Prop. 89 puts voters in charge again

There's a good editorial by Malinda Markowitz at the San Jose Mercury News about Proposition 89.

It's time we took California off the auction block and put the voters back in charge.

Wealthy interests write big checks to politicians and get favors in return in the form of corporate tax breaks, pork barrel projects, legislation or regulation and vetoes. Everywhere you look, regular Californians lose. Higher charges at the pump, inflated HMO premiums, contaminated food, rising chronic asthma rates from polluted air, shoddy products, inadequately funded schools because of corporate tax loopholes that divert money that could be used for education.

With Proposition 89, voters can restore balance to our political system. Even critics, such as the Mercury News editorial board, acknowledged that ``the pay-to-play money machine in Sacramento is warping politics, values and public policy.''

Proposition 89 would make politicians work for the voters, not campaign donors. It would reduce how much corporations, unions and individuals could give to candidates, ban contributions from lobbyists, and provide limited public funds to qualified candidates who rejected private contributions. Lawbreakers could be removed from office or jailed.

Proposition 89 also would limit corporations from spending more than $10,000 on initiatives, a provision some, like the Mercury News, dislike. But this election -- already the most expensive in state history -- illustrates why Proposition 89 is needed. Oil and tobacco companies have alone spent about $144 million on just two ballot measures. Last fall, it was drug companies spending $83 million on two initiatives.

Year in and year out, corporate spending has ignited a spending race that overwhelms voters and leads to a growing disenchantment with our political process. Even the U.S. Supreme Court has expressed alarm, upholding a Michigan law to ban corporate political contributions due to ``the corrosive and distorting effects of immense aggregations of wealth that are accomplished with the help of the corporate form and that have little or no correlation to the public's support for the corporation's political ideas.''

Read the rest.....

Chevron's Huge Profits

I thought it was interesting to see the announcement of Chevron's record profits in light of their threats to cut oil production if Prop 87 passes. I thought that was an idle threat to scare voters from voting for 87, and this US News Wire release sums up my thoughts on that issue.

"Chevron's shareholders would horsewhip any Chevron executive who cut production in a fit of pique over a fee of one-tenth of one percent on its overall profits," said Judy Dugan, research director of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights. "Chevron's threat, given that every barrel of oil the company pumps in California would still yield 63% profit after the prop 87 fee, is rubbish." See California crude oil profit chart at http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/energy/rp/6994.pdf Under Proposition 87, the extraction fee would decline if the world price of oil fell sharply, FTCR noted.

"When Californians see the Chevron ads against Prop 87, they should remember that this summer Chevron charged Californians hundreds of millions of dollars more for gasoline than other drivers around the country--and picked our pockets to bank their largest quarterly profits," said Dugan.

Imagine...

The Ventura County Star ran a good, thorough article on Proposition 89 today. Check it out.

Imagine a world in which politicians didn't have to sweet talk special-interest groups in order to raise money to get elected, in which the support of a waitress would be just as valuable as the support of a CEO or a union president, in which a truck driver would have as good an opportunity to run for political office as a lawyer.