COLUMBUS, Ohio – As Tea Party Nation enthusiasts continue their campaign to cast President Obama as an agent for Socialism and pillory him for his so-called socialist agenda they say must be checked, Ohio's only true Socialist Party candidate, running for U.S. Senator, slaps America's two major political parties for being useless at a time when the nation's economy is in free fall and the private sector sits on the sidelines.

Dan La Botz, Ohio Socialist Party candidate for the U.S. Senate to replace Ohio's two-term retiring senior senator George V. Voinovich, says Congress must act now to both extend unemployment benefits and create jobs for all.

Based in Cincinnati, La Botz, a teacher, labor organizer and now politician, says Republicans and Democrats have proven to be useless because, "They have no program to deal with the Twenty-First Century Depression and the unemployment crisis."

With millions of American workers out of work since 2007, and one million losing their unemployment benefits next month, La Botz, who will be on the General Election ballot in November despite garnering only 383 votes statewide in the Ohio primary held May 4th, argues "Congress is paralyzed and the two major parties are doing virtually nothing to create jobs."

Citing one unhealthy labor statistic after another, from jobs lost to the nation's and Ohio's high unemployment rate, to workers who will lose jobs in the future to workers whose livelihood and family futures will be further dashed if unemployment benefits are not extended, La Botz says the paltry jobs created so far in the Great Recession by private employers is not even a drop in the bucket.

Congress is in gridlock as usual, La Botz contends, pointing the finger of blame at Republicans, who he says are "principally responsible for blocking attempts to extend unemployment benefits."

Calling for tax cuts for small business as the principal strategy for creating jobs at this point in a Depression is pure nonsense to La Botz.

Swimming up stream against the tide that wants to reign in government spending, La Botz says it's times like these that call for the Federal government to put billions of dollars into a new, larger and more effective stimulus program, that he says will "create jobs for all at living wages."

Arguing the line espoused by other economists like Paul Krugman of the New York Times, La Botz says Obama’s original stimulus program was "far too small, far too little, and it didn’t last long enough." Moreover, he says, it was targeted too narrowly to infrastructure construction. Additionally, it was "meant to shore up an antiquated and obsolete economic system, not to create a new economic system with a permanent full-employment economy."

"We need a stimulus program that puts money not only into construction, but also into education, health care, mass transportation, green technologies," he said in a prepared article. "We need to create jobs not only for construction workers, but also for teachers, nurses, computer programmers, social workers, and millions of others. We need to do this and we need to do it now."

Speaking the kind of socialist rhetoric that feeds those fearful of and fighting against socialism as Americans know it, La Botz says, "We should demand that the government takeover idle plants and put them to work under the management of the employees who worked there and under a state and Federal plan developed to produce for a green economy."

Like a political minnow trying valiantly to scale the cascading waters of Niagara Falls to find his spawning ground, La Botz says the labor movement and organizations like the AFL-CIO dedicated to it, should no waste time on electing Democrats with the hope that the Democrats will create jobs, but should instead "build that movement, like the one that created unions and forced the Democrats to create jobs in the 1930s."

"We know from American history, if you do not build a movement with economic and political power, neither party will do anything for you," he says, adding, "We need to build the movement now.

Commenting on California's Proposition 14, which passed (53.7 percent to 46.3 percent) and effectively created an open primary system in which the two top candidates, even if they are of the same party, get to square off against each other in the fall, La Botz, who may be speaking what Ohio's other minority party candidates are thinking, says the measured passed "because of most voters' skepticism and even cynicism about party politics and even politics in general."

"We should work to make sure that no such proposition passes in any other state, cutting off the citizens' options and choices."

Of his 383 total votes, La Botz claimed his biggest numbers from Franklin County (180), Hamilton (46), and Cuyahoga (37). He received zero votes in 46 of Ohio's 88 counties.

Dan La Botz

California Propsition 14

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