By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Joe DeMare, Green Party candidate for U.S. Senate, was a happy guy when he arrived for his interview with the BG Independent News.
The results from the presidential election were in, and the Green Party candidate had won. That would be the Austrian presidential election, and the winning candidate was Alexander Van der Bellen.
“It’s a good day to be a Green,” DeMare said. “Our first head of state.”
The Bowling Green resident has set his sights on being the first Green in the U.S. Senate.
In part his campaign was spurred by the requirements of the political system. In order to maintain its place on the Ohio ballot, the party must secure votes in a statewide primary race. DeMare’s candidacy was intended to achieve that.
He noted that about half the registered Green voters who cast ballots in the March primary defected to the Democrats, most likely to vote for Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. But, he said, for every Green who voted Democratic, two unaffiliated voters cast Green ballots. So the Greens came out stronger.
DeMare expects that many of those Sanders-leaning Greens will return to the fold in November if Hillary Clinton wins the nomination. Jill Stein will be the party’s presidential candidate.
DeMare, though, is running for more than strategic reasons. The incumbent, Republican Senator Rob Portman, “desperately needs to be replaced, and I intend to replace him.”
The Republican Party doesn’t know enough about science to be entrusted with the environment, he said. He cited a recent rider on the defense appropriations bill that would weaken legislation on ocean-going vessels dumping their ballast into the Great Lakes.
For him, the Democrats are little better. “I feel the Democrats have been given many opportunities to protect our country and our ecology. And sometimes they’ve come through. But more and more, especially over the past 10 years, they’ve failed again and again,” he said. “If I thought the Democrats could do it, I’d be a Democrat.”
In fact, in 2008 he worked to get Barack Obama elected, starting with the primaries. DeMare poured time and money into Obama’s campaign. Then in his first State of the Union address, Obama touted nuclear energy as a solution to the nation’s energy needs.
Also, DeMare said, the Greens oppose Obamacare, favoring instead universal single-payer system.
Obamacare, he said, “takes the worst of both systems.” It has government mandates, but puts the onus on individuals forcing them to get coverage through private companies.
As to his Democratic rival Ted Strickland, “he did not treat unions well when he was governor.” He’s confident there are Democrats who share his reservations about the former governor. “Strickland will not do.”
DeMare’s campaign rests on several core principles: ecological restoration, peace and social justice.
It is not enough, DeMare said, to stop the damage being done to the environment. “We need to go all the way back to restoring the environment.”
“The most urgent thing we need to do is fight climate change,” he said. “One of the ways to do that is to simply eliminate subsidies to fossil fuel industries.”
He said those amount to about $35 billion. “I want to take those subsidies and give them to wind and solar energy industries. If we do that, we can make a transition to a fossil-free economy very, very quickly.”
With plans for universal health care, eliminating student loan debt and other plans, money will need to be found.
DeMare is blunt: “I would install a progressive tax system that will literally tax multi-billionaires out of existence.”
The Greens would impose a 95-percent top tax rate. While some may see this as radical, DeMare said, that it is actually not far from 90-percent top rate in place during the Eisenhower years.
Rather than hurting the economy, he said, that rate would encourage the wealthy “to put money back into the community and put people to work because if they sat on it, they would lose it.
“That would mean more economic activity and help people employed,” DeMare said. “And with that money the government could provide more services that would also stimulate the economy.”
One budget line DeMare believes should be cut is military spending. “We are a military-addicted society. We have to become addicted to peace.”
That stance, he said, “includes cutting the military budget and looking at conflicts and seeing how we can resolve them peacefully instead of sending in drones and killing people.”
DeMare said he is devoted to non-violence. “I’m firmly convinced there’s a non-violent solution to every conflict. We’re not always wise enough to see it. Sometimes in the urgency of the moment, we react to being attacked.
“If we develop a commitment to peace, instead a commitment to military strength, and make that primary way of acting in the world, I think that will strengthen the United States not weaken it.”
But DeMare understands as a Green in the Senate he will be marginalized. He doesn’t expect much in the way of committee appointments. Still he believes he can work as a brake on certain policies.
He said Sanders, in his years in the Senate and before that the U.S. House, has shown that an independent can influence policy. And, he said, like the late Petra Kelly who served in the German Parliament, he will remain an activist even as he serves as senator.
Some of his legislative goals would be stopping the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact, though because the administration has been given fast track authority that will be difficult. “I will do my best to prevent that from going into law.”
Also, he’d like to change the bankruptcy laws back to the point where a person’s primary home and one car are protected in any settlement. That was changed, he noted, when Obama and Clinton were in the Senate and played a role in the mortgage meltdown of 2008.
He will bring the concerns of an average worker, not a multimillionaire like Portman and most of his senate colleagues, to the U.S. Senate. They don’t know what it’s like to have to choose between paying a doctor’s bill and or buy groceries, he said.
The U.S. Senate, he said, “is no longer a body that represents the American people.” Instead it protects the interests of “big business.”
DeMare works as a machinist at Ashur Inc., an industrial ceramics firm that produces parts for the glass industry.
When not on the job, he’s actively campaigning. The Greens are organized throughout the state. He plans to attend as many events as possible, including the Old West End Festival in Toledo, where the Greens will have a float.
He said it will take a lot of old-fashioned, face-to-face campaigning statewide to win.
The media doesn’t help. For them the Greens are a non-entity. DeMare said he listened to the coverage of the Austrian election on National Public Radio, and the 10-minute story was devoted to fears about the right-wing candidate, only in the final few seconds was Van der Bellen’s connection to the Green Party mentioned.
So as he campaigns he encounters people who ask: “Why haven’t I heard of you before?”
But he persists. When this reporter asks what he will do if he’s elected to the senate, he offers a correction: “When I’m elected to the Senate.”
