Taking Back California

“I would have kicked the shit out of this guy in a debate. He’s a 76-year-old man with no platform.”

Ocean Beach surfer/rocker/“extreme capitalist” Richard Aguirre has footage on his website (aguirreforgovernor.com) showing governor-elect Brown fleeing from Aguirre during the California Democratic convention in April. He’s made a movie of his run for governor called Taking Back California. “I’ve entered it in the Sundance and Slamdance festivals. We show Jerry running away from me four different times. It’s like a Michael Moore movie if Michael Moore was funny and entertaining.”

Aguirre says he was snubbed by a Democrat machine that made it impossible for him to get the Democratic Party endorsement for governor. Nevertheless, he did quite well in the Democratic primary, pulling over 99,000 voters statewide and finishing second out of seven candidates.

“If I could have debated Jerry Brown, I would have gotten the nomination and I would kicked Whitman’s ass.”

Aguirre’s platform involves production of solar panels. “We’re gonna build three solar-panel factories and install solar panels on our homes for free. Homeowners get free power, and the surplus is sold to the corporations.” He says that if he could have spoken to the 20 separate caucuses at the Democratic convention, he would have gotten the official nod from the party, which would have helped him win the primary and the general election.

Aguirre says that some of his interactions with Brown were confrontational. “Once, I actually got in Jerry’s face. I said, ‘Let’s debate Jerry. You’ve got nothing.’ He wouldn’t say anything. He became so irritated that he became aggressive. It seemed like his security was pushing him to get aggressive so they could get me to react and they could get me kicked out.

“Only one San Diego TV station covered all this. It was [KUSI] channel 9. My movie is mainly about how the media has become a big PR firm for politicians who have become slaves to power companies. A reporter from KTVU/Fox in Oakland ran a story showing Jerry running into a limo and not talking to me. A reporter from the Sacramento Bee named Jack Chang asked me, ‘What do you think of Meg Whitman telling Jerry that he should debate Richard Aguirre first?’” The Brown vs. Aguirre videos on aguirreforgovernor.com are identified as numbers 10 through 14.

For eight years Aguirre fronted the Karl Marx Band. His new band is the Beach Funk Revolution. “I wrote a song about all this. It’s called ‘Partners in Crime.’”

Beach Funk Revolution appears December 28 at Humphrey’s Backstage.