Virginians in the 8th Congressional District will be faced with a stark choice this coming election that will, in many ways, be a referendum on our Federal governance and our political process writ large. As it stands, the number one qualifier of whether someone is fit to serve in elected office is not merit but the accumulation of money. This exact scenario is playing out in the 8th Congressional District as wealth supremacy paved the way for a career politician to become a fixture in our nation’s capital.
Who I am referring to is my opponent and incumbent Donald Beyer. For those who don’t know, Representative Beyer is one of the wealthiest politicians in DC with a net worth well north of $123,000,000. If the name sounds familiar, that is because he is the principal owner of Beyer Volvo, a company his father started after coming back from World War II.
Just like our previous president Trump, Rep. Beyer was lucky enough to be born into a family that amassed large fortunes. What Donald S. Beyer Sr. built with his own hands, Rep. Beyer grew into an empire by leveraging the 2009 Car Allowance Rebate System, otherwise known as the Cash for Clunkers boondoggle, to reap a huge financial windfall for his estate.
While countless numbers of Americans were losing their homes without getting any help from the government, Beyer Volvo saw record profits thanks to the cronyism that enriched Wall Street by impoverishing tens of millions of Americans. This is nothing new of course, when government gets in bed with the very industries they are supposed to regulate, the result is rampant corruption that is sanctioned by the state and sacrifices the people in the process.
This November’s ballot will feature a first-generation immigrant from Ethiopia who doesn’t have to “feel your pain” because I live your reality on a daily basis. I did not inherit millions from my father, the only thing he passed down to me was his work ethic and determination to provide for his family. Instead of being born with a silver spoon in my mouth and living an uber-privileged life, I forked over my own money to put myself through college, attained an MBA from Johns Hopkins and became a highly accomplished IT Lead Project Manager supporting local, state and Federal agencies throughout the National Capital Region.
My story is not one of rags to riches but of resilience in the face of adversity. As much as I succeeded in the corporate world, I’ve also made mistakes and failed in spectacular ways. Seven years ago, I went from being a high-priced consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton to being homeless for two years and a half years after I made unwise personal and business decisions. I am not ashamed of my stint with abject poverty because it taught me humility and amplified my empathy; I am driven to run for public office and make a difference because I still live with the anguish of friends I made in homeless shelters and on the streets on my mind.
We can do better as a nation than to neglect the poor, indenture the working-class and decimate the middle-class for the sake of the neo-aristocracy. America, and the world as a whole, has more than enough to provide for all of us and ensure equality of opportunity for all of us. Instead we have a government that caters to the whims of multinational corporations and their billionaire owners while cratering the burdened 99%. Mr. Beyer is the poster child of a political system that transfers wealth upward to the Chablis and caviar class while socializing scarcity and financial insecurity for the rest of us.
I am sure that Rep. Beyer has encountered his fair share of hardships; pain, after all, is the one thing that no amount of riches can inoculate us from. However, when one is born into wealth that needs an accounting firm to enumerate, it creates a bubble that makes empathy for the adversities of everyday people nearly impossible. That is why politicians like Mr. Beyer are quick to tell their constituents to get electric cars in the face of rising gas prices not realizing that the average worker cannot afford to buy a Tesla that is worth more what most make in a year.
Which leads us to the crux of the matter, my fellow Virginians and Americans as a whole, I ask you, who represents you better, someone who has more dollars in his vault than almost all of his constituents put together have in their savings accounts or someone who is working two jobs to make ends meet? It is evident by now that millionaires working for billionaires is not working for us, I am running for Congress to ensure that someone who actually works for a living and represents our struggles finally has one seat at the table in DC.
Fikre means “my love” in Amharic #Ethiopia, Beyer sounds exactly how it is spelled. The choice is simple, do we want a purchaser of access or do we want love to represent us? #Fikre4VA
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We can continue doing the same thing over and over again—getting gaslighted in the process by both political parties—only to get the same result or we can do something transformative by declaring our independence from both political parties. I am running as an independent who will not take a penny from corporations for this very reason, it is time to break the duopoly instead of letting the globalist oligarchy break us. If you want someone to represent you who will not feed into the “us versus them” divide and instead will appeal to our common humanity, I am your candidate and I hope I will earn your vote come November.