There’s just one week left in the election campaign, but we would be remiss if we didn’t comment on a disturbing new development in the ongoing battle to fix California’s broken government. A billionaire investor is dumping $20 million into the effort to “reform” California, but only in the direction of unwanted and undesired corporate-friendly changes that undermine the public sector:

Nicolas Berggruen will give at least $20 million to a group of Californians who long to restructure state government so it is more responsive to voters, more responsible with public funds and ready to reposition the state to meet the challenges of today’s economy….

The members he has chosen for the Think Long Committee for California run the ideological gamut. Reaganite George Schultz and Bush administration veteran Condoleezza Rice will weigh in, as will Democrats Willie Brown and Gray Davis. Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt and Los Angeles philanthropist Eli Broad will also serve on the committee. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger will be a guest at the first meeting.

Actually, that doesn’t “run the ideological gamut” at all. Because look who is missing – that’s right, progressives. Gray Davis is a moderate Democrat; there appears to be nobody at all to his left. The entire progressive movement, which represents at least a third of California, is totally absent from this conversation, whereas the right-wing is there in the form of Condi Rice and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Looking at the proposed agenda, it’s clear why progressives have been frozen out of the process:

Berggruen, whose reading matter tends toward Sartre and Confucius, says in California he will be promoting common sense. For him, that means more constitutional controls on state spending, a halt to runaway pension costs, more authority for local government and new accountability measures for government programs. He also favors the creation of an endowment of sorts for the state university system that would help limit tuition and provide funds to attract and retain top teaching and research talent.

His reading matter ought to include Polanyi, Veblen, Sinclair and Stiglitz. Instead he’s promoting the same old failed corporate-friendly “centrist” reforms that Californians have already rejected, such as a spending cap (rejected twice by voters), slashing pension benefits even further to make retirement insecure, undermining the effectiveness of government programs by making them waste their time and money on ill-defined “accountability measures” and so on.

This is nothing more than the same corporate reform agenda that stalled out in 2009 and early 2010 for lack of public support. There’s nothing here about what people actually want or need, which is a robust public sector able to provide for the basic needs of the population so as to enable them to create new economic value. It’s all about constraining the public sector so that big corporations can do more of what they want to. No wonder progressives are excluded from this process – what we want isn’t what the wealthy “reformers” want.

Further, these proposed reforms are just nibbling around the edges. Joe Mathews and Mark Paul set out a very good set of much more important and useful reforms in their excellent new book California Crackup, and Jeff Lustig also set out not only good reforms but a coherent philosophy to organize them, rooted in a reassertion of the public good (res public) against the rise of corporate power, in his own excellent reform volume Remaking California.

I will have a lot more to say about both books after the election, but they set out the path down which California reform projects need to follow. The “Think Long Committee” takes us further down a very different path, a path Californians are set to reject next Tuesday: a path where the rich decide everything for the rest of us.

The problem with this reform effort, as with others before it, is that it has no place at the table for the people of California. Progressives are primarily interested in promoting democracy, both in politics and in the economy, as a fundamental element of both government reform and of economic recovery. That’s inimical to the goals and methods of the big corporations, and so it should come as no surprise that progressives and the people of this state are shut out of this new reform initiative.

Unless they make room for progressives and for the people of California in the shaping of the reform agenda, and not just as rubber stamps for their pre-ordained plans, this reform effort lacks legitimacy and ought to be another well-funded flop. After the election, it will instead be time for progressives to get serious about charting our own plans for rebuilding democracy and prosperity in the 21st century. At least, that’s going to be my own priority.