Why I’m A Progressive Liberal

Many (but not all) conservatives are just tools for the billionaires.

I’m #stillsanders. I will vote for Bernie Sanders if he is nominated to run for president by the Democratic Party. I’ve been this way since about 2015. I’ve never seen a presidential candidate with such a consistent message for the things he believes in. But I wasn’t always this way.

In the 1980s, I voted for Ronald Reagan as a young man. At the time, I believed his message of conservative prosperity and freedom. I believed in an America that was great. I believed in the tax cuts he passed. I believed he was right to break the air traffic controllers union. I believed in the way he sought to bring down the wall in Berlin. I believed that Reagan was doing the right thing for America.

In the 1990s, I was one of those patriots that you might see at a rally. I believed in limited government. I believed in the right of citizens and of the states. I still do, just not in the same way as I used to. I spent a lot of time learning about how the government works with the Freedom Of Information Act and the Privacy Act. I spent a few years working freelance to use the law to get personal and government records to help people in tax matters. For a while there, it was fun and interesting.

But I was poor. I was isolated. I had only a few real friends. I was collecting government documents like baseball cards. I even got a copy of all the Treasury Delegation Orders for free. That was a really cool find and I read every one of them to know what they were doing in government. If you want a real civics lesson, use the Freedom of Information Act and the Privacy Act. I learned more about how government works exercising my rights with just those two acts than I ever learned in school. I learned that not everything is what it seems.

Tired of trying to go it alone, I got a job. I started going to meetings and finding other things to do. I started to get into Information Technology and have made a living at that ever since. I just kept going to work. And I started to write. And as I started to write and publish on a regular basis, I began to research topics of interest to me and to write about them.

Over time, as I wrote, and conducted research, I began to notice a pattern of behavior in politics. I noticed that wages had been stagnating for 30 years and more while CEO compensation was rising leaps and bounds above…