Former Governor Ventura: Take Party names off the election ballots so voters will really have to find out what the candidates stand for.

(The Subsidiarity Times) In a radio interview with talk show host Brian Wilson of Brian Wilson and the Afternoon Drive, former Governor Jesse Ventura (Reform/Independence-MN), promoting his new book “DemoCRIPS and ReBLOODlicans: No More Gangs in Government”, put forward a very interesting proposition on how to get voters back to voting for individual candidates and what they stand for rather then just a political party, as well as revealing some little-known facts about his own term as governor in Minnesota.

“This could start at the local level. Why do we allow party or gang symbols and names on an election ballot? Turn them into Political Action Committees, the same ways that teachers union, the firemen, whatever, they could still endorse; but they do that by design. By putting the name Republican or Democrat next to the candidate, you don’t even have to know who the candidate is; if you are conservative you go in and look for Republican, if you are liberal, you go in and look for Democrat. If they remove all that, well then it is imperative to the voter then: ‘What does John Smith stand for?’”

This proposition followed a joke that Ventura shared with Wilson where he proposed that a law be made whereby every political candidate would be required to wear a NASCAR racing suit adorned with the names/symbols of all of his sponsors so the voters could then become informed voters and so know who “owns’ each particular candidate.

Further on in the interview, Ventura revealed some rather interesting facts about his own campaign for governor and his term as governor in Minnesota. He first revealed that he pulled off the impossible by getting Republicans and Democrats to unite together to oppose him during his last year as governor.

“Who else in the country can accomplish that today? Nobody” said Ventura, referencing the gridlock currently going on in Washington D.C.

Ventura then added a couple more fascinating facts “Let me go back to my campaign for a minute. I never took over fifty or a hundred dollars. I didn’t take any PAC money from any special interest group; and get this, here is what the media doesn’t want the public to know about my campaign in Minnesota: I only raised three hundred thousand dollars to become governor. So I bet I am the only elected official in fifty years in a major election, Governor, Congress, anything like that, who actually made more money doing the job then what I spent to get it…and because I didn’t take special interest (money), I am also the only governor or whatever in my four years, I never met with a lobbyist once.”

© 2012 The Subsidiarity Times. Audio courtesy of Brian Wilson and the Afternoon Drive Show; re-published with permission. All rights reserved. This material may not be re-published, re-broadcast, re-written, re-transcribed or re-distributed without written permission from author.

The Ideological Idols

When People think they possess the secret

of a perfect social organization which makes evil

impossible, they also think that they can use any

means, including violence and deceit, in order to

bring that organization into being. Politics then

becomes a “secular religion” which operates under

the illusion of creating paradise in this world.

– Pope John Paul II

Ideologies are a natural result of a democratic-republican form of government. People all have opinions on how problems should be handled at the level of government and in a free democratic-republican system, they are allowed to voice these opinions in debates, elections, and the public square (i.e. talk radio, television and the workplace). Unfortunately, many people believe in their ideologies to an extreme and so come to think their ideology is the be-all and end-all of their world. They worship what the ideology presents to them as the ultimate goal of those following that ideology. It is a sad reality.

Totalitarianism: The idol of those who follow the Totalitarian ideologies (Socialism; Communism; Nazism; Fascism) is Government; All-Powerful, Big Brother Government. They believe that government is the magic elixir which can solve all social, political and financial problems at every level and push for government to be given as much power as the world can give so they can solve these problems and thus produce Utopia. This “heaven on earth” cannot exist in this world because man is not perfect. Mistakes and abuses will be made and in a totalitarian system, wrongdoing and mistakes can be legalized or covered up because it is sanctioned by government which leads to greater harm for the people. {The failure and fall of the Soviet Union is a prime example of this}.

Liberalism: Power is the shrine at which liberals adore. They are similar to Totalitarians in that they believe government should be the vehicle to affect change that is needed, but they want the power for themselves and their friends because they believe they can solve everything that is wrong in the world if they are only given the power. What they fail to realize is that with power comes tremendous temptation and that temptation can corrupt anyone and so lead to the abuse of a system. {Good examples of this are scandal-ridden American presidencies such as those of Ulysses S. Grant and Warren G. Harding}.

Moderatism: Moderates glorify public opinion as their deity. Moderates believe that if the people want something then it should be given to them. They believe this will result in true peace and, by default, utopia. If the majority of the people want it, then it must be good for them and so bring about good results for them. The problem here is that deception is possible at any level and when the general public is deceived about certain ideas or facts, then caving in to public opinion can lead to disastrous results. {The French Revolution is a great example of this}.

Conservatism: Money is the bottom line for conservatives. The commonly accepted priority of most conservatives is fiscal responsibility, but this degenerates into simple money hunger. Money is what they are most interested in because to them it is what buys happiness and ensures that they have the ability to keep that happiness. They acknowledge that utopia cannot be accomplished on this earth but that does not bother them as much so long as they have the money to solve their own ills. They only wish to limit government when it hampers their ability to make money. This attitude is wrong, however, because it has been proved time and again that money cannot buy happiness or solve every ill. Some issues can only be solved by things that money cannot buy, such as love and truth. {Charles Dickens eloquently proves this in his classic story A Christmas Carol}.

Libertarianism: Libertarians worship personal freedom. A large number of libertarians believe that, as long as they do not infringe on someone else’s personal freedom, they should be free to do whatever they wish to themselves and that no form of authority has a right to say otherwise. They think that if everyone is left to rise or fall based on their own virtues or vices regarding their personal habits, then a more complete and happy society can be achieved. This view is dangerous in the sense that it does not acknowledge the legitimate place of authority on many levels, sometimes not even at the family or community level. This mindset tends to absolve people from the obligation to “Love Thy Neighbor” whereby one person can help another avoid inflicting great harm to himself/herself. While libertarians are correct in feeling that certain levels of government should not dictate personal habits because government is force, they are incorrect in feeling that the decisions that an individual makes regarding their own personal habits or livelihood should be left unaddressed by anyone at all. The family has the authority to talk to a person about their personal habits and way of living and in some cases this responsibility extends to members of the community such as the individual’s neighbors and co-workers. {Tragic deaths from bad personal habits such as drug abuse and irresponsible driving often stem from the same mindset as that which would fuel a libertarian society}.

Subsidiarism: Subsidiarism believes in problems being resolved at the most local level possible. People following this ideology wish to govern themselves by setting forth most of their own laws that they wish to follow in their own communities rather than always looking to the provincial or national government to run their lives and set their laws. Subsidiarists hold that the Creator is the one who is to be worshipped and respected because human beings receive their dignity from the Creator, Who made them as individuals and gave them their rights. They acknowledge that, as human beings, they are not perfect and cannot achieve total perfection, but that the faults that individual human beings show, (whether its in dealing with their fellow human beings, or in their own personal habits), can be best handled and settled at the appropriate level, whether it be the family level, the community level, the provincial level (for serious faults such as murder), or the national level (for grave crimes, such as treason). This will not bring about utopia, but it can isolate the instances of abuse and poor management of problems which arise and so keep the harm that comes as a result restricted to the lowest number of people possible. {The argument could be made that the early United States is the closest historical example of this kind of society}.

© 2012 New Agora and The Subsidiarity Times. All rights reserved. This material may not be re-published, re-broadcast, re-written or re-distributed without written permission from blog author.

The Importance of the Young

This piece is dedicated to the young people of three great American movements: The Ron Paul campaign, the Campaign for Liberty movement and the Young Americans for Liberty movement.

Many times over the course of my ongoing career as a high school teacher, I am confronted by fellow teachers and authority figures in the education movement who often take me to task for, as they put it, “asking too much of the children”. In other words, some feel my assignments are far too challenging; others believe the children are not smart enough to grasp what I am teaching and that I should dramatically reduce the intelligence level of what I am teaching and the assignment tasks which I am asking of the children; still others give the argument of “If I cannot see myself doing what you ask, then there is no way the children can do what you ask”. This mentality is what makes me the angriest as a teacher. It angers me even more then misbehavior on the part of the students. While prudence in submitting challenges to students is wise (and as a teacher I recognize that), the arguments given in favor of prudence make my blood boil. Why are children and the young not allowed to attempt to master challenges? Why is the intelligence level of children and the young constantly being made portrayed as small and insignificant? Why are the young so frequently dismissed like small pawns or servants who should only be doing their masters’ beck and call? Why are things not allowed to be logically explained to them like the rational human beings that they are? Why are they force-fed what the older generation defines as truth and told to accept it without discussion instead of either having it logically explained to them or being allowed to use their own logic to come to the same conclusion themselves? Why are the young being marginalized and shown so much flagrant disrespect in today’s world?

There is a movement going on to condition many of today’s young people to accept a mentality that once they earn their wages, pay their bills and do their chores then they can relax and do whatever they want around their own residences as long as they keep out of the sight of the public; they have no other responsibilities. The attempt to impose this mentality upon the young is assisted by the perception given by popular culture, such as television, advertisements and the news media, that the young have lax “whatever” attitudes in their minds and a disinclination in their nature to do anything with their lives. For these reasons, many factions in our current culture tend to look on children, teenagers and young adults as bothersome, troublemaking, pleasure-seeking brats who need to be “subjugated”, kept at a low intelligence level and made to work as common laborers barely making enough to survive and kept happy by being allowed to satisfy petty, un-intellectual and not-always-moral desires. This movement is being encouraged and pushed forward on both sides of the ideological spectrum, Left and Right. It is also why the young tend to be a rebellious lot no matter what side of the ideological spectrum on which they fall. They see themselves as being talked-down-to, marginalized, misrepresented and, to put it bluntly, abused. This offends the young because is it at odds with their natural belief in their own self-dignity. The young want to be challenged, they want to have hope, they want to help drives to do great things and they want to learn more about our world. They will not be boxed into a set of pre-conceived ideas about themselves by the older generations. They want to find out logical, rational truth for themselves.

The young need to be encouraged in this mentality to discover or confirm rational logical truth on their own. This desire needs to be encouraged and cultivated at a young age so that by the time they become active members of their communities they can be a force for good rather then ill. We can already see the effects of how the marginalization of the young has led to increased crime rates and violence among the young, and how that has unsettled communities and led to police-state type tactics on the part of law enforcement. If the young were actually challenged with the opportunity to discover truth on their own and so be a more active, working part of their communities, there is no doubt that crime rates among the young would drop as they would be engaging in more wholesome pursuits. They would help build better communities for their elders and would be more inclined to assist the elderly in their old age which would lead to a more respectful, kinder culture all around. They would give hope for the future to a world which does not know hope in this day and age.

The young are our nation and our world’s future. They need to be academically challenged to improve their knowledge and intelligence, encouraged to logically discover the truth, given the respect befitting human beings and not stereotyped as either dumb brats only interested in their own pleasures or as very unintelligent beings who need everything spoon-fed to them. There needs to be a re-direction of our education movement towards the mentality of actually encouraging the young to assert and build themselves at many levels, whether they are children, teenagers or young adults. Those who have lived through the terrible period of being marginalized while in their youth should take the mentality of assisting the current young people to challenge themselves, assert themselves and discover the truth themselves. This way they can help the young overcome this additional barrier and assure themselves that there will be a future of hope.

God Bless the Young!

© 2012 New Agora and The Subsidiarity Times. All rights reserved. This material may not be re-published, re-broadcast, re-written or re-distributed without written permission from blog author.

A Third Party Manifesto

“A man who is made a prince by the favour of the people must work to retain their friendship;” – Niccolo Machiavelli

“Whatever your issue is, whether it’s racism or homophobia or policy issues or taxes or urban decay or health care, you’re not going to go anywhere with it if we don’t focus on the concentration of power.” – Ralph Nader

“If the people want to be free…there is no force that can stop them. If freedom is what we want, it is ours for the taking.” – Ron Paul

.

Americans have come to take the current political system of two major parties vying for government power for granted nowadays. It has become accepted that if one wishes to participate in and make policy changes at any level of government, then it has to be done while serving as a member of one of the two major parties. It is a classic example of an insider-only political system which, history shows, always leads to tyranny in some form or fashion.

The complaint that most people hear when discussing politics today is that there seems to be no major difference between the two major political parties. This analysis is very true. Many officials in both parties are genuinely concerned with the people they are seeking to represent and have different ideas on how to best do so. However, as seen by myself and many others who have worked in our nation’s capital for a time, there are very many insiders who seem to be the true power controlling the political machinery of both parties. As is natural with human nature, those who hold power are always reluctant to give it up. This truth has not only been witnessed by the outsiders who have worked in our nation’s capital, but has also been recognized and, in many cases, witnessed by those participating in the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements. They have voiced their displeasure at the fact that true government power is so interwoven between the two major political parties that favors and shifts at the top are simply traded between the two under the cover of the democratic process of elections. If this is so, then it means that a form of tyranny reigns in a country which was founded on the belief that all men are created equal and the premise of checked and restricted government.

So for the abolition of insider-control and the resulting government tyranny, the two party system needs to be dismantled and a truly free process needs to take its place. To bring about this free process, discrimination against the other political parties needs to stop at all levels: federal, state and local. The mark of a truly free society is where many different viewpoints are allowed to be heard on the public stage, especially amongst candidates running for positions to represent their communities.

To reach this desired free society where the viewpoints of all the political parties running for office are freely presented to the public, the following actions could be taken:

I. Presidential Elections

1. The Commission on Presidential Debates should be dissolved. Presidential debates should be put together and sponsored solely by private intellectual organizations such as colleges and institutes. Moderators should be put forward by the private organizations sponsoring the debates. News organizations should have no power over the debates except to broadcast them to the nation to watch.

2. The debate stage should not be restricted to just the candidates who are polling 15% or higher in the polls. That is an elitist system which has no place in a country where the First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees Freedom of Speech. Access to the debate stage should depend on ballot access. If a candidate is serious about their run for the presidency, then a modest plateau of ballot access in around ten states should not be difficult to reach and all parties should be held to this standard, including the Republicans and Democrats.

3. Ballot access should be charged for all candidates and political parties in every state and they should have to renew it before every election that the candidate or party is participating in. The access requirements should be set at a reasonable level of something like 2,000 valid signatures, which should not be difficult for a serious candidate to reach.

4. Government money given to political parties should be discontinued. Money for all political campaigns should be raised through fundraising by the political parties themselves.

II. State and Local Elections

1. Debates should be scheduled for all political races where political parties are involved and the public should be invited to come free of charge in order to hear the issues affecting their communities freely discussed. Debate moderators should be unaffiliated volunteers from amongst the voters or from private local organizations and not in the pay of any news organization or political party.

2. Ballot access should be made easily attainable for the serious candidate for office and should be required of all political parties seeking to run candidates for the office.

3. For local political races, the required number of valid signatures to obtain a place on the ballot should be set at a very small percentage of the population of the district the candidates are running to represent. Example: In a district consisting of 500 people, only 65 signatures should be required for a place on the local election ballot.

4. State law should mandate that positions in the hierarchy of any political party should be determined every year by a presidential caucus-type election-and-ascension process within the parties themselves, rather then by appointment or a once-every-four-years selection process. This will help prevent the solidifying of power by any faction within a political party and will ensure that the people’s wishes shall be better represented.

III. Constitutional Amendments: Federal & State – Checking the Power of Political Parties

1. The Constitution of the United States of America was founded on the idea of checks and balances limiting government power. Where the Founding Fathers did not prescribe checks and balances was in the realm of political parties’ power because they correctly foresaw that the formation of political parties would lead to a struggle for power rather then a true representation of the people. For this reason they sought to avoid political parties. However, political parties are an inevitable result of any democratic system due to the human tendency of like-minded people to congregate together for a common cause. With this in mind, Constitutional Amendments filled with the just-listed Sections I and II’s checks and balances for political parties need to be added to the Constitutions of the Federal and State Governments. These will help break down and prevent a massive concentration of power by any one or more political parties.
2. Federal Constitutional Amendment: Commissions regulating and dictating presidential debates and access to the debates should be banned and no private intellectual organization is allowed to host, control or set-up more than one debate every four presidential elections; News organizations are only allowed to broadcast the presidential debates, not influence, host or have power over them; Federal Government money will be banned from ever going to any political parties; Debate access by a presidential candidate will be determined by one low number of states, preferably ten, that all candidates must have obtained a place on the ballot in and it will be ANY ten states, not a specific ten or fewer states.
3. Constitutional Amendments in the States: State Government money shall not be given by any means to any political party. Ballot access for any political candidate should be set at a very low number of valid signatures required, thus making it easy for a serious candidate to obtain a place on the ballot: A. Presidential election candidate requirements – 2,000 valid signatures from current state residents; B. State and Local election candidate requirements – valid signatures from a very small percentage of the current population of the district the candidates are running to represent. All political parties and candidates are required to obtain ballot access every election. Debates are to be required to take place in every political race where political parties are involved and no candidate with ballot access is to be denied the right to participate. Debate moderators are to be volunteers unaffiliated with any candidate, news organization or political party. Political Party hierarchy is to be determined by a caucus-type election every year in every political party.

These changes would radically change the American political system as we know it today. However the Founding Fathers of America believed in the idea of allowing the people to speak their opinions and having a completely equal chance to serve their communities in a leadership position for a short period of time. The people should be free to choose the best from among their community to represent them, not the ones with the most money. By opening the door to a wider array of candidates, this original dream of the Founding Fathers can begin to be re-discovered and realized.

A society where positions are debated freely is a truly free society. America has drifted from this truth in the last one hundred forty seven years and it is time that she returns to it. If she does, then she shall be better-placed to once again become the true beacon the world looks up to as the example of freedom.

© 2012 New Agora and The Subsidiarity Times. All rights reserved. This material may not be re-published, re-broadcast, re-written or re-distributed without written permission from blog author.

Greetings!

Welcome!

My name is Professor Wall and I am the founder and editor of The Subsidiarity Times. This is a news/opinion/education site designed to help everyday Americans learn more about their country and our world, where we came from, where we are going and how we should be preparing for the future. As the founder, I write about almost any topic I am interested in: Politics, NFL Football, Shipwreck Exploration, Disasters, Music, and much more. If I am interested in it, you can be sure I will write about it.

I hope you enjoy this site. I shall endeavor to post when I can.

© 2011 The Subsidiarity Times. All rights reserved. This material may not be re-published, re-broadcast, re-written or re-distributed without written permission from blog author.