["Pomp and Circumstance"]
["Pomp and Circumstance"]
Alright, this is Thomas Keegan with
BlogTalkRadio.com forward slash election channel, also libertarianprogressive.com, the real election channel.
We cover everyone on the ballot.
Right now we have Rob Sherman, the Green Party for the U.S. House in Illinois District Number 5.
He is going to be on the ballot.
He has a Republican and Democrat challenger.
I'm going to give him a call here and do a quick interview.
And let you know your choices for Congress.
We believe if a candidate has gathered enough signatures to be on the ballot and has a statistical chance to win, then they should be covered.
["Pomp and Circumstance"]
Good afternoon. This is Rob Sherman. Hello.
Hey, good afternoon, Rob. This is Thomas Keegan with libertarianprogressive.com, the real election channel.
We cover everyone on the ballot.
And we're an independent media organization, sir.
We interview independent third-party candidates who are on the ballot, Green Party independence libertarians, no party affiliation.
We believe if a candidate has gathered enough signatures to be on the ballot, a responsible media will include them in the debates and interview them.
And so you're in Illinois running for the District Number 5.
Is that correct?
As a Green Party candidate who's on the ballot, sir?
Affirmative. That's pilot talk for yes.
All right. All right. Well, over and out.
And so are you going to fly into victory this November 8th and for a safe landing, sir?
You know, let me ask you two silly questions.
Number one, when you called about five minutes ago, I don't have, like, Dr. Daddy Glenn, so the print was small.
Did you call from a Florida number before?
Yep. I'm based out of Florida. Yeah, that's right.
And now you're on a New York number.
That's right. Now I'm calling from the studio line.
It's through blogtalkradio.com or slash.
Oh, okay. Yeah.
Okay. And the other thing you said that, you know, since I got enough signatures to get on the ballot, I have earned myself a place for an interview with your organization.
And the reason that's kind of amusing is that in Illinois, the Green Party is not an established party throughout the state, but it is established in the Fifth Congressional District.
Do you know how many signatures people need to get on the ballot if you're an independent or a third party guy?
How many signatures do you need to get in Illinois?
Well, please inform us. Absolutely. Yeah, we'd like to know.
Well, if you're a candidate for Congress in Illinois and you're a Democrat or a Republican, you need somewhere between 400 and 600.
If you're an independent or a third party, you need somewhere between 8,000 and 11,000 ballot signatures.
So for, uh, uh, for, uh, to make sure you get the ballot, you need like 15 to 20,000 signatures except in the Fifth District where I ran because, uh, the Green Party is an established party.
So I needed well signatures.
Wow, I almost spit my drink out there, Rob. That's unbelievable. I can't believe that is true.
It's one half, one percent of the number of votes that the gubernatorial candidate for our party got in the last election.
It was 2,400 and since we're an established party in the Fifth District because we got more than 5% of the vote in 2014 for the Fifth Congress, so the Green Party candidate for Congress in the Fifth District got more than 5% of the vote.
This time we need one half of one percent of what the governor candidate got, which was 2,400.
Most by that, by half of one percent, you get well.
That sounds worse than gerrymandering districts or something like that, but now let's get to the core of the issues.
Um, you know, I'm sure you have a platform, um, you know, of issues that you're running on and that's what I'd like to hear first.
What are your main, like, if you had to create a platform, can you please share with the audience your platforms or your most important issues?
I do have a platform which you're welcome to read at robsherman.com, r-o-b-s-h-e-r-m-a-n.com.
Here are my top three issues.
Issue number one is to stop America from becoming a socialist country.
There are a lot of former Bernie supporters and actually quite a few people in the Green Party who want America to become a socialist country.
Socialism is the worst economic system you could possibly have and advertising your party as being a socialist party, that's political suicide.
So my number one goal is to stop America from becoming a socialist country.
Issue number two, secular government for all.
I'm going to sponsor legislation that will remove God from the money.
We're going to remove God from the Pledge of Allegiance because the federal government has long made it clear that we can no longer tolerate bullying in this country.
So why is the federal government sponsoring anti-atheist bullying?
It's time for the government to stop bullying atheists.
And while we're at the secular government for all, I'm going to sponsor federal legislation to eliminate Christmas as a federal holiday.
And you might think, oh, outrageous, how are you going to get elected doing that?
Well, I've spoken to a lot of Christians and actually they support the idea.
As I have sold the idea to them, they want to put Christ back into Christmas.
Well, you can't do that.
You can't make Christmas religious if the government is involved.
If the government's involved, it's got to be bland, neutral, and secular.
So by getting government out of the Christmas business, we can restore Christmas and return Christmas to the Christians so they can make it a religious holiday for them instead of the national gifting holiday for heathens like me.
And the third of the three things is electoral reform.
I want to mandate compact legislative districts.
So you don't end up with the kind of gerrymandering that you have here in Illinois and surely in many of the most other states.
I want the legislative districts to be compact.
And also, I will sponsor legislation to require that all candidates for a particular office are required to get the same number of nominating petition signatures
instead of one relatively low number for Democrats and Republicans and an unattainably high number for independents of third parties.
Those are my top three issues.
Awesome. And that sounds like, you know, something to build a consensus on.
Would you support an election day holiday?
No, I don't think it's necessary anymore.
And let me add one more quick thing from the secular government.
I'm going to eliminate the national day of prayer, too, for all those same reasons.
But as far as a federal holiday, no, it's definitely not needed because most people nowadays do early voting.
So the people who vote on election day are just the leftovers that haven't gotten around to doing early voting.
So we certainly don't need a holiday on election day.
And one other thing that's relevant to this, the number one reason, the best reason to do early voting,
I never again have to vote in that church because my local precinct polling place has been in the church.
I'm Illinois' most prominent atheist of all time.
Well, when you do early voting, you vote at the township office or village hall.
You don't have to vote in church. This is a good thing.
Yeah, you're absolutely right. I don't see why more people don't mail in the ballots ahead of time and save themselves some time and energy, et cetera.
Now, how long have you been in the district that you've been in? And yeah, how long have you been in district number five, Rob?
I have lived and worked in the area all of my life, all 63 years of my life.
Due to gerrymandering, extreme gerrymandering in Illinois, my home was, since I've run for public office before,
the chairman of the Illinois Democratic Party who wrote the legislative maps,
he ran a little narrow strip a mile wide and 10 miles long from another faraway district
and then made a right turn, a 90-degree turn to the right and another strip about a mile wide and four miles long
to grab my house and put it in a faraway district where nobody knows me and I don't know anybody.
The U.S. Constitution protects congressional candidates from that type of a scam, that type of gerrymandering scam,
by saying that candidates for Congress must be a resident of the state in which they're running,
but you don't have to be a resident of the district to protect us against this kind of gerrymandering.
So I'm very, very relevant to the Fifth District even though my house is slightly outside of the Fifth District due to gerrymandering.
Yeah, that's true.
Now, may I ask you, and I don't have this particular question, but let me share a lot of people would want to know,
why did you decide to run as a Green Party candidate instead of, you know, the Republican or Democrats?
I'm a retired radio talk show host.
Ten years ago, I had the Green Party candidate for governor and lieutenant governor as a guest on my Morning Drive radio talk show,
and I realized after listening to them that I was in the wrong party when I was in the Democratic Party.
What I really should do is become part of the Green Party.
So I've been with the Green Party for ten years.
I was the chairman of the Cook County Green Party, Chicago's the biggest city in Cook County.
And so I've been with the Green Party for ten years.
That's why I'm with the Green Party.
The Green Party is environmentally sensitive.
We don't take corporate contributions.
The situation is the voters, not the corporations, who donate thousands and hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy your influence,
to buy influence with the congressman.
All right. Now, Rob, if you don't mind, I wouldn't mind going down like a list.
I have about ten questions here or ten issues.
I'd just like to hear your thoughts on each one here, if that's all right.
All right.
And accountability and transparency. What thoughts come to your mind when you hear accountability, transparency?
There should be maximum accountability and maximum transparency.
I could elaborate, but I think that makes the point real clear.
All right. Great.
And the next one is the justice system.
Our court system is a house of fraud.
The facts, the law, and the Constitution don't make one iota of difference in court.
What matters is, are you friends with the judge?
Is you're an attorney? That's even more important.
Is you're an attorney friends with the judge, or is the opponent's attorney friends with the judge?
What is the political persuasion of the judge?
Because the judge isn't there to dispense justice.
The judge is there to advance his personal political agenda.
So, and it's demonstrated by what happened to Merrick Garland of Barack's latest Supreme Court nomination.
Merrick, who grew up literally down the block, he may be a couple hours away,
but so I'm from the same culture as Merrick and from the same general community as he is.
He's probably the most highly qualified nominee for the Supreme Court of all time.
He can't even get a hearing because the Republican Party has made it clear that not only their top priority,
their only priority when it comes to who should be a judge is politics.
So, since politics is the only priority, the Supreme Court and the lower federal courts and the state courts too,
for that matter, they have zero credibility.
Nobody should take seriously anything that our courts say and do.
It's all based on politics and whether your attorney or the opposing attorney is friends with the judge.
Alright, and the next topic we'd like to hear some of your thoughts on is small and mid-sized businesses.
I own a small business. I have an airplane construction business.
I build kit airplanes. I have a Builders Assistance Center for Builders of Kit Airplanes.
So, these are two-seat airplanes that fly all over the country.
They're not like little model airplanes. These are real airplanes that people fly in.
Airplanes like the one that I fly in all over the country.
I help people build airplanes and so I'm a great advocate of small business and also medium-sized businesses.
Our businesses are good too, but, you know, that's why I'm opposed to socialism.
With socialism, well, let me go back one step.
With capitalism, getting it right is what matters.
With socialism, it's whether you try and if you try, you get paid.
If you fail, you get paid. So, there's no incentive to making sure that you get it right.
With capitalism, you get paid for results. With socialism, you get paid.
So, I'm for capital, I'm for small business and medium business as well as large business.
So, it sounds like you probably would have been against the bailouts in 2008, right?
And so, now the next topic is military spending and foreign policy.
I'm glad you asked me about military spending because I have long felt that it's okay for our armed forces
to intervene in behalf of other countries, but the other countries ought to be paying the cost.
The other countries ought to be paying the salaries of our soldiers and paying the operating expenses
for our rub participation and intervention in behalf of their country
instead of our taxpayers in this country getting stuck with the bill
for subsidizing the military support for other countries.
All right. And yeah, like in Germany and South Korea and lots of other places, Saudi Arabia.
So, what about free and fair trade?
I don't know what the question is. I didn't hear you.
Yeah, what are your thoughts on free and fair trade with other countries?
Here's what I think we ought to do. I think we ought to, and this is relevant to your question.
What we need to do in this country is eliminate the income tax system
and replace it with a consumption tax because that way we would eliminate the tax on labor
and instead of products coming in from other countries where they have a lower tax rate
so the cost production is lower, we need to lower the cost production here at home
by eliminating the labor tax, the income tax, and that would similarly, by putting consumption tax,
that would place a higher tax on imports.
So, we could do a lot for the balance of trade deficit.
We could do a lot for exports in the country and we could do a lot to minimize imports,
not that imports is a bad thing, but to make it more of a level playing field
if we were to eliminate the income tax which only affects products produced in this country
and instead use a consumption tax so no matter where the products are produced, their tax is the same.
Alright, great, and how about just in general civil liberties, civil rights?
I'm the most prominent atheist in the history of Illinois.
The slogan for Rob Sherman-Ed because he is fighting injustice one victory at a time.
I have won more state-church separation battles in this country than just about anybody else in the history of America.
Maybe more than anybody else in the history of America because we've had a lot of state-church separation violations
in Illinois that I have successfully challenged.
But I've also been involved in challenging other injustices.
Ten years ago when I ran for state representative in Illinois, I had a proposal for a family,
a defensive family amendment, or a defensive family law.
You've heard of the Defensive Marriage Act from the years ago where the right wing, the radical, the crazy right wingers
wanted to define marriage as only between a man and a woman.
I was proposing a Defensive Family Act which says that any unmarried adult can marry any other willing, unmarried,
and unrelated adult because that's your family.
So I have been a long proponent and now, thanks to both Illinois state law and the Supreme Court from about a year ago,
that's basically the national policy now. My proposal from ten years ago is national policy.
I've also fought injustice in regards to black people and other minorities and women too.
But what I found is that most minority groups, women, blacks, gay people, they want their own people fighting their battles.
They don't want Rob Sherman doing it. So I support, but I am a strong supporter and advocate and activist for social justice and civil rights.
All right, sorry, let me just ask one more question on that in a different angle here.
What about privacy versus security?
Privacy comes first.
I don't want the government spying on me or spying on other people by claiming, oh, we're doing it for security
because that opens the door for the government to claim that any spying that it does on its political opponents,
oh, we're doing it for security reasons. Yeah, right.
So we need to get rid of that scam by politicians to spy on their opponents by claiming we're doing it for security.
All right, sir. And who's some of your favorite past or present people elected or not and why?
Favorite elected people past or present? There are a lot of them, but I suppose my favorites would be all of the Democratic presidents and none of the Republicans.
Okay, and now how about a pitch to, you know, because the Democrats and the Republicans and the independents in your district,
what would be the pitch to the people on the opposite side of the aisle that you're running to represent, sir?
What do you mean by the opposite side of the aisle? Because I'm the Green Party. Both sides of the aisle are the opposite sides of the aisle.
Right, right, right. So I mean both of them. What would be your pitch to Republicans? What would be your pitch to Democrats?
Regarding what?
Vote for you.
To vote for you, to support you instead of the status quo.
Okay, so what is my pitch to Democrats and Republicans for why they should vote for me?
I was asked that, you'll love this answer. I was asked that last week on Friday, which would be September 9th, in case this was playing, you know, at some point in the future.
I went to the interview by the Chicago Sun Times, which as many of you know is the second largest newspaper in Illinois.
They asked me during my candidate endorsement interview, why should people vote for Rob Sherman of the Green Party?
And I said for the same reason that the people, you know, it's the same question as why should people read the Chicago Sun Times when they could be reading a Chicago Tribune
or getting their news from CNN. What you want is the best source.
Well, I think, you know, why I'm sitting in the Sun Times in this room, I think they're the best newspaper. That's why people should read paper.
But similarly, vote for me because I'm the best candidate.
Vote for me.
You know, take a look at RobSherman.com. Take a look at my agenda.
If you support my agenda, you should vote for me.
And maybe I will, but even if I don't by receiving a lot of votes, I can then go to whoever is that does win and say, hey, I received a lot of votes because of my agenda.
I'd like to go over my agenda with you to see which, if any, of these agenda items you might find as merit.
And you can carry the ball on the cafeteria menu thing, you know, pick and choose items off my agenda that you can support and advocate for, even if you don't support all of my agenda items.
All right, excellent. And I do see a good consensus on your issues, especially like the national sales tax getting rid of the IRS.
I think that would be great for small businesses.
In regards to that, do you support the version of this national sales tax where people would get like a voucher or something?
Do you know what I mean by that?
I have a general idea. Let me answer your question in this way.
I would have to see proposed legislation and then consider the different proposals, listen to the experts, listen to the citizens, what do they like, what do they want, what should we include in the bill, and craft a bill that way.
But you mentioned that small businesses would like it. One of the great reasons for a national consumption tax, a national sales tax instead of an income tax, is that all of us, not just small business people, all of us, it seems, who are making money,
we spend half our lives trying to keep track of what our tax liability is, and the other half of our lives trying to figure out how to find ways to evade and dodge tax liability.
So instead of wasting all that time and all of that money on accountants, I love your accountants, but let's get rid of the income tax anyway, instead of spending all that time and money on accountants and all that time trying to figure out what is the legitimate amount that we owe
and doing tricks like, you know, whether it's selling assets based on time rather than how long, whether or how much it's increased in value.
You know, let's get rid of all the games and all the tricks and all the deductions. You have a national sales tax, like they do in the Cayman Islands.
Three things I like about the Cayman Islands, no sales, they have no income tax, no property tax, and no winter, yay!
Let's get rid of the income tax.
So good to talk to you today, Rob. We certainly wish you all the best and, you know, to build that consensus.
I think congressional elections are a little less divisive than presidential politics, so hopefully you can gather some consensus there and best wishes.
Do you have any final closing words of wisdom here for our audience?
Two things. If you're not busy on the evening of January 3rd, please come to my inauguration party. It's going to be in Washington, D.C.
And the other thing, I'm asking for your vote if you're in Illinois. If you're not in Illinois, you can still vote for me because I'm running in the Chicago area.
And here's how it works in the Chicago area. If you want to vote for me, that's great. That's fine. You can vote for me.
But if you don't live in Illinois and you want to vote for my opponent, hey, what are you doing trying to vote for my opponent?
You don't live here. So anybody can vote for me, but only people who live in the district can vote for my opponent.
Yeah, just following up on that. When I was doing some research on who's running in Illinois, you're the only independent or third-party candidate that's on the ballot for Congress.
So regardless, if you want to see more third-party and independent candidates to break that paradigm of the status quo, you're going to affect legislation that's going to affect the entire country.
So people might have an interest in looking into your candidacy. And that is Rob Sherman.
You are not correct about what you said. Fall of Radshaw is the green party candidate for Congress in the 12th district of Illinois.
In southern Illinois, that's the Carbondale area.
Okay, so besides her, then you're the only other one. And yes, I have interviewed her like four years ago, so yeah, we'll have to give her a call.
Well, good to talk to you, Rob, and best wishes and thanks for taking the time out to inform our audience here about their choices. We appreciate it very much.
Call anytime and come to the Inauguration Party on January 3rd.
All right, we'll do. And well, good to talk to you today, sir. Thanks for your time.
Thanks. Bye-bye.
Yeah.
Yeah.
