Stop this Legislation!

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Who is Marco Firebaugh and what does he have against wine consumers?

As we type, monopoly and anti-consumer forces are mounting a blitzkrieg on YOUR ability to buy fine wines from around the world in a free and competitive market. East LA Assemblyman Firebaugh has proposed a law, AB1922, which would make it illegal for any importer, wholesaler or retailer to exercise their right as an American to seek out the best products at the best prices in an open marketplace and would instead invest ALL control of ALL vintages and bottlings of wines freely for sale in the global marketplace solely to the authorized California distributor of the current releases of that producer. Can you imagine if only GM could sell used Chevrolets or if only Random House could sell used books published by them? We think not!

How would this affect YOU? For starters, by criminalizing the very existence of the sort of small, entrepreneurial distributors who source Old and Rare vintages, the next time you want to buy an older vintage of Port, Armagnac or Bordeaux for a special birthday or anniversary there will be no such thing on the market, so no 70th Birthday gift for Grandpa. Secondly, in those all too frequent cases where a particularly larcenous importer is holding the US market hostage with prices that are completely out of line with the world market for a given wine, the natural market remedy of parallel importing from more fairly priced sources will be eliminated resulting in artificially high prices to you. For the collectors in the audience, this will RADICALLY cut the availability of hundreds of small production wines and drive their prices in the California market even further through the roof. Economically, by driving many small, quality oriented distributors out of business this will not only take tens of millions of tax dollars out of the California state treasury, it may eliminate the distribution of many small California wineries who, having been ignored by the large distributors backing this bill, are often only available the same small wholesalers this bill seeks to eradicate.

Governor Deukmejian vetoed a remarkably similar bill in 1985 based on its anti-consumer effect and concluded his veto letter by stating: As dependent as California agriculture is on foreign markets, this bill takes us the wrong way down the dangerous road of protectionism. Simply bringing about higher prices for foreign wines is unfair to consumers.

So, who does this benefit? Perhaps you should ask Mr. Firebaugh that. We have, repeatedly, with no response.

Here is the bill in its entirety:

http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/pub/bill/asm/ab_1901-1950 ab_1922_bill_20020208_introduced.html


You can read the the San Francisco Chronicle story about the bill here:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2002/04/16/BA120677.DTL


Call Assemblyman Marco Antonio Firebaugh TODAY at 916-319-2050

or e-mail him at: Assemblymember.Firebaugh@assembly.ca.gov


Call YOUR Assemblyman and State Senator TODAY. If you do not know who they are you can find out here:

http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/yourleg.html