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Debbie Wasserman Just Got A VERY Progressive Primary Opponent For 2016
http://www.occupydemocrats.com/debbie-wasserman-just-got-a-very-progressive-primary-opponent-for-2016/Representative Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (D-FL), the controversial chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) has a progressive primary challenger in her bid for re-election in Florida’s 23rd Congressional district. Tim Canova, a little-known liberal economist and law professor, announced Thursday that he would challenge Wasserman-Schultz, who has aroused the ire of progressives for her perceived supplication to corporate interests, outdated policy beliefs, and mishandling of the primary election season.
Wasserman-Schultz has been criticized on a range of issues and liberal calls for her resignation were given renewed vigor this week after controversial comments in which she said that millennials were “complacent” on abortion rights. She has also taken fire for her numerous policy positions that are at odds with much of the progressive Democratic base, from support for the dysfunctional corporate handout known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the private prison industry to her neoliberal economic policies and support for continuing the failed and destructive war on drugs. And, from a purely pragmatic standpoint, Wasserman-Schultz has certainly failed as DNC chair, not only presiding over dramatic Democratic losses in the 2014 midterm elections but also running the party’s finances into the ground, to the point that the DNC is essentially bankrupt, owing $1.2 million more than it has in the bank.
Beyond her policy and managerial missteps, many have come to see Wasserman-Schultz as being in the pocket of corporate interests as well as the Clinton campaign, and she has been accused of using the DNC to rig the primary process in favor of Clinton at the behest of her establishment backers. Through both her own fundraising and that of her own PAC, Wasserman-Schultz has taken in tens of thousands from corporate interests, most notably the private prison industry, several corporate law firms, and the alcohol industry, which commentators have pointed out is hypocritical given her anachronistic opposition to marijuana legalisation.
Moreover, the chairwoman seems to be doing everything she can to hand-deliver the party’s nomination to Hillary Clinton. The DNC has scheduled a mere six primary debates (as opposed to twenty-six in 2008) and held most of them on the weekends when viewership is bound to be lower, in what many see as a blatant attempt to prevent rivals Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Martin O’Malley (D-MD) from getting their message across. The DNC has also been accused of packing the debate audiences with Clinton supporters and prematurely securing superdelegates for Clinton, while DNC offices have been shared with Clinton campaign offices and the former DNC finance chair was caught illegally raising money for the Clinton campaign.
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http://timcanova.com/about.htm
About Tim
Tim Canova has been challenging Wall Street banks and political corruption for most of his adult life.
As an activist, attorney, educator, and frequent commentator on the rigged economic and political systems that put Wall Street and multinational corporations first while leaving ordinary Americans behind, Tim is uniquely positioned to shake up Congress.
Born and raised on Long Island in Merrick, New York, Tim had strong family ties to South Florida before moving to the Sunshine State in the mid-1990s. He is from an immigrant half Italian Catholic, half Jewish family, which taught him the traditional values of honesty and hard work. Tim ran cross-country and track in high school and college, including on his high school varsity state championship cross-country team. As a teenager and young man, he worked in a wide variety of manual labor jobs, from delivering newspapers and cutting lawns to pumping gas, painting houses, loading trucks in a plastics factory, and picking avocados on a kibbutz in northern Israel.
Tim attended public schools K-12, completed his undergraduate studies in government and economics at Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania, earned a law degree, with honors, at the Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C., and was a Swedish Institute Visiting Scholar at the University of Stockholm.
As a legislative aide to the late U.S. Senator Paul Tsongas (Democrat, Massachusetts), Tim worked on a range of regulatory and human rights issues. While working on Capitol Hill, Tim began warning about the rise of Wall Street special interests and the assault on working families. In the early 1980s, he wrote critically about the deregulation of interest rates and lending standards and the rise of subprime and predatory lending. These practices would eventually have a devastating effect on the people of Florida when real estate markets crashed in 2008. To this day, Florida still has the highest rate of foreclosure in the country, with over 300,000 open foreclosure cases in state courts.
In the 1990s, while an associate attorney at a prominent law firm and then as a visiting professor at the University of Miami, Tim opposed efforts to weaken the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act firewalls that had separated commercial banking from the risky securities markets. He also cautioned about the rise of complex derivative financial instruments that were turning the United States into a “casino” economy. In the early 2000s, Tim warned about the growing bubble in housing prices and called for increased supervision of Wall Street banks and financial markets. He was one of the few law professors in the country who consistently opposed Alan Greenspan as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, including a 1996 op-ed in the New York Times opposing Greenspan’s reappointment.
Tim left Miami for a tenure-track teaching position at the University of New Mexico School of Law, where he was granted early tenure in 2003. While in Albuquerque, Tim spearheaded a successful grassroots lobbying campaign to abolish the state’s felony disenfranchisement law that had barred about 6 percent of the state’s voting age population from voting for life, often for non-violent drug offenses. He argued the hypocrisy of locking people up – disproportionately minority and poor, and depriving them of their voting rights -- for using the same recreational drugs that were used at some point by successive U.S. presidents and about half of all Americans. Ever since, he has opposed the misguided “war on drugs” and the privatization of prisons that has resulted in the perverse incentive of warehousing people for profit.
After New Mexico, Tim taught at Chapman University in Southern California, became an endowed professor in International Economic Law, and served as the academic associate dean, helping Chapman move up significantly in the national rankings. In his teaching and scholarly work, he emerged as a leading critic of the cozy relations between Washington and Wall Street that have corrupted our politics and distorted our economy. He opposed granting China permanent normal trade status and its entry into the World Trade Organization, was critical of the North American Free Trade Agreement and other corporate giveaways, and today is a fierce opponent of the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).
In 2011, Tim took part in the Occupy Wall Street movement, teaching a workshop on the Federal Reserve at the Occupy Los Angeles encampment. At that time, he was also selected by U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders to serve on an advisory committee on Federal Reserve reform along with such leading economists as James Galbraith, Robert Reich, Jeffrey Sachs, and Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz.
During his time in New Mexico and California, Tim returned often to South Florida to visit with his many relatives, old friends and colleagues. On South Beach, he became known as “The Hurdler” for hurdling every garbage can – 572 in all – on the 8 mile Raven Run, and earned Run of the Year award two years in a row. He also visited Israel many times during this period, returning to his former kibbutz as a volunteer time and again, and participating in workshops on citizenship, war, and counter-terrorism at Tel Aviv University.
Tim moved back to South Florida in 2012 for a teaching position at the Nova Southeastern University Shepard Broad College of Law where he is a professor of law and public finance. He lives in Hollywood, and in his spare time he enjoys cooking, movies, Pilates and yoga, as well as running and bicycling on the boardwalk.
Tim remains a leading critic of the Federal Reserve and Wall Street, opposes the corrupting influence of corporate money in politics, and is a strong advocate for programs to help students, working families, and lower- and middle-income folks. He will bring formidable energy, focus, experience, and integrity to Washington on your behalf, providing representation in the true sense of the word for the needs of the local constituents in South Florida’s 23rd Congressional District. Rather than doing the bidding of giant corporations like too many professional politicians these days, Tim asks you to join him to work for the interests of the actual, real people who reside here.
Bernie & Elizabeth 2016!!!
