Palisadian Flaherty Runs for Congress

He admits he’s not one of the top-billing, headlining candidates running for Henry Waxman’s 33rd Congressional District seat in Congress, but Vince Flaherty, a Democrat and movie producer who’s lived in Pacific Palisades his whole life, says he’s sick of the corporatists running the federal government.

“The headliners are going to represent the federal government to the Palisades,” he told the Post. “I want to represent the Palisades for the federal government.”

Flaherty, 58, attended Harvard, UCLA and Santa Monica College and is a past member of the Pacific Palisades Community Council.

He’s also former director of the Pacific Palisades Historical Society and a former Palm Springs police officer. Flaherty served as an aide to Congressman Charles Wilson, Gov. Pat Brown and as an advisor to Treasurer Kathleen Brown.

He added that he campaigned for state senate in 1984 because he thought it had “an Orwellian tone to it” and he did not advance very far when running in 2011 and 2012.

“When Waxman retired, I felt that in the home stretch things will resonate and voters will pull away from their favorites,” Flaherty said.

Campaigning before the June 3 primary, Flaherty now has 434 reforms posted on his website (vote4vince.us) that he promises to Californians.

He said the top five candidates for the 33rd District seat “are all being handled by the same Clinton-Obama operatives,” except Marianne Williamson.

Of his lengthy list, Flaherty says the business of government is flat-out broken and  “it stinks” that the banks have become so woven with the government.

He calls for cleaner elections by eliminating the monetary power of large special interest groups, like Citizens United, as well as calls for a cleaner Congress to stop soliciting and accepting contributions from lobbyists and industries.

He also criticized the government’s comprehensive bank loan modification system initiated following the housing market crash in 2008.

“We’ve sold so many of these bad securities around the world and it collapsed,” he said. “All they had to do was lower the interest rates. After the crash, they could have just paid off investors who got burned instead of pick the favorite crony banks.”

Among Flaherty’s many proposesd financial reforms are taxing corporations, implementing a secondary market investment tax, closing tax ambiguities for those earning more than $1 million and using eminent domain to acquire the state’s toxic mortgages at fair value to begin re-financing discussions.

“If you have a Congressperson, they are supposed to be representative to us, but with all the money that’s happening in Washington, they are squeezing you to act a certain way,” Flaherty said.

“It can’t survive that way. It’ll be the end if you continue this way if they keep electing people of the system.”