Daily Archives: April 24, 2008

education

Denham Files Criminal Complaints Against Perata

Senator Jeff Denham knows he can’t win on his record.  He knows that the state’s budget is screwed, he was and remains part of the problem and people are smart enough to put it together.  And since he can’t resist a recall on his actual performance as a legislator, he’s left bitching and moaning over ticky-tack stuff that only matters if you’re scared of being judged on your merits.

So today, Denham filed two criminal complaints against Senator Don Perata.  They object to some pretty innocuous and obscure actions- like a Senate staffer translating a transcript- which, while worth being looked at, have nothing to do with the actual substance of the recall election. It’s misdirection, it’s obfuscation, and it’s a refusal to take responsibility for the crisis that the state is facing.  Par for the course these days from the Yacht Party and it’s preference for party loyalty over productive governance.

Senator Denham continues to base his entire campaign on the notion that his behavior is no business of anyone outside the district.  He complains that Perata shouldn’t be involved, outside activists shouldn’t be involved, that the eyes of the state have been unjustly turned to his record and district.  But when Senator Denham obstructs a workable budget, it isn’t just his district that suffers.  Kids are losing teachers in every corner of the state because of the budget shortfall that Denham helped create.  Vital services are being slashed across California because Denham refuses to deal in fiscal reality instead of partisan obstinacy.

We’re all in Jeff Denham’s district, and if he’s going to whine about it, maybe he should find a different line of work.

Update: Just received a press release (full text below the flip) accusing Denham’s campaign of using state email accounts to solicit state employees for campaign purposes. State resources should, it seems, be used to protect his own hide but not to provide basic services to Californians. Presumably the resources in question do not exclusively come from his Senate district. We’re all in Jeff Denham’s district.

DENHAM CAMPAIGN IGNORES LAW

Campaign Manager’s E-mail Targets State Workers

In what appears to be a pre-planned attempt to subvert state law, Jeff Denham’s campaign has used state email accounts to solicit state employees to participate in precinct walks.

An email sent to staffers working for Republican legislators – and obtained by the campaign to recall Denham – urges staffers to participate in the effort to save Denham from recall.

The email – apparently written by Denham’s campaign manager – begins with the sentence, appearing in bold and capital letters “DO NOT REPLY TO THIS MESSAGE FROM A GOVERNMENT ACCOUNT” – clearly indicating that the intended email recipients were state employees using state computers.

“Jeff Denham has stooped to a new low – using taxpayer’s resources to try to help save his political hide,” said Gary Robbins, leader of the Denham recall effort. “Denham went behind our back to raise his own pay, now it looks like he’s willing to break the law to keep his job.”

A copy of the email appears below.

In addition, Denham’s campaign website – until it was abruptly changed this week – contained more than a dozen press releases that were identical to those appearing on his state website – in apparent violation of laws restricting the use of state resources for political purposes.

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Prop 98: Coupal forced to defend his landlord power grab

My Disclosure.

The LA Daily News takes a look at some of the people that could be harmed by Prop 98’s odious landlord power grab. This isn’t just some hypothetical, but real people living here in California. People will be forced to leave the cities and head out to the exurbs or out of state. For example:

He’s a disabled Vietnam veteran. She’s a retired teacher who spends most of her pension on health insurance.

Arnie and Marilyn Bernstein are among an estimated 1million Angelenos with a rent-controlled apartment.

But if voters kill rent control in a June ballot measure, the Bernsteins say, their monthly payment would jump from $876 to $1,300 – a 48 percent increase.

“We couldn’t afford another apartment,” said Marilyn Bernstein, 62, of Canoga Park, who has lived in the one-bedroom unit for 21 years. “We’d be living under a bridge – like `Tent City, here we come.’ The possibility of lifting rent control would be devastating.”

Emphasis my own. The fact is that while this is permanent vacancy decontrol, the rent control ends when the tenant moves out, Prop 98 makes it a heck of a lot easier to do evictions. Tenants are generally in a lot worse place if Prop 98 passes.  So, Jon Coupal, head of the local Destroy Gummamint Set (HJTA), has to defend this turdblossom.  Let’s see what he comes up with. Ah, yes, he lies.

“It doesn’t make it easier to evict anybody,” Coupal said. “All the protections under existing law remain in effect. Only when that unit is vacated can anybody raise rents. We actually take the existing protections against evictions and make them part of the California Constitution.”

Naysayers insist, however, that the landlord-backed measure would essentially end rent control in California.

Oh, those naysayers, always coming in with their facts and messing up your spin. You can read the proposition on the Yes 98 site. Look at Section 3, the part that would be grafted onto the California constitution. Do you see tenant protectsions there? Not so much. In fact the only time the word “tenant” is mentioned comes in the Sec. 5, where it eliminates rent control.

In reality, Prop 98 slashes into the heart of tenant protections. It is a dangerous ruse to use the issue of eminent domain to dramatically increase property rights in a way that was never envisioned in the past.

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California’s Early Primary Was a Bad Move

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Given that George Skelton has written the opposing view in today’s L.A. Times, I thought readers would enjoy my opinion about California’s early primary.

Remember when California moved up its presidential primary from June to February – so that we’d have a “bigger impact”? We ended up sharing February 5th with 21 other states – and so had almost no effect on the nomination.  Barack Obama lost to Hillary Clinton because he didn’t have enough time to introduce himself to voters in such a large state, but made up for that loss by racking up huge victories elsewhere.  Now California has a state primary on June 3rd – where turnout is expected to be very low, so the right-wing Proposition 98 to end rent control could pass.  If we had kept the primary at a later date, we would have affected the nomination – and Prop 98 would have gone down in flames.  But the Democratic leaders in Sacramento pushed a February primary to extend their term limits – in a gambit that failed.

The case for moving up California’s primary had its valid points – such as why does Iowa get to hog so much attention from presidential candidates every four years, who then are forced to take a position on ethanol?  As the largest and most diverse state in the nation, California deserves its place in the spotlight.  Candidates must be held accountable on issues that matter greatly to us like immigration, suburban sprawl, education funding, affordable housing, public transportation and levee repairs.  But despite moving up our primary, these issues did not play a prominent role in the campaign.

That’s because California didn’t act within a vacuum.  The Democratic National Committee said that states could move up their primaries to February 5th without losing delegates, so a lot of states had the same idea.  We ended up sharing Super Duper Tuesday with Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Illinois, Minnesota, Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Kansas, North Dakota, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Arizona, Idaho and Alaska.  Presidential candidates didn’t spend much time in California – because they were too busy elsewhere.

California got some attention on Super Tuesday, but we were competing with 21 states just ten days after the candidates had duked it out in South Carolina.  With the cost of running a statewide campaign here, Clinton and Obama spared their resources – and devoted more attention to states on the East Coast, Midwest and in the South where a little money could go a long way.  Obama lost California, but his campaign also figured out the math on winning delegates – focus on the small states and rack up huge victories.

Could Obama have won California if he had spent more time here?  Maybe.  Clinton still won by a nine-point margin, but she was ahead by over 20 points a few weeks earlier.  Obama needed time to get acquainted with California voters – especially Latinos – and a more systematic effort in the Golden State could have been successful.  Bear in mind that he practically tied Clinton among voters who went to the polls on Election Day.  But with California’s early absentee balloting, Clinton blunted his momentum.

What would have happened to the nomination fight if California had not moved up its primary to February 5th?  Obama would have emerged from Super Tuesday as the clear winner – but Clinton still won enough states (New York, New Jersey, Arizona) to keep the race going.  Obama would have racked up a wider lead in the delegate count earlier, but Clinton would have refused to back out – insisting that the race must be decided in California.  By June, California would have been viewed as her “make-or-break” state.

It’s interesting to see how much attention Pennsylvania got in this race – because they weren’t greedy like the other states that moved up their primary.  California could have had that same privilege if we had just been patient – allowing each candidate to come here, address our issues and earn our support.  Obama will be the Democratic nominee, and it will be no thanks to California voters.  By trying to have a bigger impact, we ended up making ourselves practically irrelevant.

Some argue that a February primary was good – because it boasted a high turnout.  That’s good for democracy, but the unintended consequences may devastate our state’s future.  A subsequent statewide primary on June 3rd will see a very low turnout – where the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers’ Association is pushing Proposition 98 to abolish rent control.  Polls show Prop 98 trailing, but we still don’t know exactly who will vote.  If renters and Democrats don’t turn out, the right-wing agenda will prevail.

In fact, the President of the Jarvis Association has admitted that a very low (and conservative) turnout will help them on the June ballot.  They started planning over a year ago to gather signatures for Prop 98.  When it looked like they were going to qualify for the February ballot, they actually stopped gathering signatures – and then resumed after it was too late.  Make no mistake about it: they put it on the June ballot for a reason.

Of course, having more of an impact in the nomination process was not the real agenda for a February primary – it was just the “official” reason to get Californians to support it.  Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez and Senate President Don Perata – who were about to step down because of term limits – wanted to pass Proposition 93 to allow them to stay in power for another term.  They could have planned ahead and put it on an earlier statewide ballot, but instead wasted our money with a February initiative.  The voters ended up rejecting Prop 93 – so Perata and Nunez will have to step down anyway.

In order to prove that the February primary was not a waste of time and resources, Perata and Nunez must now make the defeat of Prop 98 a top priority.  Defeating Prop 98 won’t take back the money that the state spent on another election (which could go towards education, housing and transportation), won’t bring back California’s relevance in the presidential nomination process – but at least it will help save rent control.  And right now, it’s the only thing that Perata and Nunez can do about it.

EDITOR’S NOTE: In his spare time and outside of regular work hours, Paul Hogarth volunteered on Obama’s field operation in San Francisco. He also ran to be an Obama delegate to the Democratic National Convention.

Budget

Right-Wing Tax Solutions

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We have become so used to the rabid anti-tax politics of the right-wing, in thrall to the Club for Growth and the Howard Jarvis Association, that we might have forgotten that they have other ways to use the budget to destroy working Californians and the public services they depend on.

Such is the case with a recent op-ed from the California Foundation for Commerce and Education which is, as Shane Goldmacher notes, the California Chamber of Commerce’s think tank. The op-ed ever so gingerly floats the idea of raising taxes to close the budget deficit:

Yet, as with the securities markets, common sense must prevail against principle if critical public services are at risk.

It is simply implausible that we can solve in a single year a deficit problem unaddressed for years without devastating important education, public safety and safety net programs.

But this comes at a price:

Any budget solution – but especially one purchased with new taxes – must unshackle elected officials to set priorities: repeal automatic inflation adjustments, cap guaranteed benefit programs, reopen union contracts that automatically boost wages (including in school districts) and at long last control future public employee health care and retirement obligations.

And a budget solution that includes tax increases must be accompanied by education reforms that improve performance of programs that spend half of state revenues and are critical to California’s economy.

Any tax increase should be legislated as a stop-gap measure that would be temporary. Taxpayers should be made whole during the upside of an economic cycle if they have been tapped for help during the downturn.

In other words, we can have some temporary tax increases to help close the budget but ONLY if we tie this to yet another attack on those public workers we hate. Accomplish Grover Norquist’s anti-government agenda by cleverly tying it to desperately needed new revenues.

For example – repeal inflation adjustments and cost of living increases? That is not a very smart solution in this age of increasing inflation. It would set public workers even further behind the cost of living and push them out of the middle class entirely, thereby hurting the state’s economy. The “control health care costs” language is code for “cut health benefits,” as is “cap guaranteed benefit programs.”

In this scenario, public services would be impacted anyway, as they would be locked into a downward spiral, prevented from catching up to real-world costs and real-world needs. It might stave off collapse of some of the public services threatened in this year’s budget, but only by a few years – this concept would accomplish the same goal over a slightly longer timeframe.

And “taxpayers should be made whole?” This sounds like a recipe for sending checks to taxpayers when the budget picture recovers – which would simply continue the real problem with the state budget, which is a decades-long hollowing out of our revenue streams by ill-advised tax giveaways during the good years.

Unfortunately this plan may not be limited to a think tank op-ed. Goldmacher again:

That position — advocating new, if temporary, taxes in return for budget reforms — is where many are speculating the governor is headed, especially with his shifting rhetoric about taxes, loopholes and fees.

That would not surprise me in the least, and would complicate the budget fight even further.

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SD-19: Strickland’s Phony Enviro Pose

An amusing article written today by Ventura County Star’s Timm Herdt on Republican candidate Tony Strickland (running vs. Hannah-Beth Jackson) on Strickland’s ballot designation as an ‘Alternative Energy Executive.’ Turns out he’s the President of GreenWave Energy Solutions, a newly-created company that is designed to develop wave energy technology. The staff is basically made of Strickland’s Senate campaign workers, and his avowed interest and faith in alternative energy is belied by the fact that he hasn’t even put up the $5,000 investment that his four partners have. In fact Strickland, when he was a member of the Assembly, voted against legislation that would have required energy companies to supply more of their energy from renewable energy resources, which would have created a real market for GreenWave Energy (and many other green technology companies). Strickland’s opponent, Hannah-Beth Jackson, was a co-author of two bills in 2002 designed to expand markets for just such companies (SB 1038, SB 1078).

What’s really funny, though, is Strickland’s environmental pose. As a legislator he was a one-man wrecking crew on initiatives to protect our air and water, never missing an opportunity to side with polluters against the environment He voted against air quality standards, emissions caps, greenhouse gas standards, strengthening penalties for air quality violations, incentives for low-emission vehicles, environmental regulation of Mexican trucks, reduction in diesel and port pollution, a ban on oil tanking along the California coast. He voted to protect agricultural burning and offshore waste incineration. He opposed a ban on the sale and manufacture of items (including children’s toys!) that contained mercury. He even voted against a Jackson-authored measure to prevent pesticide spraying next door to schoolchildren.

Hannah-Beth has long been regarded as an environmental champion, receiving the endorsement of the California League of Conservation Voters and the Sierra Club in every election in which she’s run. In the Assembly she chaired the two key environmental committees, and authored over 30 pieces of legislation designed to promote alternative energy sources, protect air and water quality, reduce coastal pollution, preserve open space, protect against pesticides and toxics in our daily lives, and protect the Coastal Commission and the California coast against overdevelopment and pollution. To find out more about Hannah-Beth Jackson’s campaign for State Senate, or join this important push to turn a historically red district blue, please visit our website.

Chris Lanier Campaign Manager Friends of Hannah-Beth Jackson

San Diego

What Vocation is Blackwater Peddling?

Full disclosure: I work for the Courage Campaign

Cross posted at the Courage Campaign blog

The Union-Tribune’s Anne Krueger is back with a command performance from the stenography pool today, delivering the latest “news” on Blackwater’s Otay Mesa facility.  Yet even she couldn’t avoid the awkward break in logic that the various pieces of today’s puzzle delivered:

“As long as it was an educational facility, if they’re training future police or security guards, that would be considered a vocational trade,” Broughton said.

Bonfiglio said Blackwater has had a contract to train Navy personnel since 2002 through a subcontractor, American Shooting Center in Kearny Mesa. The training will be transferred to the Otay Mesa site once Navy inspectors give their approval to the new facility, he said.

Bonfiglio said Blackwater hasn’t determined whether American Shooting Center would assist with training in Otay Mesa.

“We want to improve on the curriculum. We want to improve on the teaching,” Bonfiglio said. “We want to improve on the facilities.”

Bonfiglio said other agencies may use the facilities occasionally if it doesn’t interfere with the Navy’s training. He emphasized that no independent contractors working for Blackwater would be trained there.

addition: Brian Bonfiglio explicitly states that this facility will provide military, not civilian training in the article: “Already in place was a ship simulator – a miniature version of a Navy ship – that Bonfiglio said will be used to train sailors for crisis situations at sea…Although the facility has a shooting range, it will emphasize training Navy personnel to be better prepared for terrorist attacks, Bonfiglio said.”

So as long as they’re training future police or security guards it’s vocational. But they’re training Navy personnel to perform Navy duties.  American Shooting Center (if you want to visit their website by the way, it’s www.gotammo.com ahem), for its own part, is not new to shady training facilities. Last year, ASC tried to open a training facility near Cleveland National Forest without permits and was shut down by the Board of Supervisors.  At the time, owner Marc Halcon complained about getting lumped in with Blackwater and

Halcon said he has had a subcontract with Blackwater since 2002 to train military personnel at his Kearny Mesa shooting center, though he said none of that training took place at Covert Canyon. He would not say how much he is being paid for the contract, which is due to end in September.

So Halcon’s subcontract with Blackwater was due to end September of last year. And the contract was, even then, “to train military personnel at his Kearny Mesa shooting center.” And now Blackwater is saying its new facility is for training those people. Did the contract get renewed/extended? If so, I guess it was changed to reflect a change of venue for the training, even though Blackwater had no facility lined up last fall.  Going further, neither last year’s article nor the new coverage suggests that the training of Navy personnel is to ease their transition into private-sector security jobs- quite the opposite.  Given that Halcon was careful to note the differences between military, police and private training, it seems odd that it would consistently be referred to as training of military personnel unless it’s exclusively is training of military personnel for military purposes.  Which would not be a vocational or trade school. At all.

In this scenario, the only way around that rather major problem would be if Kelly Broughton’s statement- “if they’re training future police or security guards”- is given incredible latitude.  I mean, Navy personnel may very well become police officers or security guards eventually. And those who do would likely utilize weapon and other combat training as part of their job.  But that’s a far leap from the notion that training military personnel to perform military tasks is the same as training them to be police or security professionals.

And while we’re on the subject of what constitutes vocational training, Ray Lutz went ahead and checked the Yellow Pages, where Blackwater Worldwide is indeed listed under Industrial, Technical & Trade Schools (received via email).  He also too the time to note the other businesses listed under the same heading:

A Academy of Bartending

California College For Health Sciences

Center for The Communications Arts

College of English Language

Contractor Schools Golden State

Contractors License Of California

Devry Univ. San Diego  http://www.devry.edu/ (career-oriented majors)

Foundation for Educational Achievement

ITT Tech

Language Studies International

Law School of National Univ.

Occupational Training Services

Pattie Wells Dancetime Center

Reliable Communications Incorporated

Schrader & Associates

Southwestern College

California College For Health Sciences

Seeds of Success Intl. Inc.

Comprehensive Training Systems

International Center for American English

Valley Career College

Advanced Training Associates

Wow Performance Coaching

Barrera Rick & Associates

Tomorrow’s Communications Inc.

Vitality Inc

Palomar College

Healing Hands School of Holistic Health

Welsh Sales Group

Miracosta College

Spartan College Of Aeronautics & Technology

At Your Home Familycare Learning Academy

Beauty Boutique Colleges of Beauty

Dental Assisting Institute

Not so much shooting ranges or mercenary training. More…training for jobs that actually contribute positively to society.  One wonders how long it’ll be before the U.S. government will finally break down and start classifying the nation’s military as just an exceptionally well-funded jobs program.  I’m kinda surprised the Bush administration hasn’t seized on this as their version of the New Deal. Maybe it’s cause nobody will sign up…