Mark Dunau, the Green Party of New York's 2000 nominee for U.S. Senate, will campaign for Congress in 2002 in the 24th Congressional District. He will be facing Republican incumbent, Sherwood Boehlert, Conservative candidate, David Walrath, and Right to Life candidate, Kathleen Peters. There is no Democratic candidate.
Dunau is an organic farmer from Delaware County. He is running for Congress in a District he does not live in. This is Constitutional, and Dunau believes it is one of the few ways to democratically address the outrages of the gerrymandering process that has corrupted New York politics.
Dunau is running on a platform that includes 18 Acts he promises to sponsor if elected to Congress. These Acts can be reviewed in their entirety at Dunau's web site, www.ruralparty.com. In particular, Dunau emphasizes protecting the self-employed. Dunau describes the self-employed as the highest taxed, most regulatory burdened, least protected Americans. They make up the backbone of rural economies like the 24th Congressional District, yet neither Republicans nor Democrats address their needs or their issues. Dunau believes that the survival of the self-employed is the key to prosperous rural economies, and that many ecological issues can only be solved by protecting the self-employed. For instance, over 90% of farmers are self-employed.
Dunau believes that the right to be one's own boss is as fundamental to democracy as freedom of speech and the right to privacy. If elected to Congress, he has promised to sponsor the Self-Employed Survival Act. This Act would reduce the Self-Employment Tax to 7.65%, prevent anti-trust law from being applied to the self-employed, and require the federal government to study the effect of mandated regulations on self-employed producers before such regulations become law.
Dunau has also proposed Acts that would prohibit the import of food grown with Chemicals banned in the USA, would withdraw the United State from the NAFTA and GATT trade agreements, would protect collective bargaining rights, would limit credit card interest rates to a maximum of 11%, would fortify the United States' nuclear power plants against terrorist attack, would create a voluntary national cancer registry to correlate incidences of cancer with environmental causes, would capitalize renewable energy development, and would protect the nation's food supply by prominently labeling and safety testing genetically engineered food.
Dunau points out that Sherwood Boehlert voted to increase the Self-Employment Tax rate by 50%, voted for NAFTA and GATT, voted with the credit card companies to make bankruptcy harder, voted for the scientifically criticized missile defense shield, and voted for the 1996 Telecommunications Act that is responsible for the elimination of much local radio and television ownership. Dunau also points out that the economy of the Southern Tier and Central New York is worse off now than when Boehlert took office 20 years ago.
