Candidate Kiana Sears Brings a Consumer-Focused Approach to the Arizona Corporation Commission

Kiana Sears has eight years' experience as a consultant and analyst for the Corporation Commission.
Kiana Sears has eight years’ experience as a consultant and analyst for the Corporation Commission.

The Arizona Corporation Commission is the government entity that sets the rates and regulates the electric, gas, water, and energy industries. As a Democratic candidate for the Commission Kiana Sears states, “Without the element the Corporation Commission controls, one will not have a sustainable life.” Sears is running for the Corporation Commission because she “cares about the present and future of Arizona.

Running on the motto, “To whom much is given, much is required,” Sears, an experienced consultant at the Corporation Commission, is conducting a campaign based on honesty, integrity, and transparency that will put the welfare of people and small businesses first. If elected, her goals as a commissioner are as follows:

  • “Restore integrity so that the public understands what the Commission’s mission is, which is to serve the people and not corporations, monopolies, or special interests in a “clean” political fashion. In doing this, confidence and trust in the commission would be restored.
  • Serve the public by providing clean and safe water, modernizing our water and energy supply infrastructure, supplying abundant energy (with a strategic direction towards renewables like solar and wind), and lowering rates to benefit the people.

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The Religious Right’s ‘blitz’ on American democracy

Last week Ireland, long a Roman Catholic country, held a vote to repeal a constitutional provision criminalizing abortion.  Ex-pat Irish citizens from around the world flew home to cast their votes. It wasn’t even close. Ireland votes overwhelmingly to overturn abortion ban:

The Irish have swept aside one of the most restrictive abortion bans in the developed world in a landslide vote that reflects Ireland’s emergence as a socially liberal country no longer obedient to Catholic dictates.

With all ballots counted and turnout at a near-historic high, election officials reported Saturday that 66.4 percent voted to overturn Ireland’s abortion prohibition and 33.6 percent opposed the measure.

The outcome of the referendum Friday was a decisive win for the campaign to repeal the Eighth Amendment to the Irish Constitution. The 1983 amendment enshrined an “equal right to life” for mothers and “the unborn” and outlawed almost all abortions — even in cases of rape, incest, fatal fetal abnormality or non-life-threatening risk to maternal health.

“What we have seen today is a culmination of a quiet revolution that has been taking place in Ireland for the past 10 or 20 years,” Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said.

The United States, however, is now moving in the exact opposite direction. Religious Right extremists have taken Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale not as a dystopian vision of a totalitarian Christian theonomy that has overthrown the United States government, but as a handbook on how to actually make it a reality.

In March, GOP-run Mississippi enacted the strictest abortion law in the nation, for the intended purpose of a legal challenge that may get in front of the U.S. Supreme Court to directly challenge Roe v. Wade (which permits abortions in the first 24 weeks). Mississippi gov signs nation’s toughest abortion restrictions:

Mississippi’s governor signed a law Monday banning most abortions after 15 weeks’ gestation, the tightest restrictions in the nation.

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The bill was drafted with the assistance of conservative groups including the Mississippi Center for Public Policy and the Alliance Defending Freedom [based in Scottsdale, Arizona].

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The Democratic Dilemma

The Facebook fights are raging these days.

Democratic loyalists fall into two strategy camps: progressive and old school. The progressive camp believes in the power of unabashedly progressive candidates, fueled largely by small-dollar donations and shoe leather, to inspire thousands of new voters from the ranks of those demographics whose participation rates have lagged those of older white Americans. The old school camp, fueled largely by major donors and establishment political operations, believes in the Bill Clinton recipe of winning the votes of supposedly centrist white voters, including suburban pro-choice women and the “socially liberal but fiscally conservative” crowd.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with either strategy. Each has its own logic. Each has had its victories.

The dilemma is that the two strategies are nearly always competitive and almost never synergistic. Hillary Clinton whiffed badly with millennials, for example. But how would Bernie Sanders have done with the country club crowd?

Is it possible for the two strategies to work together?

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Democrats to run against the GOP’s culture of corruption

The first planks of the Democratic Party’s “A Better Deal” platform, released last year, focused on the party’s economic agenda.

Now with daily revelations about scandals of pay-to-play politics swirling around President Trump and his current and former aides, Democrats introduced new anti-corruption proposals last week billed as “A Better Deal for Our Democracy.” Democrats’ newest midterm pitch: A crackdown on corruption:

“Instead of delivering on his promise to drain the swamp, President Trump has become the swamp,” said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) during a rollout event on the Capitol steps.

While the new agenda was only sketched out in broad terms [last week], it includes proposals that would eliminate loopholes that allow lobbyists and lawmakers to buy and sell influence without the public’s knowledge, allow big donors to influence the political process through unreported donations and to improve elections by eliminating partisan gerrymandering and implementing automatic voter registration.

The message, the Democrats said: Elect us in November to “clean up the chaos and corruption in Washington.”

Democrats are going to need to hire the dwarf from O Brother Where Art Thou? who depicted the “little man,” with a “broom of reform” with which Homer Stokes promised to “sweep this state clean.” A broom is the perfect symbolism for the man who keeps crying “witch hunt!”

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Economic disruption and a federal ‘jobs guarantee’

Axios.com regularly publishes reports on how artificial intelligence, robotics, automation and computerization in the information age is eliminating jobs in the way that the industrial age caused economic disruption of the world’s economic order from its agrarian past.

Steve LeVine recently reported this fascinating piece, The coming jobs apocalypse:

Congress and the Trump administration have yet to create a coherent policy response to a widely forecast social and economic tsunami resulting from automation, including the potential for decades of flat wages and joblessness. But cities and regions are starting to act on their own.

What’s happening: In Indianapolis, about 338,000 people are at high risk of automation taking their jobs, according to a new report. In Phoenix, the number is 650,000. In both cases, that’s 35% of the workforce. In northeastern Ohio, about 40,000 workers are at high risk.

In all three places, local officials are attempting to take charge by identifying jobs most at risk, skills most likely to be in great future demand, and how to organize education and industry around a new economy.

  • Their gingerly first steps are a snapshot of how economies throughout the advanced countries will have to respond to an already-underway economic disruption that will be of unknown duration and magnitude.
  • “This is a national trend that is going to play out locally. This is something the country and really the world is facing right now,” said Rachel Korberg of the Rockefeller Foundation, which funded the reports covering Phoenix and Indianapolis.

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