?  Why do I get the feeling it will be the taxes of the hyper-wealthy and corporations?  The propaganda that cutting taxes on corporations creates jobs is just that – propaganda that too many politicians are afraid to counter.  And Ehrlich’s statements about cutting education should alarm everyone who cares about our children and the future of public education:  if you’re cutting taxes, you’re cutting services.  Oops, I mean education.

Your vote is wasted only when you vote out of fear for someone you neither respect as a person nor believe in as a leader.  Voting is the one thing still left to us and it gives us more power than we realize.  If everyone votes for what they want, we will have the government, the communities and the lives we want.

It’s not that we need no government or less government, but that we need to make our government work for us as our country’s founders originally intended it to do.  And that takes your votes for the kind of leadership I offer you which owes everything to we the people and gives everything to our collective future, a future built on serving the common good and the least as well as all the rest of us together.  I ask for your vote on November 2.

My long-term goal and that of the Green Party is providing free public higher education.

Education funding is not negotiable.  I will not reduce the state’s spending commitment to public education, nor will I support continued furloughs.  Furloughs harm working men and women and cannot be sustained long-term.  It is wrong to use already over-burdened working families to balance our state’s budget.  I also oppose shifting teacher pensions to county governments that both Martin O’Malley and Robert Ehrlich know will be unable to pay them.  An internal audit, along with new sources of revenue and the creation of a state-owned bank as I have discussed at length in previous posts will ensure that education funding is not only permanently preserved but becomes, once again, a state funding priority.

Gov. O’Malley found $2.5 billion for that boondoggle they call the ICC, but not for high-speed inter-urban rail or comprehensive regional/intra-urban light rail.  The Purple and Red lines are a start, but Maryland is behind on planning and creating mass transit.

We must face up to the fact that our car and oil-based economy is not sustainable and sooner or later it will come to an end.  Maryland’s governor must lead now to make sure Maryland is ready.  We must create mass transit that works, is affordable to everyone and gets people where they need to go.  I know many of you say what I say all the time:  I’d ride a bike , but it’s not safe.  And you’re right, it’s not.  We must commit to creating bicycle-friendly roads which physically separate cars from bicycles.  And, we must tie our steady-state approach to development with the availability of existing mass transit and the placement of new forms of mass transit.

I will create a state-owned and run bank modeled on the one in North Dakota which is the only state untouched by the economic collapse, with record surpluses and continued job creation.  All state revenues are deposited to the bank.  In turn it plows those taxpayer dollars back into our communities in the form of low interest loans where small locally owned businesses, the backbone of Maryland’s economy, are strengthened and nurtured returning control of our communities back to those of us who live and work in them.

This bank, along with new sources of revenue gained by increasing taxes on the wealthy and corporations and closing tax loopholes and instituting a real progressive tax structure, will jump start Maryland’s move to a new green manufacturing sector.  Currently wind turbine, solar farm and other renewable energy components, as well as electric cars, are made in China and imported to this country. There is no reason, other than lack of political will and vision, for American workers to remain idle while new industries are waiting for them.

It will also help fund a new public works program to repair our disintegrating infrastructure.  Maryland has one of the most diversely skilled workforces and we must create a new manufacturing economy as well as a massive infrastructure repair program to put us back to work.

A state-owned bank will provide the means to bring large-scale wind and solar farms to Maryland so that the mass market that exists for renewables is finally merged with the existing technologies, putting Maryland on the path to energy independence which means no more Constellation Energy or Pepco calling the shots.

The problem isn’t that there are no jobs.  The problem is that our elected leaders will not foster the climate to create them by investing in these new economies because that would mean diverting money from corporations and industries too used to feeding at the public trough and too used to the influence their campaign money brings them.

Anyone holding or seeking elected office is being dishonest if they are not talking about new sources of revenue.   When we are cutting essential services, furloughing workers and talking about not meeting our pension obligations, we have cut to the bone.  What next?

Maryland’s next governor must:

conduct an independent forensic audit of all state agencies to uncover waste and target potential cost savings.  Recently Wisconsin, with an investment of $750,000 in such an audit, uncovered a $45 million fraud in just one agency.

close all corporate tax loopholes (which Senate Pres. Mike Miller opposes) so that the 64 of 132 of Maryland’s largest corporations which pay no income tax to our state will finally have to pay what they owe us

increase the marginal tax rate on the wealthiest

institute a progressive income tax system,

study the feasibility of a financial transactions tax (which will affect only speculative trading).

Don’t believe it when “they” say that taxing corporations is a job killer.  W e live in the era of the lowest level of corporate taxes as a percentage of total state income and not only have jobs not been created, they have been deliberately and methodically taken away from us and shipped overseas where wealthy CEOs can pay their new workers pennies a day instead of paying Maryland workers a living wage.

Yes, we have a large and unhealthy budget deficit and we need to fix it permanently, but it’s not that we have NO money, it’s how and where we’re spending it that is much of the problem.  Look no further than the $2.5 billion being spent on the ICC – rather than investing in a 21st century regional transportation system.  Now that’s a misguided waste of our money.

Voting for and electing new leaders like myself who serve the public interest – our interests – that is the only cure for this pervasive problem.