Sirocco, Sprint and Sirocco Twin Land Sailers

Daniel Feldman for President!

Daniel rigging his Sirocco in the desert.

I am announcing my candidacy for President.

I am really tired of political Stuff.  Lots of rhetoric, little information and even fewer solutions.  Politicians are wrecking this country and one thing for sure, nobody has ever been able to accuse me of being politic much less political.

This is going to be purely a "write in" campaign.  I am not going on the road, no ads, no budget, sure as hell no polls and no contributions.  (If any venture capital people see this we are looking to take Wind Line to the next level.)

Vital Statistics:

The Issues

Below are some of my campaign issues.  You may not agree, but I never said I would say what you wanted to hear.  I am leaving that to the politicians and their pollsters.

(I will add to this section in coming weeks and are not necessarily in order of importance.)

My number one priority is developing alternate sources of fuel and energy.  This is an issue of NATIONAL SECURITY!  It also heavily impacts the environment and economy.  I want my fellow Americans to read the following and think about it for a minute. 

Every time you buy a tank of gas a significant chunk of the money you pay winds up in the hands of somebody who doesn't like you very much.

Worse.  If we don't lower our dependence on foreign sources of fuel it means we will have to be involved in region politically.  That means with the military if necessary.  Now look around the neighborhood and decide which kids should die so you can drive your car.

Look.  I am a red blooded American and I love the sound of a big V8 as much as the next guy.  But I am not sure that the long term cost can be justified by most folks.  In addition to the above we know that burning lots of fossil fuels is not great for the environment.  And whether you believe in "global warming" or not, does it pay to take the chance.

I would propose the following:

1. An all out federally funded research program aimed at the most promising new technologies with follow up to make sure that they go beyond research.  Think of it as a 21 century "Manhattan Project".

2. A substantial rise in federal gas mileage and pollution standards.

3. A whopping tax on SUVs and other big vehicles that rank as gas guzzlers.  Certain work and commercial vehicles could be exempted.

Just for the record.  We own 3 vehicles:  Subaru Forester,  Kawasaki KLR650 (my commuter), and Wind Line's work truck a Honda Element which has replaced my E350 Van with the help of a trailer.

Tort Reform: 

We all laugh when we read about some of the ridiculous law suits being filed.  The lady who spilled hot coffee, the crook who sued the guy who shot him during a break in.  The truth is it's not funny.  The legal "lottery" system costs you a lot more money than you think.  I can tell you that the insurance per unit for the Sirocco currently makes it the 5th most expensive component.  You want to lower the cost of health care and drugs.  Start by capping damage awards and the lawyers contingency fees.  Make the people who file frivolous suits pay the costs of both sides.

The legal system is being used by large companies as a tool for knocking off their smaller competitors.  File a baseless suit, depose everybody from the owner to the janitor, lots of postponements and expensive discovery and you can run their bill up to the point of bankruptcy.  You don't need to win.  Just sue them out of existence.

Class action suits.  Were you aware that when you get one of those notices that if you don't opt out of the suit you are automatically included.  I didn't until recently.  Oh and by the way, I get a coupon for 10 cents and the lawyer gets a check for 5 million.  Another legal lottery system.

I am in no way suggesting that people who suffer harm at the hands of other should not be compensated.  I am saying that it has gotten out of hand.  WAY OUT OF HAND.  The legal system is not supposed to be the lottery.  Perhaps it is because our courts have become a legal system rather than a justice system.  Too many lawyers and too many PACS in Washington.

Free Trade????  OK WHERE THE HELL IS IT???!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ok,  I am just a little guy.  But with few exceptions I can tell you that free trade means you can import stuff at next to no tax, and if I want to send one of my land sailers out of the country they whack me with anywhere from 25% to 40% tariffs.    This is ugly when you are in an industry not included in the corporate welfare legislation about to go through congress.

What I propose:

Tit for tat tariffs.  That simple.  You want to put a 40% tax on the computer I am sending you we put a 40% tax on your widgets. 

Part 2:  If we have free trade like NAFTA there need to be some key restrictions.  1) You want to move your shop to Mexico, fine.  But that shop must adhere to all the same environmental and OSHA, FDA and other regulations that you do here.  I wonder how a lot of those facilities are going to fare during inspection.

Trade Continued - Stealing America Blind!  

Another little item the current politicos seem unaware of.  The continued theft of American goods.  I am not talking about people carting stuff out of warehouses.  I am talking about countries (China and India being 2 of the biggest) taking US products and producing cheap copies.  Drugs to aerospace we are getting ripped off wholesale.  Lets face it.  It is a hell of a lot cheaper to make something when you don't have to do the R & D work and it costs the US a ton of jobs.

More perplexing, the government has turned a blind eye to this.  While little can be done to stop it, we can certainly make it less profitable by using trade restrictions on inbound goods.

For those dolts who don't get it, let me give you a few examples.

Drugs - name brand drug goes to India.  Company in India decides to copy it.  This is a pretty quick process compared to the 12 year time span it takes to develop and approve a new drug.  The plants don't have to pass FDA inspections, the clinical trials are minimal or nonexistent.  Why not.  The expensive work was already done by a drug company here.  If the US company is lucky they just use the drug internally.  More often then not the drug winds up with EU approval (much easier to get, especially if it is a rip off) and shows up in Europe and Canada.  We look across the border and get all hot and bothered about cheap drugs.  As a matter of fact I heard a commercial from a Canadian pharmacy last week actually telling us that we should buy there so we don't have to pay for the R & D that produced the drug in the first place.  Now think about it.  No profit, no R & D, no R & D, no new drugs.  When you consider that many mainstay antibiotics are on their last legs due to resistant strains of bacteria you might want to think about whether you really want to resort to importing knock-offs.

A certain motorcycle company in Milwaukee got together with a well known German sports car manufacturer to produce a new high performance engine.  That engine is now well on its way to being a cheap Chinese clone destined for Europe and Asia.  It cost millions to develop the engine.  It takes less than a hundred grand to rip it off and produce a copy.  There were a number of patents covering the design and engineering.   It will certainly be cheaper to build in China with the lower cost of labour.  That is fine.  It will be dirt cheap because they don't have to pay for the R & D and that isn't fine.

I could go on and on.  Every day I get 2 or 3 solicitations from overseas for pirated software, movies and other goods.  Each buy represents a chance to cost another US job.

Foreign Policy:

This will be a growing section and I will only address some of the high points.

With few exceptions our foreign policy stinks.  We have been a fair weather friend at best and our foreign policy has been incredibly inconsistent.  We back Pakistan one moment when it is convenient and pull the rug out the next.  It could be argued that a good chunk of the problems we currently face in the middle east were of our making.  After all, we helped arm that idiot Saddam in the 80s and let him run amok.  We incite the Shiites and Kurds to rebel in '91 and then hang them out to dry.  Is it any wonder we are neither liked nor trusted.

My foreign policy is simple.  One) Be fair.  Two) The enemy of my enemy is not my friend.  Three)  I don't give a crap whether you like us.  It would be nice if everybody did, but it ain't going to happen.  Four)  We are not going to police the world.  This does not mean we should never intervene, but right now we have our fingers in way too much.

(If we had followed rule 3 in 1991 we would likely not be back in Iraq now.  Saddam would have been gone)

Afghanistan:

Long over due.  Perhaps if a certain president had spent less time goofing off with interns in the oval office and worrying about who we were going to piss off we might have avoided 9/11 in the first place.  The opportunities certainly presented themselves.

Iraq:

We should have finished the job in '91.  That being said it is almost impossible, no matter how much research you do, to figure out whether it was justified.  I will say that the prosecution of the war has been a giant SNAFU to say the least.  The failure to not see the chaos created by the sudden vacuum was inexcusable and it is now costing a lot of fine people in life and limb both American and Iraqi.

Having stated the obvious to most people, we are now in it up to our eye balls.  I would love to see the troops home tomorrow but we now bare a moral responsibility to see that the country has a fighting chance to at stability before we can leave.  We will have to apply whatever resources are necessary to make sure we leave a functional country and stay as long as it takes to do that.  That means no sudden withdrawals.  It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that if you put a hard deadline on leaving, all the bad guys will need to do is bide their time, wait for the last troop to embark, and then start causing mayhem.  This would make every sacrifice made to this point moot.

Homeland Security:

A better foreign policy should help with some of our security issues.  But in line with rule 3 we will always have problems.  I suspect the next comments will make lots of people unhappy, but I LOVE RULE 3!

As of tomorrow we will re-start work on the Neutron bomb and every other horrible weapon we can come up with.  Now listen close.  If there is a terrorist act committed on US soil, we will track you down.  We will find your family, friends, every government who ever sheltered you and you can all go into the "after life" together.  No troops on the ground, no polite highly targeted cruise missiles, no more surgical strikes. 

The former may seem harsh, but I don't think that too many countries would knowingly provide help to these guys if they knew their country would be a moonscape afterward. 

I would take a large number of resources that are currently deployed over seas and re-direct their efforts to securing the US borders.  This would include a complete overhauling of the US intelligence agencies and combining them into one larger agency.  Re-stocking of the human intelligence resources would be a very high priority.  Satellites are nice, but they can not take the place of the man on the ground.

NEW  Immigration and the borders:

Let me first take a minute to point out to the bigots out there that  this county is predominately a country of immigrants.  We still rely heavily on immigrant labour.  Most of these folks are taking jobs Americans just won't touch.  I have immense respect for people who will work hard to climb the ladder of success from the first rung.  That being said:

We now live in a different age.  America's boarders need to be shut if only for security reasons.  This means both borders, as air tight as we can make them.  With all respect to our neighbors to the south, this is a sovereign country, not a northern province of Mexico.  There are going to be walls and fences whether real or electronic and there are going to be repercussions for crossing them illegally. 

To answer the need for workers we will issue guest worker cards.  This will involve fingerprinting and possibly DNA sampling.  There will be a fee.  Documented workers will be able to get drivers licenses, bank accounts, insurance and other services.  In return, their earnings will be taxed just like anybody else's.  If you are caught here illegally,  you will be sent home and and become ineligible for a worker's card.  If you are convicted of a felony you will be sent home, your guest status will be permanently revoked.  If you are here illegally now, you would need to return to your home country and apply for "guest worker" status.  I would suggest that citizenship might be available to "guest workers" if they can stay employed full time at least 6 continuous years but that would need to be studied.

One nation with liberty and justice for all!!!!

Minor issue but one I feel worthy of attention in the current day.  Get congress to remove the "under god" phrase they added to the Pledge of Allegiance during the McCarthy Era and restore the pledge to schools.  In the current time I believe that it is more important then ever to have this reminder of who we are and what we are about.  I know as a child that every time I stood to say the pledge it reminded me that I was part of something much bigger and more important than me.  Something special and something of value.  I am sure I will get some Email on this one, but before you write, just remember that the pledge is a pledge to the United States.  It was never meant to be a prayer.

Gay Marriage:

Given all the really important stuff going on can you believe that the government is even wasting time on this one.  I mean, talk about low on the totem pole.  That being said I will rip off somebody else's snappy line.

I believe that gay people have just as much right to lose half their stuff as the rest of us.  'Nuff Said

More to Come...  Stay Tuned