Hi this is Kirk Bangstad and I’m running for state assembly in the 34th district against Rob, sacrificing-grandmas-to-sell-more-vodka, Swearingen

Hi this is Kirk Bangstad and I’m running for state assembly in the 34th district against Rob, sacrificing-grandmas-to-sell-more-vodka, Swearingen.

Here’s a post I wrote on the Brewing Company‘s Facebook page about the criteria we will be using before we reopen the inside of our restaurant. As always, I try to keep politics outside of my business, but on this political page I’d like to expand on why individual business owners and the public shouldn’t be the arbiters of when to reopen, and why Rob Swearingen and his Republican cronies in the state legislature and Supreme Court made your life more unsafe.

-First, most small businesses, especially bars and restaurants who have very low profit margin’s, don’t have the cushion to remain closed until it’s safe enough to reopen. If allowed, most will have to make the heart-wrenching choice to open even if they don’t think it’s safe enough, because economically they have no alternative. This is why true leadership would be to keep offering economic stimuli to small businesses until a safer testing and contract tracing system was in place.  Rob Swearingen creates a false choice by saying we have to choose between the health of the economy and our own safety.

-Second, the idea that the general public will make responsible choices on whether or not to frequent bars and restaurants, and that we don’t need any regulation in absence of a functioning testing and contact tracing system, is ludicrous. If it is necessary to create a law to put your seatbelt on to help save your life and the life of the person you crash into, it’s necessary to mandate that people not to go to a bar until our state is safer. It’s not the average citizen’s responsibility to become epidemiologists and determine what is safe, it’s the responsibility of government to hire public safety experts to create regulations to keep us all safe.

Rob Swearingen and his cohort of corrupt Republicans that upended this state’s democracy need to be voted out of office this November.  The health of you and your family depend on it.

Please share this to show there’s an alternative to terrible leadership at this time. And if you want me to introduce myself to you and your friends on Zoom, especially if you’re older and more at risk during this pandemic, please message this site and we will try to coordinate some meet and greets.

Written by Kirk Bangstad on 05/17/20