Perkins to seek reelection to county commission

Two Republicans, Trudy Wade and Justin Conrad, have indicated plans to run for the new NC Senate District 27 seat. Meanwhile, some speculation has abounded about whether a Democrat will take a crack at the district, although it leans Republican.

Pricey Harrison, who has been "double-bunked" with fellow Democratic NC House member Maggie Jeffus in the same House District, said she has no plans to run for the new Senate seat. Likewise with Kirk Perkins, a Democrat on the Guilford County Commission, whose district has become somewhat less politically friendly following the imposition of a redistricting plan by the Republican-controlled General Assembly.

Perkins says he plans to seek reelection to the District 4 seat for Guilford County Commission.

Meanwhile, the announcement by US Rep. Brad Miller that he will not seek reelection is headline news this morning.

Stark contrasts in US House District 13 race: Brad Miller vs. Bill Randall

Brad Miller (left) and Bill Randall at the Greensboro Historical Museum.

Democratic incumbent Brad Miller and Republican challenger Bill Randall played rough at a candidate forum hosted by Guilford County Unity Effort tonight at the Greensboro Historical Museum. Supporters clapped often during their respective candidates’ remarks, while responding to the opposition with derisive laughter.

Bipartisan cooperation vs. partisan warfare

Bill Randall: “I am really miffed in trying to grasp how I should answer the question. I can say fundamentally and theoretically I can imagine there are things that we should be able to agree upon: things like protecting our borders, things like a balanced budget. But because we cannot come to agreement on those, does that mean that one side or both sides are wrong? I believe that you need to look at fundamentally the fact that today, in 2010, we have a division amongst the parties because primarily we have a philosophical difference on the direction that the nation needs to go. If you have a party that wants to take this country towards socialism and getting away from our individual responsibility, from responsible, limited government, I am not going to be part and parcel to going along to get along…. We have a country that’s on its way to financial ruin, and we need to stand tough on those things that actually cause this country to be great and that will prevent us from being great if we relinquish that responsibility.”

Brad Miller: “I think Mr. Randall just provided us with an excellent example of the kind of belligerent, scorched-earth partisan politics that undermines our political system and even, I think, threatens our democracy. The example he gave of immigration – there is no better example of how our system is broken than our inability to deal with the immigration issue. There is an obvious compromise the American people would favor and support and we can’t get there because politicians would rather have an issue than a solution.”

On healthcare reform

Miller: “Something has to give with healthcare. We are paying twice as much as the rest of the world is paying. We are paying 17 or 18 percent of our economy, our GDP. Countries like ours are paying about half that. And Americans don’t live as long and aren’t as healthy. We need to know what it means to have insurance. It needs to cover for existing conditions – something Mr. Randall has opposed. It needs to be something you can rely upon, and you know what’s covered and what’s not, and you don’t find out what kind of insurance you’ve got only when you get sick or you get hurt. And then you find out, even if you have insurance that you’re in bankruptcy. We have standards – because it didn’t cover what you needed because there’re caps for kinds of treatment or there is a copayment that you couldn’t begin to afford, and on and on. It needs to be predictable and reliable. You need to know what you’re getting. I support standard benefits. Like car insurance in North Carolina, every policy’s exactly the same. If we had every policy exactly the same in health insurance, it would make a world of difference. And we’re moving towards that standard benefits package.”

Randall: “The healthcare bill is absolutely not acceptable to the American people because it delivered things that we didn’t expect and we didn’t ask for. There’re things hidden in that bill that actually would make you shudder – things such as having a 1099 form required to do a transaction of $600 or more. What does that have to do with healthcare? What do student loans have to do with healthcare? Why do we have to insert that in a bill – over 2,000 pages – to get that through? Why did you tell the American people that you could keep your insurance when you know that that is not the case because your objective is going towards the single-payer. Why were we told by the Congressional Budget Office that the cost would go down, and then afterwards we find out that the costs are actually going to go up? Congressman Miller cited the Congressional Budget Office as an authoritative source; it’s true but they can only do things with the numbers that they get. And Congress fed them bogus numbers for the sake of getting that bill through. I’m for reform. I’m for getting rid of the things that are not acceptable in the bill. You can do tort reform. As a matter of fact, the overwhelming majority of these things center around costs. But much of what we have for costs are due to he fact that the federal government has its fingers and they’re manipulating things and telling you what you must have.”

On Social Security

Miller: “Social Security has got to be a rock-solid guarantee. Problems in Social Security are greatly overstated by people who were never for Social Security in the first place. We might have a problem in 30 or 40 years paying full benefits with a cost-of-living adjustment. All the estimates that we have for benefits between now and then, the worst thing that could happen under the Social Security law now is that we can’t pay full benefits with the income coming in from FICA taxes now we could ratchet back what we could pay. And the worst it would ever get to would be 80 percent. Now I don’t think we should reach that point; we’ve got 30 or 40 years to deal with the problem. If we had a more equitable distribution of wages, as we had in the past, more wages would go into the FICA system. Because all the growth in the economy has been going to people at the top – income above that cap on how much income is subject to FICA tax. It’s really recent that we have the problem that we have because the estimates, the assumptions back in the mid-’80s when Alan Greenspan headed the commission to make the changes that we have in effect now is that we would keep roughly the same distribution of income. If we addressed the inequality of income we’d probably fix the Social Security system. Having done this, I would prefer that we find other taxes for higher-income Americans to make the FICA tax more equitable than we have now so that people who really need to rely on Social Security to stay out of poverty will know it’s always going to be there for them.”

Randall: “That is absolutely amazing, Congressman. Absolutely amazing. I hope everyone was attentive on what he said. We have a Social Security system, and the shortfall we’re going to take from other things outside of the normal process to supplement. Why is that? The Social Security system – the trust fund – has been robbed by Congress. We have a system that is insolvent and cannot be sustained. What does the congressman recommend? He recommends that we take the money from rich people who don’t need it, and augment something that was robbed by Congress. You know, in my Bible, it says, ‘Thou shalt not steal,’ and you shalt not covet. No matter who’s hand it comes from, if you’re taking from someone that it’s not yours, it is stealing. And I’m saying the Social Security system needs to be revamped. The seniors that are already on Social Security, we need to continue to maintain that promise we made to them. We should not betray that trust and confidence, so we’re not touching that, nor those who are about to enter eligibility. But those that are younger, let’s look at some options at taking the Social Security tax, the FICA, and putting that into privatized accounts. There are many ways we could look at how you would do it, how much of it would go to privatized accounts, how much of it would still go to augment or supplement the current system. And then those that are younger – let’s say younger than 40 years old – to have them pay into privatized accounts. The stock market does have fluctuations; in the long term, it does show the upward trend and you will be able to have a system that’s solvent in the out years.”

Miller: “The Congressional Budget Office and the trustees of the Social Security system, the two credible [entities] on the Social Security system, disagree with Mr. Randall’s assessment. I imagine Mr. Randall means it, he’s sincere when he says that he’s committed to paying benefits to people who are over 65 now or whatever the age is, 67, who now qualify for Social Security, but he appears to not understand how the system works. If we allow everyone under the age of 50 or require everyone under the age of 50 to divert their FICA taxes away from the Social Security system, there would be no way to pay their benefits. And Mr. Randall said there were fluctuations in the stock market; it always comes back up. It dropped 40 percent in an 18-month period. Now, if you’re 70 years old and you’ve seen your stock portfolio you rely upon drop 40 percent in a two-year period, there’s probably not a lot of comfort to you that it’s going to come back eventually.”

On job creation

Miller: “I think we need to bring back manufacturing. We cannot survive as a service economy: We can’t just give each other golf lessons or haircuts. We’ve got to make something. I am for closing the tax breaks that companies get for sending jobs overseas. We’ve got to make business loans available to small businesses who’ve not been able to get ’em for the last couple years on ordinary terms. I’ve led the effort to make small business lending available and also with respect to the construction industry, which is a huge employer that we’ve got to bring back. We also need to get a hold of housing. Our economy as a whole is not going to be healthy when that big a part of our economy is as sick as it is. We’ve got to get control of the foreclosure crisis, so that foreclosures don’t continue to bring down home values, so that people are seeing their life savings, which is the equity they have in their homes, continue to decline. They aren’t going to make a consumer purchase – and consumer spending is two-thirds of our economy – if their life savings has disappeared in the collapse in the value of their home.”

Randall: “Think of yourself as a business owner. And I agree that we should do all we can to preserve jobs here in America, and particularly in North Carolina. Make yourself a business owner right now. And your federal government passes regulations that make it to where you actually cannot turn a profit in the United States because of things that they impose on your business. So I guess the answer that the congressman would have is that that factory should stay open for the sake of keeping people on the payroll instead of meeting the bottom line with a profit. Well, the reality is businesses do not open to give you or me or anyone else a job. Businesses open in the private sector with the objective of delivering a good and service… and to turn a profit. We need to examine what the federal government is doing to see, before we demonize companies that leave.”

On the Afghanistan war

Randall: “The way that we are going about it in the public arena, particularly in politics, to declare openly that we’re going to set a timetable for getting out does not send a clear signal to those that we are supporting. We also, as our government, interfered in the elections to try and influence and try and prevent the current president from getting elected. That sends a signal that is negative and wrong. So when you have the United States declaring that we’re going to possibly withdraw all our troops next year, it creates uncertainty. It is something that makes the Afghanistan government very, very wary of that because they know that if we depart they know they’re going to have to deal with the factions of the Taliban and the like. And if you put yourself in their position, when they’re behind the scenes threatening to behead you and other things when the United States leaves, that is going to cause you to broker deals with them that you would have ordinarily not done if you knew the United States was going to stand with you. Also our rules of engagement: Not letting our soldiers have munitions loaded and ready to fire, what kind of insanity is that when you don’t have a loaded weapon in a field of combat?”

Miller: “Our leadership, General Petraeus and former General McCrystal are two of the leading experts in counterinsurgency. So I think they know what needs to be done. They’re realistic. The problem is that we are now caught in the crossfire of someone else’s civil war. And the government for whom we are fighting does not have the support of the Afghan people, and it appears to a very large extent does not deserve the support of the Afghan people. The election was won widely regarded as of very questionable legitimacy, very questionable fairness, and the Karzai government is shot through with corruption. If it does not involve President Karzai himself, he tolerates it in the top officials of his own government, including his own brother. That government does not have the support of the Afghan people, and there is only so much we can do to win a war on behalf of a government that does not have the support of its own people.”

Closing statements

Miller: “I am committed to putting government on the side of people who are trying to work, to make an honest living, to support themselves, to support their families, to try to own a home, to put their kids through college, save for retirement, and not the people who have been looting the country for the last decade. And I really support policies to help ordinary families, which is where I think most people are. If you listen to everybody – you don’t just listen to the same people again and again – you understand that repealing the minimum wage, as Mr. Randall has proposed, does not help working families. Privatizing Social Security and Medicare, that doesn’t help working families. Ending Pell grants and student loans – I depended on student loans for my educations, and many middle-class families do. And my mother was a school teacher, so I know what middle class is. If we do that kids are not going to be able to afford college. I think making insurance cover preexisting conditions, which Mr. Randall opposes. I think extending unemployment benefits for the people who lost their jobs in this very tough economy so they can get by until things get better and they can find another job. And they are looking. They do not want to be on unemployment benefits; they want a job. And I want to help them pay their bills, pay their rent, pay their mortgage, buy groceries for their family until they can get a job. That is something that I support; Mr. Randall opposes.”

Randall: “We’re confronted with a decision. You’ve heard Congressman Miller open and talk about the values that he espouses and how he was raised. I’m just wondering, if those who raised him, if what he said is true, according to those values, what would they think if an organization that was founded for the express purpose of getting rid of undesirable races and calling black people ‘human weeds,’ what would those individuals think if such an organization that still exists today gave Congressman Miller its highest mark in Congress? As a matter of fact, we only have two congressman in the state of North Carolina that have received this organization’s highest rating. Bill Randall would score zero with this organization because of his principles. Congressman Miller scored 100 percent. What do you think about a congressman who’s values can get the highest marks of an organization that feels that there are races that are undesirable and should be eliminated and have not repudiated that stand to this day? We need to look at the real record. Attacks on my record, you can look at my website and view unedited footage in contrast to the commercials that you have. You think business as usual is the way to go, you may want to consider with your congressman. But if you believe in limited government, if you believe in responsible legislation, if you believe in a congressman that is going to stand for your positions and not waffle in the face of making a hard decision, if you want a representative form of government, I would ask you to consider me as your next congressman.”

As the candidates left the stage someone in the audience challenged Randall to name the organization he had linked to Miller.

“Planned Parenthood,” he answered.

Members of the audience cried out, expressing a range of reactions.

“Yay for Planned Parenthood,” one man said.

“How ’bout the children?” an elderly woman asked.

Federal funds for sustainable development flow into Triad

Two streams of federal funding affecting the Piedmont Triad region were announced last week. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, awarded $3.2 million to two regional agencies in North Carolina, including $1.6 million to the Piedmont Authority for Regional Transportation, or PART. According to a recent HUD press release, the Piedmont Triad plan “puts the focus on deteriorating neighborhoods and abandoned manufacturing areas to foster new development patterns along the region’s transportation corridors and near existing downtowns and employment centers.”

The Winston-Salem City Council has committed to acquiring Davis Garage to construct a multimodal transportation center. PART is developing long-range plans for an East-West Corridor that would link Hanes Mall in Winston-Salem to NC A&T University in Greensboro, including a possible commuter rail line.

The grants are part of the Obama administration’s Partnership for Sustainable Communities, which brings together HUD, the Environmental Protection Agency, the US Department of Agriculture and the US Department of Transportation “to ensure that the agencies’ policies, programs and funding consider affordable housing, transportation and environmental protection together” to get better results for communities and ensure that taxpayer money is used more efficiently, the press release states.

Meanwhile, Democratic Rep. Brad Miller announced that $8 million in federal recovery funds is estimated to create 710 jobs and generate $16.1 million in investment. About $2.3 million has been allocated to projects in the 13th Congressional District, represented by Miller, that stretches from Raleigh up along the Virginia state line and then dips into Alamance and Guilford counties. The projects fall under three categories: alternative fuels and technology, energy-efficient buildings and energy-efficient transportation. They range from a $125,000 grant to the city of Raleigh to install electric vehicle charging stations to a $150,000 grant to Box Board Products in Guilford County to replace the light bulbs in its facility with fluorescent bulbs and upgrade inefficient furnaces.

Candidate profile: Brad Miller

Liberal Democrat Brad Miller, who is running for his fifth term as representative of North Carolina’s 13th Congressional District in Congress against tea party Republican Bill Randall, doesn’t make a distinction between his party base and the swing voters among his electorate, who live in Greensboro and Raleigh, along with several rural counties in between.

“I think what people are worried about is making the economy work,” Miller said in an interview today, “to have it work for people who are trying to make an honest living, not a tiny sliver of people who are trying to make a killing. Most people want to see manufacturing jobs come back.”

In the face of anxiety about the federal government’s ballooning deficit, Miller argues that job creation — which the Democratic Congress has tried to push through stimulus spending — is essential to bending the curve.

“I don’t accept that now is the new normal,” he said. “We’ve got to create jobs in our economy. We’ve got to have an adequate place in our economy for people who want to work. The most immediate thing to do is get small business lending available. Small business in every recession is where new jobs come from. I’ve worked for legislation to get small business lending available.”

With Republicans energized and many independents uneasy about the nation’s current path, the other challenge of Democratic candidates such as Miller is to rally their base and persuade them that this election matters.

“I think what’s frustrating is the economy is not working,” Miller conceded. “The people who are suffering the most are the most innocent in causing the financial crisis, and the people who are most culpable seem to have skated. It frustrates me, too.”

Miller said notwithstanding disappointment among some Democratic voters, the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress have tackled substantial problems and achieved many of their goals.

“I think by any reasonable measure, there have been more initiatives, more significant initiatives in this administration than any time since the Great Society,” he said. “The financial reform that I played a role in is the most important financial reform initiative since the Great Depression. Healthcare reform is the most important healthcare initiative since Medicaid and Medicare were created in the Great Society.”

Miller added that the most significant effects of healthcare reform haven’t yet been felt by most consumers and citizens.

“People on Medicare will see the donut hole close,” he said. “They should know that Medicare will be solvent for several more years. Parents are going to be able to keep adult children on their coverage until age 26. Small employers will get help to keep their employees covered. If you get a scary diagnosis from your doctor, you’re not going to have to fight with an insurance company to ensure that you get the care that you need. It will reassure people that they have what they think they have. You won’t have middle-class families going into bankruptcy when someone gets sick.”

As a member of the House Financial Services Committee, Miller would like to see financial reform go further.

“I introduced a bill in the House to reduce the largest banks to no more than 3 percent of GPD,” he said. “The six biggest banks make up 62 percent of the GPD now. I think banks need to be smaller and less complicated. Whatever inefficiencies there may be from banks doing several things are more than made up for by the conflicts of interest that they have in. The same banks that made the loans have created pools of loans and sold the toxic assets. They’ve made a mess of things, and they’ve acted to protect themselves and not homeowners or their shareholders.”

Miller said the conservative critique positing that the crisis was abetted by Democratic politicians aligned with the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s agenda of encouraging low-income people to buy homes they could not afford is misplaced.

“I’ve been pushing for a long time as a protection to consumers that no lender make a loan that the borrower could not pay back; that’s to protect consumers and stabilize the market,” he said. “Fannie and Freddie did wrong, but the wrongs they did were the same as the private banks. They were too eager to make money and too short sighted in how they went about it. The loans that really touched this off were not the loans to buy houses; they were mortgages that people already had, but they needed money and the only asset they had was their home. They had a personal bankruptcy or a healthcare crisis or a divorce and they refinanced their house to get some extra cash. More than 70 percent of subprime mortgages were to refinance houses.”

Foreign policy is less a focus of national attention currently considering difficult economic conditions at home, but is part of Miller’s purview as a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Miller visited Afghanistan in May and said he was encouraged by reports of economic progress and stability. His confidence was shaken subsequently when he learned that the provincial governor he had met with had been assassinated in a car bomb. He added that he is disheartened by the track record of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, explaining that, “at the very least, he has family members that are enthusiastic participants in the corruption that appears to be rampant, and the Karzai government appears to have backdoor negotiations going on with the Taliban.”

“I’ve wanted to support President Obama and allow him a chance to deal with Afghanistan after seven years of the Bush administration,” Miller said, “but I’m certainly not willing to leave American forces in harm’s way.”

Democrats train to get out the vote

The NC Democratic Party announces a "blue crew" training tomorrow morning at the Presbyterian Church of the Covenant Fellowship Hall led by Jeff Mallare, regional director of the state party and formerly a staffer on the Obama campaign. The focus of the training is described as "grassroots organiz[ing] and effective tips on real, meaningful impact in your communities."

Conservative activist Joe Guarino has expressed objections [1, 2] about the church providing space for the party for past events.

Guarino's criticisms don't seem to have gotten much traction. On another level, Democrats across the state appear to understand that they have an uphill battle to turn out their base to counteract the conservative backlash at the polls against President Obama.

Meanwhile, Democratic incumbent Brad Miller's quest for reelection in North Carolina's 13th Congressional District is sure to be aided by the fact that he's been chosen as Greensboro College's commencement speaker on May 9, five days after the primary.

A press release from the college, whose spokesman is Presbyterian Lex Alexander, reports that Miller's speech will be entitled "Making a killing, or making a living."

Web-only scuttlebutt

Retired US marshal runs for sheriff
Democrat Harlon Costner, a retired US marshal, has announced he will challenge incumbent Republican BJ Barnes for the position of Guilford County sheriff. “I think it’s time to get some new leadership,” Costner said Monday. “I have some ideas about how the office should be run to save on the budget, and implement a training program for crisis intervention.” Costner indicated his approach to immigration enforcement will not markedly differ from that pursued by Barnes. “Once an inmate has been arrested and incarcerated, 287(g) would be a tool to identify whether that inmate is or is not an illegal alien,” he said. “I will not be assigning deputies to go out in the field and look for illegal aliens.” On his website, Costner says he will put more emphasis on inter-agency cooperation and community policing. The candidate appeared at a campaign event for Greensboro mayoral candidate Yvonne Johnson in September and said he will actively campaign between now and the primary next spring.

Triad representatives vote along party lines on healthcare legislation
Votes among the Triad delegation for the healthcare reform bill that passed the US House of Representatives, 220-215, on Nov. 7 broke down along party lines, with Democratic Reps. Brad Miller and Mel Watt voting for the legislation and Republican Reps. Howard Coble and Virginia Foxx casting votes against it. Watt said in a press release that final passage of the legislation would benefit 129,000 uninsured individuals in his district, which stretches from Greensboro to Charlotte. Speaking against the bill on the House floor, Coble said, “The majority of my constituents believe the United States has the best delivery of healthcare services. I concur. These same constituents are not averse to reform, but they fear the Pelosi healthcare plan will leave the gate wide open for introduction for overwhelming government involvement. I believe that fear is well founded.”

NC delegation weighs in on AIG bonuses

We're action packed this week, so some material prepared for print is getting bounced on to the blog. Posting for Keith T. Barber here....

In response to reports that employees of American International Group will be receiving $165 million in performance bonuses, members of North Carolina’s congressional delegation offered harsh criticism of the company’s actions. Democratic Sen. Kay Hagan issued a statement March 17 touching on the American public’s response to the failing financial services company using the $170 billion in government bailout money it received to reward its employees. “I share the public’s outrage at their taxpayer dollars being used in this manner. At a time when working families are struggling to make ends meet, this is atrocious use of our money,” Hagan said. A number of senators, including Hagan, demanded AIG give the money back. Rep. Brad Miller, the Democrat who represents North Carolina’s 13th Congressional District, joined Hagan’s call to hold AIG executives accountable. “It should be a condition of any future contract with taxpayer money to deny these kinds of bonuses,” Miller said. Rep. Howard Coble, the Republican who represents the 6th Congressional District, said the reason he opposed the second $350 billion payout from the Troubled Assets Relief Program was that it provided no guarantees that taxpayer money wouldn’t end up in schemes such as the bonus payouts issued by AIG.