Candidate name: Robert E. Kozak

Party affiliation: Green

Place of residence: Frederick

Date of birth: Dec. 6, 1952

Place of birth: Ohio

Current occupation: President, Atlantic Biomass Conversions, a Frederick biotech bioenergy company

Education: B.S., environmental studies, George Washington University; graduate work, GWU genetics program; Anthropology graduate scholarship work, The Catholic University; Peace Corps, Western Samoa

Community associations, involvement: Founder ‘‘Townhouse,” community action historic preservation group, Washington D.C.; Frederick Civil War Round Table.

Professional associations: American Council on Renewable Energy, American Association for the Advancement for the Advancement of Science.

Family: Two sisters.

Campaign office address and telephone: P.O. Box 3167, Frederick, MD 21705. 301-644-1393.

Candidate’s Web site, if site exists: www.kozakforcongress.com

Link to state Board of Elections campaign finance database

Make the U.S. energy economy sustainable and renewable. Establish a single-payer health care system based on the current, cost-erfficient Medicare system. Return all government funding, included that for the Iraq War, to the congressional budget controls passed in the 1990s.

Making the U.S. energy economy sustainable and renewable could offer not only jobs for residents of District 6, but also the opportunity for ownership and control of the technologies and companies by Marylanders. A ‘‘Manhattan Project” type of public⁄private effort will be needed, and Congress is primarily responsible for getting this effort started.

Specific immediate actions should include:

1. Enact a 50 percent improvement in fuel economy standards over five years. The industry has the technology. They need a stable regulatory climate before they will invest.

2. Establish government⁄private energy development⁄commercialization funds modeled after Maryland TEDCO. There are lots of good technologies in our universities and emerging companies. They need access to capital to bring these to markets.

3. Expand rural development and energy co-op legislation to include municipal governments and regional authorities. Local ownership of electrical production systems; solar, wind, and biofuel cells, will benefit both consumers and municipal governments struggling to pay bills.

4. Increase ‘‘home-grown” energy research and development and commercialization funding to $100 billion a year for five years. Funding would come from stopping current U.S. government funding, tax, and subsidy programs for non-renewable energy sources. Funding would also come from profits reinvested from the government⁄private sector energy fund.

Why is this important? First, the United States exports nearly a billion dollars per day for oil. This money should be staying home, helping U.S. citizens rebuild U.S. communities and industries.

Second, ‘‘What do we do after Iraq?” Only when we are no longer dependent on imported oil, and the dangerous alliances and preemptive actions that this dependency produces, can the United States operate freely to help establish peace and freedom throughout the world. We could also help other countries and regions develop ‘‘home-grown” renewable and sustainable energy and water systems with U.S. technology.

Establish a single-payer health care system would provide basic, comprehensive health care for all while offering a number of options that would address the challenges presented by our current healthcare system.

With approximately 40 million people uninsured, and many under-insured people rationing their use of health care based on their financial situation, taxpayers are paying more for acute, chronic, and emergency care then with such a comprehensive system.

After returning all government funding to the congressional budget controls passed in the 1990s, the House of Representatives should reclaim its constitutional oversight duties.

How would you rate the performance of the House of Representatives: excellent, good, fair or poor? Why?

Poor. As Newt Gingrich and others have pointed out, the House of Representatives has abdicated its constitutional budgetary and oversight authority. For instance, the House is funding the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as one large ‘‘earmark.” Since 2002, Congress has passed nine emergency spending bills to finance these wars without holding one regular appropriations or budget committee hearing on the specific projects included in those bills. Also since 2002, the House of Representatives has not held one official oversight hearing on either the conduct of the wars or the spending of the appropriated funds.

Do you have a timeline on when the U.S. should pull out of Iraq?

Instead of an arbitrary timeline established only by the United States, we need an immediate, regionally negotiated withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. Ultimately, it is the people of that region whose future is at stake, and they should decide it. The war has been going on well over three years (about the same length as the U.S. war in Europe took).

As Robert Baer (author of ‘‘Blow the House Down”) and others have proposed, Iran, all the parties in Iraq, the Arab oil states, and the United States need to step up and work out the future of the people and the land we call Iraq. (Remember, Iraq is an artificial state created by Britain after World War I to retain oil rights.) Iran needs to be included because they are calling the shots in southern Iraq.

The oil rich states of Qatar, UAE, and Saudi Arabia need to be included because it is their future and their multi-billion dollar new cities that are at stake. Turkey, Syria, and Jordan also must be involved. They all border Iraq. Besides, U.S. troop withdrawal, secure borders and equitable shares of oil revenue from the Tikrit oil fields should be on the table.

How should the government pay for the War on Terror?

Terrorism, such as bombing civilians, is a tactic that can be used by anyone at anytime. It is not a political or economic philosophy. We cannot combat a tactic, and therefore trying to fund something called a ‘‘War on Terror” is something George Orwell would have written about.

We can, however, combat the reasons that people resort to terrorism, and funding for those activities should be part of the U.S.’s annual tax funded budget. The primary reasons that groups and states resort to terrorism are competition for scarce resources, and tribal based worldviews.

Resource competition is where a renewable, sustainable U.S. energy policy comes into play. Only when we are no longer dependent on imported oil, and the dangerous alliances and preemptive actions that this dependency produces, can the United States make a positive contribution to establishing peace and freedom throughout the world. Furthermore, we could become a positive force in helping other countries and regions develop ‘‘home-grown” renewable and sustainable energy, agriculture, and water systems

What to do about tribal world views? We all have to see beyond our own ethnic, religious, or cultural heritages. We have to remember the fact that we’re all Homo sapiens trying to survive. We have to remember that we’re all alike and deserve the same rights and individual freedoms as we confront all the problems of our daily lives. We have to remember that all groups are entitled to the same freedoms and rights as we come together as political states to enforce human, worker, and environmental rights. Teaching mediation, helping establish a free press, building state-wide democratic institutions should be the focus of our efforts to stop people from turning to terrorist tactics to solve their problems or project their world-view. If this sounds like nation building, it is.

Would you make any changes to the way the Department of Homeland Security is run?

The department should be immediately dissolved, and any programs focused on domestic spying or depriving U.S. citizens of our constitutionally guaranteed rights should be stopped. When I was in high school, we were taught that such departments of internal surveillance were features of only countries run by dictators. Is that we have become? FEMA should be returned to its formerly independent status and run by someone like James Lee Witt who made it a model of disaster response. Citizens of the U.S. should not be told that they are on their own for the first 72 hours.

What should be done to save Social Security?

Three immediate steps should be taken.

First, the ‘‘lock box” should be reinstituted for all current and future Social Security payments made to the government by individuals and companies.

Second, Congress should pass legislation to begin the payback of previous ‘‘IOUs” taken from the Social Security fund.

Third, the upper limit for Social Security eligible income should be increased to at least $200,000 per year and indexed for the future. This could allow lower rates for middle-income families that are currently shouldering most of the Social Security payments.

What should be done to save Medicare?

The question shouldn’t be what to do to save Medicare. The question should be how can the cost-effective (3 percent processing costs) Medicare system be expanded into a comprehensive system to offer health care to all Americans? Congressional actions should be taken in this direction in the next session. Such a system would eliminate the high overhead, questionable real estate deals, and high executive salaries of private health insurance plans. The resulting lower individual premiums and a payroll tax in the 1 percent to 2 percent range could fund the entire system. In addition, Part D should be immediately revised to allow drug price negotiations.

What is your position on the death penalty?

A continuing high capital crime rate has shown that the death penalty is not a deterrent. Recent DNA analyses in many states have also shown that a significant number of death penalty convictions were wrong, and would have resulted in the wrong people being killed by state governments. Therefore, I do not support the death penalty.

What is your position on abortion?

I support Roe v. Wade, and I would think anyone who supports personal freedoms and the right to follow their own moral direction would as well. Roe v. Wade does not require anyone to have an abortion. Instead, it says the government should have no role in the decision. It is one of personal moral or religious conviction.

Many people who oppose abortion and would never consider having a family member have one (and I support their right to that belief) unfortunately forget that under our Constitution, the same right that allows them their view also allows other people to have opposing views. The United States is not a theocracy and was not established to have a state religion. In fact, that was one of the primary reasons we fought against Britain!

Do you support same-sex marriages? Why?

I do not see how allowing caring, committed individuals, no matter their gender, to enter into a state sanctioned marriage contracts will somehow ‘‘bring down the Republic” as some have stated. I feel that a much greater social problem is that approximately 50 percent of male-female marriages end in divorce, causing far too many children to have to live divided lives. Do the same people who decry same-sex marriage offer solutions to this major problem caused by nearly 1⁄2 of all male-female marriages?

I’d also like to point out that any state legislative marriage acts do not require any individual religious organizations to approve of them. Under our Constitution, church and state remain separate and religious organizations can continue to take whatever position they want on same-sex marriage.

Do you support the federal No Child Left Behind law? Why or why not?

No. It appears to have caused an increase in the educational bureaucracy while showing no marked improvement in the ability of students to have the well-rounded education necessary to succeed in the 21st century. I would prefer to see the elementary and secondary education curriculums expanded and improved with a greater emphasis on history, literature, and the biological sciences. Education funding should be focused on such efforts as the NSF curriculum building programs (cut substantially in the last six years) and to reward individual classroom innovations.

What state transportation projects are a priority for you and how should we pay for them?

I support the Purple Line (as a Metro ‘‘beltway” as originally envisioned; the expansion of the Western Maryland commuter rail and regional⁄commuter public transit; the extension of Metro Red Line to Germantown and Urbana, (eventually Frederick); and a northern bypass of Frederick combined with turning current U.S. Route 15 through town into a Boulevard reuniting the city.

I do not support the intercounty connector or widening I-495 and I-270.

The primary transportation funding mechanism should be an increase in federal and state fuel taxes. These taxes have not been raised in years, and should be indexed to fuel prices at the percentage rate they were last established at (when fuel prices were about $1 per gallon).

An increase in gas taxes results in a more equitable sharing of costs and benefits than the proposed interstate toll ‘‘Lexus lanes” that would limit improvements to those in higher economic brackets.

Has Sarbanes-Oxley worked? Is there more the government can do to prevent corporate corruption?

Yes. Increased corporate transparency was a necessary first step to reestablishing public confidence in American companies. Sarbanes-Oxley did not cause the predicted fall-off in mergers and acquisitions. In fact, those numbers have increased.

The next step should be substantially increased funding for the Department of Justice anti-trust and price fixing enforcement operations, especially in the deregulated energy industries. U.S. citizens shouldn’t have to wait until after the fact as they were forced to with Enron.