Joel Tyner – Democratic candidate for Congress

ON HOUSING The New Bottom Line coalition’s recommendations are spot-on re: housing: “The top six Wall Street banks should start investing back in the 99% by writing down principal on underwater mortgages, making fair and sustainable loan modifications to prevent foreclosures. The nation’s top six banks – Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs — paid out $144 billion in bonuses and compensation last year, making 2011’s payday the second highest on record for these six firms. Just half of the banks’ bonus and compensation pools would be enough to write down the principal on all underwater mortgages in the country. Just 72% of the $144 billion in bonuses and compensation at the top six banks would have been enough money to plug the $102.9 billion in budget holes for all 50 states for the current fiscal year.”

ON HEALTHCARE It’s still time to expand Medicare to cover all Americans (as Rep. Maurice Hinchey has long called for) to save $400 billion a year for businesses and individuals. (See “Single-Payer: Good for Business” by Morton Mintz, TheNation.com/article/single-payer-good-business) A CBS/NYTimes poll found Americans support this by a 2-to-1 margin.

ON AGRICULTURE I also agree with my friends Bill McKibben and Frances Moore Lappé — and Michael Pollan, Wendell Berry, Eric Schlosser, Mario Batali, Environmental Working Group, and Bread for the World, and over 60 other notables who sent a letter to Congress earlier this month urging reinvestment of federal farm and crop insurance subsidy dollars into programs that feed the hungry, protect the environment and promote the consumption of local, organic and healthy food.

Fact: While the number of giant farms (with more than $1 million in gross farm earnings) grew by 93 percent between 2002 and 2007, we lost 27,000 midsized independent family farms. According to the USDA’s most recent Census of Agriculture, less than half of all farms in the United States break even; the rest rely on off-farm income to cover their expenses. Food and Water Watch is right– we need a competition title in the 2012 Farm Bill that “places a moratorium on mergers of large food and agricultural companies and reviews prior mergers for antitrust issues and investigates and enforces antitrust laws across the food system.”

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