Councilmember Jeff Ritterman continues Richmond’s battle against Chevron with this “Eat The Rich” scheme that he purports will solve all of Richmond’s problems with “a redistribution of wealth and income from those who have gotten rich at the expense of others during the last generation.”
TOGETHER WE CAN END CHEVRON’S PERK:
Everyone in Richmond pays a 10% tax on utilities, Chevron does not. Let’s fix it.
Dear Friend:
I am reaching out to you with some good news about a collective effort to make our City of Richmond a more fair, just and livable city. We have made tremendous advances during the last several years, but enormous challenges remain. Our unemployment rate remains high at over 18%, and we have suffered a tragic increase in homicides since last year. We are sadly unable to adequately fund all of the programs that our city would need to put our legacy of poverty, crime and violence behind us once and for all.
Last year, Richmond’s residents voted to pass Measure T, “A Fair Share for Richmond”. The ballot measure provided $15-20 million in revenue, which now sits in our bank account unused at a time when we are laying off city workers. The reason: Chevron Corporation has sued the city, claiming that Measure T violates their right to engage in interstate commerce.
It’s a sad time when a city of 100,000 residents, which is fighting for its very financial survival is sued by a corporation which earned over $20 billion in profits in 2008. Chevron has chosen to fight against the declared will of the people of Richmond in order to maximize its profits, no matter what the cost to our city.
This has been the trend in our country for the last 30 years. California’s corporations pay less than half the income tax they did when Ronald Reagan was president. See http://www.cbp.org/pdfs/2009/0902_Californias_Tax_System.pdf, page 7. Our corporations and CEOs have become unbelievably wealthy, while those who do the actual work to create this wealth have been left behind.
The only solution for our city, our state, and our country is a redistribution of wealth and income from those who have gotten rich at the expense of others during the last generation. It is only by doing this that we can provide the city services which will increase employment, lessen crime and enhance the well being of all who live and work in Richmond.
We can do this in this city, and we can make Richmond a shining example for other communities. Today I am happy to tell you that in November 2010, the voters of Richmond will have a chance to vote for a positive future for our city. We will have the chance to vote for a ballot measure which will close a loophole that has existed for more than 20 years.
This loophole has allowed Chevron Corporation to pay a smaller Utility Users Tax than every other household or business in Richmond. This is not only unfair. It has resulted in a loss of tens of millions of dollars of potential city revenue over the prior decades. Imagine what our city could have done with all of this revenue to improve the lives of our residents.
The “End Chevron’s Perk” measure will restore fairness, and at the same time bring in much needed revenue from Chevron. If we had this revenue now, we would not need to lay off city workers. We would be able to provide a much improved level of city services. We could start community gardens in all of our schools. We could expand our job training programs. We could guarantee that all of our neighborhood schools will remain open.
Remember, each and every one of us already pays this Utility Users Tax. No one will see an increase in Utility user taxes but Chevron Corporation because no one but Chevron has been receiving this discounted rate.
If the past is any guide, we can be sure that Chevron will use its immense wealth to keep from paying its fair share in taxes. Our only strengths are the righteousness of our cause, and the creativity, sacrifice and hard work of all of us together. It will not be easy, but the future of our city and our world depends on what we do.
I am inviting you to join me for a kick-off meeting to begin this campaign to bring tax fairness to Richmond.
When: Wednesday, January 13, 2010, 7:00 to 9:00 PM
Where: 402 Harbor Way (across from Kaiser Hospital) Richmond, CA 94801For the “End Chevron’s Perk” measure, we need: The endorsement of your organization and your own endorsement; Your financial support for materials to support campaign materials; Volunteers to educate, organize and deliver the End Chevron’s Perk Measure.
No one can do this for us. Together we can and we must build a Better Richmond
RSVP JeffRitterman@endchevronsperks.org
In Partnership,
Jeff Ritterman, M.D.
{ 17 comments… read them below or add one }
Councilman Ritterman assserts that inequlaity causes poverty. Here’s an article that documents that corruption does too.
http://www.christiantoday.com/article/ngos.warn.of.link.between.corruption.and.poverty/24850.htm
Eliot Engle exemplifies the low wattage of many in Congress. Rational thought is requisite to good decisionmaking. This clip suggests that he is incapable of the former, thus unable to achieve the latter.
In exercising his power as a Congressional rep to evaluate public policy issues using baseless opinion and other flights of fancy — rather than objective examination of pertinent data and rational analysis — Rep. Engle essentially becomes an menace to society.
This discussion with Rep Engle, misses the whole point of Equality that Ritterman stresses
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CF92hUu0dTU
Sorry, you misread my meaning. If social ills correlate to inequality they also correlate to bad social policy, just as you indicate, with massive government intrusion that you propose and violation of First and Fourth Amendment rights the worst possible choice.
Your grasping “Get Chevron” measure will only enrich powerful people and organizations who are already able to claw their way to the table as favorites of commissars like you.
I would much prefer freedom be the transformational watchword rather than blockheaded state enforcement of a very narrow view of the benefits of some chiliastic notion of “equality” featuring nothing more than mounting violations of property, economic disincentives, and subsequent tethering of freedom of conscience to government fiat.
Since you have tacitly agreed that there is more than one way to skin the cat of poverty amidst great riches, it is troubling that you and Richmond City Council would dig your heals in to allow only discussion of this particular eat the rich proposal to fund more questionable government services which, if anything, is only going to create even more unsustainable budgets and further bankrupt municipalities with unfunded retirement benefits, while further draining the lifeblood out of the community like some vampire.
I suggest that instead of funding even more overreach of government that can be also correlated to poverty and inequality, you and council withdraw your measure and spend a year or two with the community to discover ways in which civil society, people and institutions including family associations, faith communities, non-government schools, NGO service providers, small and larger businesses and allied associations, clubs, neighborhood watches, youth sports, builders, housing coops that can experiment with intentional or missional communities, neighborhood-organized activities including community gardens and markets and private planners free of prevailing ideology and unburdened by tedious building codes…can all be given the resources to help them rebuild their due capacity and roles after decades of atrophy caused by abuse from a centralized welfare state you propose that is designed only to grow and protect government jobs, failing schools, and favored patrons.
It never has dawned on you or your colleagues that the best way to proceed would be for Richmond City Council to devolve as much non-public safety decision making back to its citizens, has it?
Alexis de Tocqueville was correct, in his Democracy in America, when he called the voluntary forming of associations by citizens to meet their own social needs “the first law of democracy.” Your measure fails this test in every way dramatically.
Finally, I sincerely apologize for offending your surprisingly delicate elitist sensibilities, and hope you can find something to take for it that will help toughen your skin. Sorry to see you slink off in defeat.
Very entertaining, gentlemen. Glad to see you enjoying yourselves so. Please permit me to chime in.
The bottom line: Those who advocate personal freedom and reject slavery must consider income redistribution to be immoral.
Freedom means that each man can reap what he sows . . . can benefit from the sweat of his own brow.
Income redistribution equates to slavery: one man is robbed of the fruits of his own labor and compelled, by brute force, to relinquish those fruits to another.
Thus, both slavery and income redistribution are immoral. The lopsided U.S. tax system robs creators of wealth via wildly disproportionate taxation — to “redistribute” resources to those who have not earned them.
This practice undermines freedom, demeans the human spirit and erodes government’s credibility.
All of the good intentions in the world don’t change these universal truths.
Dr. Ritterman’s views are, at best, misguided and, at worst, toxic to humanity because they advocate enslavement of one man to another.
There is no moral justification for slavery. Period.
Dear Bill,
So now that you know that income inequality is correlated with all of the social and health ills you mention, the obvious thing to do is to reduce the inequality. BTW the data on trust is quite extensive and the best fit for that data goes beyond correlation to causality.
I agree that there are various ways to redress the maldistribution. I mentioned that Sweden and Japan have done it quite differently. Our job is to find a way to do this in our country.
That’s our task. Check out the data from Professor Emmanual Saez at UC Berkeley, which Robert Reich put on his blog. It shows a radical redistribution of wealth upwards from 1970 onwards. If you feel this is a positive trend and one you can support, so be it. I can’t and can only find that it has led us into the present economic meltdown and that we will be powerless to advance without redressing this maldistribution. I’m not sure what about that you find so difficult to understand or so difficult to support. Anyway, I’ve done what I can to engage you in this discussion and at this point I am feeling that my energies are best used elsewhere. Good luck to you. I imagine I’ll be hearing more of your views in the future.
Jeff Ritterman, M.D.
Richmond City Council
Costa Rica is the exemplar of your new world order? Please. The top 20 percent represent 86% of income. How does that square with your income equality and GINI models? And its inefficient welfare state is crumbling.
Leaving aside the correlation v causation argument, let’s stipulate that where inequality exists there is also
Higher death rates for all age groups.
Higher rates of homicide.
Higher rates of violent crime.
Higher costs per person for police protection.
Higher rates of incarceration.
Higher rates of unemployment.
A higher percentage of people receiving income assistance and food stamps.
More high-school dropouts.
Less state funds spent per person on education.
Fewer books per person in the schools.
Poorer educational performance, including worse reading skills, worse math skills.
Higher infant mortality rates.
Higher heart disease.
Higher cancer rates.
A greater percentage of people without medical insurance.
A greater proportion of babies born with low birth weight.
A greater proportion of the population unable to work because of disabilities.
A higher proportion of the population using tobacco.
A higher proportion of the population being sedentary (inactive).
Higher costs per-person for medical care.
And while we’re at it let’s stipulate it is caused by social policy, you and others blame it on Reagan’s administrations, including a landslide second term, that slashed the top tax rate for personal income from 70 to 28 percent, allowing income to concentrate among the wealthy. And in 1983, payroll taxes were raised on the working poor by a Democratic Congress. Furthermore, between 1980 and 1993, family welfare payments were reduced from $350 to $261 per month in constant dollars — a 25 percent drop.
Still, pontificating that fiscally prudent government tax and welfare policy is the sole cause and welfare state is the solution I say is misguided. Just as your data from the Berkeley and Harvard studies for instance point to growing inequality, it also just as easily points to government intrusion during the same period on many aspects of civil society that have created barriers for empowerment. In your elegy to the good America you say passed after the 70s, inequality can also be seen to rise with the rise of government and public employee unions siphoning trillion dollars from civil society, not to mention stifling laws and regulations and deals with powerful labor groups that are surely more equal than others that help keep poor people from competing freely in the work place, or parents choosing education, increasing barriers to faith groups working in poor communities in favor of secular left-leaning ACORN groups agitating for dirty deals within the dark rooms of machine politics. Not to mention the political payback of crazy parochial insurance laws forbidding shopping for inexpensive health insurance outside of a state, and that unions themselves have been leaders in racial discrimination in poor neighborhoods.
So Sir, your entire analysis is hobbled by a very one sided point of view that thinks it is the only valid one; a POV that cannot stomach any debate because its intentions are so good and anyone who raises a hand is accused of fiddling while Rome burns as if your self righteousness is cause alone for silence and adoration. Your instance of the radicalization of healthcare and outcomes of inequality is so twisted it can’t see straight, nor the forest from the trees.
Your reduction of the problem to one of class struggle and revolution calling for, in your own words, “a redistribution of wealth and income from those who have gotten rich at the expense of others during the last generation” is specious at best.
Dear Bill,
You wrote:
Don’t take this personally but what do Japan and Sweden have to do with the crime rate in Richmond being caused by Chevron as the sole target for retaliation?
My response:
Chevron is not the cause of the crime rate in Richmond nor is it a target of mine nor am I interested in retaliation.
Crime is multifactorial. A prime contributor to crime is how fair societies are in terms of providing opportunity. A measure of fariness and opportunity is realtive income equality. There is scientific proof that as income inequality increases so does crime. That’s the simple truth. Making society fairer and distributing income more equally results in less crime.
Chevron, like all of California’s major corporations, is paying a fraction of the income taxes the corporation paid when Reagan was president, actually less than half. The same goes for the wealthiest 0.1 %. The current CEO of Chevron for example received a $50 million bonus in 2008 according to news stories. It turns out to be better for all of us to have a more equal and fairer income distribution. Rich people in more equal countries like Sweden and Japan live longer than rich Americans, in part because there is more social cohesion in more equal countries.
Costa Ricans, with 1/7 the wealth of the US live as long as we do and rate their lives as happier than American’s rate ours.
You wrote;
Complain all you want like a little girl but the questions above are not personal attacks but honest questions you are unwilling to answer.
My response:
There you go again needing to insult me and call me names. Are you really completely unable to abandon that immature and counter-productive behavior or do you do it because you think it helps with your blog’s popularity?
I think I’ve been as clear and consistent as i can be about these issues. I hope you actually take the time to learn something about social epidemiology and the far reaching implications of the data I have introduced you to.
Jeff Ritterman
Don’t take this personally but what do Japan and Sweden have to do with the crime rate in Richmond being caused by Chevron as the sole target for retaliation? Who’s next? People making more than $30k? What’s enough? Who decides?
Complain all you want like a little girl but the questions above are not personal attacks but honest questions you are unwilling to answer.
Dear Bill,
You seem to be unable to have a discussion without personally attacking me and then defending your attack based on nothing but more rhetoric. I don’t agree that personal attacks advance anything. You seem more interested in making my ponytail an issue than in serious, thoughtful discussion. If you don’t understand that bullying and unkindness are a part of the problem, there’s not much more I can do than point it out to you. It’s not right, it shouldn’t be acceptable to you. Name calling and bullying doesn’t advance problem solving, it creates additional problems.
As to my point about the corrosive effects of rising income inequality, the data is clear and stark. The countries with the highest life expectancy are Sweden and Japan, both of which have managed to distribute income the most equally. Neither is communist. Each has followed a different method of distributing income. And so it goes. If you look at all of the rich countries there is a statistically significant association between income inequality and poor health outcome and social problems. It is not possible for this relationship to be by chance alone. If we really want to solve the social and health problems of the US, then we must be interested in understanding the health/social well being-income equality relationship and in developing policies and practices which redress our current maldistribution of income. We will not advance out of our current economic meltdown without doing this as the middle class has been decimated and their buying power seriously reduced.
As you state, social behaviors like smoking and diet are a part of the picture but even social behaviors are largely determined by where we stand in the social hierarchy and how steep that hierarchy is.
The data on all of this is now voluminous and easily accessible.
OK, I get it. You run a blog. Partly its for entertainment. You think its entertaining to trash me and not take my arguments seriously. Great. Entertain all you want. Rome is buring while you do so!
Jeff Ritterman
I am not hiding anything. Just read the ABOUT PAGE to find out more about me. Andres Soto, Fred Jackson, or John Gioia could tell you who I am. In the meantime, there are five years worth of posts here you need to catch up on. I can set up an online event, let me check the tech. Such an online forum would serve the purpose better as it could incorporate more voices and opposing viewpoints free from intimidation from goons in purple T shirts, or the smell of gasoline and a waving red flag.
I have been very on point. Blunt, too; forgive my exasperation with bull shit. As for your passive aggressive argumentation about name calling and diatribes, please! Anyone who dresses up in a pony tail and medical jacket for their campaign collateral spouting ridiculous diatribes about “redistribution of wealth, income, and power” as the only solution and then cries foul when someone points out the anachronism is being too touchy and more than a bit disingenuous.
You still have not yet told us how even your own data justifies either your analysis based on class struggle theory straight out of the Peace and Freedom Party playbook or the unlawful violation of the Fourth Amendment. And you also decline to fess up to my data that most Richmond community health issues are caused by destructive personal behaviors, not by Chevron. Instead we get a pedantic and highly questionable diatribe about inequality, FDR and your personal vision of the end of the world back in 1970.
Nor have you explained how radical redistribution of wealth, income, and power to government commissars like yourself solves anything other than expanding an already ineffective and unaffordable budget-busting bureaucracy. It seems to me, like Komrade Lenin, the last thing you really want to happen is to put “community” back into “community action” when it’s the vanguard of the revolution at Richmond City Council who really know what’s best to keep the lumpen proletariat in their place.
Your reference to Equality Trust is enlightening and, sorry, I don’t have any trust in gurus spouting new age transformational philosophy through class struggle. Usually because these movements turn into cults of personality, in neighborhoods and city councils; secondly they always demand 100% allegiance that cannot suffer opposition. This also is well documented, cf; Jonestown. In fact, I would posit that such views as you’re promoting are far far beyond the mainstream of peer review from the widely accepted asset-based community development community (ABCD) led by thought leaders including McKnight and others. In fact they also would most likely militate against your program of reinvigoration of centralized union-shop government as prime problem solver.
So stop whining and start explaining your hyper radical program that lays the blame for all of Richmond’s ills at the feet of Chevron, and how your Orwellian redistribution of wealth, income, and power could ever really happen or be a fair or just solution.
Dear BGR, (perhaps its time to reveal your name)
You seem to have difficulty to discussing issues without resorting to name calling and attacking me personally which seems odd since you don’t know me.
We need to have this bullying stop in all of our political discourse. Its part of the problem and makes solutions much harder to come by, and solutions to our many problems is what we need. If you would seriously like to debate these issues with me, I would be happy to do so, but your diatribes are just full of name calling and you are either ignorant of the data I speak of or unable to grasp its implications or just plain dishonest.
The truth is that as societies become more unequal people trust each other less, social cohesion breaks down and this results in worsening health outcomes and worsening social ills. You can rant all you want, but that’s the data and it is clear that moving toward greater equality improves health outcome and social well being. We are more unequal now than we were at the time of the great depression. FDR changed all of that and a period of relative income equality reigned from WW II until the 1970s. It is the America I grew up in, where a working man could support a family, receive a pension, and send his kid to college. For a generation wealth and income have been redistributed upwards to the very top, decimating the middle class and the America that provided a decent living for its workers and was the envy of all of the world. We can resotre that, but it will take a redistribution of wealth, income and power. If you doubt me, read the website I referred you to and read the book “The Spirit Level” by Professors Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett who will be here on a book tour January 6 and 7th.
In parntership,
Jeff Ritterman, M.D.
Richmond City Council
Epidemiology data like Climate data can serve many purposes. Additionally, your data does not logically compel your analysis or solution as the best way to politicize and solve Richmond’s community problems and health issues.
It’s more likely that the top reasons for Richmond residents going to a hospital are: automobile accidents, personal attacks, drug, and gang warfare, non-auto accidents, bronchial ailments from smoking and malnutrition, alcoholism, drug related problems, and dog bites. So why blame it all on Chevron and make them the scapegoat for all of these local behavioural issues and outcomes that can be better solved by community action—perhaps supported by NGOs and businesses like Chevron—instead of your inability to think outside the box of more centralized political and medical bureaucracy.
Unlike your solution—not supported by the data, btw— it is more likely that effective community health action is when communities move away from being victims and clients lorded over by medical and political professionals, when the tools, resources, and power are liberated from ineffective bureaucracies like you propose to help communities be consumers of quality services instead of tools and patsies of centralized control whether it’s Obamacare or your intent to beef up bureaucracy with discriminatory support only for the public safety, education, and social welfare industrial complex controlled by fellow traveller union bosses and their hand picked politicos in purple T shirts instead of people.
Your sort of ideology and politics is rampant in our county and it needs to stop. It’s clear even from the most recent round of contract negotiations at the County that the low end workers are getting the shaft while the more powerfully represented workers including nurses, firefighters, and sheriffs are given the red carpet treatment. Shaking down Chevron to finance your Blessed Community (which I understand as a Quaker term) will prove to be just more of the same. So let’s be honest, plans like yours are about obtaining and controlling power, not helping poor people.
Dear BGR,
Since you seem to write for this publication perhaps you can arrange for the publication to organize a town forum where you and I can debate these issues seriously. I stand by my assertions and this is not an ideological argument. There is a large amount of epidemiological data which supports my view. I suggest you take some time to study the data before responding. The stakes here are enormously high. Name calling will not solve the problem. I am seriously trying to help us build The Beloved Community in Richmond and equity is a central issue.
In partnership,
Jeff Ritterman, M.D.
Richmond City Council
1. Your hyper ideological analysis amazes me in the comical way you catastrophize this issue into systemic world wide class struggle. How’d we get to Singapore?
2. Your Patch Adams approach to social policy seems to suggest that mob plebiscites are more effective than the rule of law that is due Chevron or any business or individual.
3. Your proposal is just another attempt to finance a sinecure for more failed policies via more incompetent centralized State owned-and-run-agencies, run by grown men in pony tails more eager to build a Stalinist ant farm they can control rather than give the people, value communities, institutions, and civil society the power and capacity to address these very local issues themselves.
4. Shaking down Chevron to build your socialist wet dream is not the answer.
Thanks for reprinting my letter but the “eat the rich” comment misses the point. First, the entire Richmond City Council approved this ballot measure unanimously. All are in favor of leveling the playing field. Chevron is simply being asked to pay the same percentage as any other business or resident pays in Richmond.
As for the commentary on my assertion that income and wealth inequality need to be redressed locally, nationally and internationally, I believe that there is overwhelming evidence in favor of this position. I refer readers to http://www.equalitytrust.uk.org for the data. We are now more unequal as a nation than at any time since 1913. The US is now the most unequal of all rich nations with one exception, Singapore. With rising income inequality we all suffer as life expectancy is less than in more equal societies. Actually everything gets worse as inequality increases, less trust, more homicides, more prisoners, more obesity, more teen pregnancies, more high school drop outs. So any serious attempt to lessen our social ills will need to redress income and wealth inequality. I would be happy to discuss or debate this with BGR or with Halfway to Concord staff or others of your choosing.
In partnership,
Jeff Ritterman, M.D.
Richmond City Council
Looking past the rhetoric, the issue is not a redistribution/eat the rich/or whatever you want to call it, but a matter of whether this particular business should be exempt from something which it appears most others are carrying. It is irrelevant whether Chevron made 20B or lost 20K, the question should be framed in terms of what are the pros and cons of making the corner barber shop pay a 10% fee while the corner oil refinery does not.
Now before you go running off that any tax is evil communistic inspired form of hate crimes against the God Loving virtual corporate entities of the right order of things, take it in a practical straight forward manner: given that there is a tax on utilities that the local store and the local household (not just home owner) is charged, why should Chevron be exempt?
As for the case for interstate commerce, this is a rather bogus point since everyone can be involved in interstate commerce via the net etc., so the real issue is why should Chevron not pay that which others are being asked to pay. Now there may be a good reason for that, but that is the question ultimately.