Luis Rodriguez for Governor

Yesterday, a great American threw his hat into the ring and announced his candidacy for the gubernatorial race in California.  Despite Governor’s Brown’s valiant efforts to bring change to the Golden State, California remains mired in budget woes, a looming bond crisis, and politics as usual in Sacramento.  California does not need another Republican nor a Democrat in the statehouse, California needs someone with a better vision, one that will unite Californians and return the state to prosperity and end inequality.  Luis Rodriguez is not only a writer but hero to the people of Los Angeles.  Luis has experienced first hand the reality of our unjust criminal system along with the pain and loss that it foists upon our youth.  Give your support to Luis, give your support to the people of California.  I endorse Luis Rodriguez for Governor of California.

Warren Buffett, we need a SuperPac.

The Republicans and Democrats have their SuperPacs and their billions.  Citizens United prevents any possibility of a third-party ever coming to fruition.  It is just monetarily impossible to generate sufficient media attention to get the message out.  People say one must use social media but with so many conflicting messages out there, everything becomes lost in the scuffle for people’s attention.  We need a sustained effort by progressive groups who represent the poor.  Unfortunately, the poor do not have any resources.  But there are a few in the nation that do.

Without a doubt, unless Progressives create a SuperPac to challenge the status quo, the duopoly that continues to run the nation will be running the nation 100 years from now.  Sure, we all speculate about the future implosion of this party or that one but the truth is all they have to do is move a little bit and throw some bread crumbs to get what they want.  Our government no longer represents the people, our government is in the process of enslaving the  entire globe to promote uncontrolled consumerism, and our government is on the verge of abandoning its citizens and imprisoning them.

I cannot speak for the Justice Party in this regard, nor can I claim progressives have all the answers.  What I can say is that unless we have sufficient funds, it’s irrelevant.  We are not going to stop climate change.  We are not going to provide health-care for all Americans.  We are not going to solve our deficit problems or repay our national debt.  And, we are not going to stop the militarization of our economy with the resulting death and destruction it causes.  Instead, we are going to march inexorably into fascism not just nationally but globally until the Earth is engulfed in another World War.

The Libertarians and secessionists may choose revolution to stop this inevitable destiny but in any revolution, the primary people that suffer are the poor.  What we need is a political revolution resulting from a new left of center party that represents the people, the worker who is the foundation of our economy and society, and future generations.  Some suggest we should give Pres Obama an opportunity to achieve success but a tiger does not change its stripes and neither will Pres Obama.  Hence, we need heroes but not Superheroes rather financial heroes.

Warren Buffett has built his wealth from the hard work of the American people.  He acknowledges that he can afford more taxes.  He acknowledges that we have to fix the system and change the way we do business.  Unfortunately, unless someone like Warren Buffett steps up and contributes to the poor, not directly but politically, America will continue full speed ahead to fascism and serfdom.  This goes completely against progressive values but maybe we need to think outside the box for the sake of the people who are suffering and not for our own intellectual purity.  We need $4 billion to change the political landscape for the rest of the century.  How about it Mr. Buffett, do you want to be remembered for all time as the man who saved the globe or as the man who let it succumb to tyranny and environmental destruction?

The Romney Economic Plan – Republican Wish List, not Job Creation

It’s clear that a rip-and-strip artist knows nothing about creating jobs, he knows how to cut costs and recover his investment.  That’s what he does, that’s all he does.  The easiest way to cut costs and recover one’s investment is to lay off workers.  That’s the business plan that Governor Romney wants America to buy into.  He is going to cut spending, i.e. cut government jobs, and cut taxes for wealthy Americans.  He has a fantasy that after 12 years of tax cuts, the wealthy will start creating jobs if they only have one more tax cut.  Governor Romney needs to be truthful with America and admit what he really wants, breaks for businessmen.  Governor Romney does not care about workers, only those who can get high-paying jobs.  What about all the Americans that do not qualify for high-paying jobs?  Why are they left out of his plan?

Economists know how to create jobs, politicians know how to create jobs, President Obama and Governor Romney know how to create jobs, it’s really very easy.  Either the private sector or the public sector creates demand for goods or services.  This demand creates business for factories who then hire additional workers to make the goods to meet the demand.  Here is the rub, if one is trying to globalize the American economy to support Multi-nationals or implement free-trade rules to increase their profits, then creating demand for workers in America works against one’s desire.  Both President Obama and Governor Romney do not want to create factory jobs or low paying service jobs, they only want to create jobs for college graduates, i.e. high-paying jobs.

The first step we need to do to create jobs is identify what we need to build in the nation.  There are at least 5 million unemployed construction workers so building some infrastructure projects around the nation will create several million jobs.  Infrastructure projects vary from roads and bridges to new renewable power plants.  Theoretically, most of Congress already supports this idea or some variation.  The next step we need is to create factory jobs and there Governor Romney has the right idea, he just lacks the details.  We need to impose tariffs on Chinese imports because they are not engaging in fair-trade, they are undercutting our factories, cheating on our currency, polluting the environment, and intentionally limiting the ability of our manufacturers to compete. In a normal environment, this would result in a trade war. In the laissez-faire free trade environment that our founding fathers rejected, it is considered good business.  It is only good business for the multinationals that make money no matter where the goods are produced and then they don’t have to pay taxes or support US workers.

The next step we need to do is cut our defense spending for fiscal probity and to release funds to create jobs elsewhere.  We can afford more teachers, more policemen, and more firemen if we buy fewer jets, bombs, and stop democratizing the middle-east.  For every billion spent on defense, we create 11,200 jobs; whereas, for every billion spent on education, we create 26,700 jobs.  This one is a no brainer, cutting defense by $100 billion and transferring that money to education, will generate a net job creation of 1.5 million jobs.

To create high-paying jobs, we need to invest in new industries and new products.  We need rare-earth minerals and we need Helium 3 to support nuclear fusion.  To get these products, we build a moon-base and extract them from the Moon.  The best part is that we do not need to worry about pollution, endangering the environment, or competing with low-wage countries.  A project like this takes government investment to build the infrastructure and private industry will do the rest.  We did the same for the airlines and the freeway system.  Without government leadership on these large projects, we lose our competitive edge.  One need only look at our rail industry to recognize how terribly we have failed depending on the free-market to provide us with the best transportation.  Building a national high-speed railway service built with American labor, American steel, and American engineering is another way to create several million new jobs.

Finally, we need to construct housing for 100 million new Americans over the next 40 years.  We cannot continue to invest in suburban sprawl, we need new ultra-modern high density cities similar to those one finds elsewhere in the world.  Our cities are blighted because people want to choose better schools for their kids with lower crime rates.  We need 25 million new housing units and these can be built efficiently and cost effectively in new cities.  Doing so will create several million more jobs for construction workers laid off during the current crisis. These are the kinds of things that can be done to create jobs without wasting government funds.

The Justice Party is approaching this problem from a different perspective instead of from the corporate one.  We start from the worker, the one who actually needs the job.  We look at the skills of the worker and find him/her a job.  It’s a lot easier to create jobs for people employing their skills than to retrain every American to fulfill a need that will change in one to ten years.  We focus on the needs of the people, not the needs of Multi-nationals.  Our candidate Rocky Anderson clearly understands this issue, has a good relationship with unions, and is determined to remove corporations from government.  Here’s a newsflash, corporations are not people.  Support Rocky in November, I do.

Ceramic Membrane Technology for CO2 Separation

Yesterday, I met with Dr. Franci Huang at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio.  He described a technology that they invented that separates CO2 from flue gas via a ceramic membrane encapsulating molten Lithium Zirconate.  This technology first began to be studied in earnest in 2000 (http://www.osti.gov/bridge/servlets/purl/788102-ci5lYC/native/788102.pdf).  CO2 has a natural affinity for Lithium Zirconate and in a molten state, it dramatically enhances its ability to trap and release CO2.  Further, the relative cost of using this technology is low because the industrial user does not need to cool the flue gas for separation and there are no moving parts or regular replacement supplies to drive up the cost.  This may not be a panacea for our CO2 problem but it is a process that if universally accpeted will lead to dramatic reductions in CO2 production by industry.  The second part of the problem is what to do with all the CO2 that is captured.

Dr. Huang had a number of ideas that on the surface might help us with our problem.  The first use of CO2 he suggested was to replace the fracking chemicals with liquid CO2.  Liquid CO2 acts as a solvent and disolves oils and once it reaches a warming temperature, evaporates leaving no pollutant to dispose of, excepting the CO2 released into the atmosphere.  In this case, it was material that would have been released any way but we solved a groundwater pollution issue.  Worse case, we end up with some new sources of carbonated drinking water.

Another novel idea he had was bonding the CO2 to silica and using it has building material.  Certainly CO2 converted to carbonates is useful in low-humidity applications but bonding it to silica would enable us to permanently trap our excess CO2 and benefit from it.  Although, there are some technological hurdles that we need to overcome, humanity has a strong incentive to develop unique ways to store CO2 long-term (http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/04/20/1019691108.full.pdf).  In the short-term we have to continue to find ways to reduce our output of CO2 but over the long-term, this is a problem we can solve.

It is unreasonable to assume that we can cutoff production of CO2 entirely and at the Justice Party we are interested in innovative solutions that create economic opportunities to solve difficult problems.  We support regulations that require industrial polluters to install ceramic membrane technology despite potentially higher electricity costs.  Solving the CO2 production problem is too important to delay into the future, this is a solution that is available now and we need to fast track it to get it into common use.  Some regulations are good, they protect us from corporate avarice.

Blood Taxes

One of the realities of war is that someone has to pay for it and that someone is usually the middle-class taxpayers.  When war is far away and almost never touches upon the taxpayer individually then it passes to the background much like most of the noise coming out of Washington.  Unfortunately, it is not that simple.  If one pays taxes to a government that engages in war, then that taxpayer is just as responsible for the mayhem as the soldier firing the weapon or the CIA agent flying the drone.  One cannot fight a war without funds as we learned during the Iran-Contra hearings and nothing has changed since then.

America attacked Afghanistan on the pretense of hunting down Al Qaeda and its leaders.  Had that been our only objective, things might have gone differently, instead we got involved in nation building in a part of the world we had no business being in.  To compound this unfortunate decision, President Bush initiated a war in Iraq based on a lie.  In one sense, war was inevitable because we were killing the children of Iraq with our sanctions program and Saddam Hussein was not going to give in to our demands.  Hind-sight is twenty-twenty and looking back things look like they took a wrong turn somewhere.

President Obama was supposed to change all that but he just continued it, compounding our previous mistakes with adventures in Libya, continuing the occupation of Afghanistan and now prepping for a fight in Syria.  What goes unaccounted for is the human tragedy that takes place every time a drone strikes snuffs out another innocent life.  We console ourselves with the thought that it is taking place outside America with the notion that life is not as valuable for those people.  When we make excuses for the daily murders committed in the name of fighting the war on terror, we become enablers.  The truth is that we are enablers and we are responsible for those deaths because we pay our blood taxes and we do nothing to stop the killing.  What is even worse is the military that participates in these killings using the absurd justification that they are following orders.  I cannot even fathom following an order that required me to engage in extrajudicial assassination of someone because they disagreed with me.  If that were the sole justification for murdering people, there would be a lot of dead people in the streets.  I would rather be discharged dishonorably knowing I did the right thing.

The Obama Administration has judicial reviews justifying the continued murder of innocent women and children to fight an undeclared war against an undeclared enemy in an undeclared hostile zone.  At what point will that justification transfer to Detroit or Los Angeles because there is no difference between the preemptive murder of Americans overseas for what they may do and the preemptive murder of Americans in America.  The sad part is that our President is not wholly responsible for his actions, we are each and every day we pay our blood taxes.  As long as you pay taxes to the Federal government, you empower them to kill in your name for their own designs which has nothing to do with what we want our leaders to accomplish.  The oft heard excuse is that no one in Washington listens and I am not important enough or these people want to hurt us so we have to hit them first before they can hit us.  I guess if you were blowing up my brothers and sisters, I would want to hit you, too. As long as we continue to use drones to kill our adversaries anywhere in the world, we will continue to have new enemies created each and every day.  For those who say they cannot be responsible for what happens in Washington, you are an enabler because 60 cents of every one dollar in income taxes you pay goes to feed the war machine.

Celebrities got together to ban war diamonds to slow the pace of killing in Africa but they are doing nothing to turn off the flood of money that finances the military industrial complex that engorges itself on the blood of the innocent.  These people are worse than vampires, they are the reason we have war, they are the participants.  One does not have to pull a trigger to kill someone, one just pays a mercenary to do the dirty work.  America has plenty of willing mercenaries because that is one way to gain citizenship, kill for America, get a passport.  If you hire someone to kill someone, you go to jail, in America when a multi-national hires the military to back a coup or foment a revolution, the CEO gets a bonus.  It is time to stop the blood taxes, it is time to realize the peace dividend that President Bush stole from us, destroying our economy in the process.

The Justice Party does not support blood taxes, we support peace and dialogue.  The Justice Party does not support killing people with drone strikes outside a war zone because that is a matter for local law enforcement.  The Justice Party does not support another war in Syria or Iran just to bump quarterly profits and create jobs.  We need to stop paying the blood taxes and instead begin paying peace taxes.  The justification to go to war in Syria is that 1,000s are dying, well 1,000s are dying in Mexico yet we do nothing.  Mexico is our neighbor and instead of finding solutions to the problem we created, we prefer to go halfway around the world and solve other people’s problems.  It is time to lay down the arms and return to the United States.  Anyone that engages in the indiscriminate killing of another person is guilty of murder, that is the law.  President Obama has yet to provide a justification for his indiscriminate killing other than national interest.  How much more blood must be spilled before Justice comes to Washington?  How many more children must be butchered to sate the bloodlust in Washington?  How long will you continue to pay your share of blood taxes?  If you want Justice in Washington, then you have only one candidate able to deliver it, Rocky Anderson.

America’s War Against Minorities

Reading the headlines, another massacre, death and destruction, a gift of the drug war, a war fought without end, destroying lives but helping none.  For 40 years, our nation has fought the war on drugs and after 40 years, the only thing we have to show for it is packed prisons, broken homes, and the militarization of our police.  People say we have to keep fighting but what are we fighting for?

Our last three presidents smoked dope and one shared a little blow.  Drug use is endemic and still we keep fighting this war.  Now we have a private prison system to hold the noncriminals, prisons that compete with local industry paying slave wages of $.25 an hour.  Why move offshore, when you can open a new factory at the local prison?  Over 70% of African American children are raised in single parent households because law enforcement focuses on poor minorities unable to fight back.  The drug war is lost and yet we keep fighting it like Ahab chasing his white whale.

There are lots of reasons to use drugs so let’s start with the main one, hopelessness.  We sent our jobs overseas but did not create new ones to replace them.  Without economic opportunities, there is only hopelessness in our inner-cities.  Young children walking along the street choose role models of successful people, the ones they see every day working the street corners, after all America worships money and the drug dealers have it.  Rapstars and singers promote the drug culture making it cool and exciting but most of all they make it legitimate.  Our only response is tougher sentencing and longer jail terms.  With over 1 million people in jail for nonviolent drug offenses, it begs the question, does this even make sense?

In Portugal things got so bad, they decided to think outside the box and decriminalized drugs.  The naysayers decried the horrific possibilities that drug use would escalate and more would succumb.  The truth is there was little change in the number of drug users and crime has dropped dramatically.  This issue is one of personal responsibility, not societal responsibility.  People have to make individual choices about right and wrong.  When the government takes that responsibility away from people and pretends to be the parent, inevitably people will resist, that is what children do.  If someone chooses to ruin his or her life with drugs that is his or her choice, to suggest that imprisoning that person will somehow benefit society defies common sense.  Once imprisoned, a person is forced to join gangs for protection, they will never find a decent job in the future, their family is split-up, and the state takes on the burden of supporting more children.  Sure some people need a helping hand to manage their problem but imprisoning them is not help, it is a disaster.

In Texas, cross-border trade continues to drop as Americans become more and more frightened with every headline.  In fact, the US border has become a no-go zone driven by the need of cartels to control smuggling routes.  We continue to punish people for using Marijuana despite the fact that Marijuana is far less dangerous to one’s health than cigarettes.  Marijuana should be legalized and regulated like cigarettes and alcohol.  People call it a gateway drug but that is not true, the gateway drug of choice is alcohol.  Poor people use harder drugs because they do not have physician friends to prescribe them legal pharmaceuticals.  No reason to use coke if one can get percodan or valium from their local CVS.  We feed our children Ritilin and then act surprised when they get hooked on harder drugs later in life or prescribe zantex and other drugs to help one get through the day.  It is time to behave rationally and accept that, like alcoholism, a certain percentage of our population is susceptible to drug addiction.  We must treat the addiction, not punish the person. Our constitution guarantees equality to all men (women, too), not just the ones with the proper paperwork and our nation was built on the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  I doubt anyone can find happiness looking through a set of steel bars.  One cannot commit a crime against oneself, one can only choose to commit stupid acts.  The government is not our father and mother and it needs to let go.  Stop the war on drugs and bring peace to our neighborhoods, our cities, and our borders.

The Justice party demands a return to individual responsibility to rebalance our society from one driven by governmental control of every phase of our life to one focused on wellness.  Our candidate Rocky Anderson supports ending the war on drugs, eliminating overseas efforts to stop production of drugs, legalizing the use of Marijuana, and decriminalizing the use of drugs.  Justice is more than a strong court -system, it includes showing compassion and mercy as well.  One must have a balance between a firm hand and a caring one.  The war on drugs is a war on minorities because they are the ones filling our prisons, leaving their children cast adrift in the concrete jungles prey to the drug dealers and criminals roaming our streets.  End the war on drugs and we end the need to have private prisons.  End the war on drugs and we end the need for so many families to collect welfare.  End the war on drugs and return peaceful borders to our southern states.  End the war on drugs and return personal liberty to our people.  Support Rocky Anderson for President and bring sanity and Justice back to Washington.

Running for President – The Cult of Personality

            It’s extraordinary watching the media coverage of our Presidential candidates.  Instead of an open discussion of the important issues facing Americans, we are treated to a political version of the Worldwide Wrestling Federation.  The 2008 campaign morphed candidate Obama into a new version of Superman generating impossible expectations on a promise of “hope and change.”  The slugfest, better known as the Reality TV comedic Republican debates, went on month after month with each new episode featuring a different player until there were two.  This notion that Presidents are the equivalent of rock stars with the expected morality of a monk results in disillusionment and despair among the people when we find our heroes cannot live up to expectations.  Who can forget twittergate starring Anthony Weiner or Herman Cain swearing he had never groped that vivacious blonde on stage.  In building these unrealistic expectations, Americans set themselves up for the great disappointment.

            President Obama seeks reelection under the premise that freed of the need to please the populace to win reelection, he will suddenly govern the way everyone expected him to the first time.  I am not sure that even makes sense in a dystopian world, let alone in today’s present balkanized environment.  As Matt Damon so eloquently put it that he’d “rather have a one-term President with some balls who actually got stuff done.”  When comparing President Obama with President Bush, one finds a striking similarity in policy decisions, especially when it comes to defense and national security.  That should not come as a surprise because Presidents can only set the tone of government, it’s the cabinet officers that actually run government.  In truth, the President is not much more than the face of government and one must look beyond the Madison Avenue face and look upon the real power brokers.

Gov Romney essentially offers himself as “nobama.”  He wants you to vote for him based on his Brooks Brothers suits, his million dollar Ken doll smile, and his promise to do whatever he said before because he meant it.  Here is a man who claims experience but cannot run fast enough away from his experience as Governor of Massachusetts.  Gov Romney does not do anything that might put him in a bad light, his words are all focused grouped, and the marketing people running his campaign make sure that he follows his script.  Unfortunately, he keeps messing up his lines and sounds like the real person he is, out of touch, part of the elite establishment, and completely unprepared for the Office of President.  Since when does running an asset stripping company make one prepared to be President.  What is he going to do, sell off all the Federal assets and outsource government services to the Indians?  Despite his handlers’ best efforts to rebrand Gov Romney, they have utterly failed.

We have to get beyond the messaging, the focus groups, and the linguistic hoop jumping that represents today’s media coverage.  None of the candidates have offered a vision for America.  None of the candidates have offered a solution for unemployment.  Both President Obama and Gov Romney offer half a solution, as for the other half, your SOL.  It’s unconscionable that our candidates continue to abandon the very voters they seek to impress and demand a vote for the lesser of two evils.  Evil is evil and does not belong in the White House.  When it comes to third parties, the pundits and paid media consultants explain why their ideas are too narrow or un-American.  I feel like I am living in some Alice in Wonderland story where the protagonists continue their insanity and everyone congratulates them.

As Americans, we need to move beyond the cult of personality that surrounds the President.  His toilet, while nicer, still does the same job, the President is just a person like everyone else with the same fears, the same longings, and the same disappointments.  Once we remove the superstar qualities, we get at the real issue of what we expect: leadership, vision, and problem-solving.  President Obama has already demonstrated his complete inability to provide either of the three.  Gov Romney has run away from his record as fast as a car elevator can carry him.  The only sane response is “none of the above.”  We need an alternate candidate that possesses the qualities we desire, one that is willing to go beyond petty party politics and tackle the real problems we face as a nation.  No one is perfect but a choice between bad and worse is unacceptable.

The biggest criticism of third party candidates is that they lack experience.  That’s a fair response and I posit that based on experience, President Bush would make a great candidate.  Another problem is that third-party candidates lack name recognition and trust.  Can a President who only delivered on less than 30% of his promises or an etch-o-sketch candidate really offer trust?  The final criticism is that third-party candidates spoil the vote and reward the election to the other party.  The best example of this is the 2000 election when Al Gore lost Florida because of Ralph Nader.  That is an absurd notion, Al Gore lost Florida because of Al Gore.  Had he represented his base and offered viable programs with broad appeal, there would not have been a need for people to express their anger.

Personally, I think the only way a third-party candidate can win is if he or she represents both sides of the argument.  To win, a candidate must represent the good part of both halves and leave the nasty parts behind.  Both the progressive wing of the Democratic Party and the Libertarian side of the Republican Party have great ideas.  Both groups have shared values that transcend party politics and speak to the national character of the American people.  Unfortunately, like oil and water, getting the two-sides to find common cause is like pulling teeth, difficult.  Here in Texas, we hope to unite both of these groups and form a progressive-libertarian party to demonstrate that government can be compassionate and thrifty at the same time.  To demonstrate that America can be a partner overseas promoting the cause of Justice, we support disengaging our troops from their overseas commitments.  Finally, a progressive-libertarian group would seek the elimination of corporate personhood and the vast sums of money that corrupt our electoral process.  Let us join together and return Justice to our nation, support the Justice Party of Texas and our champion, Rocky Anderson.

Uniting Progressives – Secularists and Christians Working Together

Progressive Christians – Balancing the conflict between secularists and faith

                Lost in the argument of today’s confrontational politics is the realization that Christianity is a progressive movement.  Certainly, some Christians continue to cling to Old Testament interpretations of moral character failing to recognize that a message that was not inclusive and full of love is not compatible with Christ’s teachings.  Can any serious person imagine Jesus walking down the street and not stopping to help someone in need?  Would Jesus ask them, do you have health insurance? Or, where’s your birth certificate?  Christianity is about compassion and community.  If one takes the teachings in the New Testament to heart then one cannot be as closed-minded as many on the religious right seem to be.  No matter how one lives his or her life, if the heart is not pure, nothing else matters.  When one finally arrives in heaven, one will not be meeting Santa Claus checking a list to see who is naughty and nice, a person’s heart will be the key to entry.  At present, there are two sides to the hateful display we see daily blasting from our television sets, the religious right and secularists.

The secularists claim some ancient wrong against them because they have rationalized their way to true knowledge while the rest of humanity continues to crawl through the mud of religious belief.  The religious right claims purity of purpose despite the thousands of years of religious inspired genocide.  The secularists tend to gloss over the experience of living under Napoleon, Stalin, and Mao but can be heard to repeat every religious massacre since the dawn of time.  Within this context, where can progressive Christians find succor and support?  Is there room to negotiate with secularists who revile all believers with a hint of intellectual superiority or should progressive Christians ally themselves with the fundamentalists and hold their nose at the anti-diluvium worldview of some of the movement’s leaders?

A true progressive would recognize the fundamental right of each person to decide one’s own personal belief, yet we have many secular progressives that are closed minded to the possibility that a rational person can believe in God.  Regardless of the factual issues or scientific analysis, religion is an emotional experience unrelated to science and maintaining a belief in God is wholly compatible with being a scientist as well.  If one ignores the emotional component in one’s life, then one only has science to provide comfort and that is a very cold mistress.  What science lacks is a moral and ethical code to live by and religion provides that along with a historical reference to its origins.  It is not necessary to know the exact origin of the universe, nor the exact process of its formation, one only needs to recognize that the universe follows fundamental laws of science and nature that maintain a symmetry that continues millennia after millennia.

For secularists and Christians to work together, both must accept the other’s right to personal belief.  After that, there are relatively few disagreements.  Both groups want to see an end to corporate personhood as well as restrict the ability of corporations or wealthy individuals to unduly influence our election process.  Further, both groups want to see a more equitable health maintenance scheme without gutting basic entitlements for the poor.  Neither group supports the expansion of our military adventures, nor do they support the continued militarization of the nation.  What both groups would like to see is a return to respectful discourse allowing us to sit down and find compromises to the seemingly unsolvable problems that face us.

The Justice Party respects the right of everyone to maintain personal beliefs without imposing them on others.  We support the continuation of separation of church and state as envisioned by our founders.  We respect the right of communities like the Amish, Quakers, and others to determine their own moral codes while living among the general community.  We recognize that there are differences between secular progressives and Christian progressives regarding a women’s choice and believe that we can agree to disagree until we regain control of our government and end endemic corruption.  The Republicans and Democrats in power use this singular issue to prevent us from uniting against them knowing that an emotional issue with no middle ground will continue to divide our nation allowing them to eliminate any nascent opposition.  Some suggest that holding the line to prevent a take-over of the Supreme Court is worth the cost of continuing to support President Obama despite his rejection of progressive causes and principles.  We reject this idea based on the rulings that the current court has made specifically relating to Citizens United.

Many maintain that the Justice Party could only act as a spoiler as if there was a true competition between the major two-parties.  Instead, there is a seesaw effect as the Republicans and Democrats trade the Office of the President back and forth in false competitive contests.  When one looks at the economic policies, foreign policy, and actual spending proposals, Republicans and Democrats have only minor differences.  They accentuate social differences in an attempt to distract the voting public and continue previous policies of previous presidents regardless of party affiliation.  Instead of calling for treaty mandated trials against former President Bush and former Vice-President Cheney, our newly elected President Obama swept the issue of torture under the rug.  Instead of allowing the Patriot Act to fade away, President Obama reauthorized it.  Instead of negotiating changes in military spending or improving education spending, President Obama renewed the Bush tax cuts without getting anything in return.  It is clear that our elected officials work for big corporations and the banks, not the people.  As for indiscriminate drone strikes, no progressive could ever support them.

Unless progressives unite together toward a common purpose, we will continue to find ourselves lost in the wilderness.  The Supreme Court is important but so is maintaining Medicare benefits, Social Security benefits, and funding for the poor and those in need in our communities.  We need to protect jobs and end free-trade which simply means, free to pillage American jobs.  Both parties largely ignore climate change and promote unrestrained fracking and oil exploration.  How many progressives are ready to engage in another unwinnable war in Iran just to fatten the coffers of banks and the MIC?  Are progressives really prepared to sacrifice all of the benefits of the 20^th century to return to the lifestyle of the 18^th century?  The Justice Party recognizes there remains a wide gulf between secularists and Christians and we do not expect this problem to go away and propose an open dialogue after the election.  For now, we must unite behind one single outcome, the return of governance to the people, the elimination of corporate personhood, and ending corrupt campaign financing.

Let’s have a real debate.

Probably the most boring reality TV show this season is the Republican debates.  After the first three episodes, there wasn’t much new information, instead everyone listened for nuances or changed positions.  I’m sure Rick Perry would love to remember them but he may have forgotten the third one.  They have really been exercises in patience for the vast majority of the electorate because they have not focused on the real issues.  Let’s have an honest debate between candidates not coached for soundbites and ridiculous policies designed to excite a base fed with a strictly red meat diet.

I propose that the candidates for Americans Elect hold a debate with the Buddy Roemer, Gary Johnson, Jill Stein, and Rocky Anderson.  Let’s get the different parties and their views out there to enlighten the electorate and present valid choices.  None of us should be afraid of putting our policies out in the open and getting people to judge them. I even have a proposed forum, TYT/Current TV.

Former VP Al Gore needs to build audience participation in his new venture and a debate hosted by Cenk Ugyer, Keith Olbermann, and a few other worthy parties could really present an informative moment for everyone as well as real entertainment.  It might be nice listening to people who did not think US territory extended across the Mediterranean into Israel or that the only way to solve our deficit problems was through tax cuts.

I propose that we hold a webcast between the South Carolina primary and the one in Florida, another mid-February, and then one in mid-March after Super Tuesday.  To further broaden the appeal, one of them could be held on the Real News and another on C-Span.  Instead of soundbite answers, respondents could be held to a two-minute rule.

This is a year when we need to get a broader picture of whom the electorate can choose from and with the flexibility that the Internet offers, the debaters could simply skype into the event instead of traveling because in the end it is the substance that we want, not the entertainment.

Mike Ballantine is a Green Party candidate for US President on Americans Elect.