The Presidential Candidates: Joe Martyniuk

Martyniuk conveniently explains that his name is pronounced, "mart-nick." He makes his priorities pretty clear on his low-tech campaign page:

Joe thinks the number one problem in America is expensive gasoline. The number two problem is having to buy that gasoline from people who hate us and may cut off supplies. Unfortunately, the only proven technology that can solve both of those problems is turning coal into gasoline. Joe thinks we should sell $500 Billion bonds to build 200 plants over the next four years to turn American coal into $1 per gallon gasoline, even if coal can't be cleaned up.

Joe acknowledges that Senators McCain and Obama are "great Americans," but unlike him, they "don't know how to bring down the price of gasoline." Presumably they lack the vision to come up with Martyniuk's sweeping solution to the Iraq problem: "Hand out two million cell phones to families to call for help and turn in their neighbors. Two million handguns for self-defense. One million PC's for kids. one million generators, air conditioners, water, gasoline, and waste water tanks. 8,000 tanker trucks to deliver gasoline, water, and remove waste water. Use 10,000 tanker trucks to carry one million barrels of oil per day from the wells to the coast on the heavy duty construction roads to pay for this and temporarily reduce oil prices until America can start turning coal into gasoline. "

From his website I infer that preparedness will be one of the big themes of a Martyniuk presidency. He'll stockpile food and bird flu vaccine while encouraging everyone to "buy a gasoline generator, electric heater, 90 days of food, and own a handgun." He recommends grass-roots surveillance; people should be more observant of suspicious characters and likely targets around them. "You may not be able to prevent a terrorist attack. But you might be able to help catch the terrorists and prevent them from doing it again. " He expects the National Rifle Association and veterans' groups to take the lead in teaching survivalism to the general public.

On other issues, Martyniuk is libertarian on drugs, calling for "hardcore" stuff to be sold with prescriptions, and marijuana over the counter. Taxing them could finance enhanced healthcare and public education, he suggests. He has a compromise solution for illegal immigration, offering amnesty for the undocumented who remain in the country and pay a $2,000 "verification fee" after the border is sealed. He'll seal the border by hiring 5 million border guards and thousands more cargo inspectors with the revenue from a "$10,000 import tax" on the containers. He doesn't expect his policy to please anyone, but considers compromise necessary since neither extreme, unconditional amnesty or mass expulsions, has sufficient public support.

Martyniuk's main campaign activities have been selling bumper stickers and posting commercial-length videos on YouTube. The most recent of these appeared earlier this month, promising to reduce the price of gasoline to $2 a gallon, but here's one from last October in which the candidate plays his preparedness theme.




Here's another self-nominated candidate who, like many of the others, clearly has thought a while on some important issues. He's one of the more modest candidates, describing himself thusly: "He's short and dumpy. He stutters and stammers. All the bad things you hear about him are true." The tragedy for people like Martyniuk is that they seem to be thinking in a vacuum where the first and only logical step when convinced of a national crisis is to run for president. I give him credit for some seriousness, even if the bumper stickers make him look a little hucksterish, but I'd like to see people like him start to build local or regional networks where more people can discuss the issues together and perhaps discover a candidate in their midst in a really democratic fashion. Look at Martyniuk's website and decide for yourself if he belongs in the discussion.