The original Demma boys. Grandpa Nick is at the far right.

After the war the original Demma brothers – Sammy, Jimmy, Tony, Carmen, Charlie, and my grandpa Nick – turned their old hang out spot into a restaurant called The Boat. Those boys went to hell and back, and then they found peace in the labor of restaurateuring and in the happy faces of their customers. Time took all six brothers, but that place is still standing, and back when I was a boy it was rocking.

Later that night, after dinner service, I sat down at a little table in the empty restaurant, and stared into the bar. The cigarette smoke filled the air like mist in a dream or in a foggy memory, and the blue and green neon beer lights shone nebulously through the darkness and the mist. That was when a bar smelled like a bar – the air thick and musty with alcohol and tobacco and breath. I’m sure there was music playing, but I couldn’t hear it over the roar – a steady howling of shouting drink orders and off-color jokes with their corresponding cackles. You never heard such cackling, but when he was on he was on – my old man that is.

They said he was a pain-in-the-youknowwhat, a sonuva-youknowwhat, and a little youknowwhat when he was a boy. He was a scrapper, a loud-mouth, and a fire-starter as a young man. When I was a boy they would tell me he was nuts, crazy, a lunatic. I thought he was smarter than anyone I’d ever met, but street smart – that is lighting quick on his feet with a razor sharp wit tinged with a constant stream of sarcasm. You never heard a joke he didn’t already know and told better than anyone you ever heard tell it. You know, the type of fast-witted street-smart kid that could make a Rhodes Scholar feel like a dumbly if he ordered his drink the wrong way.

Like I said, the bar was roaring that night. You see, Saturday nights were the night back then, the night to take your lady out for a prime rib and a few cocktails. The guys dusted off their blazers and sport coats and the ladies wore cocktail dresses and lots of make up. Some people went to the horse races up at Vernon Downs after dinner, and some stopped for drinks on their way home. People stood three deep around the horseshoe-shaped bar that night, laughing and smoking and drinking in a fog of their own bliss. Everyone was in love with their fat and happy state, and they hoped their night would last and last. I watched in awe from my table in the empty restaurant as my old man popped bottles, poured drinks, and worked his audience into a trance.

After a while, I snuck behind the bar to fix myself a Shirley temple. I found something to do, like wash the lip stick off the glasses and clean out the ash trays so I could stay out there a bit longer. By then everyone was all smiles and rosy cheeks, and they’d wanted to have some fun with me. One of them told me how I looked just like him and asked me if I was as nuts as he was, and everyone else laughed. Maybe I looked like him a bit on the outside, but on the inside I’m just like my mom, and I wanted to retreat back to the safety of my table in the empty restaurant. But I hung in there and tried to break their chops right back, except I wasn’t very good at it, and I just came off like an angry little kid, which was pretty funny to the drunk people, so they all laughed again.

Midnight came and went, and I was back at my table with my head in my hand staring into the red ice at the bottom of my Shirley temple, just like the last few drunks at the bar. I must have made a thousand salads and washed a million dishes since dinner started around five that evening, which felt like ages ago. I stared down the last few customers and barked at them, in my head, “You ain’t gotta go home, but you can’t stay here!” But they hung in there and ordered another.

Finally it was closing time, that is, time for my dad to head upstairs and count the money, and I tagged along. That upstairs office was second only to that old basement as the scariest places in the world in my book. There was an old metal desk with green padding on the top, a black metallic adding machine from the twenties, and a dusty old mattress with flowers on it from the fifties. At the desk there was a jar of something that looked like pomade. Dad told me people would use that stuff in the old days so they wouldn’t have to lick their thumbs when they were counting the cash. I opened the jar and preserved like a fossil in that ointment was my grandfather Nick’s thumbprint! I thought about how my dad was my age once, and he would have sat in that creepy old office while his father counted the cash after a long day of service.

When we came downstairs the bar was empty, except for a shadowy guy who had just slipped in the back entrance alone. The door closed behind him, and the room fell silent. I saw him more clearly as he crept closer, and he looked homeless or poor to me, and I got nervous. I thought about the cash we had just counted and thought we were done for. I froze.

“My man!” cried my dad, shattering the silence and scaring the daylights out of me. He popped a cold beer for the shadowy man, apparently a regular visitor, and then gave him a few dollars. On our way out, the shadowy man nodded to us while he broke down some boxes by the dumpster and nursed the cold-one that he took for the road. As we drove by him, I saw that same smile I had seen on everyone else’s faces that night.

God knows what time it was, but now I felt a burst of energy, that satisfying burst of energy you only get from completing an honest day of work. The August air fogged the inside of the windshield, and the hot air felt so thick I thought we were driving through a cloud. We rolled through the hills of Vernon, crept by the police speed traps in Kirkland, past Alfredo’s banquet hall and Zebb’s neon lights, and past hamburger alley and the Sangertown Mall in New Hartford. We hoped for good luck with the traffic lights as we headed east on Utica’s Memorial Parkway. Dad said he once made that drive in eighteen minutes, but it always took us closer to a half an hour, which feels like two hours when you’re eleven and it’s past midnight.

As we drove into East Utica, the thick August air stuck to the back of my eye lids. I saw the ghosts of my grandfathers as I blinked, but I wasn’t scared. I thought about how silly it was that I was afraid of ghosts and of that shadowy man in the bar. I blinked heavier now and rested my head against the warm opaque window. I saw flashes of rosy faces, and felt the warmth of the night take hold of me, and then I melted into carefree joy of a boy’s summer.

The Boat circa 1950.

The first immigrant’s in our family came from Ireland. My wife Kelly’s great-great-grandfather Patrick Howard was born in Ireland in 1852 at the height of the Great Famine, also called the Irish Potato Famine. By the time of his birth, nearly 25% of Ireland’s population had either died or fled the country. It’s hard to imagine, but try scrolling your Facebook friend’s list and stopping at every fourth person. Then imagine them either dead or disappeared. It’s even harder to imagine any able bodied people sitting around mid-nineteenth century Ireland waiting to die – the only choice was to pack up and go somewhere that had more food and less pandemic disease. And so, my wife’s ancestors left Ireland along with one million of their compatriots, not for a better life, but for their only chance at life.

Forty years later in 1892, my great-grandfather Leonardo Demma was a twenty-year old man living in Calabria, Italy with a similar so-called choice to make. In those days, the newly unified country of Italy was feast in the North and famine in the South. The northern provinces of Lombardy, Piedmont, and Venice underwent a massive government funded revitalization, fueled by the deforestation of southern Italy. The resulting draught, famine, and disease ravaged Calabria, where peasants like my great-grandfather were systemically denied schooling, and eventually revolted against their government in civil war. Leonardo Demma left Italy alone in 1892 like my other ancestors, and like the twenty-five million other Italians in the greatest human migration in recorded history – The Italian Diaspora.

Here in Hartford, Conn., 34% of our city’s population claim Puerto Rican decent. Puerto Ricans entered the States en masse starting after World War Two, and continuing through the 1970s and 80s as the island was forcefully “industrialized.” Intense foreign competition caused crippling unemployment as the agricultural society of Puerto Rico painfully shifted to manufacturing. This drove tens of thousands from their homes to the Northeastern states like New York and Connecticut.

In the 1990s, while I was a boy living in Central New York, Yugoslavia fell apart and the Bosnian War forced thousands of immigrants into my home town. Today 10% of Utica, N.Y.’s population are Bosnian. The horrible irony is that many of these immigrants face discrimination from Italian-Americans even though their ancestors lived less than 500 miles from each other in Europe! The Bosnian-Americans are more refugees than immigrants, forced from their homes like millions who came to America before them, and yet they are looked at as second class people in a town that should know how to take care of displaced foreigners.

Today Mexicans make up the largest group of people migrating to the United States (as of 2010, followed by the Chinese and Indians). What’s going on in Mexico? Well, 90% of drugs entering the United States are controlled by the powerful Mexican drug cartels, who buy this power with an estimated 12,000 murders per year in Mexico. And it’s not just soldiers dying in Mexico. Imagine waking up to learn your local police chief or town councilman had been murdered, or a family you knew was found in a mass grave near the boarder Del Norte. This is Mexico today. What choice do these people have? What would you do with your family?

Why does a drowning man grab ahold of the first log within his grasp? Not because of choice, but because he must. People emigrate from their home countries out of necessity. It’s not a choice. Immigration is fulfillment of their fate. America is their shining city on the hill just like an island is for someone floating stranded at sea. There is no where else for them to go, and staying in their raft is not an option.

My great grandfather did not move to America for an easy life filled with wealth and luxury. He signed his name with an “X” in 1892, and left home on a spaceship bound for the unknown, the unfamiliar, and the terrifying. He worked the worst jobs that no one else wanted, like lugging bricks around for masons or shining shoes. He was met with racism and discrimination. He had to learn a complex foreign language even though he was illiterate. He was just like the Irish before him, and the Mexicans after him.

At least one of my great-grandparents and at least one of Kelly’s ancestors “came in through Canada.” This is a phrase that people are comfortable using today to describe their ancestors’ undocumented immigration that they enjoy the benefits of today. These same people who use this benign phrase call present day immigrants who enter the US just like their ancestors did different names. Here are the nicer ones: border-jumpers, illegals, aliens.

Illegal alien is just a made up phrase for people who are our brothers and sisters, who act just like we do – we act in our own best interest, we act to survive, and we are moved helplessly by the millions of forces around us. Would you kick your own brothers and sisters out of your home?

This famous portion of the poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, which my great-grandfather would have seen over a hundred years ago, has stuck with me from the first time I read it…

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

America’s greatness is founded on the immigrant spirit – the spirit of those who had the strength to reestablish themselves in a foreign land. The inscription from the Statue reminds me of the Sermon on the Mount, which also stuck with me from the first time I heard it…

“Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn,
for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek,
for they will inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they will be filled.
Blessed are the merciful,
for they will be shown mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart,
for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they will be called children of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

I’m proud to be part of the greatest nation in the history of mankind, a nation that embraces the meek with open arms because we know that all men are created equal. Sure, we need safe and secure boarders, and all individuals in this country need to enrich their communities, not endanger them. We are a nation of laws AND we are a nation of immigrants. Congress must provide a firm but fair path to citzenship for undocumented citizens who work hard and do not commit crimes. And most importantly immigration reform needs to start with empathy and love.

Statue of Liberty National Monument, Ellis Island and Liberty Island, Manhattan, in New York County (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A deep sadness overcame David as he continued on his drive. He longed for their early years of marriage, those frivolous days of laugher and shallow bliss. Then he thought of when the children came, and he remembered, in his sad state, how those babies revealed to David and his bride the true meaning of a marriage, that is building a family. And then David thought about how the children had grown and occupied themselves with their own lives, and how he and his wife had cherished what their marriage had became in those later years, when it was just the two of them again.

David drove on, and in remembering those later years with her something changed within him. He could barely hold onto the feeling, but somewhere deep down something was growing at the bottom of David’s sorrow. In effort to grasp this thing, David thought more about his life and his marriage and how his wife and his children had become a part of his whole being. He again remembered the priest’s promise on their wedding day, that two lives would become one, and he felt that their children were also now a part of this one life. He kept thinking about this and he kept driving.

Then, at the bottom of his sorrow, David began to recognize that growing thing inside him was perfect joy. Through his thoughts and memories and through something else, he felt his bride was still with him. He began to feel almost ashamed of his sorrow, and he began to feel his memories and thoughts were silly and insignificant. Then he felt that he, his bride, the children, and even the strangers driving in the cars beside him, with all of their silly thoughts and memories, were all somehow connected, all somehow a part of his life. He became overwhelmed with joy, and he wept like he hadn’t wept in decades, since he was a silly little boy. He no longer felt he would be half of a life. He felt more alive than he ever had before. He was one life made not of two parts, but of billions plus something else holding everything together. She gave him this gift. And David kept on driving in this state of perfect joy until he reached their home.

Two years ago today mommy brought you into this world.

Two crazy years of chasing your stinkin’ behind all over the place.
Two years of laughing, playing, screaming, wrestling, and running.
Two years of, “Daddy!”
Two years of pidder-padder on the wood floors.
Two years, and you still don’t sleep through the night.
Two years and you still toss your food on the floor.
Two years of choo-choos and tars and trucks and Oso and Melmo.
Two years of sock monsters.
Two years of boo-boos and kisses and huds and duddles and dia-dees.

Two years of all the things that are making you you, and me me.

Love you buddy,
Daddy

Businesses do not exist because of great leaders or managers. The greatest leader can achieve nothing in business unless he happens to work with a bunch of other people who have decided to work together towards a common goal. The individuals work for this common goal, not because the great leader asks them to, but because they believe they can achieve their own individual goals, that is they believe they are in the best possible position to make money, advance a career, or occupy themselves. And this can only continue if their output is desirable by other individuals called customers.

To put it another way, a business can be described as a function of two variables. If X is the sum of the individual wills the employees of the organization, and if Y is the sum of the individual wills of customers, then the business f(x, y) can be described as:

f(x, y) = XY

This is what the graph of a business looks like, with the bottom left corner of the frame being bankruptcy, and profits increasing exponentially along the z access as X and Y increase:

While it is impossible to definitively quantify X and Y, it is possible to draw some conclusions from my function. When X and Y increase together, the function of the business, or profits, or perhaps the utility of employees and customers, increase exponentially. When either is zero, the function is zero, or the company goes out of business.

I’ll present two quick practical examples to illustrate my point. First, Twitter is a company that is growing exponentially. Twitter the name for the group of people who decided to work together and use their talents for innovation and writing computer code to achieve their personal goals of pay, advancement, and self-worth. These people are achieving their goals, because the product they produce allows hundreds of millions of other people to achieve their goals of communication, leisure, connectivity, the need for information, or whatever else they use Twitter for. Both variables, the will of employees (X), and the will of customers are increasing (Y), and so the business (or function) of Twitter is growing exponentially.

Blockbuster is a group of people who also want to make money, advance careers, or increase self-worth – a high or maybe even growing X value, but sadly for these people, the customers can achieve their goals of entertainment better from Netflix, On Demand, or iTunes. The Y in this function is being reduced to zero, and Blockbuster is going out of business.

Where does leadership fit into this equation? I now believe that the minuscule role leaders play in the function of a company can be expressed as a coefficient, s, which modifies X, the sum of the individual wills of the company, so that:

f(x, y) = sXY

In other words, a business is a function of the sum of the individual wills of employees which is modified by a leadership coefficient, times the sum of the individual wills of consumers. I suspect this leadership coefficient is a very very small number that, from company to company, ranges between zero and a teeny tiny bit over one.

The sad story of Circuit City will provide an example. In the two-thousands, Circuit City fired all of their commissioned salespeople. Commission salespeople at Circuit in those days could make almost a hundred-thousand dollars per year in commission. As a result the company had been able to attract top sales talent, and create a competitive advantage over Best Buy, Walmart and the Internet. Then the leaders decided to fire all those talented salespeople, and they hired clerks to replace them. To express this fatal decision in my function, we can let the leadership coefficient s equal zero, so that the function for Circuit City (CC) became:

f(CC) = (0 * X) * Y

The horrible leadership decision modified the sum of the individual wills of the employees to zero, and even though the demand for consumer electronics remained high (Y), Circuit City went out of business.

But why am I suggesting here that this leadership coefficient is always a small number? This seems odd since for the past two years I’ve been writing blog posts about how leadership and management can move companies to greatness.

Well, I’m beginning to realize that leaders can only bend the wills of individuals so much, if at all.

The real question is what moves people? What motivates someone to behave in a certain way? The real answers to this question are too varied and too complex to be known. A group of a dozen direct people can millions of factors that motivate them – from their upbringing, to their genetics, to the laws of physics, to the mood they are in, to their family life, to their hobbies, to their dreams, to their greed, to their intellictual capcity, and so on. Of these millions of motivators, leadership is only one factor, and so even when leaders do a great job, they can only bend the sum of the individual wills by a multiple of 1.0001 at best.

So is all hope lost, and are leaders to submit to the fatalism of my cold math? Maybe. The way I see it, business leaders only have one way of significantly affecting the ultimate success or failure of an organization – and that’s by attracting and hiring people who will behave in a way that when their individual utility is maximized, the utility of the organization increases. In other words, hire people who when they chase after their personal goals by behaving based on their own unique and inexplicable motivators, they will also be chasing the company mission. Stated simply, as a leader making a hiring decision the question is, if I cannot change a person in any significant way, are they likely to advance the mission of the organization? Only by building the right team, can a leader effectively change future outcomes. The rest is just fate.

Epiloge

For the one or two of you who may recognize some of the language used above, yes I did deduce this post from Leo Tolstoy‘s War and Peace. For those of you who have not read it, or are too afraid to read it, let me tell you this. You could read ten books this year and learn nothing, or you can read War and Peace and learn the meaning of life. The book is not hard to read. Tolstoy is extremely accessible. It’s just long. You can do it.

I’m pretty lucky too. Let’s imagine, as Buffett often encourages, that a magic genie takes me back in time to the moment before my birth. The genie points to a clear plexiglas box with billions of white plastic balls with black numbers stamped on them wildly churning about, and he proposes a deal in his reverberating baritone, “You may either take the life you currently have, or you may draw from life’s lottery box, and take a chance on a ball that leads to a different life.”

What a risk. In my new life, I would certainly want to be born into America, but there’s only about a 4% chance of drawing a red, white and blue ball. I’d want above average intelligence, and a family that supports my education, but only 8% of those lives will come with master’s degrees. And I certainly would rather not have to try to work my way out of poverty, but one out of eight balls would mean I would not have access to clean drinking water, and half the balls would mean living on less than $2.50 per day. These are not good odds.

“I’m going to keep the life I have, Genie, thanks anyway.”

“Hmmm. What if you I let you draw more than one ball? Will you now play the ovarian lottery?”

This would only be a worth-while proposition for me if the genie would let me draw about 5,000 balls from the lottery pool! Only then would I be likely improve my situation, or, in other words, only one in 5,000 people in this world are born with a better chance at life than I was born with.

I’ve had to remind myself of my good fortune lately. Like everyone else, I’m not immune from feeling sorry for myself from time to time, no matter how much or how little relative achievement fate has bestowed on me. It’s during my most pitiful moods I remind myself that there are about 4,999 other people out there who would have been luckier if they drew my ball from the ovarian lottery box. They would’ve killed to have the start that I had.

They surly wouldn’t sulk at dealing with the tiny troubles that come my way from time to time, and I bet they imagine they would never complain about the nonsense that gets me down. Just like I look at the ultra lucky, and think to myself – what do they have to complain about? They were born lucky. Well, they’re not the only lucky ones.

Warren Buffett speaking to a group of students from the Kansas University School of Business (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I couldn’t wait to tell my wife, who happens to be a therapist, about my amazing discovery. I shared the article with Kelly, and she said, “John! I’ve told you about Kazdin a hundred times. Don’t you ever listen to me?” Sometimes I’m not a good listener.

No one is better at praise than my wife. I have to remind myself constantly to give praise both at home and at work, but she’s a natural, which is why she’s a naturally excellent mother and therapist. Two quick examples follow.

First, our son Jack hates taking medicine. A couple of months ago, Jack had strept throat. I tried everything to get him to take the medicine. Eventually I had to force him to take it – I pinned the little guy down and dumped a shot of amoxicillin down his throat. It was awful. Later my wife put the medicine in some applesauce. Every time Jack took a bite of his applesauce/medicine concoction Kelly would start hooting and hollering like a whackadoodle. “YAYYYYYYYY!!!!” You never heard such hooting and hollering. Fast forward to this earlier week, and Jack was sick again, this time with a double ear infection. He needed to take the same lousy medicine, expect this time, Kelly didn’t need the applesauce. To my astonishment, Jack eagerly gulped down the pink slime, and then looked up at mommy for his praise. “YAYYYYY!!!” shouted two whackadoodles this time.

As a second example, Jack has recently taken interest in going pee-pee in the potty. “He’s too young,” I told my wife. “Don’t waste your time.” Anyway, somehow she got Jack to squeeze out a couple of drops of wee-wees into the toilet a few weeks ago, and when he did, it was like the Fourth of July in the bathroom. Not only was there a massive celebration, but out of the chaos the “Pee-Pee in the Potty,” dance was born. You can do it. Just point your fingers to the sky and alternate pumping them up and down while chanting, “Pee pee in the potty! Pee in the potty!” It’s such good fun, that after a few lucky shots Jack start asking to go to the bathroom. “Pee-pee,” he says in his little Jack voice as he waltzes towards the bathroom door. Amazing.

The WSJ article makes the point that focusing on praise is harder than it sounds. Dr. Kazdin says people’s brains have a “negativity bias,” which means parents are more likely to notice when kids display the wrong behaviors. This seems to ring true in the workplace too.

Let’s face it, management and parenting are essentially the same thing. Employees will behave the way managers desire if the managers would just lavishly praise the employees when they model those desirable behaviors. Managers tend to focus on the worst – the bottom ten percent, the challenges, the opportunities, or whatever other jargon you’ve heard used to describe an aggregate of negative behaviors.

Managers – Kazdin says there’s a better way. You can get more out of your people with a spoonful of sugar.

A spoonful of sugar (Photo credit: AJC1)

A three-hour car ride for an eighteen month old child feels like a week does for you and I. So, in Gabby’s mind, it was about a week after leaving her house in Newtown when she first felt the sand between her tiny toes. It was blindingly bright that day, and the light shone all around her. For their entire lives, adults chase that rapturous feeling of boundless excitement that Gabby felt at that beach.

By August the Cape Cod water was as warm as her night-time bath, but she could run and run and run in this warm bath tub. Daddy chased his little angel until she tired him out. Then grandpa tried to keep up. Grandpa remembered a day like this one when Gabby’s Mom was young, and he lost himself in this memory for a moment, and the glow of this memory lasted for a few moments more. Grandma was there too, and they all ran and played in the light, which not one cloud dared to interrupt.

Much much later, they all went for ice cream. Gabriella grew tired, but became still more aware of her parents’ love. She was their little angel. The sun fell towards the horizon like a halved blood orange. Gabby’s perfect day lived forever in that brilliant light.

English: Cape Cod beach at sunset, Race Point Beach(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Half of my professional career has occurred during the Great Recession. Four years ago giants like Lehman Brothers and General Motors collapsed and the fall awoke the monster. The monster is now well known. To the jobless. To the part timers. To those who do not have benefits. To those starting over.

The monster has spared me, and I am grateful. Somehow my company and my career have managed to continue forward into the economic darkness. I have a good salary and full time hours. I have health insurance and a 401k. I get to wear a suit to work every day. I can afford to pay my mortgage. I am very lucky, but it takes more than luck to survive an economic apocalypse.

Unless congress comes together to make a change, the country faces automatic tax increases and spending cuts that the Congressional Budget Office predicts will plunge our economy into another recession. Am I the only one who didn’t know this recession ended? If the commerce world is going to come an end for the second time in five years, than I will survive again using what I have learned from those who have met the monster.

I will always embrace hard work.

I will remember that thoughts like, “I deserve better pay,” and “I deserve to be off the road,” are evil thoughts, and, “I deserve” is an evil phrase.

I will save money and build my 401k. I will pay down my debt.

I will never stop learning. I will learn and grow faster than my company and my industry. I will keep up with changes in technology. I will find new ways to stay relevant and valuable to my organization.

I will be loyal to my boss, other department leaders, and company executives. I will be a company guy – my company’s very own Captain America. I will make allies in other departments, not enemies. I will help my coworkers achieve their goals.

I will follow my company’s zero tolerance policies like safety rules, information security regulations, and harassment standards.

I will make sound decisions and surround myself with good people.

I will take care of my people, and care about each individual person. I will not yell at them, swear at them, or make them feel powerless. I will embrace the role of a servant leader. I am more like an elected official than a king, and I will remember that the people who put me in my position can vote me out at any moment.

I will lose my ego now.

Lastly, I will take risks, because not taking risks is the riskiest strategy. I won’t stand still. I will sprint forward into the darkness, because I know the monster is right on my heals.

1. Partisanship: Congress has stalled as each party has moved away from the center and entrenched themselves into immovable principle-based philosophic positions. When there is gridlock in a business, the rank and file employees don’t take the blame – the leaders do. And if the leaders cannot get things done, the leaders get changed. I’m voting for moderate leaders who are willing to compromise to produce legislation that will get our country moving forward.

2. Taxes: I believe we need to simplify our tax system, lower tax rates, and broaden the tax base. Lowering tax rates while closing loop holes would effectively get the rich to pay their fair share, as wealthy Americans are much more likely to take full advantage of legal tax lowering strategies (i.e. itemizing deductions, tax shelters). And at a 35% corporate tax rate we are the least competitive country in the developed world. Yet by using some of same loopholes and legal tax avoidance strategies, huge corporations can lower their effective tax rates into the single digits. A lower tax rate without the loopholes would be fairer and would bring jobs back to America.

3. Energy Independence: We’re hooked on fossil fuels for the foreseeable future, and we have an ocean of natural gas and oil, along with the world’s largest recoverable reserves of coal right here in North America. We have so much energy that the next great economic boom could be right below our feet. I also believe that government investment in research and development of the energy technologies of the future is important.

And here’s who I’m voting for, along with my predictions for how I see the election panning out:

2nd Congressional District: I like democrat Joe Courtney, and I think he’s a decent congressman. I met him once and saw him speak a couple of times. I even voted for Joe in 2010 because he broke from his party in voting against TARP in 2008, and he has helped protect submarine manufacturing jobs here in Connecticut as a member of the Seapower subcommittee. Joe is losing my vote this year because of his recent votes against free trade agreements, his support for big labor, and his advocacy for a more “progressive” tax system (i.e. raising rates). Prediction: My vote goes to businessman and local municipal leader Paul Formica, but Courtney the populist will win big anyway.

U.S. Senate: Republican Linda McMahon gets my vote for Joe Lieberman’s old seat. Her extremely liberal opponent Chris Murphy voted with Nancy Pelosi in the house 1788 times since 2007, and he was LEFT of his party’s leadership on some bi-partisan congressional efforts. McMahon is running as moderate, touting herself as a pragmatic business woman who will work to get things moving in the Senate. Prediction: Murphy is being outspent by a fortune, and is running a lousy campaign, but he’s still polling comfortably ahead. Sadly McMahon won’t get the miracle she needs on election day, and we’ll be sending another extremist to the senate.

POTUS: I freely admit that as a registered republican I voted for Barack Obama in 2008. I believed candidate Obama’s boldness and charisma would help him execute his message of unity and change. I’m not voting for him again because he has failed as a leader to make good on this promise. I don’t know about you, but if I didn’t get results for four years at my job, I would get fired. And in the business world, leaders don’t get to blame employees for lack of results. Leaders have a responsibility to work with all stakeholders to get things done, no excuses. President Obama has failed to show the leadership necessary to bring congress together. Of course congress bears part of the blame, but a true leader would have united congress, not participated in dividing it further. Prediction: Most polls show the president’s lead has dwindled or disappeared both nationally and in key swing states. Romney is now favored in Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida. Today’s reports from Ohio show a lower early voter turnout than 2008, which favors Romney. I think Romney will squeak out Ohio and maybe even turn another blue state red, like Pennsylvania. Mitt Romney will become the 45th President of the United Sates of America.