There has been some speculation and perhaps wishful thinking that Hillary Clinton and/or Barack Obama might make a swing out here to California around the time of the CDP convention. There will be a bunch of super delegates floating around that the candidates could make their pitch to in person. Plus, there is always the California ATM to make a withdrawal from. But this from Ben Smith makes me think it is unlikely that Hillary Clinton will make an appearance.
The votes have been counted in California, but the money’s still coming in.
Hillary’s got a pair of fundraisers scheduled there: April 2 in Menlo Park and April 3 in San Francisco.
If she were going to come for the convention she would have timed those fundraisers for the weekend, not the middle of the following week.
It would be great to have them there and perhaps Obama will make an appearance. Heck, Clinton could still come, but it seems unlikely at this point.
How about we use this thread as a roll call of Caliticians heading to San Jose in a week for the CDP Convention. I will be there as a blogger for this fine site. Are you coming?
UPDATE by Brian: Bob reminded me in the comments that we should remind everybody of Calitics mobile, which you can read on your cell phone. The new version even allows you to sign in and comment on diaries. There likely won’t be much in the way of other press coverage, so Calitics will be your best source for news on the convention. So whether you are at the convention or at home, make sure you keep an eye on Calitics. And hey, if anybody needs signatures, Calitics would be a great place to let other delegates know about that.
(This did not get the attention it deserved. It’s a big deal that the labor-enviro alliance worked and was able to push this through. There’s more at the LA Times and Matt Yglesias’ blog. – promoted by David Dayen)
In a landmark vote by Los Angeles Harbor Commissioners, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa moves closer to his goal of cleaning up Southern California’s air and paves the way to improve the lives of 16,000 port truckers and their families. The sorely needed L.A. Clean Trucks Program is expected to serve as a national model for ports around the country.
Here’s why the program was needed, the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports have served as the nation’s top entry point for commercial goods slated for store shelves at the likes of Wal-Mart and Target. This brought a daily barrage of thousands of the worst-polluting trucks in Southern California through its major transit corridors and nearby communities, causing many residents to suffer high rates of lung disease, cancer and childhood asthma.
On top of that, the port truck drivers themselves were classified under Jimmy Carter deregulation as independent contractors which meant they each were individually responsible for operating and maintaining their own trucks. Problem is, the combined injuries of low load fees from shippers and their middlemen brokers, rising cost of diesel fuel and high cost of living in L.A., most truckers ultimately earned little more than minimum wage.
Small earnings in a multi-billion dollar industry left port truckers unable to purchase and operate expensive new trucks with environmentally friendly emissions standards that could clean up the air and reduce the health risk to neighbors living nearby.
The Clean Trucks Program places the responsibility for cleanup squarely on the backs of new trucking companies by requiring that only companies with fleets of 2007 emissions standard trucks and drivers to operate them can serve the port.
Unfortunately the Long Beach Port Authority authorized the new emissions standards only and fail to realize that the current business model at the harbor will not afford truck drivers there to finance the expensive, but much needed upgrades.
This program is a longtime coming and I have a feeling Wal-Mart and Target will not simply roll along with the program. This should also teach us a lesson that democrats should not always accept conservative-business friendly deregulation ideology as it can have disastrous impacts on local communities.
But thanks to the new Blue-Green Alliance (Labor-Environmental), new progressive ideals are advancing.
Damn. Now this could come back to bit her in the rear. It turns out that the $35 million figure included $10 million from her Senate account and the $5 million loan she gave the campaign. Not to mention the $3.7 million she owes people. Dan Morain dropped the bombshell in this LAT story.
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) was second in fundraising. She collected $34.6 million in February, pushing her total to $173.8 million. That includes $10 million from her Senate campaign account and a $5-million personal loan. Clinton owes consultants and other vendors an additional $3.7 million.
While that is well above the $11 million McCain raised, it is well below the $55 million Obama raking in during the same time period. She heavily promoted the amount she brought in and the discovery of the potency of online fundraising. Since then we have seen her do goal based asks, with a version of a thermometer and other well known fundraising techniques.
So she had $20 million less to spend (not deducting her debts) than Barack Obama and only $20 million of it was really raised that month. The rest were transfers and loans. I wonder if this will turn into a negative news cycle as people reflect back on the claims made when she first announced these numbers. There was nothing in the reports that indicated that a huge chunk of it came from her Senate account. Indeed they were highlighting the small donor online contributions. MSNBC
In their call to fundraisers, Clinton’s advisers announced that the campaign had raised the money from 300,000 donors, including 200,000 new contributors, most of them donating through the Internet. Aides said almost all the money was for the primary election
The $20 million figure makes sense, given the number of donors she cited. Divide that by 300,000 donations and that gives you an average of $66.67 per contribution. (Obama’s average for February was $75.56, given that he raised $55M from 727,972)
The ongoing state budget deficit is but one aspect of the crisis facing public services in California. Local governments in particular are still very dependent on property taxes, and when those revenues decline, it affects libraries, local parks, roads, and puts added pressure on local schools.
The tumbling housing market has prompted county tax officials around Southern California to begin reducing the assessed value of many houses, resulting in lower tax bills for homeowners but less-than-expected revenue for already cash-strapped governments.
The values of more than 41,000 homes have been reassessed downward so far in Los Angeles County, resulting in an average tax saving of $660. Other counties have barely begun the reassessment process but promise to get the job done before property tax bills are mailed in October….
In Los Angeles County, the assessment rolls include 2.3 million parcels and about 300,000 pieces of business equipment, boats and airplanes. The county receives about a third of property tax revenue, cities get a quarter, school districts take 20% and community redevelopment areas and special districts combined receive 20%.
The process by which reassessment takes place is somewhat complicated, but the overall point is that as property values decline, so too will revenues.
And this is going to be a long decline. The “bottom” may not be reached for another 4 years. And as this recession is likely to be long and deep, it suggests that government finances in California, on the state and local level, are going to be stressed for the next few years.
In such a situation the previous approach of “gut and run” – slash the state budget and hope a quick recovery prevents further damage to services – will accomplish little more than creating more suffering.
Weekend’s coming up, and we’re only one week from the CDP Convention. Oh, and the Republicans still want to cut $4B in education funding. A few other stories around the state:
Arnold got mad and didn’t reappoint his brother-in-law Bobby Shriver and super-actor/director Clint Eastwood because they didn’t want to build a toll road through San Onofre state beach. So much for independence on state boards.
Arnold also vetoed SB 867 to allow organization of workers in the subsidized childcare industry. Apparently, Mr. Schwarzenegger isn’t a huge fan of some of the lowest paid workers bargaining on an equal playing field.
Squabbles between federal, California, and Nevada agencies charged to protect Lake Tahoe made it tough to actually protect the region.
At Calitics we’ve amply covered the long and winding road that led to the rejection of the 241 Toll Road through San Onofre State Park. Members of the state parks commission showed a lot of courage in siding against big business and powerful interests in Sacramento to come out against the plan. In 2005 they passed a resolution opposing it, and they signed on to a lawsuit attempting to stop construction, before the California Coastal Commission eventually voted it down. Here is how the Governor rewarded a couple of them, including a movie pal and his own brother-in-law:
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has dropped his brother-in-law, Bobby Shriver, and fellow action hero Clint Eastwood from the state parks commission after their vigorous opposition helped derail a plan for a toll road through San Onofre State Beach in San Diego County.
The decision not to renew the commissioners’ terms, which expired last week, surprised observers and sent a strong signal that the governor expects loyalty from political appointees.
“This is a warning shot from the governor’s office to all of his appointees: Do what I say, no matter how stupid it is,” said Joel Reynolds, a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council in Los Angeles. “And I know of no project more destructive to the California coast than this toll road project.”
Shriver is one of my city councilmen here in Santa Monica (and as a measure of Santa Monica, he’s considered one of the more conservative ones). Shriver and Eastwood weren’t just two members of the board – they were the chairman and vice-chairman, and both of them wished to stay on for another term.
By the way, these aren’t the only appointees who have been “terminated” by Schwarzenegger after they crossed him (over):
Shriver and Eastwood join a list of other spurned appointees.
Bilenda Harris-Ritter, a former member of the state Board of Parole Hearings, said she received a call from a member of the governor’s office a little more than a year ago asking her to resign, six months after she had been appointed. No explanation was given, she said.
The call coincided with an Internet campaign from a crime victims group asking the governor’s office to remove her for granting parole to too many prisoners […]
In June, the chairman of the state’s Air Resources Board, Robert F. Sawyer, was fired by Schwarzenegger for pushing for antipollution measures beyond what the governor’s office wanted, Sawyer said. The executive director, Catherine Witherspoon, quit in the aftermath.
In September, R. Judd Hanna quit the Fish and Game Commission at the request of an aide to the governor, after Republican lawmakers urged his ouster because he had sought to ban lead bullets in condor territory.
This is a pattern of arrogance and of demanding loyalty. It’s pretty obvious and sloppy.
NOTE: This also comes at a time when Schwarzenegger’s proposed budget includes a bunch of closings to state parks, which Shriver, at least, has been very outspoken against.
I don’t think we have a full appreciation of what’s really happening in these exurbs. This is a crime.
By the way, the most lucid explanation I’ve seen about how this housing crisis happened is in this Web comic, of all places. Basically the investment banks tried to put together a pyramid scheme, knowing that it was fated to fail but hoping that they were more clever than everyone and nobody would find out, and the housing market would hold out at the historically anomalous levels it was headed in 2004-2005. I remember being told in 2005 when I was looking for a house that “nobody gets a fixed mortgage anymore.” That was the mentality from the banks, the lenders, the investors. The goal was to shovel more and more people into mortgages, no matter their credit history. Everybody benefited; government, industry, financial institutions. There was no check on this forward motion, the regulation that was needed. Unregulated capitalism will always step in the “Shitpile” this way. And the banks and the lawmakers will all get bailed out, at the expense of these people in the Hoovervilles Bushvilles.
(This has been an interesting discussion (when people are not flaming each other), so let’s keep it civil. – promoted by Julia Rosen)
Thanks to Brian for his post on the blogger discussion with SEIU's Andy Stern and for opening this discussion. I'm new to the Calitics community and the new UHW Online Communications Specialist.
As a first contribution to this discussion, I thought it would be helpful to share the broad background of our dispute with SEIU, and the outlines of a few of the lessons we've learned in the course of many campaigns to build our union. Through focused efforts to improve the lives of healthcare workers and the people we serve, UHW has developed a model of growth through strength that at the same time achieves the goal of growth for strength.
For the first two terms of Andy Stern's presidency, from 1996 to 2004 and beyond through the initial days of Change to Win, UHW and SEIU shared vision of increasing union membership and improving workers' lives based on building the capacity of strong local unions, maximizing member partcipation in organizing and politics, coordinating our strength across entire industries through democratic structures of accountability to rank and file union members.
However, in recent years, SEIU's priority of growth has lost its qualitative dimension. It is now an act of blasphemy to question what kind of growth makes sense or what purpose growth should serve or what role the informed consent and active participation of workers should have in growth. It is expected that local leaders accept the gospel of growth for growth's sake and accept the quickest short cuts possible to achieve it, even when that means putting employers agendas ahead of workers' aspirations, taking decisions out of workers' hands, and limiting workers' rights to advocate for themselves and for the public interest, both now and in the future.
In this climate, UHW's success at winning some of the nation's best contracts that significantly improve standards (wages, benefits, voice on the job to improve patient care, etc.) has actually been derided as “polishing the apple” – i.e. forgoing growth opportunities by using the union's money, staff and political capital to improve contracts that are already “good enough” instead of using those resources for more growth and for that alone.
The misguided notion at play here is that there's a one-to-one correspondence: the more resources spent on improving standards, especially when that involves struggle with employers, the less growth will be achieved.
This caricature does not stand up to scrutiny.
The fact is that UHW was the fastest growing local in SEIU from 2001-06 (excluding growth from mergers) and it's also the fact that most of SEIU's growth in recent years has come through the creation of quasi-public employers for independent homecare and childcare providers rather than from actually winning union recognition from corporate employers based on the kinds of “value added” arrangements that Stern touts in his book, “A Country That Works”.
But even putting aside these facts, we should question the fundamental logic of the Stern regime's premise that pursuing higher standards for organized workers is an impediment to achieving growth, an expenditure of limited resources in a zero-sum game.
Our members' experience is that improving standards and achieving growth generally go hand-in-hand because when workers win higher standards in one place, it inspires workers in other places to join the union. Indeed, this is why most workers want to join the union.
The hidden and deeply troubling premises of the Stern regime's false choice between growth and standards are these: that no substantial growth can take place in the face of employer opposition and that workers themselves can't be trusted to make wise decisions that defer short-term gains for growth and the long-term power it builds.
The first premise is troubling because starting out, as the Stern regime does, with the PRIMARY purpose of currying favor with employers rather than addressing the issues of union member and consumers cheats workers of their power to achieve real change.
The second premise is troubling because it leads to the kind of autocratic leadership and abuses of power documented at www.seiuvoice.org. When you believe workers are incapable of making good choices, you take the choices out of their hands and entrust them to a closely held inner circle accountable only to itself and to it own agenda of growth at any cost.
These premises bring extremely big problems.
First, the structural tensions between the goals of workers and the goals of employers require that a good union be able to work constructively with employers when that's possible and to fight their initiatives when that's necessary. When winning employers' approval is universally understood as a prerequisite for growth and growth is your only concern, you're operating from a position of weakness, as you've given up in advance on winning any objectives that employers might not prefer. Literally, workers don't even have a fighting chance.
Second, it's wrong and undemocratic and fundamentally disempowering to cut members out of shaping their own destiny. You shouldn't make sacrifices for someone else without their informed consent, and you can't do so without building a hollow organization. Workers can and must take real ownership of their unions and make real choices for themselves to build power.
Moreover, counter to the Stern regime's elitist assumptions, workers have shown time and time again that they are capable of making decisions to postpone short-term gains in favor of long-term growth. Such trade-offs are an integral part of what unions do, but workers themselves must decide to make them. It is unacceptable for these decisions to be made Washington insiders who think they know better than the workers themselves what trade-offs are in their best interest.
In a future post, I'll lay out in greater detail some of UHW's concrete experiences of the corrupted culture within SEIU's current top leadership that we are fighting to put right.
Dave’s video a few weeks ago on the yacht tax loophole inspired the Courage Campaign to create this TV ad, which with your help we will get up on MSNBC, CNN, The Daily Show and the Colbert Report. Please contribute using our ActBlue page to place it on the air.
The goal is simple: frame the Republicans as the Yacht Party and draw more attention to their refusal to close the loophole.
Check the flip for the email we sent out to Courage Campaign members a few minutes ago, which gives a h/t to Dave, Robert and Calitics, plus quotes from Mark Leno’s blog post here.
Dear Julia,
It’s shocking and unbelievable.
California is in crisis, facing a $16 billion budget deficit. Social services are being slashed to the bone. Teachers and education professionals are being laid off by the thousands (up to 20,000, according to California Department of Education). Tuition and fees at state universities and colleges are being raised through the roof.
And California Republican Assembly members are unanimously supporting an appalling loophole in our state’s tax code that allows the super-rich to avoid paying sales taxes on…
Yachts.
Still blinking in disbelief? You read that right: Tax loopholes for yacht owners.
While you are wondering if your child’s school is going to be shut down because of the brutal cuts proposed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, his California Republican “Yacht Party” colleagues in the state legislature are protecting the lavish lifestyles of the super-wealthy.
With the budget crisis approaching catastrophe, it’s time to change the conversation inside our state capital. Inspired by California netroots activists like David Dayen and Robert Cruickshank, the Courage Campaign asked our friends at Agit Pop Communications to create a memorable ad to air on cable news programs watched by Republicans in Sacramento (OK, we also want to air it on “fake news” shows like The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, but not fake news like the Fox News Channel).
The 30-second ad is called “Yacht Party” and you can watch it by clicking here. To air this ad Wednesday on CNN and MSNBC, plus the Daily Show and Colbert Report, we have to raise $10,000 by Tuesday from members like you.
That means we need 250 generous donors contributing an average of $40 per person ASAP. Will you chip in $25, $50 or $75 or more on ActBlue to fund our “Yacht Party” ad campaign no later than Tuesday at 12 p.m.?
Yacht purchases aren’t the only tax loophole California Republicans are blowing open for the fat-cat donors who paved their path to power in Sacramento.
Get this: Private jets are tax-free as well.
The only catch? Richie Rich must stash his yacht or private jet outside of California for at least 90 days.
So, if you’re wealthy enough to not only own a yacht but spend a sizable chunk of time vacationing on it (or sneakily ship it elsewhere for a few months), you don’t have to pay one dime of sales tax on your ultra-luxurious extravagance. Meanwhile, people like us pay sales tax on essential needs, from clothing to school supplies. And the Republicans in the state legislature march in lockstep, calling for draconian cuts that will destroy California’s social safety net.
It’s time for someone to tell the truth inside Sacramento: instead of serving the people of California, Republicans are serving their yacht-owning paymasters.
Will you help us raise $10,000 to air this “Yacht Party” ad on the Daily Show, Colbert Report, CNN and MSNBC? If you can contribute $25, $50, or $75 or more on ActBlue by noon on Tuesday, we can air this ad Wednesday on the huge flat-panel TV’s of Republicans across Sacramento:
We don’t have much time. But if 250 generous supporters of the Courage Campaign contribute an average of $40 per person before Tuesday at 12 p.m., we can raise the stakes in Sacramento, change the conversation, and maybe even embarrass Republicans into doing the right thing.
Can’t contribute? Then please forward this email to your friends who can ASAP.
Your activism is making 2008 a new era for progressive politics in California. Together, we helped kill the GOP’s electoral college “dirty trick,” count the “double bubble” votes in Los Angeles County, and block Blackwater’s base on the California border.
Now, with 30 seconds of your time and a few dollars, we can change the conversation in Sacramento.
Rick Jacobs
Chair
P.S. On Monday, Democratic Assemblymember Mark Leno blogged the details behind this outrageous “yacht tax” loophole on Calitics (a community blog for Californians):
“In February, the legislature considered closing the loophole that gives the wealthiest in the state a tax exemption for their extravagant toys. The proposal was simply to adjust this loophole in the tax law and increase the waiting period to a year–an action that is estimated would have netted the state $26 million. No-brainer, right? Well, not to the Republicans in the legislature.
Because Republicans in both houses voted against the bill, it failed to garner the two-thirds majority needed for passage. Republicans in the legislature have taken a pledge to never, under any circumstances, consider tax increases, even during budget deficits like the $16 billion one we currently face…
… (Governor Schwarzenegger) is now proposing that we cut more than $4.5 billion from K-12 education; decimate our AIDS Drug Assistance Program; further reduce reimbursement rates for health care providers; put the children of mothers on state assistance at risk of homelessness; deny the blind, the elderly, and the disabled even a minimal cost-of-living adjustment; slash funding for our court system; virtually close down our state parks system; and continue to under-fund our higher education systems.”
Enough is enough. Please watch the “Yacht Party” ad. Contribute what you can afford on ActBlue by Tuesday at noon. And spread the word by forwarding this email to your friends across California as soon as possible:
