ELMHURST (July 28) Jim Oberweis was chosen as the
early favorite in seeking the Republican Nomination for U.S. Senate to replace out-going U.S. Senator Peter Fitzgerald in a straw poll conducted by the DuPage Young Republicans at the DuPage County Fair in Wheaton,IL.

The straw poll was conducted from July 23 through July 27 at the DuPage GOP booth at the fair. Both Republicans and Democrats were polled.

Oberweis finished with 289 votes of the nearly 851
(34%) people that were polled.

Jack Ryan finished a close second with 251
votes (29.5%).

Secretary of Defense and former U.S. Congressman
from Illinois, Donald Rumsfeld came in a distant third with 186 votes (21.9%) of the vote.

Rounding out the rest of the results, Andrew McKenna
finished fourth with 41 votes (4.8%), Other or none received 35 votes(4.1%), John Cox finished sixth with 32 votes (3.8%), Chirinjeev Kathuria finished seventh with 11 votes (1.3%), and John Borling came in last withonly 6 votes (0.7%).

The most common question asked by most people that
took the poll was "I don't know any of these people," which led to a smaller vote total than expected.

Other comments were "Is Oberweis the same
as the ice cream?" or "Is Rumsfeld really running?"

Many people did mention that they did know that Jack Ryan was a teacher and he was not related at all to George Ryan.

The purpose of the straw poll was to get an early
indication of the voters' feelings on the candidates and to get them familiarized with the candidates' names. But it does show that many candidates need to work harder to get their names and their stances on
issues out to the voters.

More detailed results will be posted later on
www.gopparty.com

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On July 29th, before a crowd reputed to be the largest ever to fill the Gurnee Village Hall and reported as 'Standing Room only" according to one major
daily newspaper, eight Republican candidates for the US Senate outlined their positions on important issues. The forum, sponsored by the Republican Assembly of Lake County, hosted by Raymond True, RALC Chairman and moderated by Hal Coxon, drew all announced or potential candidates except Jim Oberweis, who was out of the country.

The RALC Chairman, indicated that the event was designed to bring all candidates into a common, neutral setting to answer questions on an equal footing. Eight men answered difficult questions in a tight one minute response envelope. They were all outstanding. There was no usual political diatribe in their responses. All answers were sincere, articulate and surprisingly direct.

Questions were asked of all candidates in rotating order. A forum, not a debate was the key. Political audiences are tired of the usual five minutes given to each aspirant to tell us what they did since they got out of the sandbox. One youthful attendee said the forum “Rocked!’
Candidates answered written questions submitted by the audience for 90 minutes. A social mixer of all attendees followed where the results of a Straw Poll
were announced.
The winner was Jack Ryan who received 30%(33 votes) of all the votes cast. The runner up was John Borling with 20% (22). All candidates received votes with the remaining order John Cox (14), Andrew McKenna (13), Dr.Chirinjeev Kathuria (13),Steven Rauschenberger (9), Thomas McCracken (4) and Raymond Choudhry (2).

THE FORUM RULES RESTRICTED STRAW VOTING TO CANDIDATES PRESENT ONLY!

The audience was nearly 200 with most casting ballots. Two dozen Republican Assembly of
Lake County members provided escort duty for the candidates. Question timing was provided by Zion Township Chairman, Guy Glenn Garrison and Doreen True. The tabulation of votes was supervised by Lake County Judge Raymond McKoski. The Invocation was provided by RALC Chaplain Glenn Stewart, a Zion Republican Committeeman.

Host Village comments were given by Ken Arnold, a Gurnee resident and Vice Chairman of the Republican Central Committee of Lake County. Arnold also read
welcoming remarks [available on request] by Gurnee Mayor Don Rudny, temporarily out of state.
Tom Adams, Chairman of the Lake County Republican Central Committee warmly welcomed the candidates and wished them well. The comment was expressed by many in the audience that the Republican Party appeared to have an "embarrassment of riches" when it came to qualified people willing to take on the duty of high public office within the Party.

For more info or to join the RALC contact Raymond True, Chairman, Republican Assembly of Lake County raymon8844@aol.com or respond to this newsletter

And Jones has the facts to prove it. More than 56,000 U.S. manufacturing jobs were lost in June, the 35th straight month of losses due largely to foreign competition--particularly from China, where goods can be made at a fraction of the cost and sold cheaply on our market. Forty-nine states have shared in the loss of more than 2 million manufacturing jobs since July 2000. Illinois' record is devastating. In 1974, it had 1,345,000 manufacturing jobs, or 30 percent of all state jobs. By 2001, it was down to 907,000, only 15 percent of state jobs. By 2002, we were down to 870,000, and we're still dropping. This state has lost one of every 12 manufacturing jobs since July 2000, he says.

''Don't forget that the rule of thumb for each new manufacturing job is that it creates 1.6 jobs in other manufacturing and service industries. Also the loss of one manufacturing job will cause the loss of 0.8 jobs in service industries.''

Jones knows whereof he speaks; he is a manufacturer as well as a banker. His Cummins Allison Corp. is, because of its patented technology, the only U.S.-owned company that manufactures coin and currency processing equipment. His competitors have withered away to foreign ownership. Cummins Allison is now engaged in litigation to save its many patents. This could be a national security issue, Jones says. Cummins' equipment ''helps protect against the possible flooding of the world with fraudulent currency and the tracking of drug and terrorist money.''

As Jones sees it, when the U.S. economy was protected by high tariffs, effective anti-trust, anti-dumping, minimum wage and patent laws, it flourished on a relatively level playing field with world competitors.

But after World War II, ''the 'free trade, free market' doctrine was embraced . . . and by 1971, the United States became an open, unprotected economy.''

If free trade worked as touted, Jones says, ''incomes for the poor, the middle class and rich should be significantly greater . . . the growth rates of gross domestic product, per capita income and real wages per worker would all have substantially increased. This has not happened.

"Instead, growth rates for GDP and per capita income have declined and real wages per worker have turned negative. Our nation is now a net debtor rather than a net creditor as it was when protected. Over 45 percent of U.S. government treasury notes, 35 percent of U.S. corporate bonds and 13 percent of the U.S. equity market are foreign-owned, and 9 percent of U.S. corporations are subsidiaries of foreign companies. Our balance of payments deficits for 2002 was over $500 billion. We now have 6.5 million citizens looking for jobs, 2.7 million who have lost hope and stopped looking, and 4.8 million only working part-time. The real unemployment rate is probably over 10 percent--not the 6 percent reported by the government.''

Jones levels blame on segments of big business for making ''free trade sacred doctrine.'' Some ''large U.S. multinational corporations see it as a way to break the power of the unions and reduce the wages of their workers. They believe that manufacturing in poverty wage level countries will enable them to compete with high-tech and large-scale manufactured products dumped here from high-wage countries like Germany and Japan that protect their domestic markets. But this is not working. U.S. multinationals are still losing the trade war, even with access to labor that is paid at poverty-level wages.''

The answer is a return to a protected economy, Jones says. He was just getting warmed up. More of his blunt analyses next week.

Jones calculates that real wages for the middle class peaked in 1973, ''shortly after the U.S. became an unprotected economy in 1971,'' when they were 176 percent of what real wages were in 1946. During the 17 years after 1973, real wages declined to 86 percent in 1995 and recovered to only 92 percent of real wages in 2000 during the "economic boom" of the late 1990s. ''If 'free trade' had been a better policy . . . their real wages in 2000 should have been significantly more than 175 percent of 1973--not a reduction,'' says Jones. ''When I confronted one 'free trade' economist with this data, he responded by saying, 'This is the price that must be paid to raise the standard of living for the rest of the world.' ''

Jones finds that the percentage of households in poverty bottomed out at 8.8 percent in 1973, just as real wages peaked, and by 2001 had risen to 11.7 percent. ''If 'free trade' were a better policy, the downward trend of families in poverty that prevailed when they were protected should have continued,'' he says. "Since 1973, the net savings rate has fallen from the long-run average of between 9.5 percent to less than 4 percent of net national product,'' he says. ''If 'free trade' is a better policy, the savings rate should be at or above the long-term high of 12 percent, and household debt should be reduced.''

Meanwhile, none other than conservative Phyllis Schlafly has weighed in on the issue of what the global economy costs Americans. ''When U.S. corporations built hundreds of plants in Third World countries, we were told not to worry about losing blue-collar manufacturing jobs because we were keeping service jobs,'' she writes. Now, she points out, big corporations based here hire immigrant workers from India and China at half or a third of the wages. She cites passage of legislation that legalized the importation of immigrant, non-citizen labor: H-1B visas, L-1 visas and outsourcing. She calls it a ''racket.''

''H-1B visas were created in the 1990 Immigration Act to allow corporations to import up to 65,000 cheap skilled workers from foreign countries to fill alleged labor shortages,'' she says. ''The shortage claim was always a fiction and now is nonsense.'' Some observers estimate that as many as 890,000 H-1B aliens are now employed in the United States, she declares. Immigration officials say the count is less than half the number because it excludes those previously approved or those who had their stay extended. It is still very high, and when compared with unemployment here, possibly scandalous. Schlafly details a U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics report that records joblessness among American electronic engineers at 7 percent and computer hardware engineers at 6.5 percent. Electrical and electronic engineers lost 241,000 jobs in the last two years, according to the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, as reported by Schlafly. ''Despite hundreds of thousands of unemployed American engineers and computer specialists, corporations continue to import foreigners at the same time that they lay off U.S. citizens.''

Schlafly makes plain who the culprits are: ''It is collusion between corporations that pour big money into politics and Congress that passes legislation enabling the corporations to replace American workers with substitutes, thereby keeping all wages artificially low to enhance corporate profits.''

John Jones and Phyllis Schlafly may not always be on the same page, but his indictment of ''free trade'' and her critique of free-wheeling corporations underscore real problems with the economy that the Democrat and Republican parties have ignored.

==>Robert Bork