What I Would Have Said at the Candidate Forum, Question 6

 Some of you may know that I filed for Lt. Governor as an independent in an effort to advance a lawsuit by Neighbors of Arkansas against the unjust changes made in the law in 2013.   These changes make it harder to get on the ballot as an independent. I will not be on the ballot as part of the remedy, but I remain confident that the law will soon be thrown out as unconstitutional. Similar laws have in the past, and there is no way there can be “equal protection” under the law when one's access to the ballot can be made harder every time one attempts to access the ballot outside of the two parties whose misrule has so harmed our nation.

During that process, before it was clear that our (three of us sued as candidates, the other two for local offices) being placed on the ballot was not going to be a part of the remedy, I held myself out as a candidate. I even got invited to a forum. One co-hosted by the El Dorado Chamber of Commerce and the Union County NAACP. This forum is to occur on September the 30^th. Since I went to the trouble to answer the questions (in case access to the ballot this cycle was still an option) I thought I might as well share my answers with you. With that set up, here are the questions which will be asked at the forum tonight and how I would have answered them. If you don't think the system is broken, compare how I would answer them by how they are being answered by the candidates that the system is offering you.....

Question #6

The issue of minimum wage has been in the forefront for many weeks, are you pleased with the current ruling, if so why, if not why not.

I am neither pleased nor displeased with the court ruling, as I consider the whole issue to be a distraction or even a gimmick that has nothing to do with bringing back good jobs with good wages.

You have to address the root causes- such as the corporate tax code which rewards American corporations for becoming global corporations and outsourcing our manufacturing base. If they leave their profits at home they get taxed at one of the highest rates in the world, but if they make money off shore then they never have to pay U.S. Taxes on it, unless they bring it back home! You could not think of a tax policy more suited to offshoring American jobs.

Then they both tell us we can have “free trade” with unfree people. That the Chinese are now a “most favored nation” in trade status. That we should not put tariffs on Chinese goods even though they have a captive labor force of one billion human souls. They are like a gigantic 21^st century plantation, but somehow our workers are supposed to compete against people that have virtual slaves. Well, let me tell you something, trading on the labor of unfree people was the wrong way to get cheap cotton in 1850 and its the wrong way to get cheap junk from China now.

And the money. Don't look at the wages, look at the money and what they have done to it- both parties. When I was born the dollar could be exchanged for gold by any nation on earth, 35 dollars to the ounce. And our coins were made of silver, just common quarters and dimes were 90% silver. Today the melt value of each of those quarters from the year I was born is $3.35 per quarter. So four quarters from the year I was born have a melt value of $13.00 now. So a wage of $7.00 an hour in 1961 money would be like a wage of $91 an hour today!

What happened to our money? Our gold is gone and our silver is gone. It has been replaced by DEBT. Debt they now say that we owe to them. Instead of real money that naturally buys more as we get more productive they give us fake money that they can drain the value from. We now have to scramble for wage hikes just to stay even. They steal value from the dollar by over-printing. Then they give us a few government peanuts with some of what they stole. We see that and we think they are giving us free stuff. What they have really been doing is stealing from us in ways hard to detect and giving a little back with grand announcements and brass bands. The result is that people connected to government, to the political system, and to the global banks have gotten richer and the rest of us have gotten poorer. Both parties are hip deep in it. They are both all about going global, not looking out for America.

So voting for or against this gimmick is not going to change anything for the better. You want change for the better, here is where it starts. Here it is: Quit voting for the people whose policies have been robbing you blind. That's the first step. And until you take it, its not gonna get better. Thank you.