Letter to the editor: Stand with Occupy Movement and Fix the Budgets

October 28, 2011 Leave a comment

Maintain and Control?

In the Oakland Tribune’s article on Occupy Oakland, Mayor Jean Quan focused on maintaining safe and sanitary conditions, and controlling vandalism.

Maintain and control? After years in city government, Mayor Quan must know the city has been harmed tremendously by the same 1 percent the occupiers are fighting. City Hall is both strapped for cash and handcuffed by restrictions on the ability to create good budgets.

Rather than shut the occupiers down, I wish Quan and every other city official would stand with the 99 percent and let everyone know that voters alone have the power to pass state propositions to keep the good parts of the old Proposition 13 — passed in 1978 to keep people from losing their homes due to rising property taxes — and fix the rotten parts. Prop 13 enabled billionaires to pay state and local taxes at a lower rate than the lowest income families, and enabled majority Democrats and minority Republicans to blame each other while California sinks.

The mayor could provide portable toilets and Dumpsters — they will cost far less than helicopters and police. Then stand with the 99 percent and stop Prop. 13′s terrible effects: upside-down taxes, centralization of decision-making, and gridlocked and excuse-ridden governments.

Laura Wells

Oakland

[Published in Oakland Tribune, 10/28/11, letter to the editor, page A7 and online, http://www.insidebayarea.com/opinion/letterstotheeditor/tribune/ci_19207280

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Occupy Movement Will Not be “Arrested”

October 24, 2011 Leave a comment

The Occupy Movement will not be “arrested” – meaning stopped. The 1% has gone too far. People, especially young people, are too wise.

It reminds me of when I was arrested outside the gubernatorial debate a year ago. The private security guard told me, “You don’t belong here.” That was not the magic phrase to get me to move. Yes, as a Green Party candidate for Governor, I did belong there, and we of the Occupy Movement do belong here.

My crime was “trespassing at a private party.” Perfect. That’s what our democracy had become, a private party. This year people are arrested for disturbing the peace, but as Daniel Ellsberg said, what we’re doing is disturbing the wars.

All the oligarchy is doing with their arrests is to firm up our resolve to keep going. We won’t stop. Even if the movement seems to falter or stall, there’s no need to waste our time and energy wondering if it will continue. It will. We’ll use our time and energy (while maintaining our health and happiness!) to do everything we can to pull out from the oligarchy and their corporations pushing junk and destruction, and we’ll create another way.

Power of a Good Example – that the Oligarchy Does Not Want Us to Believe

There are precedents for the kind of positive change we can achieve in the U.S. Of course the oligarchy has lied to us about good examples. And of course the good examples are not perfect! But just this morning I heard another South American president who was not the U.S. first choice got re-elected. This is excerpted from the British newspaper The Guardian, link:

Since [Cristina Kirchner] and her predecessor as president, her husband Néstor Kirchner, first moved into Argentina’s presidential palace in 2003, the income gap between the country’s rich and poor has been reduced by nearly half. Meanwhile, according to the International Monetary Fund’s numbers for 2002-2011, Argentina’s real GDP has grown 94%, the fastest in the western hemisphere and about twice the rate of Brazil, which has also grown substantially, the economist Mark Weisbrot said.

People Power Formula – that the Oligarchy Hates

In a future blog I will write about the formula for positive change most hated by the oligarchy: People Power = Social Movement + Electoral Movement. Latin America has changed in ways not expected 13 years ago. People most responsible for positive change were formerly disengaged from both the electoral process and social activism. Ironically, they understood the problems of the system the best, because they were the ones hurt by it. Then the breaking points occurred and things began to change for the better. People took to the streets, and began to vote for people and proposals that were not corporate-and-oligarchy backed.

The Occupy Movement will not stop. We will create a new way, and achieve the people power needed to keep it growing into the future.

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How to Tax The Rich in California!

October 3, 2011 Leave a comment

We need to wipe out Sacramento’s excuses for why they are not taxing the rich, and are instead giving us cuts-only budgets. Republicans are blaming majority party Democrats for our financial situation, but wait a minute –  Democrats are blaming minority party Republicans. How can that be?

First thing to remember is California is a wealthy state. For one thing, the number of billionaires in the state has grown to 85 with a total wealth of  $287 billion (10 times the California budget gap – think about that for a minute).

There’s no excuse for California to be in the financial situation it’s in, with bad budgets, terrible credit ratings, high unemployment, reduced educational opportunities, and a growing disparity of wealth.

What Can We Do?

Unlike voters in Wisconsin and other states, voters in California gave Democratic Party leadership big majorities in both houses of the Legislature, and 100% of statewide offices: Governor, Lt. Governor, Secretary of State, Attorney General, Controller, Treasurer, Insurance Commissioner, Superintendent of Public Instruction, and both U.S. Senators.

Could this group of elected officials stand together and make sure everyone knew beyond a shadow of a doubt what has happened to California? Of course. What if everyone knew with certainty that groups who’ve been blamed are not the root causes of our problems? Groups like welfare recipients, immigrants, school administrators, convicts.

“Honey, I love you, but you’ve got to change.”

That’s my valentine to old Prop 13. Keep the good parts, and acknowledge and fix the bad parts.

Proposition 13 was approved by voters in 1978 to keep people in their homes, especially seniors on fixed incomes. Thirty-plus years later a movement is afoot to fix problems caused by flattening property taxes, and do an even better job of keeping people in their homes.

Prop 13 had another rotten part. This one line in the ballot statement set the scene for the next 30+ years of bad budgets: Requires 2/3 vote of Legislature to enact any change in state taxes designed to increase revenues.

The State Controller, Treasurer, Insurance Commissioner, majorities in the Legislature along with the Governor could show us step-by-step how the 2/3 vote requirement for matters of revenue reduced taxes on the richest, raised taxes on the rest of us, and forced cuts in everything from budgets for schools to budgets for fixing pot-holes. Only voters have the power to fix it, by passing a state proposition.

Years ago California had taxes that were much more fair, and the richest 1% were still able to get richer. We can enact those taxes again when we understand and demand a change in old Prop 13. We can stop the gridlock, stop the excuses, and tax the rich!

Great Information:

California Crackup: How Reform Broke the Golden State and How We Can Fix It, by Joe Mathews and Mark Paul, 2010, 192 pages, http://www.californiacrackup.com/

California Budget Project www.cbp.org. Sign up for their blog, California Budget Bites.

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Disparity, Prosperity and Austerity

September 16, 2011 Leave a comment

A TV report about “poor” people pointed out how many have refrigerators, TVs, computers, and cell phones. The report used quotation marks and sarcasm to say the “poor” aren’t really poor.

Wealth and poverty are not all about material stuff. More money helps make us happier up to a certain point, a point called “enough.” An increase in happiness affected by money comes from having enough for survival and health, options in life, comforts and even some luxuries.

It’s the Disparity, Sister

Who’s wealthy and who’s poor is not absolute, as we know from seeing how simply people live in most other parts of our world, even Europe. It seems people can be happy with less, if things are more equal.

But things are less and less equal. The global economy came tumbling down and government rewarded Wall Street with more prosperity, and threatened the rest of us with more austerity.

Solutions to the Disparity

A major weapon of mass distraction (on the list with divide-and-conquer, keep-them-busy, and reduce-their-options) is to keep us discouraged. I believe hope is an essential human nutrient, and we need to feed ourselves with hope so we have enough spirit and energy to keep going toward a better world.

The Wall Street bailout was the tip of the iceberg that leaders of our Titanic Parties are steering us into. The iceberg itself is an underwater mountain of government subsidies for the very wealthy.

We can change direction. There are many solutions. Here are three:

  1. Create a State Bank, a publicly-owned bank that will invest in our state, not Wall Street. State Banks partner with local banks and credit unions, and make good loans to homeowners, small businesses, and students.
  2. Stop subsidizing the rich, and rationalizing it by saying they create jobs. They haven’t, and they won’t. Tell the truth about it. Tax breaks for corporations do not create jobs. Local businesses create jobs.
  3. Implement fair taxes for a change. Our current tax system is much more upside down than is commonly realized, both in terms of type of taxes, rates of taxes, how they are administered, and who gets audited. If the richest 1% paid the same percentage of their income in state and local taxes as the lowest 20%, and they got audited as diligently as the rest of us, we would be on our way toward balanced budgets.

The rest of this blog on Disparity, Prosperity and Austerity will be links which are engaging and informing, and I believe, encouraging. There are solutions.

Here’s a link to research on the effects of the disparity.

http://inequality.org/happiness-and-inequality-study/

Here are the “poor” people links, a one-minute video with Jon Stewart, and the full 3-minute piece from Fox TV.

http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/201108250029

http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/wealthy-fox-pundit-stuart-varney-rem

Here is a link to information about state and local taxpayers from the California Budget Project.

http://www.cbp.org/publications/state_taxes_land.html – click on “Who Pays Taxes?”

Here are two books by David Cay Johnston, an investigative reporter.

Free lunch: how the wealthiest Americans enrich themselves at government expense (and stick you with the bill).  David Cay Johnston, New York: Portfolio, 2008.

Perfectly legal: the covert campaign to rig our tax system to benefit the super rich– and cheat everybody else.  David Cay Johnson. New York: Portfolio, 2003.

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Solutions, or Rule by the Few?

September 5, 2011 Leave a comment

SourceURL:file://localhost/Users/lwells/Documents/BLOG%20published.doc

In my first blog I said, “Who do I mean by they when I say they don’t want us to believe there are solutions?” I’m writing this blog on the morning of Labor Day 2011 to address that question.

For awhile I figured the word was simply “them.” It’s a word people use all the time; it means those few who are running the show. I recently heard it used on a radio program. The host was interviewing young black activists about their take on the Obama presidency, and the host related a conversation he had had. An African American father told the host that for the sake of his son, he was very glad the U.S. had elected a black man as president, but even so, the father understood Obama was “one of them.”

If we had a monarchy, we would know kings and queens together with their troops and agents were ruling us. We don’t have a monarchy; we have a democracy, but it still doesn’t feel like majority rule.

Louis Brandeis, a Supreme Court Judge, said, “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”

“Elite” is a word often used to describe those few, but I reject that word. “Elite” brings with it the idea of “the best.” If they were the best, we’d be getting better and better in the areas of health, housing, education, environment, jobs, justice and peace. But those things are currently getting worse. In Latin America, where the balance of power is shifting toward majority rule, many people use the term “escualidos,” meaning squalid ones, rather than “elite” to refer to those who would keep all the power and wealth to themselves.

“Plutocracy” means rule by the rich. “Theocracy” means rule by religion. “Corporatocracy” has been invented to mean rule by corporations.

“Oligarchy” is the word I’m going for, simply rule by the few. While some may say it has too many syllables, it has exactly as many syllables as democracy, and the same number as Republican and Democratic. I know we can handle it.

The members of the oligarchy are not all rich, religious, military, or corporate. Who makes up the oligarchy: government or the private sector?  The answer is “Yes!” Leaders of the Democratic Party or the Republican Party? Again, the answer is “Yes!”

The oligarchy is government and private sector working together to benefit a few. Bipartisanship is the game they play to keep the system in place.

The next question that comes up is, “Why?” as in “Why would Washington turn toward wars and Wall Street rather than toward the people who voted them in?” A future blog will address that question, but for now it’s important to realize what’s going on.

We have an oligarchy, a few who rule. Ironically, they are the few who know how powerful we many are, more than we know it. They don’t want us to know bipartisanship is the game they play to keep the system in place; they don’t want us to know how powerful we really are; and they don’t want us to know that there are solutions.

But I’m smiling, because we’re learning.

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Green Tea Party faces off “Tea Party”

August 16, 2011 Leave a comment

The Tea Party and I will have another chance to face off on Saturday, August 27, in Napa.

The Napa County Green Party is reaching out to Green Party members and progressives to protest against the Tea Party from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. in Veterans Memorial Park in downtown Napa. The Tea Party will be kicking off a national tour. Green Fairfax Mayor Larry Bragman and I will be speaking.

My initial face-to-face encounter with the Tea Party happened shortly after my first appearance on Neil Cavuto’s TV show on Fox Business News. His programmer needed to book a guest in favor of taxing the rich, so they contacted the Green Party of the U.S. and I went on the show.

Neil Cavuto’s staff called me two weeks later and asked me to appear on his show in Sacramento on April 15, 2009. The Tea Party had just begun to get a lot of media, and they were holding tax day rallies around the country.

My memories of that Tax Day rally included my conversation with the young make-up person in a tent next to the outdoor TV stage. While Cavuto was interviewing Tom McClintock (a former opponent of mine from the 2002 State Controller race–Mr. Reverse 10-Key-Values), this young woman said, “I really disagree with what they’re saying here. It’s awful.”

A few minutes later I must have looked like a “deer in the headlights” when I said something about taking care of our future generations and the whipped-up crowd shouted that they’ll take care of themselves!

That was two years ago. I can’t wait for Saturday, August 27, when the Napa Green Party is giving us all a great chance to hold our signs and speak our values in Napa. (By the way, there are some tea partiers who are not in line with the agendas of their billionaire backers and mainstream media promoters, and there are defections!)

Join us if you are able, and bring friends. I’m looking forward to seeing a big crowd at this Green Tea Party.

CONTACT: napacountygreenparty@gmail.com, and http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=218992081477762

NEWS ARTICLE: http://www.timesheraldonline.com/news/ci_18679774

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There Are Solutions

August 15, 2011 1 Comment

It’s Sunday evening, August 14, 2011, and I’m starting a blog. It’s about solutions.

We actually can turn this mess around; we can turn away from destructive directions, and toward positive directions. There are solutions, but they don’t want us to believe that. That’s why I’ve decided to focus on solutions.

Who do I mean by “they” when I say they don’t want us to believe there are solutions? That will be my next blog.

Who do I mean by “us”? People who want great education and environment, jobs and justice, housing and healthcare, peace.

What kind of solutions? Individual and institutional solutions. Solutions where we take personal and global responsibility.

And a very important thing we’ll talk about is “How do we get there from here?” Social movements and electoral movements, awareness and solidarity, the power of good examples.

That about covers it. Thanks for joining in.

Another world is possible,

Laura

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