Candidate for
United States Representative; District 7

Age: 70

Birth date: April 11, 1944

Community of residence: Antelope, Sacramento County

Years lived in the community: 24

Affiliations:

• Libertarian Party, California

• Cato Institute, Sponsor

• Cato University, home study course completed in 1999
• Louisiana Tech University, Civil Engineering, B.S. in 1971

2004: Candidate, U.S. Representative, CA Congressional District 3.

2002: Candidate, U.S. Representative, CA Congressional District 3.

2000: Candidate, U.S. Representative, CA Congressional District 3.

1998: Candidate, U.S. Representative, CA Congressional District 5.

1997, July 12:

• Submitted letter to California Regional Water Quality Control Board regarding its Control Program to Reduce Selenium Discharges from the Grassland Watershed to the San Joaquin River, Agenda Item No. 4, Meeting of 19 June 1997. Reprinted November 12, 1998 with the following introduction.

• Too Much Leviathan Caused Kesterson Tragedy - Not Selenium
• Federal government deception regarding the authorized purpose of a federal water project facility named Kesterson Reservoir remains the basis for continuing political tragedy - communist reallocation of property. State government reliance on this federal hoax extends the scope of this political tragedy by enforcement of bogus water quality regulations.

• First day of federal civil service retirement. Total federal service included 21 years as a civil engineer in the Bureau of Reclamation, U.S. Department of the Interior, and 2 years active duty in the U.S. Navy.

1972: Graduate Assistant, Louisiana Tech University

1971:

• Engineer-In-Training, Louisiana
• B.S., Civil Engineering, Louisiana Tech University

• Total corporate employment included two years as a gas plant instrument mechanic and three years as an engineering assistant for Chevron Oil Company, The California Company Division, in Louisiana and Mississippi.

• Total military service included four years as an Electronics Technician (Radar) in the Naval Reserves, nearly a year as an Airman on the USS Saratoga, and a year as a cadet in Aviation Training.

Biography as of 2006

Libertarian Congressional candidate runs in District 3 again

On November 7, District 3 voters will again see Douglas Arthur Tuma for U.S. Representative on their ballots. 9310 voters voted for Tuma in 2004. More than 78 percent were not registered Libertarians, because there are only 2040 registered as Libertarian in Congressional District 3. Tuma appreciates every vote, Libertarian or not.

Government high school taught Tuma journalism in 1960. He read Barry Goldwater's column, "Where do You Stand?" in the Omaha World Herald. Most of the time, he thought he would stand with Goldwater.

Army ROTC showed Tuma how to handle M-1 rifles in his first year of high school, 1957-58. Air Force ROTC showed him nearby Titan II missiles in his first year of college, 1960-61. But he wasn't shown how to handle them.

Tuma's sophomore year was at Hinds Junior College in Raymond MS, thanks to incredibly low in-state tuition rates. Tuma's laugh-a-minute roommate took him to hear Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society. Tuma thought Welch sounded pretty reasonable.

On September 30, 1962, Tuma heard President John Kennedy address the nation on television and thought he sounded pretty unreasonable. Attorney General Robert Kennedy sent federal marshals to racially integrate classrooms at the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) in Oxford MS. The U.S. Supreme Court had just decided college students have equal rights to education only if they have access to the same classrooms at the same time as students with a different skin color.

Being an engineering student who learned from books, Tuma doubted the skin color of classmates would make any difference in how well he or anybody else learned. Other factors seemed much more important, like willingness to study. Kennedy said Mississippi would immediately comply with the court's new federal law and he cautioned people to stay away from Oxford and Ole Miss. Of course, young patriots had to see what the federal government was hiding.

Kennedy was smart. He should have known Southerners still resented the Union's conquest of the Confederacy and the following Reconstruction. He should have known a federal marshal invasion of Mississippi would provoke and incite Southerners to spontaneously rise and resist in defense of States rights. He should have known a federal invasion would test the South's willingness to rise again.

Tuma and fellow schoolmates drove to Ole Miss that evening to witness and protest. When he got there, a cloud of tear gas obscured the administration building occupied by federal marshals. Looking closer, he saw a tear gas canister rolling and burning in the street. But the crowd of protesters was at the opposite end of a circular park, far from the occupied building and its cloud of tear gas. Through the smoke Tuma briefly saw a large person wearing a gas mask casually walk away from the burning tear gas canister.

With nothing of interest to be seen in front of the occupied building, Tuma set off to look at the back. But that required going a few blocks through a residential neighborhood. All the houses were dark. The streets were deserted.

Passing the backside of a dormitory, Tuma noticed two guys sitting in a dark shadow below a dormitory window. He asked what they were doing. They said they were guarding the area. They weren't in uniform; they were just sitting there in the dark. No one else was around. On the other side of the building, some guys gathered in the entranceway. Their conversation was serious, something about somebody being no different than anybody else.

Further down the road Tuma saw the backside of the occupied building. It was a couple hundred feet from the road and lit with lights all around. Two people with a spotlight were standing about two-thirds the way down the slope from the building. Their spotlight swept across a grassy field. It revealed some people further down the road. The people retreated from the spotlight.

The pair with the spotlight didn't move. They turned the light off and on intermittently, pointing it in different places. They spotted Tuma as he walked down the road. When Tuma reached the point in the road closest to them, one called, "Come here." Tuma came. They cuffed him.

One burst into a long profane rant. They checked Tuma's hands for brick residue. Apparently, somebody had been throwing bricks. They led Tuma to the basement of the occupied building. About thirty other captives were there. One captive's head was wrapped in white bandage. He said somebody struck him with a rifle butt.

The next day the captives were paraded before television cameras, fingerprinted and released. Tuma and the rifle butted captive were schoolmates, so they headed out of Oxford town together. They caught a ride with a couple of other guys. They stopped at a National Guard roadblock. Guardsmen told them to get out of the car and took them to a steel enclosure to spend the night with thirty other guys sitting on a cold concrete slab.

The guards told the men to sit with arms folded over tucked knees. Three or four guards pointed their rifles at the sitting men, threatening to shoot anybody who moved. The prisoners sat motionless for eight hours. Over time the weight of Tuma's torso pressed his tailbone down until it pinched nerves against the concrete.

This ordeal was torture by incremental pain as muscles cramped. Tuma heard someone say Oxford was under Martial Law; and Martial Law canceled the Bill of Rights. The Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment didn't apply in Oxford that night.

The federal government took Constitutional protections of personal liberty away from the people of Oxford. It treated Oxford like a foreign country. It invaded and occupied Oxford like it invades and occupies any foreign country. America's federal government rules by supreme force wherever it goes. America's consent for federal government authority is for protection of personal liberty, not abuse. Federal government abuses of its authority deserve careful and objective investigation, study, discussion and reform.

Five months later, Tuma started Naval Air Training in Pensacola.

Tuma's flight training lasted a year. He failed formation-flying lessons and served out the rest of his active duty time aboard an aircraft carrier, cleaning sleeping quarters. He said years later that he never could put his finger on the problem he had with formation flying until the Thunderbirds, an Air Force aerobatics team, followed their leader into the ground. Those pilots had the right stuff, and they were all dead.

In hindsight, Tuma's flight instructors probably saved his life by ending his training. Although it wasn't a concern for him at the time, his fellow students, including some from Vietnam, would no doubt go on to serve in the following years of escalating conflict in Southeast Asia.

Much of the escalation occurred during the Presidency of Lyndon Johnson, who defeated Goldwater in 1964. Incumbents almost always win elections. And so do candidates promising peace. Johnson's campaign aired a message that showed a precious child plucking petals from a daisy while a mushroom cloud rose in the distance. Given Goldwater's refusal to say he wouldn't use nuclear weapons, the image sent a clear message: a Democratic administration was a better prospect for peace.

But the better prospect continued killing people in Vietnam year after year. By the time America withdrew in 1973, the undeclared, and thereby unconstitutional, "war" killed a million Southeast Asians and 46 thousand Americans. Johnson also escalated federal power with new "Great Society" welfare programs, more ways to force redistribution of wealth according to "need," as determined by federal bureaucrats.

In 1969 Nixon followed Johnson with even grander delusions of federal solutions, promising protection of the environment, protection of drug-free minds and wage and price stability.

In the wake of Nixon's decree on wage and price controls and removal of U.S. currency from the gold standard, a few defenders of liberty in Colorado decided a new party was needed that stood for real limited government and individual freedom. They voted to form the Libertarian Party on December 11, 1971.

Meanwhile Tuma taught and took civil engineering classes as a graduate assistant at Louisiana Tech University. He studied news reports on the "Pentagon Papers," a purloined classified report that apparently revealed government lies about America's involvement in Vietnam.

In 1988 Tuma happened on a listing of candidates and their positions in a Phoenix newspaper and saw that Libertarians were the only candidates promising to end the drug war. He immediately registered Libertarian and voted for all the Libertarians on his ballot, including Ron Paul for President. Soon after he moved to Sacramento in 1989, he joined the Libertarian Party and began reading libertarian literature.

Tuma retired from federal civil service in 1994, finishing 21 years as a civil engineer for the U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Reclamation. He authorized payment for research, monitoring and management of selenium rich sediments in the former Kesterson Reservoir site, a drainage sump for ground water collected below farm fields in the west side of the upper San Joaquin Valley.

Tuma helped develop plans for more wetlands near Kesterson as partial mitigation for a ballyhooed "environmental disaster" that prompted regulatory agencies to force closure of the reservoir in 1986. He studied government records of correspondence, technical reports, environmental impact assessments, legislation, hearings, news media commentary and Green group publications related to the closure of Kesterson and agricultural drainage for the San Joaquin Valley.

Tuma concluded that the alleged "environmental disaster" at Kesterson was a hoax, fabricated by zealous Green socialist agents employed as government biologists, geologists, economists, lawyers and refuge managers. By claiming a disaster, they all facilitated the Green group objective to break renewable federal water supply contracts with irrigation districts, thereby stopping river diversions and keeping more water in rivers and wetlands.

Rather than being honest about the complete loss of habitat value expected in a drainage sump, government agents acted horrified as if the low biological productivity of the sump represented a violation of refuge sanctity. Opportunistically, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service named the sump "Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge," and by acting outraged, misrepresented the revocable contract terms for its conditional wildlife management use of the sump.

The Kesterson hoax fallout leaves San Joaquin Valley farms dry for lack of irrigation water. And it leaves them to perish in accumulated salt for lack of an out-of-valley drain, other than the California Aqueduct, which supplies drinking water to Southern California.

The perpetrators of the Kesterson hoax caused drought by regulation, loss of farm production, loss of business, loss of capital, loss of quality for Southern California's drinking water, and loss of more valuable wildlife habitat in other locations where more land is cleared to grow crops that could have been grown in the desert climate of the San Joaquin Valley.

Rather than improving net habitat conditions, the Kesterson hoax gave Green groups and tour guides at refuges, including Stone Lakes Refuge near Elk Grove, a scary story to fool people into voting for politicians promising to block further development of water supply and drainage facilities. This fraud is the basis for a moratorium on water resource development and for "reallocation" of prior water rights and contracts to meet fish and wildlife "needs."

Reallocation according to need is the Marxist criteria for communist redistribution of wealth. Tuma remembered Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev's words to Western ambassadors in 1956, "History is our side. We will bury you!" Tuma decided the best way he could help stop those words from coming true was to enter politics as a Libertarian candidate.

Tuma uses the Kesterson hoax as an example of federal power abuse by Green socialists. He advocates release of federal property to private ownership as the most certain way to end conflicts among special interests over the purpose and use of federal property.

Tuma also advocates return of capital investment choice to wage earners, letting people be free from federal payroll, income and death taxes to build their personal estate faster and retire sooner.

And Tuma advocates return of environmental protection management to property owners, freeing land and water owners from the whims of government-employed eco-priests.

Tuma hopes to raise America's spirit of freedom to defend against aggression, both foreign and domestic. He joins his fellow Libertarian Congressional candidates in urging voters to defend against federal government aggression by voting Libertarian.