The Romney Gambit

Ever since the release of Romney's comments on the 47% that he described as "victims" and "dependents", something has not set right with me. And it has to do with the nature of American politics. When you run for the highest office in the country, you've already been vetted, you've already learned how to handle a mic, and what to say and what not to say when the cameras are rolling.

Sometime late last night, amidst the Facebook fury that continued to pour out, it hit me. Romney didn't misspeak, this was very deliberate. I believe that the Romney campaign is employing a new strategy to separate the two candidates. Let's call it the Romney Gambit.

It has long been theorized that to understand how someone's mind works, you need to look at the accusations of their opponents. In the case of the Republican Party, look back no further than 2008, when they accused the Obama campaign of using race to bait the undecideds. They charged the Dems with planting the idea that if you didn't vote for Obama, you were racist.

Switch "Obama" with "Romney" and "racist" for "classist", and you have the Romney gambit in a nutshell. Buy demanding that 47% are victims, he is challenging voters to prove that they are NOT part of the 47%, that they are in charge of their own destiny. He is charging everyone who has ever bought a scratch ticket, every worker who has ever tried to burst that glass ceiling, to prove that they are not part of the dregs, the commoners, the unwashed masses.

It's a risky proposition, to be sure: potentially alienate half of the American public in order to push the other half to the polls to prove they're worthy, to pony up to the Republican trough in the mere hopes that the 1% will throw their breadcrumbs to the 99.

But gambits are risky, and it's one that just may work. Certainly a lot of self identified conservatives that are part of the 47% Romney chastised have come up to defend his statements. And Romney has not backed away from his statements, something he would have done had it been an actual gaffe.

No Worker Left Behind

This is a bad time in America for labor. And some would say it's a bad time to speak up for worker's rights. But the truth is, in all of my 42 years of existence, I can't think of a BETTER time to speak for worker's rights. To that end, I propose the following program, which I call "No Worker Left Behind". It's an imperfect proposal, to be sure, and probably contains ideas that both left and right reject, but I'd like to use it as my contribution to start the conversation on how we should address workers' rights in America.

1. Minimum wage should be set regionally, with a base that puts a full time worker's salary at 80% of the poverty line for a family of four. Based on a 40 hour week, this would give a median minimum wage of $9.22/hour ($23,050 x .8 = 18440/2000 = $9.22). This minimum wage would have a regional multiplier based on the area cost of living. Thus, a region where the cost of living is 85% of the national average would have a minimum wage of $7.84; an area with a cost of living of 120% of the national average would have a minimum wage of $11.06.

2. Small businesses and startups that meet certain defined criteria would receive a stipend of up to 50% of their employee's salary if they hired the long term unemployed or employees from disadvantaged demographics, which would include not only minorities, but employees from families with multigenerational poverty.

3. Businesses would be allowed to outsource, but they would pay a tariff equal to two times the percentage of their workers times the tariff charged to the country where their employees are outsourced. For instance, if they outsource 20% of their workforce, they would pay 40% of the tariff they would pay if they did business within that country; if they outsourced 80%, they would pay 160%. Exempt employees would NOT be included in the headcount of employees for this tariff program. Tariffs would be applied to the small business/startup stipend mentioned in point 2, as well as workforce development programs.

4. Workforce development programs would include a relocation grant/resettlement program for the longterm unemployed. This would allow unemployed individuals to be able to afford relocation to seek employment.

5. All employees will be advised of their right to unionize. While they wil not be required to join a union if they work in a "right to work" state, they must be advised of their right, and that the employer does not have rights to terminate them if they join the union.

6. 401k/pension plans will be portable, meaning they don't have to move from one plan to another when they change jobs. While employers will not have to match employee contributions, the employee will be able to move their payroll deductions to allow their old plan to accumulate.

7. Businesses will be allowed to deduct all contributions to employees' salary and benefits.

8. Businesses that cap CEO salaries and payout over 50% of net company profits to their nonexempt workforce on a proportionate scale will receive a 25% tax liability reduction.

9. We will work to provide legal immigration status to any worker who has committed no violent felonies, meets a strict residency requirement, and has worked/attended school continually for at least 90% of their residency.

10. H1B visas shall not be issued until a database of workforce applicants in all 50 states has been searched and eligible candidates interviewed and, if qualified, offered relocation assistance.

I don't think of any of these points as being particularly radical, but am interested in CIVIL discussion on the ideas I have advanced.

An Open Letter to my Republican Friends

You had your chance. You blew it.

Despite the tongue in cheek title of this blog, I support the idea of a free market. I am prolife (although my definition of "prolife" is more inclusive than my Republican friends; I hold it to mean anti-war, antiabortion, anti death penalty, antipoverty), pro Second Amendment, and I believe in smaller government (via smarter government, but that's a whole other blog post right there). In short, I should be custom made for the Republican Party.

But I've had enough. I've had enough of the slander of our sitting President by rank-and-file Republicans, I've had enough of Republicans claiming to want smaller government while wanting to set a landmark by rewording the Constitution to deny rights to a certain group of citizens (a first), and enough of the hypocrisy of someone who won't vote for a candidate because he MIGHT be a Muslim (a charge he has consistently denied), but has no problem voting for a religion founded on the notion that all mainstream Christian faiths are of the devil.

And more to the point, I've had enough with the utter contempt shown to the working class. While denying they are doing so, virtually every one of the Republicans I have met supports a flat or a "fair" tax, effectively lobbying to lower taxes on the wealthy while raising them on the lower classes (falling in line with the well travelled myth that the working poor pay no taxes).

And I could go even further, but in the brevity will address as my final point in this rant the clear obstructionism of every bill put forward by Dems since the GOP gained enough power to obstruct. I cannot support people who are openly rooting for the failure of our President.

The true colors of the GOP shone brightly at this year's convention when they denied Ron Paul a chance even to speak. They broke their own rules to marginalize Paul, and did not eeven give delegates the voice they should have been promised in the process. And this wasn't about Paul, per se, but about his right to speak.

And Mitt Romney is by far the worst possible candidate you could have chosen. Granted, none of the candidates you proffered had any real chance of being carved in stone by future generations, but the rest of the pack was better than Romney by a long shot. This is a man who believes corporations are people, yet does not believe they bear the same tax responsibilities; who raids companies and guts them, outsourcing their jobs to other countries. Remember that giant sucking sound Ross Perot warned us about in 1992? It comes right out of Romney's office.

The consolation you have given me is to urge me to vote the lesser of two evils. You don't want that. Trust me, you don't. As a person who, for good reason, views the LDS church in the same way that a child who grew up in the Second Mile views Penn State, I cannot, I will not, vote for a priesthood holder in that church as a "lesser of two evils". Sorry, but the lesser of two evils vote would go to Obama.

If you lose this election, it will be because you failed to connect with the people who do not identify with your party. Your party faithful would vote Republican even if you put Adolf Hitler on the ticket, but independents aren't so inclined.

I still remain true to my core beliefs and vote the person, not the party. But the Republican Party continues to show itself unworthy of my vote. And unless that changes, they are unlikely to ever get my vote.

An Open Letter to my Democrat Friends

In the midst of the political back and forth, a lot of pithy words have been spoken, and a lot of feelings have been hurt. I cannot adequately sum up my feelings in a short post on Facebook, so I felt a lengthier, more descriptive blog post to be appropriate.

The first and foremost thing I would like you to know is that I support our President. While President Obama and I do not see eye to eye on a lot of things, he is my President and I will continue to afford him the respect due to the office until such time as he is voted out or termed out of office. While I am a conservative, I do NOT stand with other self professed conservatives in demanding that President Obama present his birth certificate (again), or somehow prove his Christian faith. As far as I am concerned, both matters are settled.

And in exploring the lesser of two evils, I gave serious, hard thought to voting Obama. But I have decided I cannot, in part because of my beliefs on the sanctity of life and opposition to any unnecessary warfare, but in large part for the reasons that follow:

I believe that I do not stand alone in being a conservative who respects diversity both of race and culture, and who believes that we CAN allow for free enterprise to thrive while still not neglecting the world of suffering and poverty outside our window. A conservative who values life while recognizing the strongest weapon against abortion is not legislation, but opportunity, and who is THANKFUL for Roe vs. Wade for bringing the ugly reality of abortion out of the back alleys and the black market clinics and onto the boardwalk where we must confront it, not with hate, but with hope.

A vote for Obama in a world that deals in generalizations is a world where my vote will be labelled as a Democrat vote rather than a disenfranchised conservative vote. While there are admittedly unintended consequences of an independent vote, I have weighed them and accept them, for the longterm strategy of making the statement that I am conservative, but am not represented within the hallowed halls of the GOP.

We cannot function as a single party system in either direction. The Democratic Party needs at least one other viable party to provide a balanced perspective and not allow it to be steered by extremist elements that are just as disconcerting as the extremists on the right.

For better or worse, at this moment, that other viable party, that foil is the GOP. Whether another party rises and takes its place or whether the GOP reforms to better represent the entirety of the American people remains to be seen, but one thing is sure: there will need to be people ready to lend their voices to the debate that don't have the racial hatred and religious segregationist mindset of so many of the Tea Party right, and who can see that it is in the best interest of our nation to move forward together rather than apart.

It is my hope that at some point I can be one of those voices, for whatever small contributions I will offer.

And so in November my vote will be counted for Gary Johnson, not because I believe in everything Gary Johnson stands for but because I hope that if enough conservatives band together to say "we are the conservative, and the GOP does NOT represent us", our voices will be heard.

This is not a position I have taken it lightly, and it is one I will not surrender lightly. I pray for the direction of the nation, and I hope you understand that my vote this November is not a vote against you or your core values, but a vote for a return to cooperation and understanding.

Too Small to Fail

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness"

Every schoolchild in America knows these words. For those of us who have forgotten those halcyon days of elementary school, carefully reciting the words of our founders, they are to be found near the beginning of the Declaration of Independence.

With those words began a revolution. A revolution predicated on the idea that the individual had worth (we'll ignore the obvious double standards for the moment, of woman, blacks, and indigenous peoples who were not treated equally, for the sake of discussing the ideal). A revolution forged on the idea that the government belonged to the people, not the people to the government. With those words, we became citizens, rather than subjects, and our world changed.

The Constitution continued in that tradition. Read carefully the Bill of Rights, and you will find something not taught to many American schoolkids. The simple truth is, the Bill of Rights does not GIVE us a single right; but rather, they define rights the Founding Fathers felt were clearly God given and could not be taken by any government.

Enter 2011. When we have a generation of people who believe that big government is good when it grants money to Goldman Sachs, GE, and BP, but bad when it keeps its promises to social security recipients and to the next generation by providing an education to ensure that, while they may not be equal, they have equal opportunity. A generation that has villainized teachers and lauded opportunistic talking heads who speak for the corporations, for the wealthy, for a class that shaves gold into its food and turns its nose up at the poor despite building their wealth on the backs of those very poor.

When the first stimulus bill was passed, we were told that the banks needed bailouts because they were "too big to fail". The same banks that made questionable investments. The same banks that would exploit loopholes and robosigners to evict hardworking families from the homes they had once bought with a youthful glint in their eye and a promise of seeing grandchildren swing on the swing of that old oak tree.

Well, I am possessed of the opinion that the individual is too little to fail. We built this country on the idea that the individual was important, had value, had worth. We impressed upon our children's minds that they could become anything they wanted, even the President of the United States, and we fostered that ideal to such an extent that our country is now governed by a man who was born 3 years prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, at a time whan he couldn't have even voted in many states, much less held elected office.

What the Democrats have forgotten, what the Republicans have forgotten, what the Tea Party has forgotten, is that somewhere in this discussion we cannot forget the individual. In the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, we forged a social contract with these individuals. A social contract we have long forgotten.

It's time to talk to our representatives, not about giving more tax breaks to the wealthy, but about remembering those who are too little to fail. .

The New American Reality is the Old Dickensian Reality

I read one of the most disturbing articles I have seen in awhile. Yes, more disturbing than the news about the NDAA or SOPA.

It seems that corporations, in desperation to recover lost assets, have turned to a time honored Dickensian solution: jailing debtors.

The following article details this deplorable practice: Debtor's Prison Makes a Comeback.

. The article states that 1/3 of US states have laws which allow debtors to be jailed for their debt. Using Wikipedia for a source (I know, I know...but the article didn't list them, and I couldn't find a better source in short time to allow me to post up an article), I was able to find six: Arkansas, Arizona, Illinois, Indiana, and Washington. The same article stated that Tennessee and Oklahoma outlaw the practice.

If anyone has a list of the states that allow it, please send it to me. I'd like to post it, as I can't find returns on my searches on this one.

These are the reasons we are outraged. At the same time corporations are jailing their debtors, their own debt is being forgiven or restructured. Corporations under recent ruling not only are considered persons, but have superior legal protection.

I don't think this nation will long survive as long as it continues to treat its working class like criminals, devalue wages, and increase prices. There has to be a breaking point, and the Occupy and Tea Party movements would suggest to me that we are near it. The question is, are we near enough to help the families who will undoubtedly be torn apart by the government to whom they so blindly pledged their allegiance, the government that they were taught functioned "of the people, by the people, and for the people" that now only works to serve the wealthy and powerful?

We Made the Wrong Argument Against McCarthyism

As the Occupy movement continues on despite media reports of its demise, there have been a few very revalatory incidents from the opponents of Occupy Wall Street. Not only do we have Ann Coulter, one of the most widely heralded voices of the right, advocating openly for a "Kent State" solution, but virtually every pundit, every forum discussion has focused on the movement, which many see as Socialist. If I were to count the times I have been called a "useful idiot" by these people in open discussion, I would need several extra fingers and toes.

This is, in a nutshell, the new McCarthyism. Even speaking out in support of the movement is considered radical, and I have no shortage of well meaning friends "helpfully" filling my inbox with commentaries on the "evil" Wall Street movement. Often, the commentaries focus on the vandalism and the now absolutely infamous (and similarly isolated) incident or a protestor using a police cruiser as a toilet. But more often than not, the charge of "communism" is rampant throughout the discussion.

Before I continue further in this discussion, let me be clear that I am not a communist, although I consider it sad that such a qualifier would be considered necessary by any rational individual claiming to even have a modicum of free thought.

I have long thought that in the McCarthy era, as now, the debate was focused on the wrong subject. Even if the accusations of McCarthy and his henchmen were true, why is it relevant? We pride ourselves on the free exchange of ideas in this country, yet nothing could be further from the truth when we deliberately suppress ideas, deliberately disqualify them from consideration in public civil discourse.

The truth is, in a free society where people are free to self determine their future, that freedom should allow as much freedom to exercise certain elements of socialist economic thought as it does to the warped version of economic feudalism that we've wrongly labelled "capitalism". It is, after all, not a free and open electoral process if certain candidates and certain ideologies are not allowed to even be debated in the public forum.

The truth is, casualties of "capitalism" are just as rampant as casualties of "communism". The difference is, we do a better job of hiding it. We don't count the deaths of people who die from preventable diseases because we attribute those to lifestyle decisions. We don't count the deaths of those who freeze to death or burn up in our inner city tenements because we ascribe those to carelessness on the part of slumlords, who we rarely prosecute for their negligence. We don't count the suicides of those who failed financially because we ascribe that to mental illness. Similarly, we don't count the abortions by parents in impoverished regions who choose abortion because they feel it is preferable to raising a child in the ghettoes. But most of all, we don't count the deaths of both citizens and soldiers in foreign nations where our nation building has crushed them under the wheels of our war machine. If you counted those casualties, the bloody nature of the system we currently have in place would easily meet, if not exceed, the statistics of those who suffered under Communist dictators.

This is not to say Communism is right. I personally abhor Communism just as I am beginning to abhor a laundry list of other "isms". But if we are to be honest, we should abandon the notion that our system is preferable simply on the government's word alone.

Until we truly embrace a free exchange of ideas, we can expect the same endless line of failed politicians, failed policies, and the same old cookie cutter lies coming forth. If we want to make real and meaningful change, we have to accept that several things need to drastically change as regards our current modus operandi.

And that cannot happen if we abandon ideas based not on reason but our own preconceived notions.