Learn about the platform and views of Danny Lutz Jr, the Mountain Party Candidate for Governor of West Virginia.
Danny Lutz Jr’s website
Other candidates for Governor are:
Marshall Wilson-Independent
Erika Kolenich-Libertarian
Ben Salango-Democrat
Jim Justice-Republican
Danny Lutz Article-Selected Excerpts from the Interview
Well, good morning, all. I’m Danny Lutz running for the governorship of West Virginia on the mountain party ticket. We’re an affiliate of the Green Party of the United States, and the question probably in most people’s minds, why run? Well, I’m going to steal a phrase from one of my dear friends who has since departed, his name is Carl Hess; he wrote this line for Barry Goldwater in 1964; “I want to offer a choice, not an echo.” I want to offer the people of West Virginia a plan that will enable them to enter the 21st century on a competitive basis. I’m not hearing that from any of the other candidates.
Richard: So what would you say are three of your main platform points that you would like to share?
Danny Lutz: My number one point is broadband. Until we have broadband accessible to everyone in West Virginia who wants it, we will not progress. I have been in touch with Intelsat and Space X, and they have assured me that six months from the date of an agreement, a contract, as they said, they could have a turnkey operation available to every West Virginian, every business, every church, every school, every organization that wants the broadband service, and I emphasize that adjective turnkey, they said it would be ready to operate within six months……
A second point, and it can be summed up in one word, water. Most people don’t think about it, but West Virginia is the birthplace of most of the rivers in the East, that is east of the Western Continental Divide.
We supply some of the water for ourselves, the District of Columbia and parts of 12 other states. That is a mandate to stewardship.
We have got to assure that the water that leaves West Virginia is as clean as when it came out of the earth, because water is life, and with that, I’ve also got a program that I would like to implement. It would be a pollution control credit system. Before anyone can discharge any contaminant into the air, the water or the soil, they have to get a credit for a certain amount of that. Now the state of West Virginia will create these credits under my program, and then they will be distributed to each household in West Virginia where there is a registered voter, and then it will be up to the entity desiring to discharge the pollution or contaminant to purchase these credits for the best deal they can make. The households could hold the credit, they could sell the credit. They could swap the credit for something that want. They could trade it. Whatever the best deal is they could make. My opinion is that each of these credits should be worth between $2500 and $4500 apiece. So if a household had only 10 credits. That could be as much as a $25,000 income boost. And seeing how 45% of the people of West Virginia, for whatever the reason, do not work, this would be an annual income supplement, not a guaranteed annual income, not a welfare program. This is pure capitalism. That is, the household have a good that the industrial users need and they make the best deal they can for it. You can’t get purer capitalism than that. And it will be something I think that the other states would implement. California is doing a modified version of this and Virginia is looking at a modified version, especially with regard to carbon dioxide.
In addition to firms like Rockwool, fracking companies would be required to purchase these credits before they could discharge or inject their waste water, sewage waste and other sources and contaminants……
Another point that I have that I want to develop involves the coal industry. West Virginia has coal, and we have it, not in the abundance that we used to have it, but we have, in addition to the coal, we have some of the largest recoverable deposits of rare earth elements in North America, and that’s the elements between Element number 57 and 71. And they are used in all kinds of high technological applications for, you name it. We can recover these, and some of them are worth as much as $70,000 a kilogram. They’re in the shales that are on top of the coal that’s being stripped off. They’re in the coal itself, and they’re in the shale deposits that are beneath the coal. And those tailings have been pushed into ravines, smoothed over and patched up. And called reclamation. The coal ash and the GOB piles, just are in waste piles. We have a fortune that we can recover……
Something else along this line, mechanization is coming in leaps and bounds, I was reading an article in yesterday’s, Washington Post, about, with the COVID 19 problem that a lot of firms are looking at robots to do the cleaning instead of people. They are saying some of the robot cleaners can do it a third as fast as a human person doing the cleaning. Well, if a company employs a machine to replace one or more people, why shouldn’t they contribute a portion of the savings that they’re going to realize to, A) Help to re-train these people to do something else, to assure that they can have medical and healthcare, B) To assure that they do not have to choose between whether to put food on the table for their families or to buy prescriptions to cure their ills. This is something that we’ve got to consider, because once again, going back to that figure… The last one I had, 45% of West Virginians do not work, whether it’s because they’re disabled, whether because they’re unemployed or because they’re on social security or retired, whatever…….
I would like to re-create an equivalent of what used to be the civil defense program, for West Virginia. Now, I don’t wanna go back to duck and cover drills and stuff like that, and having signs up on the highway is saying in the event of an enemy attack, this highway may be closed to all but military traffic, etcetera. I don’t wanna go back to that, but what I want to go to is to a civilian, a civil defense program that will inventory our resources so that we have stockpiles of food, stockpiles of potable water, and medical supplies for basic medical needs, and have them within 30 minutes of any West Virginian and have a program developed to deal as these pandemics arise, and I think there’s going to be more of them, I don’t think we’ve seen the last of COVID because it appears to have a fantastic replicating ability, and it could even mutate into something we haven’t anticipated yet, so I’d like to see that kind of a program developed whereby it wouldn’t be just say, stay your house and wear a mask. It would involve a health care program, that is a health services program that would enable people, to get the health service they need and to get the instructions for coping with such organisms as they need them and in a timely fashion. And a usable way…..
Richard: So on the point you mentioned about forcing people to do things… One issue I’m been working on is our forced vaccination system. As you know, West Virginia was one of only two states where they have the policy, no full vaccination, no school, no exceptions, except for extremely hard to get medical exemptions, which are only about 100 granted per year, if that. Point being, a few other states have now adopted that, as you know, like New York state and California, unfortunately, but is that a good policy? Shouldn’t people have freedom to choose before they’re forced to inject dangerous substances? What’s your take on that?
Danny Lutz: Well, I’m torn, I’d like to share with you an anecdote, if you will, from my own experience. In 1955, the Salk vaccine for polio came out. And two years later, in the Jefferson County school system, they had a program where they brought all the students into what was then the county building on the corner of Congress and George streets, and they got a polio vaccination, I think it was a three shot type. My mother had heard about what turned out to be a bad batch of the Salk vaccine, which had caused polio, so she wouldn’t let my sister and I take the Salk vaccine. I don’t know whether that saved me from getting polio or not. It probably wasn’t an issue because none of the students with whom I was in school, came down with polio. And then, seven years later, when the Sabin live vaccine came, they called it the serum on sugar, we did take that because that had been tested and was proven. Where, for instance, it’s a disease like small pox, has pretty well been eradicated from the Earth, because of vaccination.
Richard: Well, there’s some debate about that, meaning not that it doesn’t have any effect, but that most diseases, even small pox, some places use quarantine, like Leicester, if I pronounce it correctly, England, and they were successful using other methods, and that many diseases like diphtheria, the instance, and even measles the instances of disease had gone down more than 90% before the vaccine was introduced. So it’s not an A then B thing, it’s like because of improvements of sanitation, like no more horse manure in the streets and things like that, even before vaccines were introduced a lot of diseases had decreased. So, to just say, oh, it’s because of the vaccine is overly simple…..
Richard: Well, would you, in a nutshell, allow people to have exemptions for religious or conscientious reasons. That would be a simple thing.
Danny Lutz: I would allow the consideration of contentious religious objection to vaccines. But once again, I would also like to keep track of the people who, and of course, the health department would have these records, keep track of the people who have made such and received such an exemption, so that if a disease should break out among these people or a community where these people reside, that we could get the handle on it……
Richard: As governor, would you promote having time limits on these kind of mandates, or you think that the way it is now is fine?
Danny Lutz: As governor, because as governor, I realize I know enough about this to get into trouble, I would be surrounding myself with the best expertise I could, and if they said it’s time to cut… To cut it out, then we would cut it out, if they say, Hey, you’re gonna have to continue this in another six months, then that’s what I would do, and it’s the same way with education, I know enough about education and education theory to get into trouble. So I would be relying upon the people who have made a lifetime study of education, tell me what the best thing to do is. There are certain things that I can do fairly well, but a lot of things I’ve got to rely upon good information and heaven help the person who gives me bad information…..
Richard: I noticed that the Mountain party, when you’re talking about the family, but like I noticed they’re saying they are for the LGBTQ equality and these kind of things. So are you okay with that?
Danny Lutz: You probably won’t be able to put this on the air this way, but the way most of us in a Mountain party feel what two consenting adults do inside their own four walls, between their eyebrows and their knee caps is strictly between them. Don’t take it outside and ram it down somebody else’s throat. And don’t inculcate it in the children unless it’s their lifestyle, they’re eligible, they’re old enough to understand and eligible and able to choose. It’s an individual liberty thing there, as far as we are concerned, between the eyebrows and the knee caps and inside four walls… We’re not going to dictate that.
Richard: In some sense I agree with that. Those kind of thing. But those things also affect society profoundly in the sense that as we know, there are states where the examples where people are fined because they have a problem with baking a cake or doing photography for a same sex wedding. So there are those areas where it gets out into society and then where the state can, and in some states does force people and say, “Oh no, no, you don’t like to serve that clientele. Sorry, you must” So you get into that area, you know what I mean?
Danny Lutz: I see where you’re coming from. And if I could play dictator, we might have fewer lawyers litigating such cases, because if I walk into, and I am heterosexual, I might add. But if I was homosexual and I walk in to a bakery and order a wedding cake and tell them that I want two male figures on top of it; let’s say I can’t do that. I’d just walk out the door. It’s not worth the fight. It’s not worth taking up public resources to litigate something like that. It is not worth the aggravation and the heartache that it’s going to cause a number of people in a particular incident. What’s wrong with simply walking away from what you don’t like unless it’s going to physically harm you? And I’m taking that position with a lot of things. That’s why I’m hard on pollution, but soft on individual liberties. Let people live their lives as they want to, but don’t put smoke down their throat.
