Jerry Lee Wilson, Candidate for Oregon Governor

Occupation: Founder/CEO, Soloflex, Inc.

Occupational background: Airmail Pilot; Airline Transport Pilot; Organic CSA Farmer.

Education: Attended New Mexico Military Institute, South Texas College, Eastern New Mexico University; Flight Safety International.

Candidate Statement

Oregon’s Constitution grants its Governor Executive Power. By Executive Order I will:

End government-for-sale. Money is the root cause of every ailment in our body politic. No contributions or gifts will be allowed to those seeking or holding public office. Candidates for office can publish their resumes and ideas in an expanded voter’s guide and participate in televised and other public debates. This is a truly revolutionary thing I will do if you elect me. Both major party candidates in this election have accepted contributions from unions and corporations, a clear violation of the law (Ballot Measure 47, passed by Oregon voters in 2006).

Establish a State Bank. This bank would make 2% loans to municipalities, private companies and individuals to repair and expand Oregon’s transportation and renewable energy infrastructure, to make our factories, offices, homes and schools more energy efficient and to rebuild our manufacturing base. We need this bank to create long-term, living-wage jobs. And we need it now!

End the drug war. It hasn’t worked, we can’t afford it and we can use that money to help create an economically viable future for the next generation.

While I have never run for elective office, I have been a Chief Petitioner on two statewide Initiatives, one to close the Trojan nuclear plant, another to decriminalize hemp. I served as a member (dissenting) on the 2004 National Democratic Party Platform Drafting Committee. I have been a long-time anti-war activist, Executive-in-Residence at the University of Oregon MBA Graduate School and twice a keynote speaker at Willamette University’s Entrepreneur Conference. I have created hundreds of jobs and brought to Oregon about $1 billion in sales.

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“Without Jerry Wilson in this race, important issues like campaign financing, the war on drugs, and state-supported, broad-scale economic development would be quietly swept under the rug by the two major candidates. Why vote for the lesser of two evils when one has the opportunity to vote for the better candidate with better ideas and the courage to state them.”

—John Platt

See more such comments and read the latest news: One Alternative to Kitzhaber and Dudley, by Hank Stern, Willamette Week, August 16, 2010

So Vital!

Everyone knows the definition of an honest politician – one who stays bought.

I’m running for governor primarily to make a big deal about an issue no democratic or republican party candidate would dare mention – getting money COMPLETELY out of our politics.

No other issue is so vital to the health and quality of government.

What is needed in government is a commitment to work for the public good above special interests. That’s not what we have.  EVERY illness in our body politic stems from this one root-cause.  I intend to stop it in its tracks by Executive Order. No more bribes, no more gifts, no more favoritism for those seeking or holding office.

Candidates for public office can publish their resumes and beliefs in an expanded voter’s guide. Nothing else is needed. The best IDEAS for improving society should determine our votes, not the advertising agencies that sell us candidates like they sell us soap.

We don’t allow those who judge our laws to be conflicted by money.  The same should hold true for those who make and enforce our laws.

I’m embarrassed…

…that many of us are on the streets reduced to penury, in this, the richest country in the history of the world. I’m embarrassed that each child isn’t provided an income so they might share in the riches of our inheritance.

I’m embarrassed that our most difficult, tedious and valuable kind of labor, motherhood, goes completely unremunerated. Being a factory owner, I view things from that perspective. The real product of Factory America is the next generation.  That’s the bottom line and that’s where we should all focus our attention.

I’m embarrassed that we spend more on caging people than we spend on higher education. I’m embarrassed that we have a government for sale. I’m embarrassed that we torment our children and teachers with a Prussian Military education system that teaches them to obey and believe instead of learning to question. I’m embarrassed that we’ve allowed ourselves to become subservient to a nanny state as a consequence of this education system.

I’m embarrassed that our country  has been so intimidated by demagogue politicians that we devote half our industrial output to protect it, from what I can’t discern. I’m embarrassed that we fund this spending by printing paper money instead of raising taxes, shifting the debt to our kids and hyper-inflating our currency. That shows a serious lack of character.

We owe it to our children and grandchildren to do something about these embarrassments. Ralph Waldo Emerson says the state is a trick. Clearly it’s time for a new trick. Nothing should be off the table to get this factory humming again, justice demands it.

What should kids learn in school?

It will come as no surprise to those who’ve read my previous blogs on our education system that I think it stinks, a Prussian military invention that has produced a fearful nation of non-readers and non-thinkers. Pouring more money into more of the same will only make things worse. We need to totally rethink what an education should be, and whether government should have any role at all in providing it. We need diversity in education, not all be stamped out like sub-standard parts on a Chinese assembly line.

Our schools do not teach us how to grow, preserve and safely handle food, the most important thing anyone can learn. Our schools do not teach us how to eat properly, what to eat and what to avoid. It is ruining our health. The information is out there but it isn’t being passed along.

Our schools do not teach anything about the law, an amazing fact considering we’re a country founded on law.

Our kids are not taught how to diagnose illness. Africans were taught that with a yes/no chart and could diagnose as well as 99% of American physicians after three months of practice.

Our schools do not teach us how to build or fix things electrical or mechanical, so remain ignorant of such things in an electro-mechanical world.

Our schools do not teach the practical aspect of ethics. No person can rise above the level of his own character.

What the teacher’s union IS allowed to teach is very strictly dictated by competition, so nothing one can earn a living with is allowed to be taught. Of course, the real point of our education system is to act as babysitters, while parents, both of them, are working at mostly boring and irrelevant jobs, working twice the hours necessary just to feed an overblown military/welfare/police/prison state that doesn’t even resemble what our founding fathers imagined.

It isn’t the state’s responsibility to educate your children; it’s a parent’s responsibility. The whole point of an education is to teach people the art of providing for themselves. Does that sound even remotely like what public education does? No wonder the kids and teachers hate it.

All the other candidates in this governor race say education is their top priority but all just want to spend more doing the same thing, digging us deeper into this trench. Delegating someone else the responsibility for educating your children is like having another guy take your wife on her honeymoon.  Some things you must just do for yourself.

http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html

Second Amendment

Second Amendment: A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

Having been oppressed by a professional army, the founding fathers of the United States had no use for establishing one of their own. Instead, they decided that an armed citizenry makes the best army of all. George Washington created regulation for the aforementioned “well-regulated militia” which would consist of every able-bodied man in the country.

The reason I’m bringing this up has nothing to do with the National Rifle Association but with the fact that we ARE oppressed by a professional army—our own! I wrote about this a few blogs ago in my 800 pound gorilla piece but nagging is profoundly underrated so here I am again, nagging you to do something about this travesty. Do you really enjoy working six months every year and giving every penny you make to support this expense that gives us nothing in return except the hatred of the world? I’m sick of it.

When I point this out to most people they respond by saying that military spending is only 5% of GDP. Why they would use non-standard accounting to justify this stupidity astounds me. GDP is just everybody’s salary—regardless of what they do. GDP means nothing whatsoever, except as a ruse. Military spending consumes over half of our total industrial output! That’s the real truth. We could cut our work week in HALF with no loss of incomes if the military industrial complex would  stop oppressing us.

I was a chief petitioner…

Excerpts from Rolling Stone Magazine, March 2010

…on the Oregon Marijuana Legalization Initiative in 1986. Talk about being ahead of the times. In 1999, when Gary Johnson was still governor of New Mexico, he spent some time examining drug-policy reports, found the evidence for decriminalization compelling and publicly announced his support for legalization — and immediately saw his approval rating plunge from 58 percent to 28 percent, almost overnight.

“I wasn’t blind — I knew that was going to happen,” Johnson says today. “But actually having it happen was something else.” Rather than backtrack or waffle, Johnson took a novel tack: He continued to speak out on the subject. “I vowed to myself to make it to every nook and cranny in New Mexico to explain to people what I was talking about,” he says. “And I ended up leaving office with a 58 percent approval rating. I really see this issue as one of education.” Later, he adds, “There is one segment of the population that is 100 percent against legalizing pot. And that’s elected officials. What I’ve been telling anyone who’ll listen is that legalization is a good issue. By good issue, I mean it makes sense. I really believe that, literally, one day all politicians are going to go to bed and get up the next morning and say, ‘Yeah, OK.’ I always say it’s a litmus test for having a brain.”

Repeal of Prohibition is not normally listed as a New Deal jobs program. Still, it happened in 1933, when unemployment had soared to nearly 25 percent, the high point of the Depression. Certainly repeal had some positive economic effects. Alfred Vernon Dalrymple, the National Prohibition Director — the drug czar of his day — predicted in Time magazine that repeal would mean “putting hundreds of thousands of men back to work and…hundreds of thousands of dollars of new business.” And FDR himself — who, in 1937, would be the first president to make marijuana illegal — argued in a 1932 campaign speech in Sea Girt, New Jersey, that “our tax burden would not be so heavy nor the forms that it takes so objectionable if some reasonable proportion of the unaccounted millions now paid to those whose business had been reared upon this stupendous blunder could be made available for the expense of government.”

The Senator from China

The Supreme Court has ruled that corporations are people too, have first amendment rights like people so can now contribute as much as they want to candidates of their choosing. The ruling also permits foreigners to contribute whatever they want to help us decide what’s best for us. This should be interesting. The people who will actually get all the money, the media, will love it. Think I’ll call Hugo Chavez today; see if he’ll back my run for governor. I might finally get some press attention. But I’m getting off track. “I yield my time to my esteemed colleague from China,” says our esteemed colleague from Boeing…

When are we gonna get it, that a government for sale to anybody is a really bad idea! I have promised to end government for sale in Oregon by Executive Order my first day in office. No contributions, no gifts, no favors, no bribes of any kind will be allowed to choose our elected representatives or influence their legislation. I don’t know if this will actually improve things but things can’t get any worse so why not try something new?