From: Steve Schoettmer
Columbus
I ran for office last year as a Democrat in District 69. That area is comprised from pieces of Bartholomew, Jackson, Jennings and Jefferson counties.
It was all neat, but I didn’t run for the neatness factor. I ran because I was concerned about health care, low wages and the attempt to dismantle public education here in Indiana.
I may have lost, but those battles are still going on. People still sit around the kitchen table trying to figure out how they are going to pay all their bills. Still wondering what they are going to do about a new unforeseen medical condition. Still concerned, as even more and more money is being funneled from public education and given to charter schools.
In many regards the fault is ours. We seem to trust too deeply that these politicians and corporations have our best interests at heart. But do they?
All of us have a right to participate in America’s success and failures. But it seems that the average worker, family, and voter only gets to participate in its failings.
Large corporations will raid smaller ones, taking the workers pensions and selling off the company in parts. Leaving the workers broke, but the corporate leaders lining their pockets with the deferred wages of the workers retirement funds.
That is not what this nation is about.
That is not what the Founding Fathers intended. My belief system that I had expressed on the campaign trail is based on what I perceived as a simple truth, and that is that America is a shared nation. It seems that our elected officials are always trying to find ways to appease the top 5 percent at the expense of the rest of us.
When they allow the trees of our public forests to be sold off to “friends” for pennies on the dollar. When they sunset net metering laws so that citizens lose their right to fair compensation for the solar energy that is produced off their own roofs, just so energy companies can have an ever more expanding monopoly. When they strip teachers of the ability to teach so that businessmen can start up charter schools and take our tax dollars as personal profits for themselves.
Maybe when all that happens and we still vote for single-party control in Indiana, maybe we are just getting what we deserve.
I again think the path is simply that we need to break up single-party rule at the local and state levels. We need to introduce a different view into the process that includes transparency, and we can beginning doing that with our city council.
Let’s take our country back, one city council seat at a time.
(Editor’s note: This letter is paid content.)Single-party
