WCRC meeting – January 2008
Tonight’s meeting focused on our invited guest, First Congressional District hopeful Dr. Joe Arminio. Here he was talking with folks before the meeting.
Obviously we took care of some of the important club business first, such as reciting the Lord’s Prayer and Pledge of Allegiance. As always, we reviewed the minutes from our last meeting, which was November’s gathering with fellow candidate Andy Harris. (In the interest of equal time, Wayne Gilchrest also came to visit during this cycle, along with departed candidate John Leo Walter.) And the treasurer’s report was given before the speaker began.
With the completely different format came a completely different Joe Arminio than the amped-up presence at yesterday’s Washington College forum. Instead, by first asking us what issues we had in mind and wanting to make the event more like a seminar than a speech, he seemed much more in his element.
So what issues did we have in mind? Well, they were the hot issues all Republicans seem to be facing – the economy, illegal immigration, and the Long War. Those three issues, Arminio contended, were basically all that his competitors were discussing, and not other matters of fiscal and foreign policy. Certainly he had ideas on the three topics we’d brought up but there were other aspects not brought into the race. There were a total of 10 principles he wished to address during the campaign. And like a professor, he asked questions of the audience as well and used me as a backup to some of what transpired yesterday at the forum for topics he wanted to introduce.
Somehow he managed to tie together a vast array of issues into three basic areas – monetary policy, trade policy, and foreign policy. And like a typical college class, there were some that got it right away and a few whose eyes glazed over quickly. He even had handouts, his recent newspapers dubbed The American Way. I was sort of in the middle as I was also trying to mentally synthesize things into a good (but not necessarily long) summary. As you keep reading, bear in mind Joe claimed to be a “Jeffersonian before a Republican.”
Key among his monetary policy ideas was his version of the American Dream, something that was easily realized before 1972. At that point “real” wages peaked and two-income families became the norm. It was no longer the ideal of one breadwinner and one to raise the children, which was how Arminio defined the American dream in this case. So what had gone wrong? America, he argued, had “scuttled” policies that made this success possible. Among other items he cited were changing our trading stance to one of more unfettered free trade (GATT, NAFTA, CAFTA), dropping the gold standard, and growing the money supply too rapidly. A lack of knowledge about monetary policy, he charged, will “bring down the country.” That and a $40 trillion debt bubble in Federal Reserve interest.
With a brief foray into patent issues thrown in (because it was large corporations and foreign interests like China and Japan who were changing patent policy from “first to invent” to “first to file” so they could snatch patent rights from the true inventors more easily), Arminio spent a good deal of his time discussing his views on trade.
“Protectionism where appropriate” was his model. He told us that originally Republicans were the party of protectionism, while Democrats had a long history of advocating free trade dating back to 1856. But the roles have reversed over the last decade or so as Democrats are switching to a more protectionist view, particularly on NAFTA. Arminio also had unkind words to say about the North American Union, where it was a “travesty” that Congress had “no role” in stopping it. It was a product of the executive branch, Arminio said. As further proof of trade bills as a step toward political integration he talked about this interview Larry King did with former Mexican leader Vincente Fox, a good friend of President Bush.
In asserting that Gilchrest had denied the existence of a NAU at previous forums, Joe equated this as a truth that’s part of a higher truth that Wayne may well have not been aware of. More proof of Joe’s theory came in discussing the NAFTA Superhighway, where the first border check would not come at the Mexican border, but in Kansas City. Arminio pinned the defeat of former Kansas Congressman Jim Ryun on the issue, claiming opponent Nancy Boyda (a Democrat) used his denials about the corridor to upend him in 2006.
And as he did yesterday, Joe talked about the disappearing trade surplus in agricultural products due to lower tariffs and subsidies to large corporate farms. Corporatism also was brought up when he discussed briefly the consolidation in media over the last two decades. Fewer people control the message now.
Finally, he went somewhat in depth on foreign policy, particularly with Iraq.
There were two main points he drilled home about our foray into the Middle East. One is that the real reason we went to Iraq and deposed Saddam Hussein was because he violated a gentlemen’s agreement of sorts worked out by President Nixon in the early 1970′s that oil would be traded for dollars (“petrodollar recycling”) - Hussein moved to trading in euros in 2000. That was why the top-secret report that there was no linkage between Iraq and al-Qaeda was ignored, a report he alluded Gilchrest knew about (because he had top-secret clearance) but did nothing to stop the invasion that ensued.
What it boiled down to was that, in Arminio’s opinion, his opponents were centered on a few issues and missing the basic philosophy that it was a multifaceted process we need to get things back on the right track. (As he said yesterday, he needed 10 years.) And he could’ve kept going tonight but we tried to keep him to about 40 minutes because we had some other issues to take care of.
Dr. Bartkovich briefly plugged the Lincoln Day Dinner, which was the extent of his report. Other new business was announcing the upcoming Lower Shore YR meeting this Thursday and the speaker for our next meeting (Jared DeMarinis of the State Board of Elections). We’ll also elect officers then, and the slate is the same with one exception at the moment. I’ve volunteered to maintain my position; however, nominations are still open.
It wasn’t the show I thought it might be, but we certainly had a lot of information thrown at us by Dr. Arminio. Whether it will translate into more support will be discovered on February 12th.
I had one final question for him afterward, and it was on something I wish was covered in yesterday’s forum. Given his stance on tariffs and given we import 2/3 of our oil, where did he stand on securing more energy sources domestically?
His answer centered on three issues. One of them was attempting to do away with the “petrodollars” alluded to above, while the other two would be to build oil reserves while at the same time investing much more in alternative energy sources – research that had been squelched by the major oil companies in the mid-1970′s.
Personally, I don’t mind the first two parts so much but I’m not sure I buy the corporatism aspect of the last part. After all, if you use his media allegation as an example I shouldn’t have a website because the corporations own all of the mass media. Similarly, there’s always someone with ingenuity out there and I think that even with the cutting edge most alternative technologies are at, they’re still nowhere near ready to take over the bulk of our energy needs. Maybe by the end of this century but not now. It’s not because the oil companies don’t want these things out – after all, oil will run out someday and what would their business be then – but because technology isn’t where it needs to be to mass-produce a substitute. Just my two cents.
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