Republican Caucus

What is a disenfranchised Republican to do? Does disenfranchisement make one a democrat, an independent or just pissed off? We have some critical problems to solve: the economy, foreign policy, the maldistribution of wealth and the extent to which poverty and all its accompanying ills threaten to destroy our culture.

The Republican Party I grew up with could at least deal with the economy, supporting competitive business and fair trade, but not today. Now it's special interests and an extreme misreading of Adam Smith which dominate legislative strategy. The grand old party has created this enormous mess -- depression -- and their only solution is to do more of the same thing that caused it. Trump, and he may not be the answer, is the only candidate with any expressed plan to solve the puzzle -- that puzzle being the economic mechanism, feeding the disaster, stripping the country of its wealth its jobs, its manufacturing while creating massive poverty. At least Trump would understand how the sub-prime mortgage scheme ripped off the low income home owner to the extreme profit of the banks, ultimately at the expense of the taxpayer. Sanders would be his counter part on the Democratic side with a view of the role monopoly banking and the special interest of the super wealthy drive our equation of stagnation.

What can one person, an independent, say in a Republican caucus or a Democratic caucus for that matter -- that its platform is one of profound ignorance, that it's ideological belief system, its own political correctness is fundamentally wrong, that the social issues the media focuses upon are a smokescreen hiding more embarising problems? Well, I think there are enough of us disenfranchised voters that a challenge to that wrong-headed theology would be welcomed. It should be clear by now that the present strategy of deliberate gridlock, the support of monopoly interests and the refusal to dialog and synthesize with opposing views has lead to polarized thinking in both parties, wherein the only acceptable strategy on either side amounts to an an unworkable extreme -- from lassie-fare on the one hand to Utopianism on the other, that is greed on the one hand and globalization on the other. The US economy fails with either extreme.

Our present philosophy of regulation by self-interest, greed, gave us poverty -- poverty of nutrition, health, wealth, culture and mind. The other side is just as bad with the idealism of globalization, the loss of jobs, outsourcing of services, outsourcing of manufacturing and unintended as it was, the exploitation of developing economies by multinationals. What was billed as utopia turns out to be neocolonialism with the exploitation of our people as well as theirs. Who would listen?