Larry Smith will fight for Middle Class Families
Larry Smith will be a fighter for working class families in the United States House of Representatives. Larry Smith knows first hand the struggles of working class families. His great grandfather, grandfather, and father mined coal along the mining communities of far western Maryland and neighboring western Pennsylvania. At the age of 16, his father took work in the Amecelle Celanese Textile Mill where he worked for 38 years and lost his job at the beginning of the era of American corporate job exportation to unfair labor markets. After the factory closed without warning after 38 years, his father was forced to take a job driving a taxi-cab for $97 a week. Larry went to work at the age of 14 to help support his family cleaning brake lines on school buses under the Comprehensive Employment Training Act for $2.90 an hour. He has been a fighter his entire life working his way out of poverty to become an award winning educator and school administrator who has testified before legislative committees and who has forcefully took big utility companies in open testimony challenging the Maryland Public Service Commission to stop allowing working class families to be a, "punching bag." Larry Smith will fight to end the assault on our middle class families that threatens every family.
Larry Smith will fight for trade agreements fair to our Middle Class
Despite many leaders in our nation's capitol who echo the voices of corporate leaders telling us that all is well for American families. Larry Smith knows first hand the reality of the human condition of our working families. From the personal experience of his well entrenched working class roots, or his work as a public educator and community leader, Larry Smith knows that Democrat and Republican proponents of free trade initiatives have brokered deals that have been neither free nor fair to our families. The tragic result of these flawed agreements has been and will continue to be if the course is not reversed, a continued decline of the vast middle class that has made the American economy the envy of the world and has allowed our small and large business to grow. This decline affects the standard of living of each and every American. Today our families struggle economically to meet the most basic of needs, with two or more income earners in the family working multiple jobs, including grandparents and children still in school.
Larry Smith is a proven, passionate, intelligent, forceful voice that will fight us. If we make sure Mr. Smith goes to Washington he will fight to:
• Attack the failure of NAFTA to require that American companies follow the same employment and environmental standards they abide by in their home country. In the 13 years of NAFTA the $1.3 billion trade surplus with Mexico is now a $45 billion trade deficit. (Those of us on Main Street see that Mexico was purchasing American automobile, electronic, and automobile part manufacturing jobs from the US).
• End US participation in the Central American Free Trade Agreement, which has thus far enabled the exportation of an estimated 16,000 jobs from Maryland, and rising)
• Establish and implement a ceiling on the US trade deficit to secure the financial position of the United States and fight efforts of Communist China to manipulate currency values.
• Revoke Permanent Normalized Trade Relations status with Communist China. Normalized trade relations with Communist China will be subject to US Congressional review annually and must have mechanisms that permit US trade verification of compliance of minimum standard protections including prohibition on child and slave labor, the environment, and worker and product safety.
• Propose minimum standards for all trade agreements based on a playing field fair to American workers that remedy the failures of GATT, NAFTA, CAFTA and the revocation of US membership in the WTO. The United States of American can no longer itself allow our local, state, federal and international foreign policy to be determined by an organization that steals power, influence, autonomy, authority and accountability from American democratic institutions from our municipal governments, to our state legislatures to the US Congress. The inherently Un-American rules of the WTO for example, require with threat of financial sanction that the United States for not issuing 6,000 H-1B visas annually to foreign workers. In other words, if the US doesn't issue 6,000 visas every month to allow foreign workers to come here to compete for your job, our nation gets penalties and fines that we pay in our US tax dollars.
• Establish standards for foreign lobbyists. Larry Smith knows that there is no gentle way to say it; American workers are being scammed, screwed and losing to our government that does not represent the public interest, responds often to foreign interests and appears to work for the corporate interests. Larry Smith recognizes that the current US trade policies have not been developed for American families.
• To spur increased corporate commitment to the national interest rather than the interest of a few CEO's, Larry Smith will propose the American Corporation Ethics Standards Act that will establish core components essential to ensure integrity and accountability of our corporate citizens in their interdependent relationship between corporations, CEO's, employee, stockholders and community stakeholders.
• Larry Smith will fight to eliminate tax incentives. By eliminating the tax incentives that reward American corporations for abdicating the most fundamental corporate responsibilities essential to ensure that both stockholders and employees win on the mutually beneficial principles that will restore the dignity of America's Middle Class. American corporations can no longer receive the benefits of unbalanced interest protections that come from rewarding American companies who create products using child and slave labor, unsafe working conditions, ruin our environment, and force our American working families to compete on these unfair and immoral fields of commerce.
• Larry Smith knows first hand that corporations have out spent our unions nearly 12 dollars to one. He will be outspoken to stand against the billionaires and millionaires who do not want to pay their fair share.
• If Mr. Smith goes to Washington he will fight to ensure that employers of illegal immigrants are held accountable by increasing fines and penalties.
• Fight current efforts to overturn or weaken the landmark Sarbanes-Oxley Act that has provided for transparency and accountability of corporate financial statements essential to stability of our free market economy.
Larry Smith will fight to ensure the fundamental right of our working families to organize and secure essential workplace standards
- Larry Smith knows first hand of the expansion of reasonable workplace standards that built a US economy that created a vast middle class filled with the opportunity of individual dignity, self-reliance and responsibility, and a robust standard of living. These standards led to the 40 hour work week, overtime protections, workplace safety, and supported building an America that all could benefit from their contributions to the economy.
Larry Smith will fight to create fairness in the US tax system. If Mr. Smith goes to Washington he will:
- Propose mandatory federal transparency of the US tax system. Easy to understand of what income groups pay will be transparent to all our citizens. Any corporate loopholes will be transparent.
- There are ongoing lobbying efforts by the wealthiest Americans which comprise ¼ of 1% who pay the estate tax and want to repeal it. Larry will fight to ensure that the wealthy few meet their also patriotic obligation to pay their fair share of taxes.
- Restore tax rates to pre 2002 levels to the top 3% of income earners. Retain all other tax cuts.
- Create increased fair tax structures to alleviate and support our overburdened small businesses.
- Propose tax incentives in research and development for research and development partnerships with institutions of higher education in the areas of medicine, science, mathematics, transportation and communications technologies.
- Fight to repeal the disproportionately higher taxes on labor.
It is time for us to take America back. Larry Smith knows that today our working families work longer hours for less. If we act together to ensure that Mr. Smith goes to Washington he will fight endlessly to ensure that our working families, the true backbone of our economy, are no longer invisible to our representation in the US Congress.