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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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The 800 pound gorilla
We all appreciate the sacrifice made by our boys in uniform. That’s not the point. The point is that military spending is bankrupting the country. How disappointing to hear President Obama declare a freeze on desperately needed investments into our capital infrastructure but won’t cut back a dime on military spending. This is not the action of a capitalist. It is the action of a fascist. If that doesn’t alarm you, you need a remedial course in history.
I wish our politicians could read a balance sheet and financial statement. A tank is not a capital item by any definition of the word. It is an expense, a night watchman’s expense. Based on the spending for military nonsense the past 50 years one could make the case that we have had a military coup in this country. In fact, we have. It seems everyone welcomes it. Well, not everyone but the military has an 80% approval rating. Compare that to the approval rating of congress.
I’m a factory owner, competing in a market economy. If I had the same night watchman’s expense as the United States I’d have to double the price of everything I sold – which explains our trade deficit. Our military consumes half our total industrial output annually. Is the reason we aren’t told this because we’d instantly see the lunacy of such a policy? This misdirection of our labor, credit and material resource must come to an end. Nothing is more detrimental to commerce than war, invented or real. Unless of course, you own stock in defense contractors.
We’ve been sold protection we didn’t need. We have no enemies with the capacity to do us real harm. We are protected by vast oceans and are individually armed to the teeth, impossible to occupy by foreign invaders. The simple fact is nobody wants our territory, so polluted it is. Our forests are ravaged. Our roads, sewer systems, bridges and cities are crumbling before our eyes. Our farms are sterile and poisoned. And all we do is make weapons. This is a mindset worthy of a true hillbilly.
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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.
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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.”
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The only affordable healthcare insurance…
…is to exercise and eat right. No one can afford remedial healthcare – at any price. At best it will only miserably stretch out your death. I own the federal trademark on the advertising slogan “Exercise and Eat Right.”™ I’ve been in the preventative health business for 30 years. I’m 66 and only see a doctor for my required flight physicals. I wouldn’t go then if I didn’t have to by law.
There are a few things we can do to improve this situation. We could mandate the implementation of sustainable agriculture practices to stop poisoning ourselves. We could ban proven harmful ingredients in prepackaged foods like High Fructose Corn Syrup and Genetically Modified Crops. We could mandate proper nutrition be taught in school. None of these practical solutions are politically feasible however, so it’s up to you to learn what to eat. Food is the new medicine, says Tufts University School of Nutrition but physician training doesn’t even include nutrition. As for exercise, all one has to do is get one’s heart beating fast every day. No end of ways to do that and it takes only one minute.
Physicians are the new priests. People used to pay Physicians of the Soul to relieve their self-induced maladies, or witch doctors. Superstition is still the rule. I think our health would improve dramatically if physicians were restricted to setting broken bones, repairing hernias and gun shot wounds but people have “faith” so most will continue running to the doctor every time they sneeze. Reminds me of what that great enlightment philosopher Denis Diderot said, “The best physician you can run to is the one you can’t find.”
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When words lose their meaning . . .
When words lose their meaning
the people will lose their freedom. Confucius
I’ve always supported and voted for Nader. Despite his being labeled a “socialist” by the corporate-owned press, he’s anything but. We’ve been close friends for twenty-five years. He’s cited my America, Inc. capitalist treatise many times on national television interviews. You can thank Ralph for the Freedom of Information Act and countless other legislative acts to hold government accountable, maybe even your life if you drive a car. Ralph isn’t perfect but he comes about as close as any human I’ve seen in the political sphere. He’s always been right, even when he knew the political consequences of telling the truth. Que cajones!
I’m flattered he cited my autobiography as exhibiting “semantic discipline” and putting me in the company of Pulitzer Prize winning Chris Hedges, one of my heroes for sure. I’ve tried to exercise the same semantic discipline in this governor’s blog. Here’s his article:
Words Matter
by Ralph Nader
Ever wonder what’s happening to words once they fall into the hands of corporate and government propagandists? Too often reporters and editors don’t wonder enough. They ditto the words even when the result is deception or doubletalk.
Here are some examples. Day in and day out we read about “detainees” imprisoned for months or years by the federal government in the U.S., Guantanamo Bay, Iraq and Afghanistan. Doesn’t the media know that the correct word is “prisoners,” regardless of what Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld disseminated?
The raging debate and controversy over health insurance and the $2.5 trillion spent this year on health care involves consumers and “providers.” How touching to describe sellers or vendors, often gouging, denying benefits, manipulating fine print contracts, cheating Medicare and Medicaid in the tens of billions as “providers.”
I always thought “providers” were persons taking care of their families or engaging in charitable service. Somehow, the dictionary definition does not fit the frequently avaricious profiles of Aetna, United Healthcare, Pfizer and Merck.
“Privatization” and the “private sector” are widespread euphemisms that the press falls for daily. Moving government owned assets or functions into corporate hands, as with Blackwater, Halliburton, and the conglomerates now controlling public highways, prisons, and drinking water systems is “corporatization,” not the soft imagery of going “private” or into the “private sector.” It is the corporate sector!
“Medical malpractice reform” is another misnomer. It used to mean restricting the legal rights of wrongfully injured people by hospitals and doctors, or limiting the liability of these corporate vendors when their negligence harms innocent patients. Well, to anybody interested in straight talk, “medical malpractice reform” or the “medical malpractice crisis” should apply to bad or negligent practices by medical professionals. After all, about 100,000 people die every year from physician/hospital malpractice, according to a Harvard School of Public Health report. Hundreds of thousands are rendered sick or injured, not to mention even larger tolls from hospital-induced infections. Proposed “reforms” are sticking it to the wrong people—the patients—not the sellers.
“Free trade” is a widely used euphemism. It is corporate managed trade as evidenced in hundreds of pages of rules favoring corporations in NAFTA and the World Trade Organization. “Free trade” lowers barriers between countries so that cartels, unjustified patent monopolies, counterfeiting, contraband, and other harmful practices and products can move around the world unhindered.
What is remarkable about the constant use of these words is that they permeate the language even if those who stand against the policies of those who first coin these euphemisms. You’ll read about “detainees” and “providers” and “privatization” and “private sector” and “free trade” in the pages of the Nation and Progressive magazines, at progressive conferences with progressive leaders, and during media interviews. After people point out these boomeranging words to them, still nothing changes. Their habit is chronic.
A lot of who we are, of what we do and think is expressed through the language we choose. The word tends to become the thing in our mind as Stuart Chase pointed out seventy years ago in his classic work The Tyranny of Words. Let us stop disrespecting the dictionary! Let’s stop succumbing to the propagandists and the public relations tricksters!
Frank Luntz—the word wizard for the Republicans who invented the term “death tax” to replace “estate tax” is so contemptuous of the Democratic Party’s verbal ineptitude (such as using “public option” instead of “public choice” and regularly using the above-noted misnomers) that he dares them by offering free advice to the Democrats. He suggests they could counteract his “death tax” with their own term “the billionaires’ tax.” There were no Democratic takers. Remember, words matter.
Using words that are accurate and at face value is one of the characteristics of a good book. Three new books stand out for their straight talk. In Grand Illusion: The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-party Tyranny, Theresa Amato, my former campaign manager, exposes the obstructions that deny voter choice by the two major parties for third party and independent candidates. Just out is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle by Pulitzer Prize winner, Chris Hedges. Lastly, the boisterous, mischievous short autobiography of that free spirit, Jerry Lee Wilson, The Soloflex Story: An American Parable.
Not withstanding their different styles, these authors exercise semantic discipline.
Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer, and author.
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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?
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