Wingnut Opposition
prizewinner and The New York Times op-ed columnist Paul
Krugman too, now that he’s “come around” on trade.
Obama’s current advisers? “They’re dealing with the
fi nancial crisis, not the structural economic crisis,” he says.
In a recent letter to supporters, DeFazio wrote that there
are 150,000 bridges across the nation in need of repair or
replacement, and the Willamette River’s fl ood control
system is at 85 percent of capacity because the Army Corps
needs $100 million for repairs.
“The vision from the other side is sort of nihilism,”
DeFazio says. They “want a government we can drown in
the bathtub.” He points out that if there is a rain-on-snow
event and the dams fail, “How much is the damage going
to be? More than a $100 million. How stupid is this non-
philosophy of theirs?”
House Republicans are making a mistake, he says, in
cutting infrastructure funding. “Tax cuts,” he says, “don’t
create jobs.”
What’s DeFazio’s solution? “A quarter of the defi cit is
due to people not working,” he says, “Give me a hundred
billion dollars; let me spend it on infrastructure. For that
amount of money, I can put several million to work building
stuff that will last for generations.” Money borrowed now
could be used to fi x infrastructure and bridges and create
transit systems with long-term benefi ts, DeFazio says.
County Money
While the politicos in Washington, D.C., debate
how to solve the nationwide economic crisis, DeFazio’s
constituents back home in Oregon want to know where the
man is on the logging and timber payment issues that affect
Oregonians.
Back in the 1990s, as the logging wars peaked, counties
in Oregon, Washington and California started to get federal
payments to make up the massive cutbacks on logging on
federal lands that came into place as people began to realize
the ecological effects of logging on endangered species like
northern spotted owl and salmon. These payments made up
for the loss of timber receipts in counties like Lane, where
instead of tax revenue-generating private land, large areas
are made up of federal land.
In 2000 the Secure Rural Schools and Community
Self-Determination Act was introduced to ensure counties
would get their needed funding. It was reauthorized in 2008
and expired in September of this year. Now Lane County
and other counties like it face a massive budget shortfall.
DeFazio has come up with a trust plan that he hopes
would go a long way to solving some of the county funding
issues, while at the same time preserving old-growth
forests. DeFazio says the plan would be to split the BLM’s
O&C lands between conservation and logging, with each
of the two sections managed by a board of trustees, creating
a conservation trust and a timber trust.
So far this plan has not been written up into legislation,
DeFazio says, and exactly what percentage of land would
go into each trust has not been decided as he is awaiting a
detailed inventory of the land in question.
A bill was recently introduced in the Senate to renew
the county payments and hopefully, DeFazio says, give
counties time to work out a more permanent solution, such
as his trust plan.
DeFazio must have thought he’d fallen down the
rabbit hole last year when his fi rst serious opposition for
the 4th District congressional seat that he has held for a
23-year stretch arose in the guise of radiation-embracing
Tea Party favorite Art Robinson. This opposition got even
weirder when it was revealed that this Mad Hatter of a
candidate (who did not respond to a request for comment)
got $750,000 from a New York hedge fund manager for his
campaign. That same hedge fund manager, Robert Mercer
of Renaissance Technologies, has began to contribute to
Robinson again, possibly in opposition to DeFazio’s call to
reinstate a tax on Wall Street speculators.
“He’s capable of raising much more money than a
normal nutcase,” DeFazio says.
In addition to advocating for small doses of radiation as
a health measure and publishing articles in his newsletter
Access to Energy on the benefi ts of dumping nuclear waste
in the oceans, Robinson has claimed that human-caused
global warming doesn’t exist, that the pesticide DDT
should never have been banned and that public schools
should be abolished, calling them “nationalized child-
abuse.” (See EW 8/12/2010)
Robinson raised more than $1 million for his last bid
against DeFazio and has already begun fundraising for
the 2012 race. But some of Robinson’s Federal Elections
Commission fi lings look a little odd. According to his
FEC fi lings, Robinson reported receiving aggregate
contributions over the maximum of $4,800 from 19
different donors. And 12 contributors made aggregate
contributions exceeding $2,400 after the date of the May
18 Republican primary, but do not appear to have made
any indication that Robinson was raising this to retire his
primary election debt.
Robinson has indicated his belief that he was entitled
to raise funds under a separate $2,400 limit for both the
Independent and Constitution Party because he was a
candidate for those parties, as well as the Republican Party.
The FEC has indicated in the past that this is not the case.
Of the 50 or so donors to his 2012 effort listed so far on
the FEC fi lings website, only seven are from Oregon.
Since the 2010 election, Robinson has retained the
media limelight with attacks on Oregon State University.
He accused the school of retaliating against his children
because of his 2010 campaign against DeFazio. Robinson’s
accusations appeared to have been based on DeFazio’s
support for Oregon’s public universities and community
colleges. Robinson called OSU a liberal socialist institution
and labeled a professor in the nuclear engineering
department a “militant feminist.”
As he approaches an election year where President
Obama remains unpopular, Republicans control the House
and his opponent could be able to raise millions against
him, is DeFazio worried?
“I think I can be outspent 2-1 and still win,” he says. ew
To see DeFazio’s take on Occupy Wall Street, go to his YouTube page at http://
wkly.ws/14i
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Sanitation and pasteurization will be discussed.
EUGENE WEEKLY OCTOBER 13, 2011
13