Byron DeLear Missouri Democrat Candidate

Debating Republican Todd Aiken for the House

Byron DeLear, Democratic candidate for the House of Representatives, is co-founder of the non-governmental non-profit organization Global Peace Solution.

In 2004, Global Peace Solution sponsored a peace delegation to Israel and Palestine in an effort to affect a two-state solution to the ongoing conflict. Today, he's giving one of Bush's most loyal supporters a run for his money in the great state of Missouri.

He ran for the US House of Representatives for the Green Party in 2006. At the time, there was a popular dissatisfaction with the Iraq War and yet there was complacency on the part of the Bush administration to deal with the people wanting to pull us out.

The politics-as-usual, two-party system in the United States was languishing and DeLear joined the Progressive Democrats in 2007 in St. Louis, Missouri. He now opposes one of the most radical, extreme Bush Republicans in the United States House of Representatives: Todd Aiken.

Missouri is the quintessential bellwether state. In the last 100 years, Missouri has only been wrong once in picking the presidential candidate who eventually won the White House. On Super Tuesday, Missouri went in favor of Barack Obama.

Obama presents an amazing restorative tool for engaging folks who have been apathetic and disenfranchised. The gross dissatisfaction with George Bush has created an amazing political vacuum that the Democratic Party has the capacity to fill.

After 9/11, George Bush and the American people had the sympathy and empathy of the global community. He could have taken that political capital and expended it to build an international coalition dedicated to protecting against international acts of terrorism. Instead, Bush decided to order a traditional mass military deployment into Iraq.

Many warned against "standing armies" because in that mindset, you start to look for purely military solutions. The presidential seal of the eagle has something in each of its two talons. One talon is full of arrows and the other talon has an olive branch of peace. The eagle's head faces towards the olive branch of peace, which suggests that we should pursue diplomatic solutions.

A recent poll indicated that upwards of 61% of American historians believe George Bush is the worst president in the history of the United States. Another 30% said he was likely the second worst president.

Americans are looking at long term economic interests because in the short term, they see the price of gas, health care and education skyrocketing. The dollar is falling thanks to those perpetuating an ongoing occupation in Iraq, upwards of 50 million Americans are denied health care, and corporations shut down jobs in America to open factories with questionable labor and environmental practices.

When rainforests are being razed so cattle can be grown to feed our growing appetite for meat, when the air supply is being polluted and water is compromised, when coral reefs are diminishing - when every single component of our global ecosystem is under threat, a sustainable socio-economic system, a green economy removed from fossil fuel addiction is the only choice.

Social corporate responsibility and the triple bottom line of enlightened capitalism - people, planet, profit - is going to save our planet from destroying itself. More than 67,000 lobbyists currently orbit Washington DC legislators. There are 175 lobbyists per legislator in the House of Representatives and the US Senate, controlling, mangling, manipulating, and compromising agendas.