{"id":185471,"date":"2014-11-09T21:16:00","date_gmt":"2014-11-10T02:16:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/11\/09\/i-guess-you-cannot-buy-an-election-if-you-blow-up-the-town-twice-thrice\/"},"modified":"2014-11-09T21:16:00","modified_gmt":"2014-11-10T02:16:00","slug":"i-guess-you-cannot-buy-an-election-if-you-blow-up-the-town-twice-thrice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/11\/09\/i-guess-you-cannot-buy-an-election-if-you-blow-up-the-town-twice-thrice\/","title":{"rendered":"I Guess You Cannot Buy an Election if You Blow Up the Town \u2026\u2026\u2026 Twice Thrice"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Richmond, California, whose town is dominated by a Chevron oil refinery, had local elections, and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sfgate.com\/bayarea\/article\/Chevron-s-3-million-backfires-in-Richmond-5873779.php\">Chevron\u2019s dumping $3 million into the race netted them nothing<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">Richmond voters handed Chevron a resounding rejection in Tuesday\u2019s election, defeating all four candidates supported by the oil giant despite Chevron outspending its opponents by a 20-to-1 margin.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Voters elected City Councilman Tom Butt as mayor and outgoing mayor Gayle McLaughlin, incumbent Jovanka Beckles and retired teacher Eduardo Martinez to the City Council, giving the panel a potential 6-1 left-leaning majority.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u201cIt\u2019s extraordinary. This is a celebration of democracy,\u201d said San Francisco State political science Professor Robert Smith, who studies Richmond politics. \u201cThis means that big money doesn\u2019t always win, that ordinary people can defeat huge corporate power.\u201d<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Chevron spent more than $3 million supporting Charles Ramsey, Donna Powers and Albert Martinez for council, and longtime Councilman Nat Bates for mayor. Butt won with 51.4 percent of the votes, with Bates trailing at 35.5 percent.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Seeing as how <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Chevron_Richmond_Refinery\">that refinery has had fires and explosions in 1989, 1999, and 2012<\/a>, (along with a long history of toxic emissions, and litigation over taxes, which Chevron lost) and the fact that the Richmond City Council was <a href=\"http:\/\/www.contracostatimes.com\/west-county-times\/ci_23853762\/thousands-more-sue-chevron-over-richmond-refinery-fire\">working on a lawsuit<\/a> over the last fire, it&#8217;s pretty clear what this massive dump of election cash was about getting a &#8220;friendly&#8221; city council.<\/p>\n<p>Unfortunately, I cannot see how this could be applied more general.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Richmond, California, whose town is dominated by a Chevron oil refinery, had local elections, and Chevron\u2019s dumping $3 million into the race netted them nothing: Richmond voters handed Chevron a resounding rejection in Tuesday\u2019s election, defeating all four candidates supported by the oil giant despite Chevron outspending its opponents by a 20-to-1 margin.Voters elected City &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1005,1094,1000,1135],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-185471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-campaign-finance","category-elections","category-energy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185471"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=185471"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185471\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}