This could be just to get the freshman members of the legislature up to speed, but it sounds rather… serious.

The entire Legislature will meet in a joint session Monday in the Assembly chambers to discuss the state’s cash situation and overall budget dynamics with state fiscal leaders, according to Jim Evans, spokesman for Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg.

In a rare Budget 101 session, Treasurer Bill Lockyer, Controller John Chiang, Department of Finance Director Mike Genest and Legislative Analyst Mac Taylor will describe the consequences of delaying a compromise over the budget. They’re likely to discuss the possibility of issuing IOUs to state vendors and state workers, as well as layoff scenarios and other consequences.

If I had to guess, this will be one of those meetings where everyone is sat down and told that this is what they have to do or the state will fall into the ocean.  They should get some veterans from Scared Straight to run it.  Put the fear of God into these lawmakers.

Although, I can’t say whether or not it’ll be successful.  I mean, the Governor has already called a state of emergency and that didn’t shake anybody up.  Mike Villines is still sounding like a Yacht Party regular on budget issues:

Republican Assembly Leader Mike Villines (R-Clovis) took a dim view of a Democratic proposal to take reducing the threshold to pass a state budget to the voters.

Calling the proposed bill, which would ask voters to make a simple majority all that’s necessary for passing a budget, a Democratic power grab, Villines said doing so was a duck on responsibly addressing the state’s budget woes.

“Shutting Republicans out of the budget process will just make it easier for Democrats to pass more of the same reckless spending measures that have resulted in our current fiscal crisis.” Villines said in a statement released late Wednesday.”This will do nothing to improve our long-term budget picture, and will actually make things much worse.”

He still wants a spending cap, of course.

But Lockyer and Chiang have plenty of ammunition to throw around.  Failing a bailout from the Feds (which I think is a better bet at this point), state workers are about to be laid off or have their salaries frozen, and cuts to popular professions like teachers and nurses and cops and firefighters would be on the horizon in a protracted delay.  Whether or not this threat of potentially hundreds of thousands of angry Californians and their families marching in the streets (Lockyer and Chiang need to have a flair for DRAMA in this speech) is enough to overrule the Iron Law of Institutions remains to be seen.

Howie Klein notes that the next in line for the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, should Charlie Rangel succumb to his ethical struggles, is progressive Pete Stark.  This has many on Capitol Hill in a tizzy: including those who should have the loudest voice in determining Democratic chairmanships, anonymous operatives and industry lobbyists.

Next in seniority to Rangel is Ways and Means Health Subcommittee Chairman Fortney (Pete) Stark, D-Calif., who is given virtually no chance. “The conventional wisdom is he would have a tough time getting elected chairman,” said a Democrat close to leadership. From suggesting Republicans were sending troops to Iraq to die “for the president’s amusement” to referring to a former GOP lawmaker as a “little fruitcake,” Stark is prone to gaffes, sources said. “The guy behind [Rangel] is just not tenable. Republicans would have a field day,” an industry lobbyist said, while noting the business community would “go nuclear. It would just be open warfare.” A more viable pick might be Ways and Means Trade Subcommittee Chairman Sander Levin, D-Mich., who is next in seniority, although sources cautioned the cerebral Levin may be too deliberate for the high-profile job. Levin also appears to relish his duties at the helm of the trade panel. He is also seen as very much in tune with the labor movement, although industry sources said Levin was someone they could work with, as opposed to Stark. Also, the Democratic Caucus still largely respects the seniority system, the Democratic strategist said. “If you make the decision that Stark is too out there, then I don’t see how you go over Sandy,” he said. “He’s been a loyal member, and nobody would doubt he’s got the intellectual and legislative expertise for the job.”

As Matt Stoller notes, there are NINE anonymous sources in this article.  You’d think the people who presume to control Congress and who gets selected for particular committees wouldn’t be so cowardly, would you?  But of course, they just want to be behind the curtain, impervious to political pressure.

As a contrast, Pete Stark is open and honest about his views.  He has paid his dues and he’s next in line for the job.  His “radical” policy ideas include making health care accessible and affordable for every American and opposing a giveaway to the financial services industry.

Howie explains the double standard at work here:

Do you recall any of the Inside the Beltway types viewing a Republican appointee to any job thru the lenses of how that person might be accepted by working families or by organized labor? Or did I miss the issue where CongressDaily suggested that Elaine Chao might be the world’s absolute worst Labor Secretary because she loathes working people and doesn’t recognize their aspirations as legitimate or worthy of her attention?

Did anyone ever question whether one of Congress’ biggest corporate shills on environmental issues, Dirty Dick Pombo, would be unqualified to be Chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee because he was unanimously loathed by every single environmental group in the country? And what about that issue of CongressDaily– or any other daily– that pointed out that maybe Joe Barton (R-TX) shouldn’t be chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce because the $1,315,660 in legalized reported bribes he’s taken from Big Oil over the years is far more than any other member of the House, more even than notorious Big Oil puppets like Don Young (R-AK- $964,763), Steve Pearce (R-NM- $804,815), Tom Delay (R-TX- $688,840), and Pete Sessions (R-TX- $582,264), and that all the green energy groups feel that Barton is an integral part of the energy problem in our country and decidedly not part of the solution? No, I must have missed it too.

Indeed.  This might be a good time to contact the Speaker and tell her that Democrats up for Democratic committee chairs shouldn’t be subject to a veto by industry.

Courtesy of your friendly neighborhood open thread people.

• A federal judge today appeared to signal that he will mandate the early release of California inmates in order to control the unconstitutional prison health care disaster.  This is happening because of a total failure of leadership from the top down over 30 years on prison policy, so they have no right whatsoever to object, but early release is not the final answer, only a temporary stopgap.  If sentencing is unchanged, if the root causes are not addressed, we’ll be returning to this issue again and again.  It’s also unclear if terminally ill prisoners would be the ones released, which would make no sense since they would merely become a burden on the strapped regular health care system.

• Lawyers in Santa Monica for Roman Polanski are seeking a dismissal of his notorious underage sex charge which has caused him to be in exile in Paris for over 30 years.  They’re basing their motion on revelations of prosecutorial misconduct in the HBO movie “Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired.”

• I’m a fan of Citizens for Repsonsibility and Ethics in Washington, but lumping in a $145 charge from Rep. Loretta Sanchez for culturally appropriate Vietnamese attire during meetings in her Vietnamese-heavy district with Sarah Palin’s $150,000 clothing charge during the fall election is borderline insane.

• In other campaign finance news, MapLight.org, a Berkeley based watchdog group, is suing the state for electronic voting records for the legislators.  That would be very, very helpful for us bloggers.  Combining those with MapLight’s campaign finance tools would be even more powerful. Here’s their release.

• Village idiot Jim Boren thinks Darrell Steinberg represents politics as usual because some of his committee appointments have gone to the same Senators who held them under Don Perata.  Uh, Jim?  There are 19 committees and 24 Democratic State Senators.  Everyone who doesn’t have a chairmanship is in the leadership.  Do the math.

• Here’s one local election where the winner prevailed by one – 1 – vote.

The fairly spectacular flameout of LAUSD superintendent Adm. David Brewer, hailed as a savior for the district just two years ago and now on the verge of being fired by the school board, could perhaps provide a valuable lesson to progressives about education policy.  Too often the focus is solely on finances – protecting education funding, fighting fee hikes at colleges and universities, spending X amount per classroom.  These are noble and important goals, but Brewer’s tenure shows the pitfalls of this focus at the expense of proper management and development, which is simply a disaster in Los Angeles, the state’s largest school district and one of the largest in the nation.  A lot of it has to do with internal politics.  Antonio Villaraigosa spent millions to put his acolytes on the school board, and Brewer was seen as a legacy of the past.  There was a Solomonic gesture to make everyone happy, and it made things worse.

Eventually, Brewer’s accumulated missteps — and his dismaying lack of prowess — led to an arrangement in which he ceded much of his authority while preserving the illusion of his leadership, a revision of his job description that avoided roiling the city’s ever-tenuous racial politics. Senior Deputy Supt. Ramon C. Cortines was hired in April to oversee academic matters for the district, while Brewer continued to preside over administrative matters such as payroll and construction; Brewer also acts as a public figurehead and attends the protracted board meetings. This is classic Los Angeles politics: Administrative and racial comity is achieved by paying two superintendent-level salaries for one complete superintendent-level package. It also typifies all that is wrong with L.A. Unified. The district protects administrators who fail rather than students whose futures depend on a solid education.

For his part, Brewer was overconfident about his ability to navigate the political shoals that lay ahead. Shortly after starting his job, he was confronted with an enormous payroll snafu, as a new computer system put in place by his predecessor repeatedly spat out inaccurate checks — for months, some teachers were overpaid, some paid not at all. Though Brewer tackled the problem competently, he also compounded it, first by trying to blame district employees for the mess and then by hiring expensive and ineffectual public relations consultants to spin a new image for the district.

On Which Way, LA last night, one guest reported that the Administrative newsletter had to be scaled back to a 10th-grade reading level because it was causing difficulties for the TEACHERS.  And there were a lot of horror stories about the composition of the district political architecture itself.  These are not all questions of finance, and many positive steps could be achieved for students without an appreciable amount of funding, or cutting back on needless public relations spending.  This CAP report about teacher tenure and high-poverty schools might be a good place to start.

I think we need to have a broader conversation about education policy than “protect our school money,” is all I’m saying.

On the first day of the legislative session there was an irrational burst of optimism that the roadblocks put forward by the Yacht Party on the budget and taxation would somehow be hurdled.  It’s true that Democrats have three more seats in the Assembly (though currently one less in the Senate, pending the filling of Mark Ridley-Thomas’ vacant seat), lowering the amount of Yacht Party members they’d have to bring aboard for any solution.  But the idea that these new Republicans represent any kind of fresh thinking or newfound moderation is a fantasy.

Though Democrats picked up an aggregate of three seats in the Assembly, Niello said, they still need at least three Republicans to cross over and vote for any legislation that requires a two-thirds vote, such as a state budget.

Because the GOP caucus is united around opposition to any new taxes and wanting to see reforms such as a state spending cap and improving the state’s regulatory environment on businesses, Niello said, Democrats will have to give to get any of those crossover votes.

“We’re still solid, still firm on the things that are priorities,” Niello said.

Newly sworn-in Assemblyman Dan Logue (R-Linda) sounded a similar note.

“We’ve got to create wealth, and we’ve got to grow our way out of trouble, not tax our way out of trouble,” Logue said. “Raising taxes will drive more jobs to Nevada.”

Some of this could be bravado, and there are a couple legislators who were in close races – Steve Knight in AD-36, Bill Berryhill in AD-36, Tony Strickland in SD-19 – who would, in theory, do well to part ways with ideology and compromise to enhance their chances in the next election.  But this would contradict the Iron Law of Institutions – “the people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself.”  Republicans who give in on the budget will be primaried and feel far more fear from that internal challenge than from the opposition.

The only way to counteract this is to make the challenge from without more vital than the challenge from within, and to make the power inside the institution line up with the power of the institution.  It means getting 2/3 and making anyone who rejects the will of the people pay.  SEIU has the right idea with their new ad campaign about the budget, playing off of Obama’s popularity in the state, and John Burton’s curt response to Yacht Party efforts to roll back labor and environmental regulations as payment for a budget solution – “The Republicans are full of crap” – ought to be said a bit more often, maybe in less colorful language, to make clear who is causing this crisis.  

I’m not sure any of it will be enough, though.  The Yacht Party is still the Yacht Party.

The unemployment statistics for October at the state level were released today, and as it turns out California lost the third-most jobs in the nation at 26,400.  Only Washington and Florida lost more.  This puts the unemployment rate in the state at 8.2%.  This is a 2.5% increase from one year ago, the largest year-over-year increase since 1982, the last major recession.  Worse, in regions of the Central Valley, that number is much higher.  Unemployment in Fresno County is 11.2%.  In San Joaquin County, 11.1%.  In Merced County, 11.7%.  In Tulare County, 11.8%.  And in Stanislaus County, 11.8%.  Those are desperate numbers.

The loss of income tax revenue along with the dip in property taxes thanks to cascading foreclosures is leading more cities to the brink of bankruptcy.

Now two more California cities – Rio Vista and Isleton – are considering bankruptcy protection as an option as they face large budget shortfalls and staggering debt.

While experts caution against ringing the alarm bells just yet, they do say tough economic times could push municipalities already on the brink over the edge.

“I think it’s quite possible municipal bankruptcies could become somewhat more common but will still be very rare,” said Jason Dickerson, budget and policy analyst at the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office. “There are more municipalities that will look at what it means.”

We need a massive fiscal stimulus as soon as humanly possible.  And that needs to include aid to state and local governments, particularly here in California.  We are right on the edge.