Post in Neither Democrat nor Republican

Jul 18 16:42 UTC

Thanks, Michael Cavlan, for your comments.  The Greens are rather unique among
parties in leading with a focused vision of the future. Our democracy would be
improved if ballot access for all political parties were eased and instant
runoff voting were adopted so that supporters of the Democratic and Republican
parties could not use the “spoiler” argument to squelch candidacies from other
parties. They offer the voters stones for bread and then complain that we are
stealing their votes.

In the early ‘90s, I had the privilege of submitting articles on international
trade to a national Green Party publication, Synthesis/Regeneration.  One,
titled “A Labor and Environmentally Oriented Trading System” appeared in the
spring 1993 issue of that publication; the other, “A Search for Trade Standards
to Protect Labor and the Environment”, appeared in the winter of 1996.  Today,
the concepts developed in those articles are the heart of the program that I am
proposing as a Congressional candidate.

Locally I was involved with a group of landlords called Minneapolis Property
Rights Action Committee which played a part in the Greens’ amazing victories in
two Minneapolis City Council races in 2001:  Natalie Johnson Lee’s victory in
the 5th ward and Dean Zimmermann’s victory in the 6th ward. To date, these two
elections represent a high water mark in my experience of citizen activism
going up against an entrenched structure of political power in what is
basically a one-party town.

The Independence Party has a rather different focus.  It began in Ross Perot’s
presidential campaign in 1992 and the subsequent organization of the Reform
Party.  In my views, the Perot campaign consisted of three issues:  (1)
opposition to perpetual federal budget deficits, (2) opposition to NAFTA with
its “giant sucking sound” of jobs going south, and (3) sympathy for the
forgotten victims and veterans of the Vietnam war.  As the Reform Party changed
into the Independence Party, it dropped its opposition to free trade. I would
say it lost its focus.  Instead, it has adopted a platform consisting of 70
plus planks which individually are commendable but collectively amount to a
blur.  I want to narrow the focus so that, in this campaign at least, voters
have a clear idea of what I stand for as an Independence Party candidate.

If the Republican Party were what it was 50 or 60 years ago, I might belong to
that party:  a bunch of “old fogeys” who believed in balanced budgets, free
markets and business promotion, and “isolationism” (which I would call “minding
your own business” internationally) while also producing reformers like
Theodore Roosevelt and visionaries like Harold Stassen, one of the persons most
responsible for the creation of the United Nations.  I would gladly accept a
president such as Dwight Eisenhower who liked to play golf when he might have
been shuffling through papers in the Oval office or Calvin Coolidge who in the
summer of 1928 took an entire month off to go fishing in northern Wisconsin -
provided that the country was prosperous and peaceful.

Instead, the years of the Bush-Cheney administration have been pure hell.
Whether it’s the disastrous Iraq war, the neglect of our veterans, the
foreclosure crisis, the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the $900
billion budget deficit and the $700 billion trade deficit, the costly
prescription-drug benefit, the “no child left behind” program, the torture
policies and violations of civil liberties, the lucrative no-bid contracts in
Iraq, etc. etc., it seems that everything Bush has touched has turned to ashes.
You know something is seriously wrong with this Republican presidency when
Julie Nixon Eisenhower contributes thousands of dollars to Barack Obama’s
campaign.

I continue to support free markets and economies regulated primarily by the law
of supply and demand.  At the same time, government needs to regulate the
economy by impartial laws.  As economic growth butts up against finite natural
resources, government needs to intervene in the free market by giving tax
incentives and subsidies to support renewable energy while imposing an
additional tax burden on consumption of petroleum and other nonrenewable
resources.  If the government can get its act together, this would be the time
to push wind and solar energy and invest in battery technologies and
people-moving systems of public transportation in congested urban areas.

As a party which supposedly believes in the free-market economy, the current
Republican administration was run by three individuals who got rich through
their contacts with government rather than through honest free-market
competition:  Bush himself who sold his interest in the Texas Rangers at a huge
profit after getting the Texas legislature to build that baseball team a new
stadium; Dick Cheney, formerly of Halliburton, who led the charge on the
wasteful privatization of U.S. military operations in Iraq; and Donald
Rumsfeld, who became CEO of the Searle drug company by virtue of his ability to
convince the FDA to approve its medications.  This is corrupt capitalism.  As
a pro-capitalist party, the Republicans need to come to grips with who they
have actually become.

If the Democrats were an effective “loyal opposition”, they would be
aggressively challenging all this in Congress instead of complaining that Ralph
Nader or someone else was on the ballot stealing their issues.  When I listen
to the nominating conventions of the Green Party or the Libertarians, I hear
earnest proposals for government being discussed and not just vague references
to “health care”, “transportation”, or “education”, as if that covers it.  So,
standing on the back of past Independence Party candidates such as Tim Penny
and Peter Hutchinson who exceeded the 5% vote requirement, I’m proud to be
someone out there in the political wilderness running for Congress at a time
when our country desperately needs to change its politics.