John Corzine for Governor of New Jersey.

I am going to vote for John Corzine for governor of NJ on Tuesday November 3 for many reasons, but the most important is that he is not a Republican, and that a vote for him is the only vote that will prevent the election of the Republican candidate.

There was a time when I might have voted for a Republican. There was a time when there were some decent Republicans around, like Senator Case of New Jersey, or Senator Javits of New York, or Senator Morse of Oregon. But the big tent Republican Party is no more. They have systematically purged all who do not fit the ideological bent of the party.

To be sure the Republican Party had its genesis in the election of Lincoln and the abolition of slavery, but by 1877 less than a dozen years after the martyrdom of Lincoln, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes sold out the newly freed slaves in order to gain the Presidency. The website Travel and History put it this way: “To the four million former slaves in the South, the Compromise of 1877 was the ‘Great Betrayal.’ Republican efforts to assure civil rights for the blacks were totally abandoned. The white population of the country was anxious to get on with making money. No serious move to restore the rights of black citizens would surface again until the 1950s.”

 Thereafter, Republicans and their big business allies dominated the political landscape with such “luminaries” as Chester A. Arthur, Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley, William Howard Taft, Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover representing a dominant Republican Party. Lincoln must have been revolving in his grave. This sorry lot were were interrupted only by the ascendancy of Teddy Roosevelt, who became the only distinguished Republican during this whole era leading up to the Great Depression, and he was never the choice of the Republican establishment. After being elected governor of New York, he was kicked up to the Vice-Presidency to get him out of the way, and much to the dismay of the Republican establishment became President upon the death of McKinley. The Great Depression was not the sole fault of Herbert Hoover. It became inevitable through the policies of three Republican Presidents from 1921 to 1929, eight years, which in many ways resembled the eight years of the Bush Administration. Fortunately for the US and indeed the world, Bush who was only the head of the monster, realized in the last year of his Administration that we were facing a potential repeat of 1929 and took drastic steps to avert disaster, which true to form were opposed by the majority of his party. Also happily, while it took four years between the onset of the Depression in 1929 and the inaugural of FDR, it took only one year between the beginning of the recession of 2008 and the inauguration of Barack Obama in 2009.

To be sure the Democratic Party for most of the years after the Civil War was identified as the party of racism and the Republican party continued to bask in the image of Lincoln, but this was the result of the Democratic Party being a House divided against itself, with the part from the old South hanging on to the vestiges of slavery, and the Northern part becoming increasingly the party of emancipation and Civil Rights. Such Democratic Senators as Bilbo and Eastland of Mississippi, and Richard Russell of Georgia along with Strom Thurmond of South Carolina were determined to hold onto the quasi slavery that continued in the Unreconstructed South while northern Democrats like Lehman of New York and Humphrey of Minnesota worked for reform. Thurmond even ran for President in 1948 on the Dixiecrat Party. But the Nixon Administration’s Southern strategy changed that and invited such segregationists into the Republican fold. Thurmond became a Republican in 1964, and as late as 2002 the Republican about to become majority leader of the Senate, Trent Lott, hailed Thurmond with these remarks, “I want to say this about my state. When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years either." See The Nation for more background on Lott.

The Republican Party gave us McCarthyism in the 1950’s and torture in this century and even the relatively benign Eisenhower ordered the CIA to overthrow the democratically elected President of Iran, Mohammed Mosedegh, and installed the hated Shah, which was directly responsible for the ascendancy of the present theocracy in that poor country.

   But what of New Jersey? The Star Ledger endorsed the 3rd party candidate, Chris Daggett, but the latest poll shows Daggatt garnering 9% of the vote, so a vote for Daggett is a wasted vote. The Republican candidate, Chris Christie, stands for all the Bromides of the National Republican party. He would be a disaster for the state and his election would be interpreted as a repudiation of Obama. His main attack on Corzine is that NJ has the highest property taxes in the nation, but he forgets to tell us that neither the governor nor the State legislature has any control over property taxes, which are levied by the many towns and villages that dot New Jersey, and that New Jersey had the highest property taxes long before Corzine became governor. He tells us about the high unemployment rate of New Jersey, but he forgets to tell us that it is no higher than the National average and is the product of the Republican induced recession. He also forgets to tell us that New Jersey has the 2nd highest personal income per capita in the nation. As for the income tax, which is under State jurisdiction, New Jersey is 23rd in tax revenue as a % of personal income.

There are only two ways to reduce property taxes. One, with which I fully agree, was suggested by the NJ Chamber of Commerce in a Letter to the Editor in August of 2006. They wrote, “Property tax reform will only happen when there is consolidation of some of the more than 1,000 layers of government that currently have taxing authority” but only Governor Corzine of the three candidates has made any proposal that would further this objective. He has suggested that money should be put into a fund to incentivize municipal and school consolidations. This is the only sound idea on the table.

The other is to raise the income tax and finance our schools with those taxes. Since the main purpose for local property taxes is to fund local schools, changing the funding formula so that schools are funded by state taxes would lower property taxes and remove a major inequity in school funding.

But the biggest problem that New Jersey faces is its huge deficit, which is the direct result of the popular but shortsighted Republican penchant for tax cuts. When Republican Christie Whitman became governor in 1994, she cut the income tax by 1/3 but never found the savings that would offset this loss of revenue. The result, NJ is saddled with huge debt, the interest that goes with it, and no end in sight. Christie promises more of the same, but like all Republicans will not say what programs he will cut, or how he will finance the debt. If Christie is elected NJ will not long continue to be second in per capita income.