Electoral Politics and Democracy American-Style In CA

[Peter Lemkin]

One look at her platform and it is obvious why someone illegally had her arrested, as she might have asked an embarrassing question or made an even more embarrassing statement during question time. She IS A VALID candidate and had valid tickets to the event - yet she was arrested for trespass!...wanna know why? In her own words:

California is now in a situation where they call it ungovernable. And the candidates, past and current, are not talking about what the real issues are. In 1978, the voters took matters into their own hands about taxes, because the governor at the time, Jerry Brown, was not taking care of business. And people were in danger of losing their homes because of rising property taxes. So they voted for Prop 13 in 1978, and it had the hidden zingers in the back, which is what a lot of propositions do. And that had the flattening of the property tax, which more people know about than the other part, which is the two-thirds majority required to raise income, to raise revenue, to raise taxes. And so, what happened, in combination with a simple majority, to lower taxes. So our legislature was very much encouraged to lower taxes in the boom years, because it comes back to feed their campaign in the form of what the Supreme Court called "free speech" and what I might call "corporate bribes"—corporate campaign contributions. So they lowered taxes in boom years. Now, when we need it, two-thirds is too high a jump.

AMY GOODMAN: What do mean by what you’re calling for, a state-run bank?

LAURA WELLS: A state-run bank—there’s a quote: "Give me control of your money supply, and I care not who makes the laws." If we had control of our own credit—we do with the pension funds and so on. We have a lot of wealth in this state. If we used that wealth to invest in California, not in Wall Street, loosen ourselves from the grip of the Federal Reserve, and behave as one other state in this country, which is North Dakota, and as all the other countries—there are only seven countries that are larger than California—have their own central banks, and partnering with the local banks and the credit unions—those are the banks that made the good loans, those are the banks that want their communities to be strong, unlike the out-of-state banks—partner with the local banks and credit unions and invest in the infrastructure of California, invest—and the interests that would be paid would come back into California. Imagine, the students would have loans, not from, you know, CEO-run companies, where they have private golf courses on their land, but from the state of California, that wants the students to thrive and the universities to thrive. Imagine that. That’s what I’m proposing.