Daily Archives: June 22, 2007

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Former Assemblyman wants to change public pension system

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by Randy Bayne
X-posted from The Bayne of Blog

“It’s not fair that people in the private sector are working well into their 60s and 70s to pay for extravagant pensions for public employees who can retire at 50 or 55,” said [Keith] Richman, a former Republican Assemblyman from Northridge who is now president of the California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility. [Sacramento Bee, 6/22/07]

I would agree, if it were true. It sounds good to say something like this. You have a convenient villain – public employees – but they are hardly getting rich off their early retirements. Truth is, most early retirees have another source of income supplementing their reduced retirement income. Few public employees are receiving “extravagant pensions.”

Also untrue is the lie that “private sector [employees] are working well into their 60s and 70s to pay for extravagant pensions for public employees.” Last time I checked public employees were having retirement deducted from their pay, many in addition to Social Security. Some will be amazed to find out that public employees are also taxpayers, which means public employees pay for their own retirement.

But former Assemblyman Keith Richman isn’t about to let truth or a working system get in the way of his agenda. He is once again on the attack against those evil public employees who are only in if for themselves and wants to “reform” their pension system. He has filed an initiative to do just that.

You remember Richman. He teamed up with Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2005 in an attempt to put new public employees into risky 401(k)-style retirement accounts. His new 2007 version leaves employees in a defined benefit — good — plan but cuts retirement benefits and raises retirement age — bad. He also proposes changes that would base the pension payout on the highest consecutive five years of pay, instead of the one year or three years now in use — bad.

To make his plan more palatable to current employees he is reviving his divide and conquer tactic from 2005. His initiative would only apply to state and local government workers hired after July 1, 2009, forcing public employees into a divisive two-tiered system.

Earlier this year, Governor Schwarzenegger appointed a commission to look into public pensions. The commission is schedule to come out with recommendations in January.

“It seems that Richman is way out ahead of the governor on this one,” said Dave Low of the California School Employees Associaton, one of the Legislature’s appointees to the commission. “Why not wait?”

  J.J. Jelincic, president of the California State Employees Association questioned the rationale for the initiative. He says CalPERS, the state’s biggest pension system is not severely underfunded.

Rather than waste time and money fighting public employees, Richman should be working with the Governor’s commission to study pensions and come up with a legislative solution. But that won’t happen. The commission isn’t likely to find any major problems with the current system, and that just doesn’t work into Richman’s plan.

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Carole Migden Gets Billboards from Clear Channel

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Our own paulhogarth broke this story last week, but let me take the liberty of building on his writings.  Here is more info and a few pretty pictures below the fold.

Over the past few weeks Clear Channel owned billboards started popping up in the district featuring a picture of Migden and the slogan “Carole Migden Leading California’s Campaign Against the War”.  The picture and color scheme is copied right off of Migden’s official campaign website.  One would think that she paid for the ads.  If that were the case there would be a disclaimer “paid for by friends of Carole Migden”.  But no, there is nothing there.  That means that Clear Channel is paying for the billboards.  But why?

Well, it turns out that Migden’s former Chief of Staff Michael Colubruno is now Clear Channel Outdoor’s VP for Government Affairs.  Ironically, his very first blog post called Migden his favorite politician and featured an actual billboard from a previous campaign.  Colubruno is perhaps best known for the “kiddie porn” scandal that made the jump from the blogs to all of the local newspapers.  Midget finally had to tell him to knock it off.  But the two are still close.  We spotted him staffing Migden at the CDP convention in April, following her from caucus to caucus whispering in her ear. (click the picture for a bigger size)

One can assume that Colubruno helped hook her up with the free advertising.  The billboards really should be considered an in-kind contribution and I believe it is something the FPPC should consider investigating.  This is clearly political communication.

Hogarth ties the billboards appearance to the current efforts of Clear Channel Outdoor to win a lucrative Muni contract for bus stops advertising.  This seems designed to gain her support for the company winning the contract.

The message on the war is fairly ironic, considering she is a state legislator.  Hogarth writes:

But Clear Channel isn’t waiting for the Muni contract to help her campaign. Last week, the company set up huge billboards throughout the district, proclaiming that Migden is “leading California’s campaign against the War.” Migden has always opposed the War in Iraq, but to say that she has led California’s campaign demeans members of Congress like Barbara Lee, Maxine Waters and Lynn Woolsey who represent California and have led the charge since Day One. Carole Migden may have authored a resolution in the State Senate last January to oppose George Bush’s escalation. But ironically, it was her opponent, Mark Leno, who sponsored the very first resolution in the nation against the Iraq War – in October 2002.

And janinsafran chimes in:

Last week I was walking down Union Street when I noticed the billboard above. I have to admit I laughed out loud. Carole Migden has been a fixture of San Francisco politics for twenty-five years — and she never did anything so lacking in class as associate with the rabble in the antiwar movement. She’s long been known as a pol who “doesn’t do rallies.” Now she’s being challenged for her State Senate seat by Assemblyman Mark Leno and all of a sudden she claims to be out in front of the antiwar effort? What a crock!

For me the real issue is the potential illegality of the billboards.  Clear Channel is one of the country’s most despised companies.  If they want to use their properties for political lobbying, then they need to run it through an independent expenditure campaign.  They would need to get permission from Migden to use her photograph etc. etc.  Right now this looks like an official Migden billboard, when it is her former Chief of Staff running a campaign to boost her re-election prospects and hopefully get her support for a big city contract.  That stinks, to put it mildly.

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CA-37: GOTV Weekend

The primary election to replace Juanita Millender-McDonald is next Tuesday, June 26.  Both main campaigns, State Sen. Jenny Oropeza and Assemblywoman Laura Richardson, have released internal polls showing them in the lead; however, both polls are tight enough to make this a very close race.  Oropeza has about twice as much money for the final days.

There’s not much of an air war going on, but the mailers are fast and furious.  And Richardson continues to engage in not-so-subtle identity politics.

over…

A crowd of nearly 100 people heard State Senator Jenny Oropeza (D., Carson-LB), a polished public speaker with 19 years of elective experience, become audibly emotional, her voice at one point seemingly approaching tears, while retaining her composure to complete her closing statement in emphatic tones. To hear this, click here.

The Senator’s reaction came after fellow Democrat candidate George Parmer, Jr. (“I’m a truck driver, a working man, not a politician”) said that at a candidate forum a day earlier, someone [not a candidate] suggested that he and other less well funded candidates should drop out of the race in favor of a candidate who could win. Mr. Parmer interpreted this to mean defeating a Hispanic candidate [Sen. Oropeza] to benefit a Black candidate…which he likened to returning to the “road to segregation.” To hear his statement, click here.

Following Mr. Parmer and Senator Oropeza, Assemblywoman Laura Richardson (D., Carson-LB) delivered her closing statement, reiterating her stance that the Congressional seat held by the late Congresswoman Juanita Millender-McDonald (D., Carson-LB) should be held by someone from “our community.” Assemblywoman Richardson indicated the phrase means someone with a working class background reflective of the district, along with the legislative experience to do the job. “I’m not speaking about race. I’m talking about respect,” Assemblywoman Richardson said. To hear this, click here.

I don’t know what the outcome will be, but progressive politics suffer when campaigns become a race about “respect” and identity and street cred.  And I sense this is all coming from one particular candidate.

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Is Positive Campaigning Really This Unusual?

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(What a flippen surprise. They focus on the money and past 527 rather than what the group is actually doing. – promoted by juls)

Cross-posted at votehope2008.org

The mainstream media has discovered Vote Hope, and it seems like they can’t quite get their heads around it.

While we are thankful for the publicity (any press is good press as long as they get the url right!), it’s clear that it’s going to be a little difficult for some people to grasp an independent campaign that isn’t designed to ruthlessly smear someone. News stories published in two places today, both the L.A. Times and MSNBC’s “First Read”, are focusing on the past history of negative independent campaigns, rather than on the reality of what Vote Hope is trying to do in California.

Part of that is the cynicism around politics that Vote Hope is explicitly fighting, with a grass-roots campaign that is designed to empower Californians to be involved in this presidential race, and to increase voter turnout in communities that are woefully underrepresented in our state’s electorate.

We do recognize, however, that in the landscape of national politics, what we’re trying to do is different and unique. So while we did explain when we launched in the blogosphere last week where we were coming from, it’s worth saying again.

The people who are leading Vote Hope are activists who have worked in California politics for the last two decades, around issues of economic justice, education and voter engagement. Our PAC is working to win the Feb. 5 California primary for Obama, but we will also use the 2008 election to support local and state candidates who share our values, and to educate California voters about the early primary election.

Contrary to the conventional wisdom, it is possible to spend political money on something that is good for democracy, and that is precisely what Vote Hope is doing. Once the mainstream press realizes that, I hope the story will remain interesting to them, because it truly is a transformative moment that is worth their attention.

California

Crunch Time for High Speed Rail

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Over the last few months I’ve been writing about high speed rail and the ongoing legislative efforts to save the project from Arnold’s efforts to kill it. As the budget negotiations reach their climax in Sacramento, the future of California’s high speed rail project – and of transportation funding itself – remains as uncertain as ever.

As the BayRail Alliance notes, the legislative budget conference committee didn’t resolve differences between the chambers on what to do about overall public transportation funding or about high speed rail funding itself. As I noted  last month Arnold is looking to gut public transportation funding to the tune of $1.3 billion. Both the Assembly and the Senate want to restore some or all of this funding but disagreed on how much should be restored.

How does this impact HSR? And why is it critical that HSR get funding in this budget? Keep reading…

The California High Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA) has been working toward completion of necessary environmental studies, analysis of ridership, and final route/station selection ever since Gray Davis signed the original high speed rail bond act in 2002. Earlier this year the CHSRA requested $103 million to finish these studies and begin property acquisition.

Instead, Arnold only offered $1 million in his January budget, upped to $5 million in the May revise. Arnold and his advisers seem to believe that this will allow them to “keep the lights on” at the CHSRA until they can find private and federal commitments.

This thinking is flawed – private investors and the federal government simply do not commit to a project like this without the state taking the first step. That’s how these things always work. But without completed studies, even a state vote to fund HSR will not alone attract investment. Every major development needs to have all of its important environmental impact studies completed before it can be considered viable, and without a finalized route, including station selection, no private investor will be willing to take on such a project that still has some lack of certainty about it.

Both chambers of the legislature seem to recognize this – one chamber supported giving CHSRA $50 million, another supported $40 million. But as I noted above, the conference committee was unable to reconcile these numbers and, along with public transportation funding as a whole, chose to let the leadership decide. High speed rail funding is now in the laps of Senator Perata, Speaker Núñez, Senate Republican Leader Dick Ackerman, and Assembly Republican Leader Mike Villines.

The next two weeks, then, are critical for marshaling support for this project. The BayRail Alliance has created a contact page for getting in touch with these key legislators and, of course, the governor. State legislators need to know that the public takes this project seriously and expects to see it given enough funding to make it to the ballot.

Obviously to mobilize the public to save high speed rail, and to begin building support for it ahead of the November 2008 vote, we need to ramp up public outreach. There have been some significant positive steps in this direction – Fiona Ma’s trip to France to be a part of the TGV speed record event generated a lot of publicity and support for California’s project, with some in Sacramento believing that her actions helped push Arnold to make a public statement of support for HSR.

But certainly more must be done. The key may well be the Central Valley. As wu ming noted, inland Californians are used to seeing the Bay Area and SoCal hog all the infrastructure funding while highway 99 rots. One of the *main* beneficiaries of high speed rail will in fact be the Central Valley, which will be connected to the other major metro regions of the state, making it easier for residents of Fresno and Bakersfield to travel not only to SF or LA but to the rest of the country and the world (thanks to easier connections to major airports). Virtually every Chamber of Commerce along the line in the San Joaquin Valley supports HSR, but Assemblyman Mike Villines needs to hear this again.

With so much going on in Sacramento these days surrounding the state budget – especially on the health care issue – it can be easy for HSR to be lost in the shuffle, as it has been for the last few years. But this is the most important project California has considered in the last 45 years. Now is the time to help give HSR the final push over the top so that we can move on to the next phase – getting a successful vote on the bonds in November 2008.

Health Care, Los Angeles Area

The real health care disaster: Quality is falling

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As if we don’t have enough problems with access to health care, but across the nation we are dealing with problems of degrading quality.  And that’s not even relative quality to other nations.  I mean just absolute drop in quality.  Exhibit A: King Harbor Hospital:

California regulators moved Thursday to revoke the license of Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital, an action that, if not reversed, would force its closure. The move, the boldest thus far by the state, follows recent findings by the federal government that patients at the public hospital are in immediate jeopardy of harm or death despite years of reform efforts. (LA Times 6/22/2007)

If you’re so incline, you can click on over to that LA Times link and see the local news story, which, ahem, is a local news story.  Follow me over the flip…

You see, King Harbor has had a poor history, to say the least, but in the last few months, dramatic, public stories have emerged:

Concern about King-Harbor has been building in recent weeks after highly publicized lapses in care.

In one case, a 43-year-old woman writhed untreated on the floor of King-Harbor’s emergency room lobby for 45 minutes before dying. In another, a brain tumor patient waited four days for treatment before his family drove him to Harbor-UCLA Medical Center for emergency surgery.

On Tuesday, The Times reported that health inspectors, dispatched to investigate the brain tumor patient’s case, found 16 additional cases of substandard care in the King-Harbor emergency room.(LA Times 6/22/2007)

But the thing is, that this isn’t the only instance of this. You can find it all over our health care system. Hospitals failing their patients. Much of this is simply due to underfunding of public institutions, and other instances are due to corporate malfeasance or concern of dollar over person.  You needn’t look all that hard for more problems.  Here are some from Tenet healthcare, one of the largest hospital groups in the nation:

Last year Tenet paid out $31 million in settlements to people who sued when cardiac patients at a Florida hospital claimed they suffered from post-surgical infections because of unclean conditions. Twenty cardiac patients died at this hospital.

In 2002, the FBI raided a Tenet hospital in Redding, California, in connection with its investigation into whether doctors were performing unnecessary open-heart surgery. Tenet admitted no wrongdoing but paid $60 million to settle federal and state claims and another $395 million to the 750 patients who claimed they were victims of the heart-surgery center.  CNN 3/9/06

It’s clearly not just this one instance at King-Harbor, or just with TENET. The system is the problem. We have little consistency between hospitals, and the profit motive is lying underneath much of the system, trying to grab a few dollars wherever possible.

So, yes, King-Harbor needs to be fixed, but it’s just one small cog in a massive, failing system of health care in this state and in this nation.

Health Care, Los Angeles Area

King-Harbor on the road to shutdown

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You never know when the traditional media will latch on to a story, but they’ve certainly raised the case of L.A.’s King-Harbor Medical Center to new heights by publicizing the tragic story of a woman who died while waiting in the lobby of the emergency room while hospital staff casually walked by her.  It’s become a powerful symbol of our broken health care system.  In fact, King-Harbor has been troubled almost since the moment it opened in 1972, and the tales of woe emanating from the medical center are numerous. 

Among the cases cited:

•  One patient in King-Harbor’s emergency room told a triage nurse on April 30 that he was seeing “aliens and devils” and that he was thinking about drinking bleach to commit suicide. He was left in the lobby for more than an hour and not seen by a physician for almost seven hours. A mental health evaluation was not completed for 17 hours after he arrived, according to the federal report.

At that time, the patient denied being suicidal and was discharged without receiving treatment.

•  A female patient went to the emergency room on March 8 complaining of two weeks of stomach pain. She said she had nausea and rated her pain as a 10 on a scale of 1 to 10. “The patient identified that the pain she was experiencing was constant and that nothing provided relief.”

Even so, she was given no treatment to alleviate pain or reduce her fever. Two hours later, she was checked again and again offered no treatment. She was not seen by a physician until nearly seven hours after she arrived. “The patient experienced severe pain throughout her [emergency stay],” the report said. Eleven hours after she arrived, she went to surgery.

•  A patient went to the emergency room on May 11 complaining of spotting during pregnancy. An hour later, a triage nurse saw her, gave her a pregnancy test and sent her back to the waiting area. When staff called her name two hours later, she had left without being seen.

Three days later, the same woman returned to the hospital with complaints of vaginal bleeding and severe pain. A nurse didn’t evaluate how much she was bleeding and had her wait four hours without pain medication. During an ultrasound, she had a miscarriage and was discharged a short time later.

So today, state regulators have moved to close the hospital.  But is that the right thing to do?

over…

Both the governor and a portion of the LA County Board of Supervisors seem resigned to King-Harbor’s closure:

Two of the five members of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors said Thursday that they now support closing the hospital without delay.

“I think it’s over for us,” Supervisor Gloria Molina said. “I’m in fact terrified that somebody else might be hurt or neglected or abused at Martin Luther King hospital.”

Supervisor Mike Antonovich agreed. “The time has come to put patients’ lives before incompetent employees or political agendas,” he said.

The state’s decision, which was approved by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, is subject to appeal. That process could take six months to a year.

So for the next year, King-Harbor would remain open until the process is complete.  But what would be in place in the wake of any closure?  In the CA-37 debate, the district which includes the area around King-Harbor, almost all of the candidates stressed the fact that there are few options for the low-income residents that King-Harbor serves.  Most of them use public transportation and can’t afford an ambulance to take them to the next closest hospital.  And the trauma centers in the area are already overburdened, and another 47,000 ER visits per year (the approximate average at King-Harbor) could create the very problem regulators are seeking to avoid.  If there is an extended, year-long process to close King-Harbor, plans MUST be made to provide for some replacement access for the citizens who would be left with practically no alternative should they become sick or injured.  Community advocates are saying the same thing.

“We are playing with not only fire, we have gasoline in the other hand,” said Lark Galloway Gilliam, executive director of Community Health Councils. “That emergency room, you can’t let that go. Closure to me is not an option.”

Finally, this really stresses the need for a better safety net for all citizens than a crippled emergency room system that acts as a faux-universal care apparatus.  People deserve better than this.  They need to have access to preventative care instead of going to the ER for a fever.  King-Harbor’s problems are part of the larger health care crisis in America.

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Running into a brick wall in state legislative races?

Democrats haven’t picked up a state legislative seat in California since 2000, when they won the 24th and 28th Assembly seats in Saratoga/Los Gatos and Salinas, respectively.  They also picked up Mike Honda’s South Bay Area Congressional seat that year.

In 2002, Democrats pushed through a redistricting plan to protect incumbents in the state legislature, and gerrymandered Senate District 12 for Rusty Areias.

This didn’t stop Republicans from picking up two Assembly seats and the 12th Senate District seat in 2002.

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In Memory: Discovering Community

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Ten years ago yesterday, I learned the amazing power of the Internet to form community.  It is a lesson that continues to effect my work to this day.  I am sure each and everyone of you has a story about the time you discovered the power of using the web for many to many communication.  It has a unique ability to allow disparate groups to build a powerful narrative by one person building upon what another has said and creating a permanent record of that discussion.  Here is my story and I hope you will share yours in the comments.

On July 20, 1997 my Aunt Jan and Uncle Phil Karlton were killed in a car accident in Italy along with Jan’s friend from college.  A half-ton fully laden dump-truck plowed into their Saab at a notoriously dangerous intersection in Canelli, Italy.  I was in high school and home for the summer.  The phone started ringing that morning and non-stop for days.  My mom, Phil’s sister, started coordinating the travels of their son David and my aunt Jo’s travels to Italy and communicating with Jan and Phil’s friends and family back in the states.

My Uncle Phil was a talented computer engineer and worked at a long line of some of the most famous computing labs in the Silicon Valley, whether it was his days at Xerox at Palo Alto Research Center, or at Digital Equipment Corp. at its Western Research Lab, or Silicon Graphics.  At the time of the accident he was working for Netscape, with the self-selected title of “Principle Curmudgeon”.  My Aunt Jan was an artist, who showed all over the Santa Clara Valley.  She was perhaps the sweetest person I have ever known.  The two had been inseparable since they met and married after only three dates.

Within hours of the crash on of their good nerdy friends set up a listserv and a website to record all of the messages so everyone could stay updated and share their favorite memories.  The Merc wrote up a great article about it and my aunt and uncle titled “Grief on the Net: Website spreads news of couple’s fatal crash.”

Within hours back in California, a Web site offered a mailing list, so friends could learn and remember and mourn. By Saturday, the site had recorded 2,000 hits from 1,000 different addresses. Within days, scores had posted anecdotes about how Phil and Jan Karlton had charmed their lives.

It was a lesson in communication. “At the usual memorial and funeral, you can talk to a few people,” said Nancy Teater, a friend of the Karltons’ for 25 years. “In this environment, everyone can share. And sometimes when you write things down, you can say what you can’t say out loud.”

The email list was incredible.  I learned so many wonderful stories about the two of them, whether it was Phil rappelling off the side of the building in a tutu for a spectacular entrance into a party or the phrase that still makes me chuckle: “Jan and I have an agreement about haircuts. She gets to decide how her hair is cut, and she gets to decide how my hair is cut.”  To say they were beloved was an understatement.  I got to know their friends virtually, share my memories and most of all form a sense of community in our mutual grief.  It was powerful and eyeopening.

The website and archives are still up ten years later and even though that Merc article link is dead, I can still pull from the piece.  I am still amazed at this story:

Jan Karlton wore that diamond for 28 years before the dump truck slammed into the Saab at a curving intersection, killing her and her longtime friend, the driver Rosemarie Bröcking of Bex, Switzerland, outright, and Phil Karlton seven hours later in an Alessandria hospital.

The intersection had been the site of death and destruction before. The people of Canelli had pleaded for changes for more than two years, the mayor of Canelli said after the crash. When David Karlton and his Aunt Joanne went back to buy a tough little white-flowered Marguerite to plant as a memorial at the intersection, the nearby florist refused to let them pay. Everyone in Canelli knew what had happened, they said. As cars slowed, genuflections told of their sadness.

A judge gave David Karlton permission to search the wreckage of the Saab and the truck. His parents’ camera had been missing from their effects, and so was the diamond from Jan’s ring. He found the camera, but broken shards of glass inside the Saab sparkled like a thousand zirconium fakes. Finally he turned to the cab of the truck for a futile look.

Before leaving the wreckage yard, he made one more pass at the Saab. “There was one point on the floor where the sunlight was shining differently,” David Karlton said. “It’s amazing. I found it.”

For eight years David wore that ring on a chain around his neck, until two years ago when he placed it on his wife’s finger at his wedding and moved his dad’s ring to his thumb.

Yesterday, many of the same people from the listserv gathered at Gordon Biersch in San Jose, the site of Phil’s 50th birthday party to get together, swap stories and remember Jan and Phil.  It is amazing that 10 yeas have gone by.  The memories may be fading, but I know I can always refresh them by going to the archives.

Let me leave you with this sage word of advice from my uncle Phil: “If you kiss an electric blanket you only get fuzz in your mouth”.

Julia Karlton Rosen