AARP Statement on Presidential Debate

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President Obama, Governor Romney Call for Lowering Corporate Tax Rate to 25 Percent

“Tonight’s debate only underscored what we’ve known for weeks now -- the choice this November couldn’t be clearer, and the importance of this election cannot be overstated for the millions of Americans who want a secure climate future, a prosperous clean energy economy and clean air and water.”

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Interest Groups and Others Set the Stage for the First Presidential Debate

The Campaign to Fix the Debt

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October 1, 2012
Contact: Jon Romano


WASHINGTON D.C. - The Campaign to Fix the Debt will commit significant resources to urge discussion of America's out-of-control national debt at the Presidential debate on Wednesday at University of Denver (DU). The Campaign's presence in Denver is part of a recently announced $25 million national effort to encourage policymakers to pass meaningful debt legislation in the coming months.

Campaign spokespersons available for comment include:

- Maya MacGuineas, who leads the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget and the Campaign, is available from 1:30pm - 6pm on Tuesday, October 2nd for interviews with press to discuss the debate, the Campaign and her 12 Fiscal Rules for the 2012 Election.

- Campaign Co-Chairs Governor Ed Rendell and Senator Judd Gregg will also be available for select satellite interviews on Tuesday, October 2nd and Wednesday, October 3rd from Philadelphia, PA and St. Anselm College in Manchester, NH respectively.

Scheduled Campaign activities include:

On both Tuesday, October 2nd and Wednesday, October 3rd, Campaign staff will be on the DU campus passing out official Campaign t-shirts, sunglasses, cups, and informational postcards. The schedule of Campaign activities is as follows:

Tuesday, October 2nd

Campaign staff will speak with DU students and members of the DU community on-campus and speak to classes at George Washington High School in Denver. Staff will also meet with DU College Republicans and College Democrats on-campus in the morning and attend their evening debate at 6:30pm MDT on the DU campus.

Wednesday, October 3rd

The Campaign will participate in DebateFest from 12:00pm - 6:00pm MDT, the official DU on-campus celebration of the debate, and educate students, alumni, faculty, staff and the community. In partnership with The Can Kicks Back, the Campaign will debut the "Can Initiative," in which attendees will be encouraged to select one item that they do not want Congress to kick the can on to write on a tin can. Attendees will also be able to instantly sign the Campaign petition.

The Campaign will host the official Fix the Debt Debate Watch Party steps from the DU campus at the Tavern Wash Park (1066 South Gaylord Street) from 7pm - 9pm MDT. From here, the Campaign will live blog, tweet, and fact check the Debate. There will be an additional Campaign watch party in Washington, D.C. at Mackey's Public House (1823 L St NW) from 8:30pm - 11:00pm EST.

For those outside of the Denver area, learn here How to Host a Debate Watch Party and meet up with Campaign supporters in your own community. For real-time alerts on Campaign activities, text DEN to 877877.

The Campaign to Fix the Debt
The Campaign to Fix the Debt is a non-partisan movement to put America on a better fiscal and economic path. We come together from a variety of social, economic and political perspectives, around the common belief that America's growing federal debt threatens our future and that we must address it. The Campaign will mobilize key communities - including leaders from business, government, and policy - and people all across America who want to see elected officials step up to to solve our nation's fiscal challenges.

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Occupy the Debates
Contact:
Kevin Zeese              
Margaret Flowers      


Baltimore, MD - On October 3, 2012, the first presidential debate will be held in Denver, Colorado and a people's dialogue will be held at the same time to provide broader perspectives. The live-streamed event (details below) will provide an opportunity for the public to discuss how to solve the pressing challenges of the nation.

The presidential debate is being produced, as it has since the mid-1980’s, by the corporate and partisan Commission for Presidential Debates (CPD) and only the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates will be permitted to debate. George Farah, Executive Director of Open Debates, said, "The Commission on Presidential Debates undermines our democracy. Because of the Commission's subservience to the Republican and Democratic campaigns, the presidential debates are structured to accommodate the wishes of risk-averse candidates, not voters."

Occupy the Debates is concerned about the anti-democratic restrictive nature of the debates and about the lack of connection between what will be discussed in the debates and what the people actually care about. “Most people who watch the debates will believe that they are seeing two sides of a debate when in fact the corporate-party candidates mostly agree within a narrow spectrum on each issue. The views of other viable candidates and the concerns of the people will be excluded,” says Dr. Margaret Flowers, co-director of It’s Our Economy, who helped to organize Occupy the Debates.

To bring the people’s voices to the forefront, Occupy the Debates worked with Occupy Denver and other local advocacy groups to canvas the community and determine their top concerns. This past weekend, public events were held in Denver to bring people together to discuss these top issues, which were corporate influence over politics, education and student debt, the environment and climate change and health care.

“We found that the discussion in the community is very different from what is being said in the campaigns,”said Kevin Zeese, also co-director of It's Our Economy, "People at the Occupy the Debates events developed solutions to key problems facing the country.  It was evident to everyone in the room that none of these solutions will be discussed by either Obama or Romney.  The duopoly politicians are out of touch with the people."

On the night of the first debate, Occupy the Debates will bring together a diverse group of people who are in touch with what is happening in the communities and who have perspectives different from what will be said in the debate and among the commentators on corporate TV.

This alternative debate coverage program will be live-streamed on UStream and Global Revolution. It will begin at 8:30 pm eastern with pre-debate commentary and will be moderated by Lisa Simeone (bio below). During the debate, the panelists will comment on what is said and will respond to comments and questions from the audience through social media such as twitter and online chat. After the debate, the panelists will break down what was said and how that compares to the candidates’ records and will explore what was omitted.

Occupy the Debates is partnering with Its Our Economy and U Stream TV for this dialogue. U Stream TV has 57 million unique hits each month and 1.4 million twitter followers. The debate will appear on the U Stream channel: Economic Democracy Media, Its Our Economy.US.

Only two candidates are allowed to participate by the National Corporation on Presidential Debates (they call themselves a commission, but that is just to disguise the fact that they are a private corporation created by the Democrats and Republicans and funded by big business interests). Two other candidates, Jill Stein of the Green Party and Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party, are on enough ballots to receive 270 Electoral College votes, but the Debate Corporation has created barriers to their participation.

Where to watch: Economic Democracy Media, Its Our Economy.US, Occupy the Debates,October2011/Occupy Washington, DC and Its Our Economy.

Panel:

Jill P. Carter represents Maryland’s 41st legislative district of Baltimore City in the Maryland House of Delegates. She was elected to the Maryland legislature after defeating four incumbents in the Democratic primary that September. She is currently a member of the House Judiciary Committee and chair of the Estates and Trusts Subcommittee. She was the third African-American female attorney elected to the Maryland Legislature and has served from 2003 to the present. She has received the largest vote total of any member of the House of Delegates in the last two elections. Carter is the daughter of the late Walter P. Carter, who was a civil rights activist and leader in the desegregation movement in Maryland in the 1950s and 1960s. Carter received her B.A. in English from Loyola College in Maryland in 1988, and her J.D. from the University of Baltimore, School of Law in 1992. Prior to law school, Carter was a journalist for Afro American Newspapers. She served as the Executive Director of the Maryland Minority Business Association in 2002, chair of the Baltimore Branch NAACP Legal Redress Committee, and was listed in Maryland’s Top 100 Women in the Daily Record in 2006. In 2009, she was the honored as an “Exceptional Woman in Business and Government,” at the first annual “Pretty in Pinstripes” Women’s History Month celebration.

Marsha Coleman-Adebayo, Ph.D. is an EPA whistleblower who served as a Senior Policy Analyst in the Office of the Administrator at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Dr. Coleman-Adebayo won an historic lawsuit against the EPA in 2000 on the basis of race, sex, color discrimination, and a hostile work environment. She led a successful effort for passage of the Notification of Federal Employees Anti-discrimination and Retaliation Act [No FEAR] — the first civil rights law of this century. Thousands of federal workers and their families have directly benefited from this law which allows federal employees to raise red flags when they see misconduct. She is the founder of theNo FEAR Institute, devoted to educating the American public about federal sector discrimination and the implementation of the No FEAR Act. She also founded the No FEAR Coalition, a grouping of civil rights and whistle blower organizations that fight for increased legislative protections for federal employees. She is the author of No Fear: A Whistleblowers Triumph Over Corruption and Retaliation at the EPA published in 2012. She organized the Occupation of the EPA which protested corporate domination of environmental policies. She has held various academic positions as Adjunct Professor at the Georgetown University – School of Foreign Studies and Visiting Scholar in the Department of African-American Studies at George Mason University. Dr. Coleman-Adebayo received her BA degree from Barnard College/Columbia University and her doctorate degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Sergio Espana is from Baltimore, MD. He spent the first 15 years of his life in Los Angeles and Guatemala. He studied philosophy and sociology and was an active student organizer at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, where he graduated in 2008. He has been involved in the Student Farmworker Alliance since then, now serving on the steering committee. He is also a co-founder and serves on the board of the Civilian Soldier Alliance where he works alongside veterans and military family members nationwide. He worked with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Florida and United Workers in Maryland, both are nonunion worker’s organizations. He is a small business owner and writer for the Indypendent Reader. He currently works as the organizer for the Maryland Health Care is a Human Right campaign. The inspiration for his work came directly from the transformative organizing model he learned from organizations such as the CIW, Student Farmworker Alliance, and United Workers.

Glen Ford is executive editor of Black Agenda Report. He has had a long career as a radio host and commentator. In 1977, Ford co-launched, produced and hosted America’s Black Forum, the first nationally syndicated Black news interview program on commercial television. In 1987, Ford launched Rap It Up, the first nationally syndicated Hip Hop music show, broadcast on 65 radio stations. Ford co-founded the Black Agenda Report. Ford is also the author of The Big Lie: An Analysis of U.S. Media Coverage of the Grenada Invasion.

Margaret Flowers, MD, co-director of Its Our Economy and an organizer of Occupy Washington, DC/October2011. She is a Maryland pediatrician who graduated from the University of Maryland School of Medicine in 1990 and completion of pediatric residency at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Flowers worked first as a hospitalist and then in private practice. She left practice in 2007 to advocate full-time for a single payer health care system at both the state and national levels. Flowers served as Congressional Fellow for Physicians for a National Health Program during the 2009-2010 national health reform process. She organized briefings, lobby days and testified before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee in June, 2009 and before the National Commission for Fiscal Responsibility and Reform in June, 2010. She was co-founder of the Mobilization for Health Care Reform. She is currently a spokesperson for PNHP and is on the board of Healthcare-Now.

Lisa Simeone (moderator) is a freelance writer and radio host. She hosts World of Opera and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Series, and is an editor and contributing writer for Style Magazine. Simeone hosted the public radio documentary series Soundprint until she was fired from the show in 2011 because of her involvement inOccupy Washington, DC/October2011. Also because of her political activism, NPR stopped distributing World of Opera. WDAV in North Carolina, which produces the show, immediately began distributing the program itself. Simeone has hosted All Things Considered, Performance Today, Weekend Edition Sunday, and The Metropolitan Opera, and has written for City Paper, Urbanite, and the Baltimore Sun. She also writes for and edits the civil liberties watchdog site TSA News.

Kevin Zeese is co-director of Its Our Economy and an organizer of Occupy Washington, DC/October2011. He is an attorney who has been a political activist since graduating from George Washington Law School in 1980. He works on peace, economic justice, criminal law reform and reviving American democracy. He advocates for democratizing the economy as co-director of It’s Our Economy and works to oppose to war and shrink the military budget through Come Home America. Zeese serves on the steering committees of the Bradley Manning Support Network which advocates for alleged whistle-blower, Bradley Manning. Zeese served as press secretary and spokesperson in the 2004 Nader for president campaign. He ran for the U.S. Senate in 2006 and was the only person ever nominated by the Green Party, Libertarian Party and Populist Party. His recent election integrity work has included challenging the activities of the national Chamber of Commerce through StopTheChamber.org, as well as the activities of Karl Rove’s Americans Crossroads as part of AmericanCrossroadsWatch.org and seeking to overturn the Citizen’s United decision, including filing complaints against Justice Clarence Thomas, as part of ProtectOurElections.org. Zeese has also led the effort to prosecute Rupert Murdoch of NewsCorp for hacking into private phones and bribing officials. Zeese serves as president of Common Sense for Drug Policy. He is a co-founder of Voters for Peace, Prosperity Agenda, True Vote and the Drug Policy Foundation, now known asDrug Policy Alliance

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Alliance for Justice
Richard Wexler

WASHINGTON, D.C., October 2, 2012: As the United States Supreme Court begins its new term, and with the first presidential candidates’ debate scheduled for tomorrow night, the Alliance for Justice is urging the moderators of the debates to press the candidates for answers about the kinds of people they would nominate to the Court.

“Under Chief Justice John Roberts, the percentage of cases in which decisions are reached by a vote of 5 to 4 is the highest in history,” AFJ President Nan Aron wrote in the letter, sent to moderators Jim Lehrer, Martha Raddatz, Candy Crowley and Bob Schieffer on Oct. 1.  “So even if he fills only one vacancy, the next president may change the direction of the court, and America, for generations.

“Of course candidates have stock answers for any question about the Supreme Court,” Aron wrote.  “We hope you will press them to go beyond the usual boilerplate.”

 The letter, available online here, coincides with the formal release of AFJ’s new documentary, Unequal Justice: The Relentless Rise of the 1% Court.

“The term underway now may well see the culmination of a 40-year campaign on behalf of big business to put its interests ahead of those of labor and consumers,” Aron said in a statement.  “Over several terms the court majority has put the thumb of big business on the scales of justice, repeatedly voting to roll back protections for workers and consumers.  Over and over, these were 5 to 4 votes.

“With polling showing the public increasingly fearful that corporations are receiving favorable treatment, the Court risks drifting further from the American mainstream and jeopardizing the legitimacy of its decisions,” Aron said. 

In a series of other cases, discussed in this publication from the Alliance for Justice Action Campaign, prohibitions against discrimination and protections for consumers were among the rights upheld by votes of only 5 to 4. 

• By only one vote, the Supreme Court ruled that police cannot interrogate a 13-year-old boy and obtain a “confession” without telling him his rights or notifying his guardian.
• By only one vote, the Supreme Court said states can sue the Environmental Protection Administration to get EPA to regulate greenhouse gasses.
• By only one vote, the Supreme Court said a state supreme court judge should have recused himself from a case involving a man who donated $3 million to the judge’s election campaign.

“The stakes are likely to get even higher very soon,” Aron said.  “In the term now underway, the Supreme Court is likely to hear a challenge to the heart of one of America’s most important civil rights laws, the Voting Rights Act.

“And the current majority appears to have an even bigger target in its sights. As the decision of Chief Justice Roberts in the Affordable Care Act case makes clear, the majority wants to revise radically how the Court interprets the Constitution’s commerce clause, the clause that has formed the legal foundation for much of the infrastructure of progressive reform from the New Deal to the Great Society.” 

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Alliance for Justice is a national association of over 100 organizations, representing a broad array of groups committed to progressive values and the creation of an equitable, just, and free society. AFJ works to ensure that the federal judiciary advances core constitutional values, preserves human rights and unfettered access to the courts, and adheres to the even-handed administration of justice for all Americans. It is the leading expert on the legal framework for nonprofit advocacy efforts, providing definitive information, resources, and technical assistance that encourages organizations and their funding partners to fully exercise their right to be active participants in the democratic process. AFJ is based in Washington, D.C.

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Americans for Limited Government
For Immediate Release                                                    Contact: Richard Manning (press); Rebekah Rast (TV & radio)
Oct. 3, 2012                                                                                                                                 
 
 
Oct. 3, 2012, Fairfax, VA- A new truth detecting technology will be employed by Americans for Limited Government while watching the debate between Republican nominee Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama.
 
Voice analysis measures the voice patterns of individuals and determines whether the speaker is telling the truth or not.  It also measures the level of stress the person is under, as well as their level of concentration.
 
Bill Wilson, president of Americans for Limited Government called the use of the technology "a break-through for the American people.  For the first time, within a few hours of a political debate, the American people will know if the candidates are telling the truth, and better be able to judge what promises are real, and which ones are nothing more than political pandering."
 
The company behind the verbal truth teller is Voice Analysis Technology, and they have been hired in many high profile criminal cases including the search for the killer of Natalie Holloway, the teenager who was killed while on a student trip in Aruba.  Recently, the company showed that one of former Republican presidential contender Herman Cain's primary accusers was not being truthful when making her charges.
 
The U.S. Department of Defense, Bureau of Prisons, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and more than sixty other law enforcement agencies across the U.S. all have contracted with Voice Analysis Technology to help them successfully interrogate suspects.
 
Unlike a traditional polygraph which requires a suspect's cooperation, and places numerous probes on the person's body, voice analysis literally takes the words right out of a person's mouth and based upon variations in speech patterns determines if statements being made are true or not with a high degree of accuracy.  With words like inaccurate, person uncertain, false statement, highly stressed and truth, the user's computer screen literally explodes with data related to the veracity of the subject's assertions.
 
"The near real time analysis that Americans for Limited Government will be able to provide the public on the veracity of the statements made in the debate is a game changer in how people relate to politicians.  The operating assumption by the general public is that if a politician's mouth is moving, he or she must be lying, by putting Obama and Romney to the test, we will find out if this is true," Bill Wilson concluded.
 
It is anticipated that an analysis of the debate will be released within three hours of its completion, providing the overnight shifts in news rooms across the country plenty to write about.
 
View online at: http://getliberty.org/americans-for-limited-government-puts-tonights-debate-on-a-lie-detector/
 
Interview Availability: Please contact Rebekah Rast at (703) 383-0880 or at rrast@getliberty.org to arrange an interview with ALG President Bill Wilson.
 

 
Americans for Limited Government is a non-partisan, nationwide network committed to advancing free market reforms, private property rights and core American liberties. For more information on ALG please call us at 703-383-0880 or visit our website at www.GetLiberty.org.

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October 4, 2012

Oct. 4, 2012, Fairfax, VA—Americans for Limited Government released the following statement regarding the lie detector voice analysis tests of the presidential debate:

“The lie detector voice analysis tests of the presidential debate were found to be inconclusive by Voice Analysis Technology. The technology can detect a deception if the person knows they are deceiving, but if they believe what they are saying is true, even if it is not, it is not picked up. We are engaging in further review of these reports.”

Interview Availability: Please contact Rebekah Rast at (703) 383-0880 or at rrast@getliberty.org to arrange an interview with ALG Communications Director Rick Manning.