Oregon Strategist

Reinventing the Oregon Dream

Youth and the Republican Party: An American Recovery

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Republican Elephant and Democratic DonkeyParty warfare and polarization of ideologies may be significantly to blame for the finger-pointing and squabbling in Washington D.C. Open primaries, term limits, and policies that suspend Congressional pay if shutdowns occur are just some of the answers to questions of how we must reform the internal mechanisms of our government in order to get back on track for being a proud and confident nation.

Yet, these policies may be some time away from now until young leaders are put in power that are willing to limit their own power for long-term objectives. Until that time, we must ask serious questions about how all of us – Republicans, Democrats and Independents – can come together to help shape the new Republican Party and bring back a balance of power to the system to check the unprecedented spending and waste in our federal government.

Every dollar our government spends today is a dollar that young people will have to pay back in their future. This is inherently unfair and unjust. Entrenched leaders in Washington D.C. continue to waste the money of future generations for their own political short-term gain. Our interests, the interests of those in their thirties, twenties and younger – are not being represented.

Young people have an opportunity to take over the Republican Party here in Oregon – be you Democrat, Republican or Independent. We have the opportunity to shape the party for ourselves and take back what is our future to spend – not theirs.

And conservative and progressive values, the real kind that is (as opposed to the kind promoted by the media), may be the kind we younger generations can embrace. We know what it is like to be under the weight of massive educational debt, not to have the employment opportunities we were told would be waiting for us on the other side, and to find ourselves unable to fulfill our American Dreams.

Our current leaders have failed us. We must now take up the torch and lead with real principles. That is, with self-sacrifice, courage, and pride in a future America we can own and love.

Entitlements are wasting our money. Military ventures are wasting our money. Centralized corporate-sponsored federal programs are wasting our money. Congress is wasting our money. This is our future. We want this future to be green, healthy, productive, and local.

To get back in the game we must go to work. We must find work in any sector. If it means working in an area we perceive to be below our educational level, we must work. We must reject anything handed to us. Only then can we hold our heads high. And we must hold our heads high in order to lead.

We will bring jobs back from overseas. We will go to the ports, find out what China is shipping to us, and make those products here. We will make them better and less expensive. We will encourage entrepreneurs. We will educate. We will stockpile. Our future will be one of great influence.

We will put our money into credit unions and keep our organizations nimble, flexible and local – like Privateers. We will execute a trade surplus and pay down our deficit. And we will not be reckless with the future of our next wave of youth.

We will reform Congress. We will take only one term in any given political office and will condemn political entrenchment and the establishment. We will limit our salaries because what we do is a service to our Great Nation, not a pillage of our Great Nation. We will give back, we will pay the way forward, we will unite, we will overcome and we will live mightily on our principles, work and love.

Timothy Crawley, a native son of Oregon, is a candidate for the 2014 United States Senate seat for Oregon.

A New Feudal America

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Statue of LibertyThe top 10 percent of earners took more than half of the country’s total income in 2012, the highest level recorded since the government began collecting the relevant data a century ago, according to an updated study….The top 1 percent took more than one-fifth of the income earned by Americans, one of the highest levels on record since 1913, when the government instituted an income tax. –As reported in the on-line New York Times, September 11, 2013

I’m a Matt Damon fan, so I’m looking forward to seeing his latest film, Elysium. The movie takes place in a future time when the entire Earth has become a slum so that the very wealthy have taken up residence in an exclusive retreat in space, visible from Earth, but inaccessible and forbidden to the mass of humanity.

The irony of Elysium is that it is not really a film about the future: it is a metaphor for the present economic situation in the United States of America, a situation that should shame us. (And bravo to Matt Damon and the Elysium writers for their political sensibility and boldness!)

The idea of an America of economic democracy—not Socialism, mind you—in which middle class prosperity is virtually guaranteed to anyone willing to labor with earnest ingenuity for the fruits of modest wealth has died.  The reigning economic culture is a throwback to the late 19th century and the era of the robber barons. The rich deserve to get richer and those in the underclass must learn to accept their suffering if they have not been lucky enough to design (and patent) a jackpot computer app or a chance to buy a loaded security with adequate insurance for its failure.

Wealth is accumulating in the pockets of the corporate magnates, money taken out of the pockets of the former middle class. The very rich now do live in a separate society prohibited to the ordinary masses. Traditional means for righting the inequities between the very wealthy and the working class—such as strengthening organized labor—have fallen into disrepute. The 1990’s taught the young they have a right to aspire to great wealth before they turn 30 and if they don’t achieve that, well, they’ll have to accept that they’re just losers.

There is no longer any community sensibility advocating a continued American aspiration for the wider distribution of wealth.  Moreover, with the help of our advanced technology, the corporations have acquired and are employing the means to make its customers—us—their servants.  By reducing personal services and compelling us to accept more efficient automated alternatives to increase the corporate bottom-line, they substitute our labors for services we used to take for granted. (Consider, for example, the nightmarish recorded message option menus that now often prevent access to real human beings when we try to do business or file a complaint with a corporation or, for another example, the growing self-checkout lines in supermarkets.)

America has apparently become a new kind of feudal state: a plutocratic regime run by and for the benefit of the already rich.  What can we do about it?

Harrison Sheppard, San Francisco, CA