The budget cuts that have already been made are starting to create consequences, ones that will effect just about every Californian.  Ellinorianne brought us the story of her daughter’s school.  Now the OC Register is reporting (h/t to Weintraub) that officials with the state are warning people away from state beaches.  They are literally praying for bad weather so people will stay away.  Parks just does not have enough money to pay lifeguards.

“I’m sending out a warning that the state beaches – and San Clemente State Beach in particular – will be very, very dangerous and the public should avoid them,” Long said. “If they come down and they don’t see lifeguard service, I would suggest to them that they go to the city beaches.”

“For the first year in the 30 years I have been down here, we do not have a schedule of seasonal lifeguards during spring break,” he said. “We have no money.”

They only have about half of the amount of money to pay lifeguards than normal.  These budget cuts are already putting Californian’s lives at risk and we still have a huge budget gap to close.

“We are praying for a very unfavorable spring with overcast and drizzle,” he said, “and hope that the water stays cold. We do not have the funds to put the lifeguards out there. We (also) have cut back on grounds keeping (and) our entrance station. We’ve eliminated virtually all of our interpretation – school groups and the likes of that.”

The budget discussion is not some sort of essoteric argument.  There are real consequences for the decisions the legislature has and will make about funding.  Our state system has been slashed for years and there is nothing left to give, except in this case our safety

A major reason for the increasing controversy surrounding SEIU International has been their lack of commitment to genuine healthcare reform-and in fact their active attempts to undermine and sink patient-centered, single-payer reforms.  

Progressive elements in the labor movement (and their own union) have long been aware of this problem, as have healthcare and single-payer activists around the country.  

This story is now entering the wider public discussion as SEIU International embarks on new partnerships with corporate America and, all too often, Republican power brokers.  We’ll take a look, below, at their latest partnership, this one with the National Federation of Independent Business and the National Association of Realtors, to support a bill that hurts patients in the name of increasing insurance corporation profits-and, perhaps, winning employer sanction for SEIU organizing.

…for more background, please visit the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee’s new site, ServingEmployersInsteadofUs.

Jeffrey Young in the Hill newspaper this morning unveils the new partnership:

A bipartisan group of senators, with the support of small-business and labor union lobbyists, on Wednesday unveiled legislation they said would go a long way toward expanding healthcare coverage for the largest segment of the uninsured… the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) and the National Association of Realtors (NAR) to develop the legislation. …[to]  break a deadlock that has stalled past efforts to facilitate access to health benefits for small-business owners, their employees and the self-employed… in addition to the business groups, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has endorsed the bill.

What does  the bill do?

The legislation would combine annual tax credits up to $2,000 per worker for small-business owners and $3,600 for the self-employed with state- and federally based insurance pools designed to spread risk for insurers and reduce premiums for workers.

Please note that these tax changes to encourage more people to purchase private, for-profit insurance products are the basis of the healthcare proposals of both George Bush and John McCain.  These policies are widely disparaged by most healthcare reform activists because they further entrench the insurance industry in the delivery of care, will lead to greater profits for the insurance industry at the expense of patient care, and make it that much harder for our nation to ever achieve the guaranteed, single-payer healthcare reform we desperately need.

Here’s what right-wing Senator Mike Enzi had to say about the proposal:

 Asked about the Durbin-Snowe bill, a spokesman said Enzi “welcomes bipartisan efforts to bring market-based solutions to the health insurance crisis that is hurting millions of families.”

“Market-based” health care solution is a Republican talking point that basically means, “let’s do everything we can to help insurance corporations and stop single-payer healthcare.”

This kind of selling out of healthcare reform is the same pattern SEIU International has engaged in across the country, most recently when Andy Stern put his credibility on the line to help Arnold Schwarzenegger pass a bill, with the support of insurance companies, that would have included enormous public subsidies to insurance corporations and a mandate that all individuals purchase their products,no matter the cost or quality.  The California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organzing Committe, along with most of the labor movement in California, healthcare activists and progressive Democrats, defeated that bill by holding it to one single “yes” vote in the state Senate.

Unfortunately these type  of partnerships with corporate CEO’s and Republicans have become standard business practice for SEIU in recent years, as it looks to get new members through organizing employers instead of workers.

A few other examples:

1. In New York, SEIU and the New York State Hospital Association have long worked together to ensure that the Republicans control the state Senate This is a key reason why New York has not had a single-payer bill passed…bad for patients, but good for SEIU’s hospital partners.

2. This post documents SEIU’s partnership with Pfizer to sell Lipitor.  This is ethically and medically dangerous, as wellas representative of the reason that Registered Nurses historically have not wanted to join the SEIU.  RNs are patient advocates, and you can’t advocate both for patients and Pfizer.  One of the other, not both.

3. The Nation documents Stern’s partnership with Lee Scott, the CEO of Wal-Mart, in a PR coup for the embattled company, looking to turn around its reputation for denying healthcare to its employees.  The author notes Stern crossed a UFCW picket line to appear on stage with Scott, despite UFCW’s heroic efforts to organize Wal-Mart workers.

The governor exacerbated the budget problem on his first day in office by slashing the vehicle license fee and denying the state billions of dollars in revenue.  He could return money to the state’s coffers without going back on his promise, by hewing to his supposed environmental credentials and following the will of the people:

Californians support the idea of charging “green” vehicle fees that would make drivers of gas guzzlers pay higher taxes and offer discounts for those driving less-polluting vehicles, according to a survey by a transportation researcher at San Jose State University.

The state now charges drivers registration and licensing fees and gasoline taxes at rates that do not take into account vehicles’ pollution levels. But the survey, conducted by Asha Weinstein Agrawal, a research associate with the university’s Mineta Transportation Institute, found that Californians would support a variety of taxes and fees to raise money for transportation improvements as well as combat global warming, including:

— Raising vehicle registration fees, which now average $31, to an average of $62 and having higher-polluting vehicles pay higher rates and cleaner cars lower rates.

— Offering rebates of up to $1,000 for people who buy new cars that emit very little pollution and levying a surcharge of as much as $2,000 on those purchasing gas hogs.

— Levying a mileage-based tax that would replace the 18-cents-per-gallon gasoline tax. The per-mile amount would vary depending on how much a vehicle polluted the air.

“The public is very supportive of these green taxes and fees,” said Agrawal. “This shows that it is realistic to improve the way we collect transportation taxes in this state.”

You could even make this revenue-neutral for all I care and it would still have a meaningful impact.  But if the budget could be improved and the air quality at the same time, all the better.  The governor talks a good game on global warming but hasn’t yet called for the kind of action necessary.  This could be coupled with a direct investment in mass transit and incentives for transit riders, so that those who can’t afford low-emitting vehicles aren’t adversely affected.  We’re not going to get rid of the car culture in one fell swoop, so encouraging consumers to buy clean energy vehicles while implementing the proper smart growth and transit policies (along with massive renewable infrastructure) will get us there in stages with a meaningful reduction in emissions right at the beginning.  The people want it, the government needs to give it to them.

Yesterday I noted with considerable disdain that Darrell Issa doesn’t give a crap about 9/11 victims and is, not surprisingly, an ass.  Turns out that Issa’s heartless BS isn’t finding much of an audience elsewhere either, as people from coast to coast line up to tear him a new one:

“That is a pretty distorted view of things,” said Frank Fraone, a Menlo Park, Calif., fire chief who led a 67-man crew at Ground Zero. “Whether they’re a couple of planes or a couple of missiles, they still did the same damage.”

“New York was attacked by Al Qaeda. It doesn’t have to be attacked by Congress,” added Long Island Rep. Pete King, a Republican.

“I’m really surprised by Darrell Issa,” King added. “It showed such a cavalier dismissal of what happened to New York. It’s wrong and inexcusable.”

Lorie Van Aucken, who lost her husband, Kenneth, in the attacks, slammed Issa’s “cruel and heartless” comments.

“It’s really discouraging. People stepped up and did the right thing. They sacrificed themselves and now a lot of people are getting really horrible illnesses,” she added.

New York Democratic Reps. Jerry Nadler and Anthony Weiner and GOP Rep. Vito Fossella also added some heated criticisms of Issa.  Issa, however, remains mostly unrepentant:

“I continue to support federal assistance for the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks,” he said.

But he didn’t retract his wacked-out rhetoric claiming the feds “just threw” buckets of cash at New York for an attack “that had no dirty bomb in it, it had no chemical munitions in it.”

He went on: “I have to ask … why the firefighters who went there and everybody in the city of New York needs to come to the federal government for the dollars versus this being primarily a state consideration.”

In his statement yesterday, Issa insisted he only “asked tough questions about the expenditures” during a hearing Tuesday on an aid bill for sick New Yorkers.

And if that wasn’t enough, contrast this with another recent dumbass maneuver by Issa in which he DID scurry to apologize for his missteps.  Back in February during hearings into a million missing White House emails, Darrell Issa enthusiastically did his water carrying for the Bush administration, declaring it entirely reasonable that converting from Lotus Notes to Outlook would cause such a loss of information.  He went so far as to compare Lotus Notes to wooden wagon wheels and Betamax.  But once big business got agitated about it, Issa fell all over himself and even officially correcting the Congressional record.  But 9/11 rescue workers? Apparently not on the same level as keeping Lotus happy.  I mean after all, according to Issa, 9/11 “simply was an aircraft” hitting the World Trade Center and causing “a fire.”

I don’t know what world Darrell Issa is living in, but he certainly doesn’t have much company.

Robert Hamilton is challenging Darrell Issa this year.

Cross posted at San Diego Politico

Originally posted at my high speed rail blog

On Monday Sacramento Bee columnist Dan Walters devoted his column to the high speed rail plan. Unfortunately he showed a total lack of understanding of the reasons to build it.

So Dan Walters needs our help in grasping why this project is so necessary to California’s future.

After describing some of the very real issues with the overall funding plan, he devotes the second half of his column to an attack on high speed rail:

The most romantic bullet train vision is the lightning-fast trip from downtown Los Angeles to downtown San Francisco. But how many people really want to make that trip each day, and would it represent a marked improvement over the very frequent air travel now available?

I can anecdotally provide him with about two dozen names of CDP convention attendees who expressed the desire for a high speed train to connect San José to their homes in SoCal. But we can answer this charge much better by explaining why HSR will be not just an attractive – but necessary – transportation option.

First, attractiveness. I dealt with that last week when discussing the 5% increase in Acela market share on the Northeast Corridor. Acela isn’t even a true high speed rail system – ours would provide double the speed of Acela. LA-SF is one of the busiest air corridors in the country, and if a flawed high speedish train can take nearly half the market share from airlines in the Northeast, that suggests it’ll work here too.

Second, necessity. Walters assumes that present conditions will last for some time to come. But nowhere in his column are the words peak oil mentioned. Nor does he discuss soaring gas prices. Both will make it difficult and unattractive to continue flying between the two halves of our state, causing either supply disruption or fare increases beyond the ability of most Californians to pay. Walters may not believe in peak oil, even though it is a fact. But the constant rise in oil prices is going to have to eliminate cheap fares sooner or later.

He goes on to try and undermine the CHSRA claims on air travel:

The High-Speed Rail Commission’s environmental impact reports contain some underlying air travel projections that are very difficult to swallow. It would have us believe that air travel demand between Northern and Southern California would nearly double between 2000 and 2010.

That flies in the face of actual airport traffic figures and seems to conflict with another commission projection that in the absence of building the bullet train, air travel times would increase only fractionally between 2000 and 2020.

This passage essentially says nothing. Demand may well have increased, but traffic figures have not met demand. Airports are congested – witness LAX or OAK on a weekend. Most California airports lack the capacity to add slots – Orange County is limited to 14 gates, LAX expansion has languished for three decades, SFO and OAK physically cannot expand any further into the bay. If peak oil is not real, then that means our population really will continue to expand – and without new terminals and runways, and in the absence of airplane innovation (most airplane R&D goes to fuel economy, as supersonic transport appears to be a dead concept) air travel times cannot physically increase.

How about auto travel? The commission projects that driving from Los Angeles to San Francisco, seven hours in 1999, would take eight hours by 2020. But as anyone who makes long-distance drives through the state knows, Interstate 5 is very lightly used now, at least outside urban areas.

This is wrong on two points. First, Interstate 5 is NOT lightly used outside urban areas. Certainly not in the San Joaquin Valley. It is a very heavily used artery. I have on several occasions been stuck in traffic jams in the middle of nowhere in Fresno County on I-5, and on several occasions found it took nine hours to drive from OC to Berkeley.

Second, those urban areas continue to expand. When new development pops up further north on I-5 near Castaic, or in the Tracy area, that adds congestion that a long-distance commuter will encounter on their drive between LA and SF. There never used to be a regular traffic jam on 580 in Livermore, but it’s a fact of life now. One used to be able to drive through the Santa Clarita area on the way to LA without encountering much traffic, but that is now difficult.

California’s traffic congestion is an urban condition, and the most likely patrons of high-speed rail wouldn’t be long-distance travelers but commuters – a poor use of expensive, sophisticated technology.

Again, this is simply not true. Interstate 15 between SoCal and Vegas is another example of a non-urban interstate that regularly sees massive traffic jams. And Walters’ argument that most users would be commuters is itself flawed – either because it is flat wrong (ridership on Amtrak California’s intercity trains has been steadily rising for years now) or because it doesn’t take into account the attractiveness of a quicker commute.

That explains why the most ardent support for bullet train service is to be found in the Central Valley, which is poorly served by airlines and whose main artery, Highway 99, is highly congested with auto and truck traffic.

Bullet trains would make commuting to and from places like Fresno, Modesto and Bakersfield easier. But wouldn’t that merely encourage the sort of sprawl that we are supposed to be discouraging?

Sprawl is a product of land use laws and cheap oil. We’re already losing the cheap oil, which itself is going to stop most sprawl in its tracks. As to land use practices, why should HSR be responsible for the lack of good smart growth planning in the Central Valley? The state ought to step in and subject all local land use planning decisions to AB 32 guidelines on carbon emissions, and localities need to improve farmland protection and infill development rules no matter what HSR’s fate is.

Walters argued that:

even the most ardent advocates have yet to present a persuasive, fact-grounded rationale for spending so much borrowed money on an entirely new transportation system.

Well, Dan, my blog is intended to be exactly that persuasive, fact-grounded rationale. HSR is necessary to our state’s future.

From the Findings and Purpose section:

The purpose of this measure is to enable the people of the City of Berkeley, by majority vote, to decide whether City streets or portions thereof shall be converted to transit-only or HOV/bus-only lanes, prior to dedication of such lanes.

Regardless of any issues one may have with AC Transit’s current BRT proposal, this is just bad planning. This initiative would mean that anytime the City wanted to convert lanes to transit-only lanes, the decision would have to be made by the Berkeley electorate. Even if the dedicated bus lane only extended one block into Berkeley from Oakland or another neighboring city, Berkeley residents would have the final say. Projects could be held up for months or even years if an election wasn’t approaching (I don’t see the city holding special elections for this issue).

But it gets worse…

When a change [in land use or transportation] is modest or uncontroversial, it is appropriate to rely on elected representatives to make these decisions, but if the change is significant or potentially harmful, the citizens should have the opportunity to decide their own future directly through the ballot.

This is just ludicrous. To me, this reads that the filers believe that deciding on dedicated bus lanes is the only land use decision that is “significant or potentially harmful” to the city. Does this mean that building permitting decisions are insignificant? How about zoning decisions? If Metzger and Kaplan have so little trust in their elected officials to make good planning decisions, why not strip the Planning Commission of all of its rights and duties and conduct all planning decisions by ballot initiative?

Normally, I’d just shrug something like this off – after all, the vocal minority of NIMBYs that controls much of Berkeley politics is one of the main reasons I moved to Oakland (well, that and the exorbitant rents). But this initiative would effect the entire East Bay, holding up transportation upgrades that are sorely needed. If we’re ever going to lure a significant portion of the population out of their cars, we need to invest in transportation and ultimately accept significant changes to our lifestyles. One might think that this environmentally friendly issue is something that “liberal” Berkeley would support, but that remains to be seen. Whether this initiative makes it to the ballot and whether it passes has the potential to show the true colors of Berkeley residents.

In July of 2007 I had the opportunity to meet would be Doctors, Architects, Engineers, Lawyers, Nurses and for the majority, non-profit Executive Directors. The day that I met them they were all Advocates taking part in America’s most honored tradition of Free Speech.  

The group of 24 students that I met that day were on a week-long fast aimed at urging the House of Representatives to move forward immigration reform that includes citizenship for hundreds of thousands of undocumented youth through the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act (“DREAM Act”). The fast began July 2nd, and took place in five cities across the state: Santa Ana, Los Angeles, Bakersfield, San Jose, and San Francisco.

The students met with many members of the Bay Area Congressional Delegation during the July 4th recess, including Chairwoman Lofgren who expressed support for their efforts and appreciation for Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s support and understanding of their struggle.

The students’ stories were at the same time tragic and inspiring.  They ranged in age from high school to late-twenties.  Some recently graduated from top-notch institutions such as Stanford, UCLA or Berkeley, but were unable to secure work in their field of study because they lacked documentation.  They spoke of hardship their families faced putting them through college, with fathers working in the fields, mothers working overnight shifts in factories, and the students themselves working two or three jobs to cover the cost of attendance.  Others were unable to go to college, and felt destined to suffer the same lives of insecurity and low wages as their parents.  Many worried about their younger siblings, and all lived with the daily fear that they or their family members would be apprehended in raids and deported.  They were all impressive and determined individuals who wanted to contribute to their community and the American economy.

As undocumented students reach college age, they harbor the same dreams of continuing their education and contributing positively to our society as many other students do.  These young adults had no choice in being brought to the U.S. at a young age, yet they face colleges and universities requiring documentation of legal status, prohibitively high tuition rates, and no chance of obtaining federal financial aid for higher education.  They face a future filled with uncertainty, in which they are unlikely to work in professions for which they have trained, and are confronted with the specter of deportation at any moment.

Our nation would be stronger if these determined young men and women are given the opportunity to continue their education and realize their full potential.  Legislation such as the DREAM Act provides a clear path to legalization for these students and recognizes the immeasurable contributions immigrant families make to our country and our economy.

If Congress does not pass the DREAM Act, America will waste these students’ valuable talents and the chance for economic gain, as well as risk sending young people back to countries of which they may have no memory. America would also lose the initial investment that has already been made in their primary educations. Numerous studies demonstrate that legal status brings fiscal, economic, and labor market benefits to individual immigrants, their families, and U.S. society.

In these economic times, can we really afford to waste such a valuable national resource?

Please join with me and Brave New Foundation’s campaign on the struggles and aspirations of immigrant families in America. Read more at A Dream Deferred.