Daily Archives: December 11, 2008

Arnold Schwarzenegger, Budget

Is Arnold coming around and has the GOP lost its mind?

For a while, Speaker Bass and others (including lots of posts here) have pleaded with Governor Schwarzenegger to stand up to the Republican obstructionism.  He says he is for revenue increases, but he’s not knocking heads like past Republican governors have been willing to do. Pete Wilson and Ronald Reagan did it, surely Arnold could bang out some sort of compromise.

But up to now, he’s just been sort of attacking the legislature in general and really failing to recognize the underlying unwillingness to work for a solution from the Republicans. Now, surely we can agree that today’s Republicans are a lot more partisan than those of 20 years ago.  However, that’s just not a sufficient excuse for the Republican governor to fail to bring a single vote over.

At yesterday’s press conference, Arnold slighlty altered his tune.  He began to acknowledge what this is: Republicans are holding the state hostage.  They are simply not negotiating in good faith.  Take this for example, from the transcript on the Bee:

But I think that what is important is to come to the meeting and to be prepared and to propose those kind of issues. I have been to many meetings; none of those things were discussed. So I think it’s very hard for the Democrats, in a way, to negotiate when no one puts that on the table and says here is the list of things that we ask for and if we have this list then we’re willing to increase taxes and to come up with extra revenues. But it’s always very vague and nothing specific and I think that makes it sometimes frustrating in those negotiations.

Ok, well it’s a start, Governor, and the legislative inaction clock is very cute. But this simply isn’t enough. But today it seems that criticizing Republicans is too much.  After a Big 5 meeting, Senate Minority Leader Dave Cogdill decided to take his frustration out on the Governor:

I believe that the Big 5 process has been irreparably compromised as a result of comments in the press over the last couple of days, and it’s pretty difficult to negotiate in good faith in that situation. My personal belief is that any resolution to this that is going to be negotiated will result from efforts with the Big 4 similar to what we were able to accomplish with the budget last year, because, again, I just don’t see this process as being productive or helpful. (SacBee 12/11/08)

The thing is that the Republicans in the Legislature have grown used to one Arnold. The post-partisan Arnold that tries to make nice with everybody. The Arnold that we’ve basically had since the 2005 Special Election.  Then some new Arnold dared to nudge the Republicans for failing to negotiate in good faith, so Cogdill is going to take his marbles and go home. Boo-hoo Dave, there’s no crying in politics, Hillary Clinton aside. You are being intransigent, and you got called out on it. You know what else? Nobody likes you, so go cry about that too.

In actuality the problem here isn’t that Arnold is being too tough now, it’s that he’s not being tough enough. We need the Governor to play hardball with these Republicans. The real problems is that he already missed his chance to really break the logjam a few months ago. If he wanted to get reform, well dammit he should have been hanging out in Audra Strickland’s district and campaigning against Tony Strickland in the Senate. He should have gone to Stockton and argued to the voters there that John Eisenhut would work to fix the budget and that Bill Berryhill would not.  But it seems that post-partisanship doesn’t extend so far as to electing people who will actually pursue sound policy, regardless of party.  

Oh to be a fly on the wall of that Big 5 Meeting, but Sen. Steinberg gave us a clue about the atmosphere:

“There was no lunch served,” Steinberg said.

The leaders are signaling that perhaps there will be a deal next week, but I won’t be holding my breath.  The recent behavior of Cogdill and Assembly Minority Leader Mike Villines don’t give much reason for hope.

UPDATE: Speaker Bass released a statement on Cogdill’s little tantrum:

“They said that they came up here because of what they believed in and they believed that there should never be a tax increase. All of us came up here for what we believed in. I came up here to make sure that I would protect programs that now I have to recognize have to be cut.  We all have to do things that we never thought we would do because California is in a catastrophic situation.”

It’d be nice if the Republicans could at least pretend to care that our state government is about to collapse.

Speaker Bass, perhaps annoyed by the clock, acknowledged that the Governor is going to have to provide some real leadership here:

Gimmicks aren’t going to keep transportation projects moving, let schools stay open or provide public safety. The fact remains Democrats are the only ones who have been serious about compromising to find a budget solution. We have stepped up to the plate and support both the deep cuts and new revenues it will take to help close the budget deficit. It is past time for Governor Schwarzenegger to break the logjam created by his own party and produce Republican votes for a package of cuts and revenues. The 2/3 vote requirement means Democrats can’t do it alone. With 51 Democrats we only need three Republican votes in the Assembly. But we need real leadership from Governor Schwarzenegger to convince even a few of his Republican colleagues to compromise. Other Republican governors have done that in time of emergency. This governor has to deliver as well.

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CA-AG: Ted Lieu files for Attorney General

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Friend of Calitics Ted Lieu has shown a lot of leadership during the housing crisis, attempting time and again to hold the mortgage brokers responsible and get sensible legislation passed that protects homeowners.  It’s been his signature issue the past two years.  Now he’s going to run for Attorney General.

Democratic Assemblyman Ted Lieu, D-Torrance, filed paperwork this week to run for attorney general in 2010.

Lieu is the third Democrat to make the move, following San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris, who announced she was exploring a run in mid-November, and former Assemblyman Joe Canciamilla, who filed in July.

Harris and Lieu and Canciamilla can answer one question for me that would help me in my decision for 2010.  Do they feel they can keep stonewalling the Federal Prison Receiver, as Jerry Brown has, and refusing to comply with providing prisoners an environment that doesn’t violate their Constitutional rights, or do they feel that the failure in leadership over 30 years of wrong-way sentencing and “tough on crime” nonsense needs to be stopped.  Solving the prison crisis ought to be the foremost issue for the state’s top cop.

Budget

The Status Quo, Corruption, And Crisis

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When Josh Richman, the fine reporter for the Oakland Tribune, called me for comment yesterday on the breaking news that Don Perata transferred $1.5 million dollars the day after the election from an IE account intended to elect Democrats to the State Senate and wage initiative campaigns into his personal legal defense fund, my initial reaction was “I’m not surprised.”  My slightly longer reaction is captured in the article:

David Dayen, an elected Democratic State Central Committee member from Santa Monica, blogged angrily this summer about his party’s contribution to Perata’s legal defense fund, contending the money would’ve been better spent on legislative races. The same goes for Leadership California’s money, he said Wednesday; despite a Democratic presidential candidate carrying California by the largest margin since 1936, Democrats netted only three more Assembly seats and none in the state Senate.

“Every time I asked the California Democratic Party about getting more active and involved in local elections, they said the state Senate and the Assembly control those races “… and we don’t have a lot of flexibility. So Perata, at that time, and Nunez or Bass had the authority to run those elections,” Dayen said. “Now we see what happens when you vest power in these closed loops – suddenly self-interest becomes more important than the good of the party.”

He believes this is why Perata didn’t step aside as Pro Tem earlier, as Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez relinquished his post to Karen Bass in May: “Darrell Steinberg was sitting there ready to go “… and we were all like, ‘What the hell is going on?’

“We speculated it had to be that he still needed the leverage to make the calls to raise money for himself.”

I want to expand on that.  The behavior of Don Perata can be directly tied to the continuance of a status quo that has failed and is failing California families.  At no time is the way elections are run – without transparency, without accountability, without meaningful checks on the potential for corruption – questioned by the powers that be.  It is enabled through a shrug of the shoulders and the words “that’s the way things are.”  What Perata did was perfectly legal, although that is subject to change, as the state Fair Political Practices Commission votes today on making such transfers illegal.  But as Michael Kinsley famously said,  “The scandal isn’t what’s illegal; it’s what’s legal.”  The bigger scandal is that there’s no desire or even interest at the top to see that change.  And why not – it suits them just fine.

California has 63% majorities in both chambers of the legislature, has just seen a 61% share of the vote for a Democratic Presidential candidate – and yet this state is completely, inescapably and hopelessly beholden to right-wing interests, as a function of a backwards set of governing rules that have climbed the budget hole over $40 billion dollars, without any reasonable hope of getting out of it.  It’s been beyond clear for several years now that the ultimate solution will come at the ballot box, and yet the state party has entrusted the most crucial elections, the ones that could net a working 2/3 majority in the Senate, to someone more concerned with saving his political hide.  And so Hannah-Beth Jackson, who came within 1,200 votes of flipping a Republican seat, reads a story like this in shock and anger.  And the citizens in SD-12, promised a recall of Jeff Denham; and those in SD-15, expecting a candidate in their majority-Democratic district to take on Abel Maldonado; they are similarly angry.  Money they had every right to expect would go to help them now goes to help one man.

(By the way, the alibi from the defenders of Perata on this doesn’t scan at all.  First of all, nobody begrudges him from raising money in his own defense – the problem lies in taking that money from an account intended for campaign work.  And second, if this is a “political witch hunt,” as they say, why would he need this lump sum of money 75 days from the time when a Democratic Administration with no inclination to prosecute Democrats on allegedly bogus charges is about to be installed?  It’s either a witch hunt about to end or a going concern.  The alibi is pathetic.)

But the larger point is that the status quo, the closed systems at the top of the Democratic leadership, the lack of transparency and accountability, create the crises we see in our state, or at least disable anyone from reacting to them.  And this is not likely to change.  John Burton is going to be the next state CDP Chair.  He’s been in politics for 205 years, and he’s basically muscled out the competition for the job.  Does anyone think that a lifelong pol, with a long history of backroom deals, the guy who was Arnold Schwarzenegger’s cigar-smoking buddy (that seems like a good profile for the opposition party chair), gives a damn about urgently needed reform?  He’s making sweet little noises about turning red areas blue, but there’s absolutely no hope that he will provide any change from the insular, chummy, mutual backscratching society that exists in Sacramento.  Grassroots activists should be furious that, in the wake of seeing countless opportunities wasted and crises lengthened, we’re boldly taking off into the future with a Party Chair who was first elected in 1965.

The future of California is a mystery right now, because there is a crisis of leadership and an unwillingness to reform.  At the very least, activists should look to electing Hillary Crosby as State Party Controller so that someone in the room will have a reform message that can spark a modicum of change.  But until the fundamentals are altered, we will lurch from one disaster to the next.

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Save the Parties from DiFi

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Last week, the DC city council passed a measure that would allow all bars to stay open until 5am and all restaurants to operate 24 hours a day during inauguration week. This seems like an awesome idea for a number of reasons. With millions of people descending on the city, these bars wouldn’t know what to do with all the money. Plus, tons of people will be showing up without anyplace in particular to sleep or anything in particular to do, so keeping them off the streets (and their probable partying off the streets) and in establishments somewhat equipped for such things seemed reasonable. Plus it struck exactly the right tone with regards to this being (to crib Hunter Thompson) “an affirmation of everything right and true in the national character. It isn’t and wasn’t about drinking, it is and was about everyone coming together and sharing an historical moment- one in which so many of us are so deeply invested. And things were good.

But then on Tuesday, Sen. Dianne Feinstein joined with Sen. Bennett of Utah to tut tut the idea with concern trolling that only a mother could love. Feinstein frets that “[w]hat is clearly meant as a boon to local businesses may instead create tremendous problems for already overwhelmed law enforcement agencies.” Of course, our curmudgeonly senior senator overlooks the reality of several million people looking for a party: they will find it. Tossing them all into the streets isn’t going to help law enforcement. Plus, on a more visceral level, ARE YOU FREAKIN KIDDING ME? You’re joining with Bob jumped-up Bennett to tell everyone to calm down and stop being so excited? Way to completely miss the boat on the national mood. ahem.

Not surprisingly, DC is up in arms over this. From the Washingtonian to DCist, on Facebook and all over Twitter, and perhaps most overtly at Save the Parties. Save the Parties has a petition in support of the hours extension and Mayor Fenty, who to his credit is thus far standing firm against DiFi.

Personally, I was born and raised just across the river in Arlington and learned about the night in DC. The cuisine, the bars, the music, the shows- it’s more than a cash cow; it’s a chance to really put on display all that DC has to offer- and it’s a lot. More specifically, I’m going to be heading back for the inauguration because I have the opportunity and therefore I kinda have to, and I have absolutely no interest in things shutting down OR spilling into the streets after last call each night. If you want to talk dangerous and irresponsible, it’s 4 million revelers all trying to travel at 2am. Senator Feinstein’s killjoy disapproval notwithstanding.

Budget

Mass Layoffs Aren’t A Budget Solution

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I will be on KRXA 540 AM at 8 this morning to talk about this and other issues in California politics

It would seem an obvious point, one that Dave Johnson made so well – mass layoffs aren’t going to solve our budget deficit. Unfortunately that seems to be exactly what many Republicans and some media outlets are suggesting be done to close the gap.

Some of this is outright union-busting, not unlike what Bob Corker and other Republicans are doing by opposing the auto bailout. Just as the 1970s crisis was used by corporate leaders and their right-wing allies to break the unions, so too do Republicans wish to do the same thing.

The SacBee’s State Worker column suggests that some CA unions – in this case SEIU 1000 – are already “rethinking their hard line” on job cuts:

Has California’s growing budget mess pushed public employee unions into retreat?

Take Service Employees International Union Local 1000, which represents 95,000 state workers in a wide variety of jobs. Last week local President Yvonne Walker told The State Worker, “There are going to have to be cuts. We’re going to have to raise taxes” to address the state’s cash crunch.

This was the same union leader who last month, after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed furloughs and other measures to trim the budget deficit, said, “We’ll fight back with everything that we have.”

Between Walker’s two quotes, the governor threatened to detonate the labor equivalent of a nuclear bomb: layoffs. It’s one thing a California governor can unleash without negotiating with unions or legislators.

“We don’t get to decide whether the state lays off people,” Walker said in an interview. “We make sure it’s done fairly and try to offer alternatives to doing that. Realistically, we don’t have the ability to stop a layoff if it comes.”

Jon Ortiz may be reading a bit too much into that statement, which doesn’t exactly suggest that unions like SEIU 1000 are changing their “we’ve had enough cuts” tune.

Let’s hope they aren’t. Mass layoffs of public employees will only produce two outcomes – a significant worsening of our economic crisis, and an intensification of the budget deficit. The laid-off workers will not be spending money and thereby generating tax income. How many more workers will lose their jobs as a result?

The lack of government services will also worsen the economy and hurt economic recovery efforts. If workers can’t go back to school or get job retraining, if families have to do without health care, the consequences are dire. California’s prosperity was built on government services constructed during the Pat Brown years. The Schwarzenegger-Republican solution would instead turn California into a basket case.

Besides, with the budget deficit nearing $40 billion there’s no way mass layoffs alone could solve the problem, as Ortiz notes:

State worker jobs this fiscal year, barring layoffs or other cuts, will account for $23 billion. That’s roughly 17 percent of California’s expenses. So making job cuts won’t drain much red ink from the state ledger.

That leaves hatred of public workers and union busting as the primary reasons for demanding spending cuts mass layoffs. Once again Californians are being asked to pay the price so wingnuts can impose their ideological fantasies on the state.

Solving this budget deficit requires new revenues at the state level, where we’ve already cut $15 billion from the budget. But that won’t be enough – we need federal assistance as well. California  sends $47 billion more to Washington DC than we get in return. That money alone could help ease the budget crisis. It may not be politically possible or even desirable to bring all of that home, but it does suggest the need for a federal bailout of state and local governments.

If California resorts to mass layoffs the result will be a depression. And that has national ramifications. Congress is right to find ways to stabilize the auto industry. They need to do the same for state and local governments. California cannot be allowed to fail.

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Wednesday Open Thread

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Tidbits Abound:

• It looks like Arnold and Mary Nichols think the AB 32 Greenhouse Gas Reduction Scoping Plan is set to be approved by the California Air Resources Board (CARB) tomorrow. The plan is fairly thorough. It doesn’t do everything we’d like it to do, but this is a fairly big step. Here’s a PDF of the complete proposed plan.

• The director of Lawrence Livermore National Lab, Steven Chu, is set to be appointed the next Energy Secretary by President Elect Obama. Chu is a longtime academic, having been a professor at Stanford. It’s good to see somebody with a background in science, rather than in industry, leading a science-heavy Department.

• Of LA Deputy Mayor Nancy Sutley, who was appointed to lead the White House Council on Environmental Quality, incoming CA League of Conservation Voters says “In summary, Nancy Sutley rocks! [She is] a rare, political/policy expert who really listens to all sides and doesn’t need to show off her superior knowledge in group situations.”

• Newsweek’s Lisa Miller makes the religious case for same sex marriage.

• Looking for you next hip T-Shirt? Walk right past your local Urban Outfitters.  The company pulled a shirt with “I support same sex marriage.” It is also owned by a right-wing Republican who gives a bunch o’ money to anti-gay legislators like Rick Santorum. I guess it is not true that “Everybody Loves a Bigot Guy.”

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Don Perata Gives a $1.5 Million Middle Finger to California

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In a stunning but not too surprising revelation, Josh Richman of the Oakland Tribune is reporting that Don Perata transferred $1.5 million from his PAC to his legal defense fund – one day after the election. Instead of using that money to help defeat Prop 11, which narrowly won, or to help elect more Democrats to the state senate – such as Hannah-Beth Jackson, who lost by 1,200 votes – he took it for himself, leaving California Democrats and the state itself worse off.

Contributors to Don Perata’s political action committee this year might have thought their money would bankroll the attempted recall of state Sen. Jeff Denham or opposition to a legislative redistricting reform measure.

But one day after Election Day and with only a few weeks left as state Senate President Pro Tem, the Oakland Democrat moved $1.5 million from Leadership California into his own legal defense fund, formed to counter a years-long FBI corruption probe.

This sum dwarfs the California Democratic Party’s $450,000 contribution to Perata’s legal fund over the past year, which had caused an outcry from some party activists. It also dwarfs the $555,000 Perata had moved from his Taxpayers for Perata committee – ostensibly created for a 2010 Board of Equalization run – into his legal defense fund in several chunks since 2005.

The transferred amount is more than the entire $1.4 million the committee had raised in this year’s first nine months, and more than half of the $2.7 million it had on hand as of Sept. 30.

Jason Kinney, Perata’s spokesman, is quoted as saying there was nothing illegal here. Even if that is true, it’s beside the point – $1.5 million is a huge sum of money that should have been spent on winning the 2008 election, not pocketed by a termed-out legislator.

Our own David Dayen is quoted in the article making that very point with forceful eloquence:

David Dayen, an elected Democratic State Central Committee member from Santa Monica, blogged angrily this summer about his party’s contribution to Perata’s legal defense fund, contending the money would’ve been better spent on legislative races. The same goes for Leadership California’s money, he said Wednesday; despite a Democratic presidential candidate carrying California by the largest margin since 1936, Democrats netted only three more Assembly seats and none in the state Senate.

“Every time I asked the California Democratic Party about getting more active and involved in local elections, they said the state Senate and the Assembly control those races … and we don’t have a lot of flexibility. So Perata, at that time, and Nunez or Bass had the authority to run those elections,” Dayen said. “Now we see what happens when you vest power in these closed loops – suddenly self-interest becomes more important than the good of the party.”

He believes this is why Perata didn’t step aside as Pro Tem earlier, as Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez relinquished his post to Karen Bass in May: “Darrell Steinberg was sitting there ready to go … and we were all like, ‘What the hell is going on?’

“We speculated it had to be that he still needed the leverage to make the calls to raise money for himself.”

David makes a key point here – this is not just about how Perata screwed California Democrats. It’s about what he called “closed loops” and a party leadership hostile to open accounting. This should become a rallying cry for all Democrats to demand more accountability from their leaders, and a greater commitment to winning elections as opposed to pocketing those funds for your own uses.

Many in the Democratic grassroots, including a large number of CDP delegates, want to build a better, more successful party, using the disappointing results on the state level as a motivating force to produce change. That is made easier by Perata’s long overdue exit from the Legislature. But this should serve as a wake-up call for the CDP as a whole, which must take a strong stand against this kind of action and take whatever steps are within their power to prevent it from happening again.