Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! Read online

  Also by Jesse Ventura

  I Ain’t Got Time to Bleed: Reworking the Body Politic from the Bottom Up

  Do I Stand Alone? Going to the Mat Against Political Pawns and Media Jackals

  Don't Start The Revolution Without me!

  Jesse Ventura

  Copyright © 2008 by Jesse Ventura

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 555 Eighth Avenue, Suite 903, New York, NY 10018.

  Skyhorse Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Skyhorse Publishing, 555 Eighth Avenue, Suite 903, New York, NY 10018 or [email protected].

  www.skyhorsepublishing.com

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  9781602392731

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ventura, Jesse.

  Don’t start the revolution without me! : from the Minnesota governor’s mansion to the Baja outback : reflections and revisionings / Jesse Ventura ; with Dick Russell.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-60239-273-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)

  1. Ventura, Jesse. 2. Ventura, Terry. 3. Governors—Minnesota—Biography. 4. Governors’ spouses—Minnesota—Biography. 5. United States—Politics and government—1989- 6. Minnesota—Politics and government—1951- 7. Ventura, Jesse—Travel—Southwest, New. 8. Ventura, Terry—Travel—Southwest, New. 9. Southwest, New—Description and travel. 10. Baja California (Mexico: Peninsula)—Description and travel. I. Russell, Dick. II. Title.

  F610.3.V46A3 2008

  977.6’053092—dc22

  [B]

  2007048884

  Printed in China

  To Doug Friedline,

  A man who worked endlessly and ultimately gave his life trying to elect honest people to public office.

  —Jesse Ventura

  and

  To our son, Tyrel, and our daughter, Jade, and to all the children of the future: Your freedom is at risk. Be wary.

  —Terry Ventura

  “I can’t be a politician. I don’t know how. I love the truth. I love to speak it, to recognize it. And that’s why many people criticize me behind my back. To be a politician, you have to take many factors into account, manipulate them, lie if it’s necessary. I’m no good at that. I’ll never be good at any of that.”

  —Ernesto (Che) Guevara

  Table of Contents

  Also by Jesse Ventura

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  PROLOGUE - THE COUNTRY AT A CROSSROADS

  CHAPTER 1 - The Need for a New Adventure

  CHAPTER 2 - The Road to the Arena

  CHAPTER 3 - Down That Texas Trail

  CHAPTER 4 - Thinking Politics in Bush Country

  CHAPTER 5 - Crossing Borders: A Curious Sense of Security

  CHAPTER 6 - Breaking Down Barriers: China and Cuba

  CHAPTER 7 - Transitions: Down Mexico Highway 5

  CHAPTER 8 - Longing for Light Rail

  CHAPTER 9 - Money, Sports, and Politics: A Universal Language

  CHAPTER 10 - The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same

  CHAPTER 11 - In the Eye of the Hurricane

  CHAPTER 12 - At Conception Bay

  CHAPTER 13 - Reflections on TV and Teaching

  CHAPTER 14 - Thinking War in a Peaceful Place

  CHAPTER 15 - Musing in Baja on Changing the System

  CHAPTER 16 - A Character in Search of an Ending

  EPILOGUE - Why I Didn’t Run in 2008 (And Still Might Someday)

  PROLOGUE

  THE COUNTRY AT A CROSSROADS

  “Gentlemen, I have had men watching you for a long time, and I am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the bread-stuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the bank.... You are a den of vipers and thieves. I intend to rout you out.”

  —President Andrew Jackson, to a delegation of bankers in 1832

  There’s an old saying: the more things change, the more they stay the same. Since this book was published in the spring of 2008, a whole lot has happened that has Americans wondering whether we’re about to plunge into another Great Depression. At the least, we’re going through the worst economic crisis of my lifetime. And we’ve elected a new president who ran for office on a platform calling for change, whom millions of people are counting on to pull us out of this mess and all the other nightmares that the Bush administration has created.

  Barack Obama is a great man who’s accomplished a remarkable thing, but he doesn’t have a magic wand. Our country lives a bit under this dream-like belief, and people need to understand that you don’t just come in and right all the wrongs. The federal government is a huge piece of machinery that’s always moving, and you just jump on. Your job is to attempt to guide and inch the machinery along, a little bit to this direction and a little bit to that. But it’s very difficult because of the bureaucracy and the enormousness of it. So the American people need to give Obama a chance, first of all—at least a year before they start passing judgment on him.

  Now, I didn’t vote for him. I met Ralph Nader during the course of the election and thought he was kind of a cool guy. And I voted for Ralph. I call my vote a protest vote—none-of-the-above—because I do not vote for Democrats or Republicans. I believe the two-party system is corrupt, for reasons you’ll understand in reading this book, and I will always cast a protest vote until I see a quality in our elections with more choices than two.

  Having said that, I’ll never forget my feelings on Election Day, when it became clear that Obama had won. I looked at my wife and it felt good. I mean, really good. I’d never believed in my lifetime that I would see a black man elected president. I felt very happy that I was alive to see this happen. Now maybe next it will be a woman. This makes sense when you look at it chronologically, because let’s not forget that in this country, blacks could vote before women could! After all these years of white males, hopefully a woman president will happen in my lifetime, too. (But not Sarah Palin. I think we need someone who knows that Africa is a continent and not a country).

  I think Obama’s message was phenomenal. He ran a remarkable campaign and raised an unimaginable amount of money. However, I’m also extremely disappointed with who he’s chosen for his cabinet. He ran on a message of change, and yet the only person missing from the old Democratic guard is Robert Byrd! I mean, from Tom Daschle right on down the line to Hillary Clinton and the rest, it’s pretty much nothing but all the old Democrats from the ’90s. How is that change? To me it’s a step backward. I may be proven wrong, and I hope I am. I hope these people can be advocates for change, but they’re sure going to have to change their spots to do that.

  So that part disappoints me. But I think Obama is being very smart, in that he appears to be governing from the center. You don’t graduate from Harvard Law School without being smart, and I think it’s about time we got somebody smart in there! George W. Bush is the worst president of my almost sixty years on this planet. He allowed the largest attack in the history of our country to occur on American soil but—he still has not caught Bin Laden, the supposed perpetrator. We haven’t even charged the guy! Bush has taken us into two wars and now Afghanistan is getting worse, so apparently we’re going t
o shift our troops from Iraq to Afghanistan to finish the job.

  He leaves our economy in total shambles. I mean, he makes Richard Nixon look like the greatest of presidents. At least Nixon accomplished a few things. I cannot think of one thing that this guy has accomplished. Spending money contrary to all conservative beliefs . . . what has he done in eight years? I blame this country for electing him twice—if they truly did. And if they didn’t, then we’ve got a lot more problems than we thought we had.

  I will state flat-out that George Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, and other people from that administration should be charged with crimes. Vince Bugliosi, great prosecutor and lawyer that he is (remember, he got Charley Manson convicted), lays it all out in his new book, The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder. A prosecution is what ought to happen because Bush is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people—our troops and Iraqis—with this trumped-up war. We were not in any imminent danger and the Bush administration knew it, yet did everything to make us think we were, all based upon lies. Why is it that they were allowed to get away with it? Where is the spine of our country today?

  We’re going to need quite a backbone to weather the economic storm that’s upon us. Let me start on a personal note by recalling something the legislature did to me in 2002 toward the end of my term as governor of Minnesota, because it has repercussions today. What I had proposed in my last budget, when we were in a milder recession, was to lower the sales tax rate but expand it to include services. This is something I’ll go into detail about later in the book, but basically I was trying to bring us into a twenty-firstcentury economy. In Minnesota, we still had a sales tax that was implemented in a ’60s economy, when it was 70 percent goods and 30 percent services, so they taxed the goods. Well, it’s flip-flopped now to precisely the reverse, where everything is probably 80 percent services and 20 percent goods. The sales tax isn’t doing what it was cut out to do.

  The legislature claimed I was raising taxes, figuring “taxes” as a “death word” that would defeat the maverick governor in the next election. So they refused to implement my budget, overriding both my vetoes. With smoke and mirrors, they used up all the state’s reserves—including all the funds they got from winning a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the tobacco industry—doing everything they could not to pass the budget I’d proposed. Well, we’re talking Minnesota running close to a $5.8 billion deficit this year, which is probably one-sixth of the state budget. They have to somehow balance that. I’m not saying there wouldn’t be a recession in Minnesota today, because that’s everywhere—but now the state will get hammered worse than if they had passed my budget back in 2002.

  On the federal level, really this whole housing mortgage crisis is a repeat of what happened to family farmers back in the ’80s. Farmers all over the Midwest were offered these fraudulent loans, told to grow-grow-grow, then the banks got them to buy-buy and mortgage-mortgage until the bottom fell out. And that brought in corporate farming. That’s the same thing they did—though I’m not sure exactly who they are—in the whole home mortgage industry.

  I don’t want to hear a word from us criticizing Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez for nationalization anymore. Not that we go to the same extreme but, if what our government is doing isn’t nationalization to a certain degree, what would you call it? We’re investing $40 billion in AIG and giving them credit lines that could bring the federal funding up to $144 billion. That’s the biggest subsidy any American corporation has ever gotten. In exchange, the U.S. gets almost 80 percent of AIG’s stock.

  I don’t like these huge bailouts, because there wasn’t enough stipulation put on them. These “wizards of finance” are the people who got us in trouble to begin with! The Associated Press did a 2008 analysis that showed the same banks getting taxpayer bailouts awarding nearly 600 big execs close to $1.6 billion in salaries, bonuses, and other benefits. At the same time, this Wall Street icon named Bernie Madoff perpetrates what looks like the biggest financial fraud in history, while the Securities and Exchange Commission that’s supposed to enforce the financial laws is looking the other way!

  This is way beyond a sub-prime mortgage problem. Our national debt stands at $10.6 trillion dollars and keeps going up. Our children’s children will be paying for these bailouts with higher taxes while the Federal Reserve prints more money that devalues the purchasing power we’re hanging on to. We’re looking at, I would say, if not a depression then a borderline hard-core recession, with a lot of destitution coming in over the next few years before a rebound can take place.

  Clearly, there has to be a revolution in our economic world. I’m talking about the disparity between the corporate white-collar types and the people doing the work. It’s been getting wider and wider, far more than in most foreign countries. Cut out the golden parachutes—especially in the auto industry. Here’s where I thought Mitt Romney, former governor of Massachusetts, came up with a phenomenal idea. He comes from the auto industry; his father saved it when he was governor of Michigan. Mitt said that letting GM, Ford, and Chrysler go bankrupt might be a good thing because it will then cause a total restructuring where you get the bozos out of there and put in new heads with a new train of thought. Like he said, eliminate the executive dining room and the corporate jets—all this stuff that creates hostility between the workers and management. All workers see are these guys flying around having fun, while they’re laboring every day trying to build a car.

  You’ve got to destroy that system, bring in new management, and start building green cars. Sometimes adverse things happen but end up being for the better. We can take this whole mess, and if it’s done right—but I hold my breath—it could end up a hugely positive turnaround. That’s if we go in the direction we need to, like with solar energy and other alternative sources, and with all the jobs this direction will create. And we need to do them here—don’t ship out the manufacturing and don’t ship out the technology.

  One other thing about our auto industry: I’ve learned that we’re at a disadvantage because built into every car manufactured is $1800 - $2000 worth of healthcare costs for the workers. This doesn’t happen with foreign autos because they have national healthcare. So they can add on that many more accessories and make their cars sell for the same price. Well, you’re gonna buy the one that’s the best deal and suits more of your needs, right? In order to make our autos competitive, you’d almost say we need to have national health insurance, too, wouldn’t you?

  Speaking of insurance, I think that industry in general is the next one to start looking for bailouts like AIG got. They’re saying in Minnesota that by the end of ’09, one out of five cars on the road won’t be properly insured, contrary to state law. And if you get into an accident with one of those, then your insurance company has to foot the whole bill. It’s all out of whack.

  Since we’re on the subject of fixing the economy, let me add: Will we now take our heads out of the sand and put through some social changes that would make a difference? Like how about finally legalizing marijuana and hemp, and turning them into renewable resources as they should be? And how about then taxing pot like the government does with liquor and cigarettes? Not only would this bring a new source of revenue, but we’d also stop spending millions to destroy it! Then the law enforcement people busting all the people for drugs could put their attention on things like going after the child molesters. Those predators are being released into neighborhoods, while drug offenders stay in jail?

  It’s time we start changing our moral values in this country. We can’t afford anymore to put “crimes against yourself ”—consensual criminals—in prison. It’s time to end that. Let’s make marijuana a legal business, bring it aboveboard. Same with sports betting—another “illegal” business that’s not going away that the government could be making revenue on. In Minnesota alone, sports betting is a $3-billion-a-year industry that the state collects nothing from. Wouldn’t that help lower a $5-billion-plus deficit?


  Okay, I’ve ranted on enough for a Prologue. I’m thinking it must be about time to head south for the winter.

  CHAPTER 1

  The Need for a New Adventure

  “The first Westerners known to have landed on Baja were a ship’s crew dispatched by Hernan Cortés, looking for an ‘island of pearls’ that the Spanish conquistador had heard about from the Aztec ruler Moctezuma. During the 1500s a popular chivalric romance narrative also mentioned a race of Amazon women who ruled a gold-filled island. Their queen was called Califia, the place California. The early Spanish expeditioners apparently believed that the Baja terrain resembled that of the fictional island. Indeed, Baja was widely thought to be an island until the end of the seventeenth century. This was the first California. The peninsula would later be called Lower California, as differentiated from its neighboring American territory. (The Spanish adjective baja means ‘geographically lower.’)”

  —Dick Russell, Eye of the Whale

  When you’re at a crossroads, sometimes all you can do is take a reprieve from the fast lane. As I begin to write this book, I’m facing probably the most monumental decision of my fifty-six years on this planet. Will I run for president of the United States, as an independent, in 2008? Or will I stay as far away from the fray as possible, in a place with no electricity, on a remote beach in Mexico?

  Right now I’m leaving Minnesota, where I was born and raised, been a pro wrestler and a radio talk-show host, and have served as both a mayor and a governor. I don’t know how much of an expatriate I’ll become. Looking at the political landscape of America today, my outrage knows few bounds.