HOW WE GOT HERE

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THE AMERICAN REALITY OUR FATHERS HAD
 

For years I have been wondering what people meant by "Make America Great Again," and I finally made the connection. They are talking about my father. Dad, now 94 and still playing pool, raised a family on one salary as a school administrator — not a hedge fund, not a tech startup. He was home with his feet up at five every day and off for months taking us on vacations in the summer. We lived in a four-bedroom home my father bought for cash. There were two cars in the garage, a cleaning lady to help my mom, and insurance over everything, including rock-solid medical and dental. My father retired at 55 with both a pension and Social Security backing him up. We played outside in our suburban neighborhood even after dark with no cell phones and no worries except to look for cars crossing the street. My parents played cards with the neighbors, and Dad belonged to the Kiwanis Club that did service projects for the community. We knew everyone on our street and even the next street over by name.

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These were the decades after the Great Depression and World War Two, when, out of the Dust Bowl, grew several shining decades during which the American Dream materialized into American Reality. We had it in our hands, and it was Great — and then it slipped away. But the thing is, we now knew it was possible! We remember, and we are, to be honest, heartbroken and angry at whatever it was that took it from us. The “great again” we are looking for isn't the lies and the corruption, the cronyism, the strongman politics and the wars without making a single working family more secure. We want the reality America used to offer, and we now know America is capable of because we lived it and it is now in our DNA. In the 1700s and 1800s it was a dream. Now we know it’s real and knowing that we can’t happily go back.

 

I am running for Colorado Governor to begin the work of giving you back that reality.  The platform that follows will do that as well as handle some very big problems that have arisen in the last few decades. In Washington, we have watched how some are willing to rub sand in our wounds and use our longing for the American Reality, twisting our heartbreak to give us still more  greed, and less fairness. Even climate change has not taught them we are all in this together – a union of Americans.

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It is probably important to name what has been trying to kill our American Reality. It is not one villain, not one party, but a policy which has held sway through 45 years of decisions made by basically the same people, regardless of party, in both Washington and Denver Policy that quietly moved wealth from your paycheck to a boardroom in New York, from your Main Street to a private equity fund, from your grandchildren's future to next quarter's earnings call.

Here is what happened for those, like me, who are not economists. Starting in the late 1970s, both parties adopted a theory that said markets, left alone, would take care of everyone — so government should step out of the way. What that theory was really all about was greed. (An institutionalization of the Laissez-faire greed-based economics that caused the Great Depression and that the New Deal firmly rejected setting us on course for the American Reality decades later. They cut top tax rates to 37 percent — because the wealthy wanted to keep more. They broke the unions — because organized workers cut into profits. They deregulated airlines, trucking, and banking — Carter started it, Clinton finished it by repealing Glass-Steagall.

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They signed NAFTA and opened trade which shipped millions of manufacturing jobs overseas — because foreign labor was cheaper. They stopped enforcing antitrust laws, allowing monopolies to consolidate everything from beef to beer to hospitals — because market power means pricing power. They replaced guaranteed pensions with 401(k)s, cut state funding for public college in half, made student loans the only consumer debt you can't discharge in bankruptcy, and banned Medicare from negotiating drug prices — because every one of those moves transferred money from your pocket to someone else's.

 

And when the Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United that corporations could spend unlimited money electing the politicians who did all of this, they made sure the system couldn't be voted out. This was not a conspiracy. It was greed unchecked by government — legalized, bipartisan, and enforced by both parties against working Americans of both parties. It was greed over the common good.

                     

The Treasury's Debt to the Penny dataset shows total public debt outstanding reached $39.488 trillion on July 15, 2026. The Senate Joint Economic Committee reports $39.38 trillion as of July 3, 2026 — up $3.16 trillion from one year prior. That is roughly $115,000 for every person in America and $292,000 for every household.

It’s important to notice that when big problems came along like the “Ozone Hole” the common good approach was able to solve them. In the current laissez-faire system climate change has been left unchecked because the industries causing climate change are profitable. Climate change is a dramatic lesson in how unchecked industry can lead to horrific even suicidal outcomes if not balanced by strong government.

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As an Independent Candidate I am not part of that system. I am free to call it what it is, and I have a free hand to guide Colorado back to the American Reality we had and lost – while begin the repair work on climate change through jobs-rich Direct Air Carbon Removal.

 

WHERE WE GO FROM HERE

I'm running because Colorado is where we start rebuilding it.

As governor I will begin the restoration of the policies that brought us those decades of the American Dream in the 50s and 60s:

• Restore bargaining power — prevailing wage and Project Labor Agreements on every state-funded project, and full protection for every Colorado worker's right to organize.

• Enforce antitrust law — the way it was enforced when Eisenhower was president. Block predatory mergers, break up monopolies, and direct my attorney general to go after the corporations consolidating everything from your grocery bill to your local newspaper.

• Make public college affordable again — the way it was when the GI Bill built the middle class — funded by reversing the state tax cuts that moved the cost off corporations and onto your tuition bill.

• Protect PERA and every defined-benefit pension — because retirement security shouldn't depend on the stock market, and Wall Street shouldn't collect fees to gamble with your future.

• Build homes Coloradans can afford — because a house shouldn't cost five years of income, it should cost two and a half the way it did when the deal was real.

• Crack down on private equity and hedge funds that strip-mine Colorado businesses, hospitals, and newspapers — extracting the value, loading on the debt, and walking away.

 

Every one of these is funded the same way: by closing the corporate loopholes that moved wealth from your paycheck to a boardroom. Zero new taxes on Colorado working families. The people who broke the deal are the ones who will pay to rebuild it.

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This platform is not a wish list. It is a set of specific tools that put paychecks back into working households, prices back within reach, safety back on the streets you walk, dignity back into the work you do, and a livable climate back on the table for your grandchildren. Every deliverable answers the same question: does this help a Denver family, a Pueblo teacher, a Grand Junction farmer, a Glenwood Springs nurse get back a piece of the deal my father had? If it doesn't, it isn't in here.