People, Businesses in Carroll, Jo Daviess, Ogle, Stephenson and Winnebago Eligible to Apply for Low-Interest Loans

SPRINGFIELD - August 29, 2011. Governor Pat Quinn today announced that the state's request for a U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) disaster declaration has been approved for several counties in Northwest Illinois that were hit by severe storms and flash flooding July 27-28. The declaration makes low-interest loans available to homeowners, renters and businesses in the primary counties of Jo Daviess and Stephenson, as well as the contiguous counties of Carroll, Ogle and Winnebago.

"This SBA declaration will support many people and businesses in these five counties who are recovering from devastating losses from the severe storms and flooding," Governor Quinn said. "The low-interest, long-term loans available through SBA will provide a much-needed helping hand as they repair and rebuild their homes and businesses."

Governor Quinn submitted the request for an SBA disaster declaration on Friday. In that request, Governor Quinn noted that Jo Daviess and Stephenson counties each had at least 25 homes or businesses that sustained uninsured losses of 40 percent or more.

"This SBA disaster declaration will help many people and businesses with their recovery efforts," said Jonathon Monken, director of the Illinois Emergency Management Agency (IEMA). "We appreciate the SBA's quick action on Governor Quinn's request."

Also on Friday, Governor Quinn requested federal assistance to help local governments in Carroll, Jo Daviess and Stephenson counties recoup 75 percent of their disaster-related expenses. That request is still pending with the federal government.

On August 10, Governor Quinn declared the three counties state disaster areas and pledged the state's commitment to helping the area recover from the severe storms and flooding.

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State Fair Presence Connects With Many Inside the Statehouse

DES MOINES, IOWA | Friday morning,  August 26th, Jonathan R. Narcisse will be meeting at the state house with Representative Ralph Watts and House Republican staff.  Earlier this week, the recent gubernatorial candidate and leader of the Iowa Party was asked to meet and discuss with staff more details concerning existing governance solutions.

Narcisse, an independent publisher and former Des Moines school board member, distributed thousands of copies of the Iowa Party's proposed governance solutions at their 2011 Iowa State Fair booth, located in the Varied Industries Building. "People who come to the fair are looking for something new and exciting. The Iowa Party is not a tough sell. And, when you have the chance to white board some facts and figures with your neighbor, the bells start going off."

The Iowa Party's state fair booth inside the Varied Industry building provided Narcisse the opportunity to meet and speak with tens of thousands of Iowans, including many state legislators and statehouse staffers. "It's apparent that the legislature didn't review annual reports for departments and divisions appropriated hundreds of millions of tax dollars. That borders on misfeaceance, malfeasance and dereliction of duty by legislators who are voting billions of dollars in annual spending," stated Narcisse.  

A state representative's assistant who visited the fair shared that, "It gets worse. We vote on bills and appropriations and the next day party leadership sends us memos on what we voted for, especially towards session's end."

"When Ralph Watts invited us to meet with him and House staff this Friday, we were pleased," said Narcisse. "Most Iowans may not know him but he's a well placed and influential legislator." ??In addition to serving on the Appropriations, Labor, Commerce and Transportation Committees, Watts chairs the powerful Administration and Regulations Appropriations subcommittee with oversight of key departments such as Commerce, Administrative Services, Revenue and Inspections and Appeals. Watts also serves on the joint House and Senate State Government Efficiency Review Commission.

"How do you tell a cop, a nurse, a teacher working the graveyard shift at a convenience store to make ends meet they have to pay taxes on overtime while statehouse leaders can't even bother to find out if a staffer at the Alcohol Bureau is giving out massive no bid contracts to his wife's best friend's husband?" stated Narcisse.

"It is clear our message of honest, efficient and accountable government is resonating. We have common sense solutions rooted in Iowa values and over the coming months and the next legislative session we are going to aggressively advocate for those solutions."

The Iowa Party Strategy
by Jonathan Narcisse

The Iowa Party has three main goals:
•    Improving how government operates,
•    Improving the structure of government, and
•    Following the money.

In order to achieve our mission we focus on boards and commissions, school boards, city and town councils and county office holders. Our legislators appropriate funds but they are not the ones that spend
the money or manage the details of governance.

We are not conservative or liberal, Republican or Democrat leaning. We are not ideologically driven at all. We are about the nuts and bolts of governance at the state and local level. This translates into an emphasis on eliminating waste and inefficiency in state and local governance and improving accountability.

During last year's campaign I was painfully reminded of where the resources for operating government come from. One morning at 3:22 a.m. I stopped at the Hardees on S.E. 9th and Army Post Road. The young lady who took my order recognized me from my time on the Des Moines School Board and started a conversation. She had an infant, a daughter in high school and a second job she had to be at at 8:00 a.m.

When she buys diapers she pays an extra penny of sales tax. She deserves to know the $57 million addition to an area high school she's helping to build is being constructed in the most honest, efficient and accountable way. When a grandmother on fixed income buys her grandbabies bandages to cover scraped wounds she deserves to know her tax dollars are not going to a tax credit scheme or funding corruption at the Iowa Association of School Boards.

An examination of the 2011 legislative session confirms core issues of governance and accountability were not priorities of our Republican governor, the Democratic controlled Senate or the Republican controlled House. The political class in Iowa has lost its way. Both parties focus on distractions like dove hunting while pandering to special, vested and powerful lobbyist funded interests.

We focus on fixing government, fixing education and fixing the economy in our state. We do not ask Iowans to stop being Republicans or Democrats. In fact, we encourage Iowa Party people to be members of the two main parties, especially on February 6th at the caucus next year. We encourage them to become leaders within their parties at the precinct level. And we encourage them to challenge incumbents at the statehouse, if necessary, in the Democrat and Republican primaries, much like the Tea Party nationally has used primary challenges to transform the national G.O.P.

Statehouse leadership must embrace data driven governance.

For example, in FY 2010 the state spent $13.5 billion dollars.
Of that 39.6% was spent on Health and Human Services.

Yet there was no meaningful discussion about fixing Iowa's broken, wasteful, fraudulent and unaccountable welfare system. You would think an area that commands 40 cent of every dollar spent by our state government would warrant attention from our legislative leaders. Instead, they spent their time on matters most Iowans would consider trivial at best and costly distractions, too - such as dove hunting.

Equally egregious is how our governance leaders do business. Too many members of school boards and municipal councils are rubber stamps. Our legislators are rubber stamps, too. While members of the House and Senate are elected to represent Iowans from their districts they, by custom, first serve party leadership, second serve lobbyists and cronies, third spend time on their pet political priorities and last, if at all, deliberate on the real issues Iowans care about:

Efficient and accountable government,
Effective schools and educated Iowans,
A strong economy built around a responsible tax structure.

Jonathan Narcisse, the Iowa Party's gubernatorial candidate finished third in the six person field behind Governors Branstad and Culver. He received nearly 22,000 votes from all 99 counties in Iowa and 1,720 of Iowa's 1,774 precincts.

For more information contact Iowa Party spokesperson Jonathan R. Narcisse at 515-770-1218 or go to: www.iowaparty.org.

More Photos Available in .zip File Here

Q: What prompted your longstanding advocacy of whistleblowers?

A: Whistleblowers are unsung heroes who often risk losing their livelihoods, friends and career to expose wrongdoing. It takes courage and integrity to go against the grain, especially in deeply entrenched federal bureaucracies like the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).  In both the public and private sectors, an underlying rule of thumb within the workplace can be to go along to get along. Taxpayers and the general public owe a debt of gratitude to those who fight an often lonely crusade to blow the whistle from within their ranks and expose fraud.

More than 25 years ago I began advocating for whistleblowers when an employee at the Defense Department started raising questions about the astronomical prices being paid for toilet seats, hammers and coffee pots at the Pentagon. After learning about these excessive costs, I started a campaign that exposed cozy contracts and a flagrant absence of financial accountability at the Defense Department. Not surprisingly, the whistleblower in the Defense Department case was less popular at work than a skunk at a Sunday afternoon picnic. Unfortunately, this description still rings true today. 

Q:  Is there legislation to help whistleblowers?

A:  In 1986, I co-authored an update of Abraham Lincoln's False Claims Act to include "qui tam" provisions. This legal tool empowers ordinary citizens to bring a lawsuit alleging fraud on behalf of the U.S. government.  The law has helped recover more than $28 billion back to taxpayers, primarily from fraud by government contractors and against government programs like Medicare and Medicaid.  In 2009 I co-authored the Fraud Enforcement Recovery Act that was signed into law.  This new law overturns a number of court decisions that limited the scope and applicability of the False Claims Act ensuring that the law will protect taxpayer dollars for generations to come. 

I also co-wrote the 1989 Whistleblower Protection Act for government employees who stand up and speak out against wrongdoing and waste of taxpayer dollars.  Since then, I have co-authored legislation to bolster the law in response to rulings by the Merit Systems Protection Board and the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals.  These rulings were often based upon incorrect interpretations of the law and supported the general anti-whistleblower sentiment found in executive branch agencies. The bill, introduced with Senator Akaka of Hawaii, is called the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act. 

Q: Do whistleblowers still need protection?

A: It's a constant battle to make sure that whistleblower protections aren't watered down and that whistleblowers aren't retaliated against.  Whether raising the red flag on government waste and wrongdoing, health care or defense contractor fraud, or corporate corruption, whistleblowers put a lot on the line to protect the public and taxpayers. And, unfortunately, all too often, the federal bureaucracy seems to line up against them, maybe now more than ever.  Whistleblowers deserve strong protections under the law from intimidation, harassment, demotion or even dismissal for doing the right thing.  Our system of self-government is strengthened when government is made more transparent, more accessible and more accountable.

August 26, 2011

Second Annual Chocolate and Wine Tasting Event to Raise Funds for Mothers and Children living with HIV/AIDS in the Quad Cities

The second annual Project Chocolate With A Splash of Wine fundraising event will take place Sunday, September 25^th, 2011 from 2 to 5 pm at the Hotel Blackhawk in Davenport, Iowa. Ticket prices are $35 per person, $60 per couple, or $220 for a "Box of Chocolates" group package that includes 8 tickets and a complimentary bottle of wine. Attendees will be treated to samples of chocolate-themed creations made by local chocolatiers, bakers and chefs. Vendors include Chocolate Manor, the Clarion Hotel, Edible Arrangements, Little Slice of Heaven, Ultimate Chocolates, The Isle of Capri, Decadent Revenge Bakery, Cupcakes, Muffins & More, and Shakespeare's Chocolates. The Hotel Blackhawk will provide wine samples and hors d' oeuvres and the Bettendorf Coffee Hound will provide gourmet coffee. Local celebrities will be judging the chocolate concoctions and guests will have the opportunity to vote for "People's Choice." There will also be live entertainment and a raffle that includes items from Isabel Bloom, East Side Bakery, D'Alessandro and more.

All proceeds from Project Chocolate will benefit The Project of the Quad Cities (TPQC). Established in 1986, The Project of the Quad Cities is a nonprofit, community-based organization that provides those infected with or affected by HIV/AIDS in the Quad City area with case management and support services Project Chocolate funds will directly benefit HIV positive Mothers and Children in the Quad City area. Visit the website at www.apqc4life.org to learn more about The Project of the Quad Cities.

To purchase tickets or for more information please contact Shannon Rembowski at 309-721-7804 or Shannon@apqc4life.org.