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I am Jack
Duckworth and I'm a special needs school bus driver in Fairfax County. I
graduated from Robert E. Lee high school in Springfield and have lived
in Virginia's eleventh district for a total of forty-five years.
For
the past five years, I have been transporting children
to and from the best education facilities in these United
States. I work with the most skilled transportation force in the
world and that's no exaggeration. The Fairfax County school system
transports more children more safely at less cost than any other
school system in the country. I love my job more than anything I
have done before. I get more job satisfaction in one year of
driving Fairfax County children than I got from my last ten years working as a
professional Engineer for the federal government.
With a smirk on
your face, you may be asking, "Why would you want to be a
representative to congress if you are so happy driving a school
bus?" My answer to that is, "I don't want to be a
representative to congress; I'd much rather continue driving my
bus."
The only reason
I will take time off from (not quit) driving my bus is because
Washington is broken. I'm sick of sitting down with a cup of
coffee after my morning school runs and reading in the newspaper about the
partisan nonsense that's going on just twenty miles away in Disneyland East,
also known as Capitol Hill.
For thirty-two
years I worked for the Federal Power
and Federal Energy Regulatory Commissions. In 1978 the Civil
Service Reform Act destroyed the impartiality of the entire Civil
Service system and turned it into the ultimate "Yes Man" for
the executive and legislative branches of the government. I finally retired
when the decisions, made in the name of political expediency, finally
became too absurd to stomach.
The Federal
Water Power Act of 1920, from which the two commissions grew was only
23 pages in length. The Federal Power Commission and its successor
the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which were created to enforce
and administer that Act, has grown according to the FERC's website
"almost 1,200 employees who help FERC with its critical job of
regulating our energy industries and protecting energy
consumers."
The agency has an accumulation of regulations that
spans 1,219 pages.
If the
regulations to administer an act of 23 pages covers 1,219
pages then the National Healthcare Act of 2,000 pages will
require more than 106,000 pages of regulations.
I can't fully
understand my rights for, or limits to, healthcare under the
federal Blue Cross/Blue Shield manual, which is only 600 pages
long. How am I ever going to figure out what my options and
limitations to coverage are from 106,000 pages of federal health
regulations? I will likely have to hire a consultant to
interpret them.
In order to do
his or her taxes a citizen now has to go to H and R Block, and in order to figure out
his or her healthcare coverage they'll have to hire some private company that
does nothing but fill out health care forms for overwhelmed
citizens. Maybe that's how the administration plans to get
America back to work. It will take tens of thousands of
enlightened professionals to read and interpret the healthcare plan to
rest of us mushrooms.
If nationalized
healthcare isn't bad enough, now congress wants to make electricity,
gas, natural gas, coal, and oil so expensive under a Cap and Trade Law
or by the regulation of the EPA that we, as citizens, will virtually have to quit using energy or be
forced into personal bankruptcy.
The house of
representatives currently has 435 members making far too many laws that
keep making the federal government bigger and take power away from the
states and rights away from its citizens. It's time to replace
at least one of them, the one from the 11th District in Virginia.
As an
independent I will have to submit a petition with 1,000 signatures
from Fairfax County, Fairfax City, and Prince William County, in order
to qualify for the election ballot in November.
I started
collecting signatures during the January snowstorm and finished on May
31 on the last day of Viva Vienna where I was kicked out and forced to
collect signatures on the streets of the town of Vienna outside of the
official boundaries of the celebration. I have found that it is
very difficult to get signatures as an independent without an
organization behind me because candidates cannot get signatures at any
of the shopping malls, outside the post offices, in any of Fairfax
County Parks or even at the farmers' market in Prince William County
because it is held on a VDOT parking lot. It seems as an
independent one is barred from talking to voters or getting signatures
wherever people gather in any sizeable numbers.
I may not have
collected enough signatures because 1,000 must be verified as being on
the 11th district voter rolls and many are not legible because many
signers are in a hurry.
Every signature
I am submitting I collected myself. I talked to more than 2,500
citizens and handed out more than that number of address cards for
this internet site.
Jack
Duckworth, School
Bus Driver
& Virginia Professional Civil Engineer
"If you
trust me to take your most prized possessions, your children, to
school every day you can trust me to carry your water to Washington
for the next two years."
Then
God created Virginia
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