If a former community organizer can become president of the United States, why can't a community organizer become a U.S. senator?
Longtime Anaheim activist Duane Roberts announced that he will file papers with the Orange County Registrar of Voters today to put his name on the June primary ballot as the Green Party candidate for the Senate seat held by Democrat Barbara Boxer.
“I intend to mount an aggressive statewide campaign,” Roberts says in a statement he released today. “Boxer's support of the so-called 'health care reform' bill, which in reality, is yet another taxpayer bailout of Wall Street billionaires, is one of the key factors motivating me to enter this race.”
Roberts had announced his intention to challenge Boxer earlier this year in Irvine, and he recently finished collecting more than enough signatures required to qualify for the nomination and avoid paying a $3,480 filing fee.
He accuses Democrats of eschewing sick people and peddling health care reform “snake oil” for private health insurance companies, “whose profits will be subsidized by a half-trillion dollars in taxpayer funds over the next decade.”
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If elected, Roberts vows to “drive Aetna Inc., Cigna Corp., Humana
Inc., UnitedHealth Group, and Wellpoint out of business. Health care is
a fundamental human right deserving of all people and not a commodity
to be sold at a profit to the highest bidder.”
Getting rid of private health insurance companies and enacting a
single-payer, “Medicare-for-all” type system “will save $400 billion a
year in costs and guarantee everyone has access to the high quality
health care they need,” according to Roberts.
He also supports the legalization of marijuana; tuition-free public
university education; withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq and
Afghanistan; same-sex marriage; immigrant rights; and solar power.
Roberts opposes the privatization of Social Security.
Learn more at www.voteforduane.org.
For those thinking, “Wow, this guy thinks just like I do. He'll never win,” consider this: many scoffed at the idea of a community organizer-turned-senator becoming president of the U.S. Stranger things have happened. Go, DR!
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.