From today’s

Beyond Chron.

Sunday’s vote on the state budget, in which every single Republican in the Assembly cast a ‘no’ vote against a proposal that would have both cut spending and raised taxes to close the current $15.2 million gap, exposed a glaring fact about the budget impasse. For state Republicans, the process has ceased to represent an effort to reach a solution. Instead, it represents an opportunity to stoke California’s anti-tax sentiments and tell constituents come election years that they ‘steadfastly opposed the Democrats’ attempts to raise taxes.’ While the State Dems must hold strong in their efforts to pass a more progressive state budget, they must simultaneously develop a simple argument targeted towards everyday voters explaining their refusal to bend to Republicans’ will.

There’s more…

Despite California’s progressive reputation, our state possesses a long history of being rabidly opposed to taxation. Proposition 13, passed in the late 70s, tapped into this wellspring and sparked a national movement still in bloom today. State Republicans in Sacramento remain determined to keep stoking the fires of the faithful.

Reading quotes from Assembly Republicans about Sunday’s vote made me feel like I’d been transported back to the apex of American fiscal conservatism, the Reagan era. Mike Villines (R-Clovis), for example, ripped a page from the Gipper’s playbook, telling the Chronicle that “what’s important now is that they [the Democrats] know we’re not willing to (vote for) taxes.”

To close the state’s $15.2 billion budget gap without raising a single tax represents an impossible task. Employing solely cuts would cause catastrophic effects to state services and anger amongst constituents across party lines. And the Republicans know it. They refuse to present a tax-free alternative to the Democrats’ solution, instead focusing on pandering to their anti-tax base and painting Democrats as fiscally irresponsible.

The state’s mainstream media seems determined to add credence to this narrative. They present the battle as one between the Governor and the Democratic-controlled legislature. In reality, because of California’s policy of requiring a 2/3 majority to pass the budget, it’s the State and Assembly Republicans who hold all the power. As long as these Republicans refuse to vote for a budget proposal, negotiations will remain at a standstill.

This leaves the Democrats with two options:

First, they can continue to bend over backwards to produce compromise budget proposals, trying to convince the public that they’re still working to solve the impasse. This involves offering up more capitulations that should be anathema to a truly progressive state Democratic Party, including creating a state spending cap that would destroy a wide array of essential services. It also does nothing to reverse the Republican narrative that the entire budget debate comes down to taxation.

Or, they can hold strong and refuse – just like the Republicans – to pass any budget that doesn’t represent their vision for California.

Holding strong seems the obvious choice. The problem remains, however, that to the average voter, Democratic control of the Senate and Assembly means the budget failing to pass will be viewed as their fault. The media will do absolutely nothing to correct this fallacy. You can try to tell folks about the 2/3 majority rule until you’re blue in the face – when something doesn’t happen in Sacramento, people will continue to blame the Democrats.

So what can the state’s progressives do? Fight fire with fire.

They can come up with a slogan, a mantra, as pithy and powerful as ‘no new taxes,’ explaining why they’re refusing to pass a budget. And they can use it as their battle cry during this year’s budget fight. The opposition has turned the debate over the budget into a proxy war over taxes, and progressives must now utilize the same strategy. Instead of reacting to accusations of being fiscally irresponsible, it’s time Democrats went on the offense.

There’s a variety of slogans to choose from, as the budget battle represents a fight to save basic services that reflect the core values of many Californians. “Respect Our Children,” for example, as a spending cap would prevent the state from being able to afford baseline levels of spending on the state’s school system. “Protect Our Workers,” as a sales tax increase would hit the pocketbooks of hundreds of thousands of the state’s low-income workers hard. “Grow Our Economy,” as desperately needed funding for research and development in building new sectors in the state’s economy would disappear without increases in taxes. “Real Transportation Choices,” as without new revenue, state public transportation funding will be gutted.

The list could go on. What’s important is that Democrats should cease trying to pass a compromise budget when the people they’re negotiating with obviously have no intention of compromising. They should instead focus their efforts on convincing Californians that the reason they’re refusing to capitulate is to protect and defend the interests of the state’s residents.

While further intransigence from both sides means a budget solution won’t be reached any time soon, what have the Democrats have to lose? Yes, the state will face a cornucopia of problems should the stalemate continue. But the Democratic Party must work to convince the state that it’s the Republicans’ thoughtlessness towards children, workers, the economy and the environment that’s the cause of these problems – not the Democrats’ love of taxes.

The budget shouldn’t be about taxes. It should be about people. And it’s up to the Democrats to change the terms of the debate.

I work for the Courage Campaign

After months of simmering, reports last week sounded rather certain that negotiations between the U.S. and Iraq to continue the American presence in Iraq would include the elimination of immunity for security contractors. Talk of a timetable for withdrawal- phased or complete- has been one sticking point, the Washington Post reported “Iraq’s insistence that its laws should prevail stems largely from the excesses of private U.S. security contractors, whom negotiators have agreed would be subject to Iraqi law.” Specifically the Nisoor Square massacre in which Blackwater agents killed 17 unarmed civilians without provocation.

The road towards some sort of justice for that massacre has been a long and torturous one (see here for a brief rundown of the attempted coverup). Despite a U.S. military investigation finding no evidence that Blackwater was fired upon, blanket immunity was immediately offered and counter-theories popped up all over the place. But after fighting through the courts for almost a year, there’s encouraging progress towards justice. Over the weekend, the Washington Post reported six Blackwater agents received target letters from federal prosecutors, suggesting that indictments for at least some of them will be forthcoming.

It’s vital that the framework be established to govern security contractors in Iraq because there are simply so many of them. For the first time in U.S. history, the ratio of contractors to servicemembers is 1:1. And so far, there’s absolutely no mechanism to hold those 190,000 contractors accountable under any laws anywhere. Jennifer Daskal of Human Rights Watch reminds us “[t]his [Nisoor Square] is definitely the most high-profile case of contractor abuse in Iraq, but it’s certainly not the only one.”

With movement in both Iraq and the U.S. to start holding these folks accountable, it only bolsters the argument that Blackwater is not a good neighbor in San Diego or anywhere else. They simply don’t serve the community or the country and- no matter how much Don Rumsfeld wanted to completely outsource the military- have no business undermining the servicemen and women who actually perform these jobs with skill and honor. Once Blackwater is forced to accept the consequences for reckless barbarism, it’ll bolster the case of grassroots activists that have never given up the fight against Blackwater. One more step in the right direction.

Brian mentioned this in the open thread, but it really deserves its own post, it’s such a ridiculous column. George Skelton today made a full-throated but deeply flawed argument for offshore drilling that as far as I can tell boils down to “well we did it in the past, and it’s not going to help in the future…so why not?!” and winds up arguing that we should sacrifice the future for hardly anything in return. The column doesn’t start off on a promising note:

On some beaches around Santa Barbara, you could feel the oozing tar between your toes — and that was long before a Union Oil platform five miles offshore spilled crud all over 20 miles of coast in 1969. For centuries, the tar naturally had seeped up through the sand, providing the native Chumash with caulking for their canoes.

Calling it “crud” is deliberately misleading readers about what actually happened in 1969. From UCSB:

Animals that depended on the sea were hard hit. Incoming tides brought the corpses of dead seals and dolphins. Oil had clogged the blowholes of the dolphins, causing massive lung hemorrhages. Animals that ingested the oil were poisoned. In the months that followed, gray whales migrating to their calving and breeding grounds in Baja California avoided the channel -their main route south.

The oil took its toll on the seabird population. Shorebirds like plovers, godwits and willets which feed on sand creatures fled the area. But diving birds which must get their nourishment from the waters themselves became soaked with tar….

Grebes, cormorants and other seabirds were so sick, their feathers so soaked in oil that they were not difficult to catch. Birds were bathed in Polycomplex A-11, medicated, and placed under heat lamps to stave off pneumonia. The survival rate was less than 30 percent for birds that were treated. Many more died on the beaches where they had formerly sought their livelihoods. Those who had managed to avoid the oil were threatened by the detergents used to disperse the oil slick. The chemicals robbed feathers of the natural waterproofing used to keep seabirds afloat.

In all 3686 birds were estimated to have died because of contact with oil. Aerial surveys a year later found only 200 grebes in an area that had previously drawn 4000 to 7000.

Skelton’s blithe dismissal of the ecological consequences of drilling is appalling. It’s not as if our oceans are healthy – oceans face crippling ecological crises and they’re in no position to withstand drilling.

Skelton goes on to turn “Big Oil” into a nostalgia piece (I’m guessing someone didn’t see There Will Be Blood):

Oh, another thing: My dad was an oil field roustabout, or driller or whatever job he could fill on a given shift. So were his dad, brother and cousins. They left their Tennessee farms and followed the migration to California for the 1920s oil boom.

My first summer job out of high school was in a Ventura oil field, an experience guaranteed to prod a kid into college if nothing else would. (But the oil job paid better than newspaper work, I soon discovered.)

So “Big Oil” never has been a big bugaboo for me. It was the producer of a vital commodity and provider of working-class jobs. Although oil derricks annoy many people as unsightly, I’ve always marveled at how they work, especially all lighted up at night.

Nostalgic memories do not count as a sound basis for public policy – unless of course he thinks we should go back to the days before OSHA, dump our toxic waste into the drinking water supply, and drive without seatbelts.

Worse is the conflation of Big Oil with working-class prosperity. Perhaps at some moment in the past this was true, but Skelton here merely reveals that he, like all the High Broderists, does not live in the 21st century, instead assuming that the conditions of the 1970s remain true today. They don’t.

Here in the 21st century Big Oil sucks precious income away form working-class families while returning hardly any in the form of jobs, taxes, or anything else resembling prosperity. And as anyone living near the Torrance refinery knows, they tend to actually have rather debilitating effect on working-class communities.

More below…

Skelton’s main thrust of the article is some weird attempt to argue that offshore drilling will actually produce self-sufficiency – since California uses so much gas, shouldn’t we drill offshore for more?

This argument has numerous flaws. First, Californians are reducing their gas consumption which has been relatively flat over the last 8 or 9 years. Conservation, not wasteful and useless drilling, is what brought prices back from the brink of $5 earlier this summer, and it alone is what will produce long-term savings.

Skelton tries to dismiss the correct argument that drilling now won’t produce usable oil for at least ten years:

Offshore exploration opponents point out that if the federal drilling ban were lifted today, there’d be no immediate effect on gasoline prices. It could take 10 years to get any crude to the gas pump. Fine. Most people driving today still will be 10 years from now.

This is a statement deeply ignorant of how oil works today. He is assuming that the supply of oil and the demand for oil will remain static so that in 10 years, the oil we drill off our coast will make it to the pump and reduce prices.

He is wrong.

The fact is that the demand for oil is soaring around the world, and it is becoming difficult if not impossible to increase production to match it. That is the phenomenon of peak oil at work and that is why gas prices have climbed by 30% every year since 2002. Supply can’t match ever-rising demand. The oil off American shores is so small an amount as to not be able to dent oil prices that, ten years from now, are very likely to be much higher than they are today. As demand rises around the world, oil companies will sell the oil we drill off our coast on a global market. The chances it will bring down the price of gas here in CA is next to none.

The only thing offshore drilling will accomplish is fouling our already suffering oceans and wildlife while lining the pockets of oil companies that sell the oil to China and India. How is that useful again?

Skelton does deal with the argument that lifting the drilling ban detracts us from the necessary long-term investment in alternatives – by dismissing it almost entirely:

Alan Salzman, founder of VantagePoint Venture Partners…adds, “The car industry is going to switch over to electric, and that’s a certainty. Hundreds of thousands of electric cars will be on the road in 2011.”

Let me know when one is affordable, practical and in the showroom.

People didn’t give up their horse and buggy until Henry Ford began making affordable cars. We’re anxiously awaiting our next transportation mode. Meanwhile, we’ll need to keep pumping gas — some of it from the Santa Barbara Channel.

Skelton needs to get out of the LA Times offices and take a look at the city around him. He might be surprised at what he finds. Hundreds of thousands of his fellow Angelenos have found alternatives to driving. That’s what enabled them to reduce their gas consumption and in turn bring down prices, albeit slightly. They bike. They walk.

His own paper reported on Metro Rail’s soaring ridership and again on Metrolink’s soaring ridership. Nowhere in Skelton’s drilling article is the MTA sales tax discussed, which would have the Subway to the Sea open by the time the first oil from the Santa Barbara Channel reaches Chinese gas pumps. Nor is high speed rail discussed, or clean bus technology, or greater urban density, or any other alternative to oil that is ready to go, right now, stalled merely for lack of political will that is currently being wasted on drilling.

Al Gore said it best at the TED Conference here in Monterey last March: drilling is “like a junkie looking for veins in his toes so he can get one last fix.” Drilling distracts us from the real problems our state faces, and for absolutely nothing in return.

Skelton doesn’t have to live in a future where the oil runs out and Californians, instead of building alternatives when we had the time and money to do so, are left with no viable alternative to oil. Unfortunately the rest of us do.

His plan for more drilling isn’t letting go of the past, it’s clinging desperately to the past in a blind refusal to accept the need to change in order to produce a better future. Just as California has failed its offspring by kicking the tax and deficit issues into the future, so too will it fail the future by drilling instead of developing alternatives.

If Skelton wants to live in the past, he’s welcome to do so. But he should not condemn the rest of us to do as well. California must change if we are to have a prosperous future.