Tim Canova: A Progressive Alternative to the Debbie Wasserman Shultz "Machine" Candidate

Furthermore, though a loyal Democrat to the wishes of her party's head, President Obama, in supporting the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, in practice this effectively means she is siding with the Republican side of the aisle, not the Democratic side, and certainly not with progressives or even many Tea Party types who are tired of seeing so-called Free Trade agreements that really mean more corporate power, fewer worker rights and protections for the environment, and fewer main street American jobs.

Into this bleak political picture comes a progressive breath of fresh air. From Canova's new website's About Me page:

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.

Canova has a long history of progressive activism backed with solid academic scholarship.

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.

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With respect to Florida's horrendous land boom and bust cycle, I wrote Canova (full disclosure: we are both part of the invitation-only Global Monetary Forum and have shared articles etc. there, and the "tip" about his candidacy came to me from another member of the GMF, Public Banking Institute Founder, Ellen Brown). I asked him about whether he would support a Georgist Land Value Tax as a way to curb the land boom-bust cycle and also to provide more middle class housing where needed. His response:

It's been years since I read Progress and Poverty and studied George's single tax proposal. I would really need to study back up on the issue, but I hope you know well enough to understand that I am open to all kinds of progressive reforms.

At least Canova has read of one of the leading theorist's major reform (Progress and Poverty was written in 1879). It may be up to Georgist activists, however, to help provide him with the more recent facts and successes of Land Value Taxation, however. I did provide him with a link to the Center for the Study of Economics, which specializes in practical implementation of Land Value Taxation.

Indeed, Canova is open to outside-the-box thinking that is both sound and progressive. In a long article in Dissent Magazine published last summer, in which he properly dissected and skewered Federal Reserve policy and the corrupt banking and financial system of which it is a central part, he concluded in part:

It would also be worthwhile to break the monopoly of central banks in the issuance of currency by funding some government operations with money created and issued by treasuries and finance ministries--money that would not add a penny to public debt. This is what President Abraham Lincoln did by issuing more than $400 million in U.S. notes, the so-called Greenback, to pay the huge costs of the American Civil War and national economic development programs. A century earlier, colonial Pennsylvania enjoyed fifty-two years of non-inflationary growth by issuing and lending its own currency into circulation, thereby financing major development of infrastructure without incurring debt or high tax burdens. Adam Smith, in his classic work Wealth of Nations (1776), praised Pennsylvania's success with government-issued money. Such proposals have been introduced in Congress over the years, but Wall Street lobbying has prevented such legislation from passing.

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I asked him in my response to this whether he would introduce legislation to support "Greenbacking" aka debt-free money. He responded:

I would reintroduce the 1999 LaHood bill, H.R. 1452, the State and Local Government Empowerment Act, which I believe would have had the Treasury make $360 billion (over 5 years) in interest free loans to state and local governments for capital investments. These funds would have been credits in United States Notes. Beyond that, I would be open to studying the Kucinich bill (it's been a long time since I read up on it).

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