{"id":1428,"date":"2012-09-26T19:12:44","date_gmt":"2012-09-26T19:12:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/?p=1428"},"modified":"2013-01-16T22:08:38","modified_gmt":"2013-01-16T22:08:38","slug":"parliamentary-pondering-middle-class-blues-hunger-drugs-and-bullets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/?p=1428","title":{"rendered":"parliamentary pondering; middle class blues; hunger, drugs and bullets"},"content":{"rendered":"

Buckeye Back Roads Tour cont…<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0 Stopped at the Spring Street Coffee House <\/strong> in St. Marys, Ohio.\u00a0 Owner Roger Beckett said he was a “moderate” when it came to politics.\u00a0 That is, he said he was basically a realist who believed in well-considered, “incremental fixes over time.”\u00a0 And one thing he said he wanted to see ‘fixed’ is: Congress.\u00a0 He said a good number of countries have a parliament with a certain percentage of seats for various political parties (often reflective of percentages of the populace who are involved with these various parties).\u00a0 Mr. Beckett said he’d like to see the same here.\u00a0 For instance, there would be seats for Green Party politicians, Constitution Party politicians, Libertarian Party politicians…\u00a0 He said as opposed to a sort of “winner take all” mentality, this would be a fairer, more balanced, approach in the U.S.\u00a0 I thanked him for the idea, put up a campaign card on the coffee house bulletin board (our answer to the SuperPac multi-million dollar TV ad strategies), and headed on…\u00a0 Or rather, back.\u00a0 I’d left some campaign material in Wapakoneta, so I headed the 12 miles back on Rte. 33, past, among other landmarks, Rte. 33 Brews & Blues Tavern<\/em><\/strong>.\u00a0 And it was Wapakoneta’s Joe Alexander who had the ‘blues,’ (sorry).\u00a0 He told me he was a retired Goodyear factory worker who had just found out some of his pension had been summarily cut.\u00a0 He said at the same time he found this out, a news service reported on the new list of the: “400 Richest Americans.”<\/strong>\u00a0 Mr. Alexander said the most astonishing part of the latter for him was that the accumulated wealth of these 400 people represented:\u00a0 1\/8th of the entire<\/em> U.S. economy.\u00a0 Mr. Alexander added that with figures like this, it’s not hard to see why the middle class ranks are becoming smaller, and smaller…\u00a0 Note:\u00a0<\/strong> To continue along these lines… the Economist Magazine<\/em><\/strong> recently reported that the top 20% of the country (socio-economically) owned 84% of the wealth; while the bottom 20% owned 0.1% of the wealth.\u00a0 In our touring, we have looked at this abject poverty in, say, the rural\u00a0 Black Belt Region<\/strong><\/a> of the South, in the inner cities of Chicago, LA, Cleveland…\u00a0 It is in these places that little kids are daily trying to dodge hunger, drugs and bullets.\u00a0 Shifting this around would be one of our administration’s top priorities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Buckeye Back Roads Tour cont…\u00a0 Stopped at the Spring Street Coffee House in St. Marys, Ohio.\u00a0 Owner Roger Beckett said he was a “moderate” when it came to politics.\u00a0 That is, he said he was basically a realist who believed …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1428"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1428\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1437,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1428\/revisions\/1437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}