Sean C. Morgan
Art Robinson, who ran against Democrat Peter DeFazio for Oregon’s Fourth Congressional District seat two years ago and lost by nine percentage points, is challenging DeFazio again, this time with a book outlining his views that has been mass-mailed to many local voters, and in two local appearances.
Robinson, 70, who has a Ph.D. in chemistry and lives in Cave Junction, has visited Sweet Home twice in July – a town hall meeting the evening of July 5 and an appearance in the Sportsman’s Holiday Parade July 14.
Calling for a return to liberty and common sense, Robinson stopped in Sweet Home July 5 to discuss issues, including what he termed a monstrously large national debt and the career politicians who have caused them attempting to hang onto their jobs.
“I’m here for the same reason most of you are,” Robinson told about 40 visitors at the Jim Riggs Community Center. “We’re up to our ears in debt.”
The nation owes some $650,000 per family, Robinson said, and since DeFazio took office in 1987, the federal government has spent $40 trillion while raising only $30 trillion in revenue.
The collateral for that debt is the labor of children who haven’t been born yet, Robinson said. That’s involuntary servitude.
“That’s been illegal since the Civil War,” Robinson said.
He said DeFazio wants to spend more, increase the debt further and increase the number of regulations.
When this nation was founded, the “individual stood above the state,” Robinson said. “They knew governments always tyrannize their citizens.”
They feared government, but they also knew that the nation must be defended and courts were necessary, he said.
Now, Congress has a 10-percent approval rating, and 90 percent of congressmen running for office this year will be re-elected, Robinson said.
The people have one job in this government, and that is to vote, Robinson said. “We haven’t been doing our job, apparently, because these people are out of control.”
Each of those congressmen will spend $13 billion as a share of the national budget over their next term, he said.
They’re elected with very little information, Robinson said. Campaign managers identify the top three or four issues voters are interested in and campaign on them.
“If you’re in office a while and you’re unprincipled, like most of them are, you do favors,” Robinson said. They receive campaign contributions, and they can run more advertisements on television.
For example, DeFazio received donations from beer companies, Robinson said, adding that the contributions are used to run ads against Robinson, while DeFazio and others sponsored a bill to reduce taxes on beer makers who produce less than 6 million barrels per year.
“I don’t mean to imply that he’s corrupt and that others aren’t,” Robinson said. “That’s the way Congress works.”
Only a small group are ethical enough to avoid this behavior.
The information that voters have to work with is minimal, Robinson said.
That’s why Robinson wrote a book for this election, and as of the beginning of the month, it has been sent to approximately 60 percent of the Fourth Congressional District.
Anyone who finishes it will know all about Robinson, he said. The book is intended as a dialogue on topics ranging all over the board.
“It is that dialogue that gets people elected, not me giving speeches,” Robinsons aid. “We’re trying to inject more information into that discussion. We’re trying to inject information into the congressional campaign.”
Among the themes included is indivdiual liberty.
“People should be free,” Robinson said. “Free people take care of themselves. That’s what this country was founded on.”
The tax code numbers some 70,000 pages, Robinson said. Those pages aren’t necessary to impose a tax. Rather, they describe decades of tax gimmicks for special interests, the campaign support for incumbent congressmen.
During the first hundred years of the United States, the average tenure of a congressman was two to three years, Robinson said. They served a brief time then went back to their lives.
Now the average is 10 to 12 years, Robinson said. DeFazio has been there for 25 years.
“Consequently, you have your career on one side of the desk and the nation’s interests on the other,” Robinson said. Thousands of decisions are made between a politician’s self-interest in his career and the nation’s interests, and it drives the country downward.
Robinson said he plans to stay in office for a term – maybe two if he’s getting things done in his effort to restore the United States.
Robinson discussed the toll he said govenrment regulation has taken on American business. He talked about his father’s petrol chemical business, something he said that, by the 1980s, couldn’t have been built.
His father’s string of chemical plants employed 1,000, but he said his father never talked about the government while Robinson was growing up.
When he was born, 10 to 12 percent of people worked in manufacturing, logging or mining, he said. That was down to 6 percent by 2000 and now is at about 4 percent.
Manufacturing has gone overseas, he said. “A country that does not make things is going down.”
The root of that problem is regulation, he said, and he argued against protectionism as a solution.
“The housing problem is destruction of the economy by Congress,” Robinson said. “We were complacent.”
A dollar buys what a nickel did when Robinson was born, he said. Every time a “do-gooder” said Congress should do this or that, everyone said “we can afford that.” Do that thousands of times, and “here we are.”
These problems can be solved, he said. “Congress has to be willing to stand up to the bureaucracy it created.”
To restore jobs, it must get rid of what’s costing the United States the jobs in the first place, he said. That’s over-taxation, over-regulation, over-indebtedness and a runaway federal government.
“This killed your jobs,” Robinson said. “Get rid of it, so it stops killing your jobs.”
Each congressman should be fighting for more economic freedom for his district, Robinson said.
Robinson plans to work his office a bit differently than other congressmen, he said. Offices are staffed with aides. He would use about two regular aides and then staff his office with experts on a temporary basis. Those experts, scientists and others, atmospheric physicist Richard Lindzen, for example, would have better access to Congress, testifying and informing the congressmen, pumping a lot more information into the building.
Serving as aides, they have all of the privileges of congressmen except the ability to vote, Robinson said. The reason is that congressmen also lack information.
“They don’t know anything about our logging industry,” Robinson said. Half of them think Oregon is cutting its last tree.
For more information about Robinson, visit his website at artforcongress.com. His book also may be read by clicking on a link at the top of his home page.