The story of the 2008 election is going to be the epic collapse of the Republican Party in traditional strongholds.  

The Republican Party, which overtook Valley Democrats in voter registration totals eight years ago, is losing ground for the first time in at least a decade.

After peaking just ahead of the 2004 presidential election, Republican registration numbers are down in Fresno, Tulare, Kings, Madera, Mariposa and Merced counties.

The GOP’s decline is most obvious in Fresno County, where the losses have turned into an avalanche, even as the party gears up its efforts to keep the White House in GOP hands by electing Arizona Sen. John McCain as president.

The most recent voter registration numbers show the Democrats are closing the gap and are now fewer than 9,000 voters behind the Republicans.

At the peak in 2004, GOP registrations were ahead by more than 23,500 voters.

This will obviously help in AD-30, where Fran Florez is facing Danny Gilmore to keep Nicole Parra’s seat in Democratic hands.  But this is a nationwide and statewide shift that is generational in nature.

In Riverside County, Republicans have lost close to 34,000 voters since October 2004; in Orange County, an 18 percentage point Republican Party lead in 2004 is now at 14 percentage points.

Bob Mulholland, campaign adviser to the California Democratic Party, points out that Democrats picked up almost 75% of the more than 411,000 new voter registrations statewide between voter-registration reports filed Jan. 22 and May 19.

During that same time, close to 21% of new registrations were decline-to-state. Republicans picked up just 3.6% of the new voters.

I think that in particular, failed conservative policies have most adversely impacted Republican areas.  The collapsing home market as a result of “inmates running the asylum” in the lending markets has hit the exurbs hard.  Job loss is most keenly affecting the areas where jobs are newer to arrive.  And of course high energy prices hurt those with long commutes.  The exurbs, the fast-growing counties, the greatest strength for Republicans in 2004, are massively turning to the Democrats.  That leaves Democrats with a noticeably bigger tent, and we have to recognize that as an issue moving forward, but for now, this cratering of Republican numbers is truly a sight, as stark a picture as it was right after Watergate in 1974.

In an article that could have been a press release from the Howard Jarvis Association, the San Jose Mercury News has an article by John Woolfolk arguing that tax proposals are inherently bad “in these times.” While an analysis of the costs and benefits of tax plans would be a welcome product of the traditional media, Woolfolk’s article is instead a hopelessly biased attack on tax plans that rarely mentions the savings the plans would generate.

No wonder California is so hard to govern effectively – with these Republican talking points being passed off as journalism, Californians aren’t being given the full information that they deserve.

Like so many families these days, the Gravelles of San Jose feel squeezed. Their home has lost about $250,000 in market value, their monthly gasoline bill hit $394, they’ve got one son heading to college and another to Catholic high school.

But valley officials are urging them to keep their pocketbook open, with more than a dozen local revenue measures filling the November ballot. The county hospital needs an earthquake retrofit. A long-planned rapid transit extension needs operating funds. Schools and libraries need refurbishing. City budgets are potholed with deficits.

And Andrea Gravelle isn’t sure her family can afford to be so generous this year.

That last sentence gives away the framing used throughout the article – taxes are like charitable giving or Christmas presents – something expendable, to be cut back on when times are tough.

But look at the list of what would be funded. Hospital earthquake retrofits. In the event of a quake Andrea Gravelle’s family is going to need the hospital to be open – without it she’s going to spend a LOT more money otherwise. The hospital tax is a form of insurance. The BART extension might help her save money on gas, and the potholes require higher amounts of maintenance.

NONE of that is mentioned in the article. Woolfolk implicitly agrees with the far-right argument that one never gets anything in return from government. Look at his section on San Jose’s 911 dispatch fee:

So while families like the Gravelles might save $7 a year on city phone taxes if both city measures are approved, the savings could be three times that if the 911 fee were simply allowed to expire.

You mean they might save a whopping $21 if they sat back and watched the city’s emergency dispatch system be destroyed? I dunno about you, but $21 a year to enable police, fire, and paramedics to quickly reach the scene of an emergency sounds like a pretty damn good use of money, don’t you think? But here again, Woolfolk never mentions the value – literal or figurative – of what the taxes purchase.

The same happens when he discusses Prop 1, the high speed rail bond. He even gets the costs wrong as he tries to make minor costs look like budget-busters, in the absence of an explanation of what it will save people:

Critics of the biggest bond measure, $9.5 billion for high-speed rail, argue it will cost the state general fund a total of $20 billion, or $2,000 per average California family over the 30-year life of the bonds. It would require the state to pony up $67 million a year at a time leaders in Sacramento are already struggling to patch a $15 billion shortfall.

Actually, the bonds have a 40 year lifespan, which would make it even less than $2,000 total. But using Woolfolk’s figures that comes out to $66.66 a year, and that’s for a family.

Nowhere does he explain that high speed rail would save at least that much per family per year in travel costs. Airfares are steadily rising as the price of oil rises, and will price out families like the Gravelles if HSR isn’t built. Do the Gravelles go to the occasional Giants game in SF? It would save them both time and money in gas costs and travel times. But none of this makes it into the article either.

The article concludes by quoting San José mayor Chuck Reed as saying the failure of the tax plans would result in “cutting core services.” The article doesn’t report what those cuts might be but I suspect Reed gave Woolfolk some possibilities that somehow didn’t make it into the paper.

The total yearly cost to a family of the San José tax plans, based on the info in this article, is around $400. But the savings produced by the spending the taxes enable are not quantified or even mentioned. Woolfolk has given readers only half the equation, a false accounting that creates a notion that San Joseans are being taxed to death, even though $400 is a small price to pay for quality services.

And it’s the big picture that the article gets so very wrong. It’s no coincidence that in the 30 years since California went on a tax cutting binge that California has experienced a “generation of inequality” as reduced services erode the middle class into nothing. Economic security in America comes from wise government spending – the 20th century proves this. In its absence Californians have seen their wages stagnate and the cost of basic needs soar as they lose protection against catastrophic life events. Smart taxes, used for good purposes, save people money and help them become prosperous and secure.

Ironically the Gravelle family, held up as an example of a family being taxed into oblivion, plans to vote for most of the tax measures. They understand the importance of having a functioning hospital trauma center, for example. Their stance suggests that more Californians understand what I just described – that taxes bring savings – than do the journalists who write in their morning papers.

A major article in today’s LA Times alleges Tyrone Freeman and SEIU Local 6434 routinely misused local funds, including giving contracts to family members:

The Los Angeles-based union, which represents low-wage caregivers, also spent nearly $300,000 last year on a Four Seasons Resorts golf tournament, a Beverly Hills cigar club, restaurants such as Morton’s steakhouse and a consulting contract with the William Morris Agency, the Hollywood talent shop, records show.

In addition, the union paid six figures to a video firm whose principals include a former union employee. And a now-defunct minor league basketball team coached by the president’s brother-in-law received $16,000 for what the union described as public relations, according to the union’s U.S. Labor Department filings and interviews.

It’s not clear if there are any legal violations here, and Freeman and his family members deny that there was anything inappropriate in the contracts and spending:

“Every expenditure has been in the context of fighting poverty,” [Freeman] said…. Freeman, 38, said the union’s members have benefited from the money spent on the video production and day-care companies that his wife and mother-in-law operate at their homes, because of what he termed the high quality of the services.

The article goes on to detail the expenditures and flaws with them, some of which went to nonprofits in trouble with the IRS and “entities” associated with former LA Rams star Eric Dickerson that have been suspended from doing business in California.

Labor unions constantly have to battle the usually false perception that they misuse funds, and face a well-funded right-wing campaign that seeks to undermine unions for even the slightest error. Most unions, including those I’ve been a part of, are very scrupulous about how they use money to avoid even the appearance of impropriety, so I am very surprised to hear that this was going on.

And I’m not alone in that. The article quotes Nelson Liechtenstein, one of the nation’s leading labor historians, as follows:

It’s very important for unions not to do this kind of thing,” he said. “Union leadership is a public trust — all the more so when the people being represented are among the lowest-paid in America.”…

Lichtenstein said the [$418,000 golf] tournament spending was troubling under any circumstances.

“I don’t care if they’re making money or not,” he said. “It’s disconnected from the world of the people they’re representing. No one’s playing golf who’s a home healthcare worker.

And Joe Matthews at Blockbuster Democracy blog is even more critical, calling for Freeman’s resignation:

So this is going to be a difficult test of the union movement in LA and nationallly. But it’s a test. Freeman needs to step down and offer a full-throated apology. The union needs to ask for an independent audit of the local. And the public needs to hear immediately from union leadership — Stern, county labor chief Maria Elena Durazo, other top SEIU leaders such as janitors’ union chief Mike Garcia — about how such conduct must not be permitted in the movement. So far, the silence is deafening. Stern, in the story, refuses to address the conduct in question. That won’t cut it.

Why does the action need to be so clear-cut? Because the labor movement is on the rise in Los Angeles. To attend a city council meeting or a mayoral press conference is to watch the labor movement governing the city. As the journalist Harold Meyerson has written, the rise of the LA unions as a labor force has been aided by the widespread perception that our unions are not old-style, corrupt empires. This is supposed to be new labor. The public needs to see transparency and accountability in the response to this.

As for Freeman, I hope he can make amends for this conduct and have a future in the labor movement. But it can’t be as president of this local.

Matthews has it exactly right. The SEIU leadership needs to show that they won’t tolerate this kind of action within their ranks. Union democracy is important, and so is union accountability, union honesty, and union ethics. The misdeeds of one local unfortunately tend to get used to attack the labor movement as a whole – and Andy Stern and Tyrone Freeman in particular owe that movement answers and action.