This is about the eighth time I've seen a report simliar to this one that undisclosed donors are financing a Schwarzenegger trade mission.

Fifty-two business delegates will join Schwarzenegger on the trip, according to a list the Governor's Office released Friday. A third of those going represent interests that have donated to Schwarzenegger's campaigns.

The governor's trip will be financed by the California State Protocol Foundation, a tax-exempt organization not required to disclose its donors. California Chamber of Commerce leaders, including President Allan Zaremberg, serve as the group's officers.

The foundation is not required by law to disclose its contributors and has not done so. In 2005, the last year for which IRS forms were available, the group received nearly $2 million in revenue. It reported $1 million in travel expenditures that year after Schwarzenegger led a weeklong trade mission in China.

The excuse put forth by the Governor's spokespeople is always the same: this SAVES taxpayer money because they don't have to finance these trade missions!  Really?  What about all the corporate welfare checks that get cut as a result of this access?  What about all the watered-down regulations that cost taxpayers, not only with money but with public health and quality of life?  What about the state contracts that could go to lower bidders who don't have the same relationships (read: bribery poke) with the Governor?

over…

Frank Russo is right:

Take a look around and you'll see that this is a bipartisan problem that needs fixing–the same way that a true reformer, Hiram Johnson– took on the railroads which controlled our state a hundred years ago. His legacy is a California Constitutional prohibition against accepting any gifts of free transportation from railroad or other transportation companies. It needs to be extended to cover today's corruption, subtle and otherwise, of our elected officials. […]

We've seen a record of obscene campaign contributions in California the last election cycle–topping $600 million dollars. The next campaign season is upon us, and the Governor has proposed bans on fundraising during certain months of the year when the budget is being considered and at the end of the session and bill signing times. The California Progress Report has railed against the influence of campaign contributions on the political process and the corruption of state government. But these other “gifts” to public officials also need to be scrutinized.

 

Action is needed, not because our elected officeholders are corrupt–any more than anyone else–but because they are human and influence is why campaign donations and private funding for trips and the like are given by private interests in this state. The same was true in when bold Progressive Reforms were needed in 1911 and human nature is the same today. Only now it's not the railroads.

 It should frankly be outlawed for a private company with business before the state to finance the Governor's travel, especially when it's supposed to be official business.  This is government for sale from the guy who was supposed to be such a big reformer because he was richer than dirt.  This is also why I've been so adamant about the CDP-Chevron donation.  Influence peddling in the capital is an epidemic that needs to stop.

I have a conflicted relationship with the LA Times.  On the one hand, they still do a stellar job covering international news; I would put the paper’s Iraq reporting up with any other news organization in the world.  But on the editorial side, the paper has taken up the neoliberal consensus with a vengeance, and turns a blind eye to vital issues to this community, like inequality and poverty.  Nancy Cleeland, an excellent writer, has decided to leave the paper for just this reason:

It’s awkward to criticize an old friend, which I still consider the Times to be, but I think the question of how mainstream journalists deal with the working class is important and deserves debate. There may be no better setting in which to examine the issue: The Los Angeles region is defined by gaping income disparities and an enormous pool of low-wage immigrant workers, many of whom are pulled north by lousy, unstable jobs. It’s also home to one of the most active and creative labor federations in the country. But you wouldn’t know any of that from reading a typical issue of the L.A. Times, in print or online. Increasingly anti-union in its editorial policy, and celebrity — and crime-focused in its news coverage, it ignores the economic discontent that is clearly reflected in ethnic publications such as La Opinion.

Of course, I realize that revenues are plummeting and newsroom staffs are being cut across the country. But even in these tough financial times, it’s possible to shift priorities to make Southern California’s largest newspaper more relevant to the bulk of people who live here. Here’s one idea: Instead of hiring a “celebrity justice reporter,” now being sought for the Times website, why not develop a beat on economic justice? It might interest some of the millions of workers who draw hourly wages and are being squeezed by soaring rents, health care costs and debt loads.

Go read the whole thing, this is an important article.  You would think that it would be easier and more cost-effective for the Times to cover what’s happening in its own backyard.  Of course, the Times was first part of a corporate-owned media collective, the Tribune Corporation, and now Sam Zell, a multi-millionaire.  The top editors and senior staff aren’t affected by the real issues impacting working people, and it shows in where they place their emphasis.

I remembered the workers who killed chickens, made bagged salads, packed frozen seafood, installed closet organizers, picked through recycled garbage, and manufactured foam cups and containers. They were injured from working too fast, fired for speaking up, powerless, invisible. I saw that their impact on all of us who live in the region is huge.

Now, like hundreds of other mid-career journalists who are walking away from media institutions across the country, I’m looking for other ways to tell the stories I care about. At the same time, the world of online news is maturing, looking for depth and context. I think the timing couldn’t be better.

I would suggest that Cleeland would always be welcome on the blogosphere, particularly on this site, where I’m proud to say that issues of class and inequality are often foregrounded.

UPDATE: I would add that proof of the LA Times’ relationship to the poor can be easily gleaned in this BS hit piece on John Edwards by Jonah Goldberg, someone who doesn’t live in California but is hired to write lazy smear jobs based on two-week old stories without merit.

After a raucous meeting in downtown LA, where FIFTEEN HUNDRED bus riders converged to protest, the Metropolitan Transit Authority nevertheless approved sweeping fare increases for bus and rail riders, though not as high as their initial plans.  But it’s a significant increase, with rates going up around 50% for most riders over the next two years.  The meeting included fiery exchanges, not only between the citizens giving testimony, but between the LA County Board of Supervisors and the Mayor (all of whom sit on the MTA Board of Directors).

The decision by the MTA’s Board of Directors marks a stinging defeat for Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who had tried to broker a compromise that would have raised most fares only 5% a year. But the board roundly rejected the mayor’s proposal, saying it would leave the agency with a deep operating deficit and would delay future rail projects […]

Villaraigosa was hoping to bring the board together on a compromise that would soften the blow for riders. Instead, he drew strong criticism from Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who called the mayor’s stance disingenuous.

During a heated exchange, Yaroslavsky said Villaraigosa had indicated that he would support a fare increase in a closed session last summer after the MTA board agreed to a new contract with bus drivers and mechanics.

A visibly angry Villaraigosa shot back, accusing Yaroslavsky of mischaracterizing private conversations and then lashing out at the supervisor for sitting in his office while the mayor was in Sacramento on Wednesday trying to get more transportation funding.

Villaraigosa then said Yaroslavsky didn’t have the courage to propose his own fare increases, calling him a “sheep who walks in wolf’s clothing.”

over…

For the record, the Mayor’s final proposal would have included lots of borrowing to deal with the MTA’s major operating deficit (sounds like Schwarzonomics to me). 

The problem is that state and federal funding for mass transit continue to stagnate while California continues to build more roads.  And it’s evident why this happens when you hear the median income for Los Angeles’ bus and rail riders:

An MTA survey showed that the median household income of rail riders is $22,000 a year, compared with $12,000 for bus riders.

That’s well below the poverty line for bus riders.  Those people don’t have lobbyists in Sacramento or Washington.  They don’t throw fundraisers in their homes for Presidential candidates.  They have their own voice, and they used it in force yesterday (1,500 people at a municipal meeting is astounding), but in the end it didn’t matter.

As I’ve said before, a budget is a moral document.  What you prioritize for spending suggests what you value in society.  In a time freighted with the threat of global warming, we should be prioritizing mass transit and smart growth extremely, not making it harder for the people already using mass transit to afford it.

Steve Lopez has a great column about this rate hike, a compromise that will do nothing in the long term.

I shouldn’t pin all the blame on the MTA, even though it’s tempting after the defeat of Villaraigosa’s proposal had him sniping with fellow board member Zev Yaroslavsky to the benefit of no one. State and federal officials are culprits in the collective failure to support transit, despite the growing social and economic cost of congestion and pollution-related illness. Where’s bold, creative leadership when you need it?

Would the option of a few high-speed toll lanes for Los Angeles motorists raise enough money to buy the buses the MTA needs?

Is it time to mandate that large companies offer transit vouchers to employees and eliminate free parking?

Does the efficiency of smaller transit systems in Santa Monica, Culver City and the foothill cities suggest that the MTA should be broken into smaller regional agencies?

Is it time to increase the 18-cent federal gas tax or use more of it to fund transit?

Should developers get bigger incentives for building near transit centers? […]

It’s time for the MTA board and the Southern California Assn. of Governments to lead a discussion on these kinds of solutions and fight for their support here, in Sacramento and Washington. As it is, they’re on a slow bus to nowhere.

Bus fares is an issue that typically has very little impact on politicians whose voters aren’t typically riding them.  But it should.  Urban planning is one of the most important issues of the 21st century, and how we go about it will affect the very health of this planet.  There will be resistance, and when nobody speaks for the bus rider, not just by borrowing to keep fares down but by prioritizing a sea change in how we transport ourselves, the resisters will win.  And the working poor will lose.

The fact that Blue Cross of California is leading the insurance company effort to stop any reform in the state’s health care system makes me smile broadly.  There couldn’t be a more reviled corporate entity around these parts than Blue Cross, the team who systematically tried to throw any sick person off their rolls and reduce any effort to get them to actually pay for medical treatment, which after all is their entire job.  Health Access picked up on this and noticed that Blue Cross tried to use the Enron energy crisis as a scare tactic (“Unintended consequences do happen”), when in fact nobody is more like Enron than… Blue Cross.

Because there are so few rules on insurers now, Californians are concerned now they are one job change or life event away from facing a blackout of coverage. We have over 6 million Californians in a coverage blackout. Frankly, we have tolerated deregulation for too long: new and fair rules would increase the security that Californians have now with their coverage, so they are not denied because of their health status.

BlueCross’ ad campaign may backfire with the public. They won’t believe BlueCross, and they will make it clear to Californians what we can win with health reform.

I don’t think it’s may, I think it’s will.

Nobody’s going to buy this for a second.  That’s why the campaign is only in Sacramento and not statewide.  If our leaders in this state are anything like Democratic national leaders, they’ll immediately drop all health care reform plans for fear that Blue Cross will continue to be mean to them.  But having Blue Cross argue about responsible health care policy is like having Tony Soprano argue about gun control.  And it’s up to us constituents to let the politicians know that.  If Blue Cross is the face of health care status quo, I’d say change is a-comin’.

That’s what her campaign manager told me just a month ago, after I gave him numerous chances to concede that she’s a more progressive Congresswoman now than she was before she was subject to a primary from Marcy Winograd.  But after today’s events, where she not only voted against the supplemental bill, but was one of only seven Democrats, along with McNerney and Stark, to vote against accepting the rules for debate, a vote which came tantalizingly close to failing (216-201).

This is clearly a long way from the person who called herself “the best Republican in the Democratic Party.”  But it’s been a year-long evolution for Harman.  It’s not only Iraq; she’s introduced legislation to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, has called to put the Iraq war on budget, and done several other good works of which progressives can be proud.

This was also personal.  Harman’s constituent, Pfc. Joseph Anzack, was found floating in the Euphrates River yesterday, one of the three soldiers taken prisoner by insurgents that sadly turned up dead.  Her statement on that tragedy is here.

Today is a shitty day.  The war is now essentially funded until the end of Bush’s tenure (the supplemental covers to September, but the defense appropriation for FY2008 then kicks in to carry well into next year).  The Democratic leadership gave Bush the ability to use critical funding money as leverage to force the Iraqis to pass an oil law that privatizes the entire industry for the benefit of multinationals (that benchmark, I can assure you, won’t be waived).  The leadership played a good hand in the worst way possible, dissipating the goodwill of the American people and showing through their actions the lack of any capacity to lead.  We can only take solace in the efforts of the rank and file to deliver a strong “no” message.  And Jane Harman, given the fact that she most certainly has changed in myriad ways, is the best embodiment of that we have in Congress.  (By the way, PRIMARIES MATTER!!!)

HARMAN VOTES “NO” ON IRAQ SUPPLEMENTAL

Calls vote a referendum on this President’s failure to listen; says claims that troops will be under-funded are “rubbish”

Today, Representative Jane Harman (D-Venice) issued the following statement after her vote against the Iraq Supplemental Appropriations bill:

“Last weekend, I made my fourth visit to Iraq.  Each time, despite the extraordinary dedication and effort of US and Iraqi soldiers, the country has seemed less secure.  I stayed overnight inside Baghdad’s Green Zone in one of the trailer pods used by most Americans there.  A day later I learned that a nearby pod had been totally destroyed by an RPG launched into the Zone in broad daylight.

“In Ramadi in Anbar Province commanders on the ground described real security improvements, but our group still needed full body armor to walk down the main shopping street, and I remain unpersuaded that our combat mission can succeed.  The time has come for it to end.  We must redeploy out of Iraq.

“Today’s vote offers two unsatisfactory choices. 

“A `yes’ vote affirms funding for the troops and benchmarks, but fails to impose a responsible end to the combat mission.

“A `no’ vote will be manipulated to tell the troops I flew with on a C-130 just days ago that we are not sending the new anti-IED vehicles (MRAPs) and other support they so desperately need.  Rubbish.  Today’s vote is not about that.  General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker will make certain that essential equipment arrives.

“Today’s vote must be seen as a referendum on this President’s refusal to listen to a majority of Americans and a majority of Congress, who want him to end the combat mission and implement the Iraq Study Group’s recommendations on training, counter-insurgency, and enhanced diplomatic and economic efforts in the region.

“I support our troops and I refuse to be manipulated.  My `no’ vote on the Iraq Supplemental is a vote to move past the fractured politics on Iraq and restore some sanity and bipartisanship as Congress confronts the serious threats of the 21st century.”

Not that I think Arnold Schwarzenegger is a Democrat or anything, but he, along with the full force of the statewide elected leadership, is pushing the EPA hard to allow the state’s greenhouse gas emission controls on vehicles to go forward.  The Supreme Court has already ruled that the EPA can regulate greenhouse gas emissions, yet the EPA is dragging its feet on giving permission to California and the other states lined up behind us.  Attorney General Jerry Brown was impassioned on this issue when meeting with regulators in Washington this week.

“This is more important than any issue that EPA’s going to have to face,” California Attorney General Jerry Brown told regulators who will recommend whether to give California the waiver it needs to implement its emissions law.

Brown asked the hearing panel to take a message to EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson.

“We want him to speak truth to power,” said Brown. “There is a tremendous influence of the oil industry. We know (Vice President) Cheney and (President) Bush are oilmen, they think like oil folks. … We say grant the waiver.”

This would be the most sweeping law regulating vehicle emissions in our nation’s history (and it was passed in 2002, pre-Mr. Green Hummer, folks), and would lead to an 18% reduction in greenhouse gases in our atmosphere due to cars by 2020.

To his credit, Schwarzenegger (along with Brown) has vowed to sue the EPA if they don’t act on this by October.  And he and Connecticut’s Jodi Rell penned a strong op-ed in the Sunday Washington Post about the issue (on the flip):

It’s bad enough that the federal government has yet to take the threat of global warming seriously, but it borders on malfeasance for it to block the efforts of states such as California and Connecticut that are trying to protect the public’s health and welfare […]

Since transportation accounts for one-third of America’s greenhouse gas emissions, enacting these standards would be a huge step forward in our efforts to clean the environment and would show the rest of the world that our nation is serious about fighting global warming […]

By continuing to stonewall California’s request, the federal government is blocking the will of tens of millions of people in California, Connecticut and other states who want their government to take real action on global warming.

If this doesn’t happen, by the way, it’s because the President signed an executive order calling for federal agencies to “continue studying” global warming until the end of 2008 (hey, that coincides with the end of his term!), which may stall any action.  Though this is a partisan blog, I think we can all agree that this is a noble effort to get the EPA to do the job the Supreme Court told it to do just one month ago, and grant the permission under the Clean Air Act to let California regulate vehicles the way it demands.  The health of our planet is at stake, and we must see action on this soon. 

You can contact the EPA yourself here.

I really want to not believe this, no matter what kind of sense it makes.

But despite initial rhetoric, political analysts believe California will avoid a long budget dispute because lawmakers have a one-time incentive this year to negotiate in a timely fashion: job longevity.

Lawmakers want voters to pass an initiative in February to change the state’s term limits law so members may serve up to 12 years in any one house. One proposal would ensure that Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez and Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata can remain beyond 2008 even though current law would force them out of office next year.

To build support for the initiative, lawmakers will need to appear productive this year, and the budget is the Capitol’s most symbolic gauge of productivity, said Tim Hodson, director of the Center for California Studies at California State University, Sacramento.

“All policy initiatives are impacted by the budget, so it has become a single, deceivingly simple symbol of the ability for state government to work,” Hodson said. “Frankly, the political players and the news media have reinforced this notion of the budget being no more complicated than the arithmetic it takes to balance a checkbook. So if the Legislature and governor can’t, the public thinks they’re obviously inept or corrupt.”

The problem is that the leaders in the Legislature would be bashed SO MUCH if they gave in on, say, slashing funding for the poor or the elderly, that they would lose as much support as they would gain.  There’s a fine line between “working together” and “giving the Governor every cruel thing he wants.”  How could  progressive groups be eager to pass a term limits bill for the benefit of those who would sell out our poor or our elderly?  Budgets in California take time, and it’s up to the Legislature to explain why, should there be an impasse.  “Arnold is trying to build a budget on the backs of the poor and our children, etc.”

over…

Still, this is not encouraging:

Perata, D-Oakland, and Núñez, D-Los Angeles, came out swinging last Monday. The two leaders sat quietly in the front row of Schwarzenegger’s presentation at the Secretary of State Building. Núñez then told reporters that “you’ve got the aged, blind, disabled and poor that are having to be the ones to take it in the shorts again.”

Republican leaders held court nearby to complain that Schwarzenegger had failed to reduce spending and that they would be demanding as much as $4 billion in additional cuts. Yet Perata briefly acknowledged that the initial back-and-forth was “part of the Kabuki,” a form of traditional Japanese theater and a term Schwarzenegger has used to describe early negotiations.

“I think these particular players have worked together long enough to know the subtext, and certainly Democrats are going to stand up and fight for those who need government services the most,” said Darry Sragow, a Democratic strategist. “I think it’s a serious criticism of the governor’s budget proposal that should be taken at face value. But having worked together for a while, they all understand there’s a side conversation either going on now or that will go on that will lead to a deal being cut.”

I certainly hope that such a deal doesn’t keep any of those draconian cuts intact.  “Productivity” should not sacrifice principle.  Especially in service to nothing more than an initiative which keeps the major players in power longer.