Advocacy group Families USA has put out a shocking report (PDF), “Dying For Coverage,” detailing how Californians are impacted by a lack of health insurance. The number “47 million” that designates Americans without health insurance is too abstract and detached from meaning. Californians are dying because of their inability to afford or acquire insurance.
• Families USA estimates that more than eight working-age Californians die each day
due to lack of health insurance (approximately 3,100 people in 2006).
• Between 2000 and 2006, the estimated number of adults between the ages of 25
and 64 in California who died because they did not have health insurance was
nearly 19,900.
•Across the United States, in 2006, twice as many people died from lack of health
(While it’s not state-based, I thought I’d cross-post this from my site and Hullabaloo due to the importance of this day. Also, Dr. King was shot at 6:01pm on April 4, so blame Bono and U2 for the technical error…
– promoted by David Dayen)
…shot rings out, in a Memphis sky,
free at last, they took your life
but they could not take your pride…
And then I got into Memphis. And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers?
Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop.
And I don’t mind.
Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!
And so I’m happy, tonight.
I’m not worried about anything.
I’m not fearing any man!
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!!
Just to contextualize, Martin Luther King was in Memphis working with striking sanitation workers who wanted a fair contract from the city. He was a civil rights leader but understood civil rights as an economic justice issue, as an issue of equality, not just of humanity but opportunity. The workers were threatened and attacked and kept on marching for their rights. King’s fight was for freedom of assembly, for equal protection, for justice in all its forms. To me, this was actually the most powerful portion of that speech:
Now the other thing we’ll have to do is this: Always anchor our external direct action with the power of economic withdrawal. Now, we are poor people. Individually, we are poor when you compare us with white society in America. We are poor. Never stop and forget that collectively — that means all of us together — collectively we are richer than all the nations in the world, with the exception of nine. Did you ever think about that? After you leave the United States, Soviet Russia, Great Britain, West Germany, France, and I could name the others, the American Negro collectively is richer than most nations of the world. We have an annual income of more than thirty billion dollars a year, which is more than all of the exports of the United States, and more than the national budget of Canada. Did you know that? That’s power right there, if we know how to pool it.
We don’t have to argue with anybody. We don’t have to curse and go around acting bad with our words. We don’t need any bricks and bottles. We don’t need any Molotov cocktails. We just need to go around to these stores, and to these massive industries in our country, and say, “God sent us by here, to say to you that you’re not treating his children right. And we’ve come by here to ask you to make the first item on your agenda fair treatment, where God’s children are concerned. Now, if you are not prepared to do that, we do have an agenda that we must follow. And our agenda calls for withdrawing economic support from you.”
And so, as a result of this, we are asking you tonight, to go out and tell your neighbors not to buy Coca-Cola in Memphis. Go by and tell them not to buy Sealtest milk. Tell them not to buy — what is the other bread? — Wonder Bread. And what is the other bread company, Jesse? Tell them not to buy Hart’s bread. As Jesse Jackson has said, up to now, only the garbage men have been feeling pain; now we must kind of redistribute the pain. We are choosing these companies because they haven’t been fair in their hiring policies; and we are choosing them because they can begin the process of saying they are going to support the needs and the rights of these men who are on strike. And then they can move on town — downtown and tell Mayor Loeb to do what is right.
The power of collective action. The power of bottom-up organizing. The power of seeing a world where everyone is in it together, where everyone has a stake in one another. The power of fighting for justice and fairness and right, and moving mountains just by walking together. We get cynical in this medium a lot, and maybe we have a right to; after all, forty years ago they shot Dr. King for leading such a movement. But the legacy lives on, and I believe in his aphorism that “the long arc of history bends toward justice.” This movement, this place where we’ve all gravitated, is but a small kernel of that legacy. But it’s growing, and regardless of the President or the Congress or whoever it will continue to move forward. And one day, we will get there.
The governor exacerbated the budget problem on his first day in office by slashing the vehicle license fee and denying the state billions of dollars in revenue. He could return money to the state’s coffers without going back on his promise, by hewing to his supposed environmental credentials and following the will of the people:
Californians support the idea of charging “green” vehicle fees that would make drivers of gas guzzlers pay higher taxes and offer discounts for those driving less-polluting vehicles, according to a survey by a transportation researcher at San Jose State University.
The state now charges drivers registration and licensing fees and gasoline taxes at rates that do not take into account vehicles’ pollution levels. But the survey, conducted by Asha Weinstein Agrawal, a research associate with the university’s Mineta Transportation Institute, found that Californians would support a variety of taxes and fees to raise money for transportation improvements as well as combat global warming, including:
— Raising vehicle registration fees, which now average $31, to an average of $62 and having higher-polluting vehicles pay higher rates and cleaner cars lower rates.
— Offering rebates of up to $1,000 for people who buy new cars that emit very little pollution and levying a surcharge of as much as $2,000 on those purchasing gas hogs.
— Levying a mileage-based tax that would replace the 18-cents-per-gallon gasoline tax. The per-mile amount would vary depending on how much a vehicle polluted the air.
“The public is very supportive of these green taxes and fees,” said Agrawal. “This shows that it is realistic to improve the way we collect transportation taxes in this state.”
You could even make this revenue-neutral for all I care and it would still have a meaningful impact. But if the budget could be improved and the air quality at the same time, all the better. The governor talks a good game on global warming but hasn’t yet called for the kind of action necessary. This could be coupled with a direct investment in mass transit and incentives for transit riders, so that those who can’t afford low-emitting vehicles aren’t adversely affected. We’re not going to get rid of the car culture in one fell swoop, so encouraging consumers to buy clean energy vehicles while implementing the proper smart growth and transit policies (along with massive renewable infrastructure) will get us there in stages with a meaningful reduction in emissions right at the beginning. The people want it, the government needs to give it to them.
At my home site I took a look today at John Yoo’s recently declassified memo, which is more responsible for torture and detainee abuse at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and throughout American prison sites abroad than practically any other document.
If you’re interested in weeping, you can read the 81-page memo yourself.
Yoo simply made up a new set of executive powers that trumped the Geneva Conventions, domestic statutes against torture, and virtually the whole system of the law itself.
If a government defendant were to harm an enemy combatant during an interrogation in a manner that might arguably violate a criminal prohibition, he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the al Qaeda terrorist network. In that case, we believe that he could argue that the executive branch’s constitutional authority to protect the nation from attack justified his actions.
Kind of a “self-defense before the fact” belief, completely contrary to how the American legal system works […] The closed loop here is self-perpetuating. The DoJ writes a memo saying that the President has virtually unlimited power in wartime. The CIA and the Pentagon then takes the memo and uses it as proof of legality for their crimes. So we have an executive branch validating the rest of the executive branch, essentially a one-branch government that writes, executes and adjudicates the law.
There is no question that John Yoo is a war criminal; he provided the legal theories that the executive branch follows to this day, even though the Defense Department vacated this particular memo in 2003.
That comes out of my hide. Your hide. John Yoo is making his living based on public payments through taxes and other receipts. And he is absolutely a war criminal. (over)
John Yoo’s Memorandum, as intended, directly led to — caused — a whole series of war crimes at both Guantanamo and in Iraq. The reason such a relatively low-level DOJ official was able to issue such influential and extraordinary opinions was because he was working directly with, and at the behest of, the two most important legal officials in the administration: George Bush’s White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, and Dick Cheney’s counsel (and current Chief of Staff) David Addington. Together, they deliberately created and authorized a regime of torture and other brutal interrogation methods that are, by all measures, very serious war crimes.
If writing memoranda authorizing torture — actions which then directly lead to the systematic commission of torture — doesn’t make one a war criminal in the U.S., what does?
I believe in academic freedom and understand the slippery slope of removing a faculty member with tenure because of their political views. In a best-case scenario The Hague would be making the decision of when John Yoo leaves his cushy law professor job by dragging him off in leg irons. But failing that, there has to be at least some standard of competence and dignity among a public university. The shoddy logic and faulty reasoning in this declassified memo should be a firing offense alone; and the implications of that memo should be more than enough to cement that. Not only is John Yoo teaching your kids about the Constitution and the law, we’re all paying him to do it. And so at the very least the UC Regents need to hear from everyone in California, expressing their disappointment that they are harboring a war criminal at their flagship school, and determining what they will seek to do about that.
UPDATE: The American Freedom Campaign has a petition you can sign to demand this abuse of executive power. It’s astonishing that it took the ACLU to force declassification of this memo rather than oversight from the Congress or the media. As the AFC says, “Prosecutions may be appropriate. Impeachment should not be out of the question. But what is needed immediately is a thorough investigation into the Bush administration’s understanding of the extent of the president’s power as commander-in-chief. “
Charlie Brown reported $225,000 in the first quarter of 2008, with over a million dollars raised throughout the campaign. He’s had 12,000 donors thus far.
Russ Warner took in $100,000 in the first quarter and has $220,000 cash on hand.
But I was more interested in this story, which shows the CNA making an electoral play in two swing districts to help the Democrats reach a 2/3 majority.
This year the nurses union also is backing two Democrats vying for open seats which are being vacated by Republicans:
Up north, longtime San Ramon Valley School Board trustee Joan Buchanan seeks the East Bay’s open 15th Assembly District being vacated by termed-out Assemblyman Guy Houston. In January she reported a $166,000 war chest and most likely will face off against San Ramon Mayor Abram Wilson.
Down south, former Santa Barbara Assemblywoman Hannah-Beth Jackson wants to fill Ventura County’s open 19th District state Senate seat being surrendered by termed-out Tom McClintock, who’s heading north to run for an open congressional seat near Sacramento. Ex-Assemblyman Tony Strickland is the GOP’s anointed successor.
“We only need two more Democrats in the senate and six more in the assembly to have a two-thirds Democratic majority,” said CNA legislative director Donna Gerber, who spent six years as a Contra Costa County supervisor.
“When there are budget cuts those budget cuts pretty much happen in health care and education. So for sure we are supporting Hannah-Beth Jackson and Joan Buchanan. Those are two that we’re putting a lot of our energy into.”
If labor jumps in explicitly in these legislative races to aid in the drive for 2/3 then we’ll have a distinct financial advantage. Remember that the CA Republican Party is essentially broke. This is the best news I’ve heard all week and I know the rest of labor will follow suit.
Here’s what I wrote yesterday about CA-46 challenger, the best we’ve had in years, Debbie Cook:
Debbie Cook (CA-46): Cook, running against certified loon Dana Rohrabacher in a district mostly in Orange County and part of Long Beach, is running on the environment, but not as an advocate against global warming necessarily. She is on the board of directors of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas (ASPO-USA), and really is passionate about moving to a post-carbon future and radically reinventing our energy infrastructure. When I asked about carbon taxes or cap and trade systems, she really looked beyond that debate about greenhouse gas emissions and toward a debate about sustainable living. This is about land use, about smart growth, about living closer together, adopting mass transit, eating locally grown foods, reorganizing society to deal with the prospects of a world without as much oil. It’s an interesting message for a Congressional campaign, especially when going up against someone who speculates that global warming may have been caused by dinosaur flatulence. But Cook also supports the Repsonsible Plan to End the War in Iraq and understands the post-carbon fight as a national security and an economic issue as well.
Cook has a total command of these issues, and on a day when the heads of the top oil companies bobbed and weaved on Capitol Hill, it would have been great to see her up there doing the questioning. The video is in three parts, and it’s below. There’s actually quite a bit more of the interview on Robert’s microcassette recorder, and he will copy it and mail it to you. (just kidding)
As far as an overall take on the convention I would pretty much associate myself with Robert’s remarks. Ultimately these events are more important for the time-honored political practice of networking, of meeting and gathering impressions on colleagues and candidates for the future, not in a formal speech setting but one-on-one. While these endorsement fights and resolutions and platforms get the attention of the activists and insiders, and as well you can pretty fairly judge the activist/establishment gaps in the party in this fashion (the activists got virtually everything they wanted in this convention, particularly with respect to the platform), ultimately it’s about people. And at Calitics we were determined to bring that experience right to you by collecting audio and/or video of some of our most promising Congressional candidates.
First up are Charlie Brown and Russ Warner, but before that I wanted to sketch out some of the other candidates I met over the weekend:
1) Bill Durston (CA-03): We have an audio interview with Dr. Durston, an emergency room physician and a Vietnam combat vet. Unfortunately the audio might be a little heavy on the background noise, so let me offer this. While I’ve heard from some that Durston may be preaching too much to the choir and not going after Dan Lungren supporters, I feel he certainly would be credible if he chose to do that. Durston is pretty progressive, and his views on health care (he supports single payer and does so from experience) and Iraq (he opposed it from the beginning and speaks powerfully on the morality of war) are compelling. As I’ve been noting, CA-03 is a changing district, with more Democrats than any Republican-held seat in the state, and hopefully more to come before November, so this is an opportunity to offer a real contrast to Dan Lungren and roll the dice. Durston is running on Iraq, health care and the environment (Lungren has a worse environmental record than even Richard Pombo by some measures) and we’ll see if he can gather support.
2) Debbie Cook (CA-46): Audio and video of our interview to come. Cook, running against certified loon Dana Rohrabacher in a district mostly in Orange County and part of Long Beach, is running on the environment, but not as an advocate against global warming necessarily. She is on the board of directors of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas (ASPO-USA), and really is passionate about moving to a post-carbon future and radically reinventing our energy infrastructure. When I asked about carbon taxes or cap and trade systems, she really looked beyond that debate about greenhouse gas emissions and toward a debate about sustainable living. This is about land use, about smart growth, about living closer together, adopting mass transit, eating locally grown foods, reorganizing society to deal with the prospects of a world without as much oil. It’s an interesting message for a Congressional campaign, especially when going up against someone who speculates that global warming may have been caused by dinosaur flatulence. But Cook also supports the Repsonsible Plan to End the War in Iraq and understands the post-carbon fight as a national security and an economic issue as well.
3) Russ Warner (CA-26): We have full video of this. I’ve seen Russ speak on a number of occasions, and let me say that I’m very impressed with his maturation as a candidate. He’s more than ready to stand on a stage with David Dreier and go toe-to-toe with him. And there’s a new passion to his message, including his belief that the Bush Administration is waging an effort to “destroy this county from the inside out,” that is uncompromising. Warner will make Iraq a front-and-center issue in his campaign, along with health care and the economy (his answer on the housing crisis and the financial mess was pretty good). This is a race we’ll all be talking about soon.
4) Charlie Brown (CA-04): WE’ll have full video of this, but for the moment we have a couple bits and pieces. Listen to this part, when I ask how he’ll deal with the expected “anti-government” message from the Republican he’ll have to face in November, and you’ll see exactly why those military veterans support Brown and rebuke those career politicians who claim to want to represent them.
There’s another four-minute clip here.
Overall I think we have an excellent crop of candidates. I was only able to talk briefly with some of them but I’ll be following up in the weeks to come. Ultimately the fight for progressive change must not end at a convention but be wrested away at the ballot box. These are some of the leaders trying to do just that.
Over the weekend the CDP resolutions committee endorsed the recall of Jeff Denham in SD-12. The Republicans have thrown a massive hissy fit over this, similar to the hissy fit Yacht Party regulars like Sam Blakeslee have thrown, denouncing those who dare to identify his record in public. All of a sudden we’re seeing op-eds throughout the region and across the state decrying what is routinely identified as a “Don Perata-engineered power grab.” The latest comes from the fount of conventional wisdom in the California political media, George Skelton:
This is the time of year when the northern San Joaquin Valley is actually bucolic. Temperatures are bearable. The hills are green and the orchards are in full bloom — almonds gussied in white, peaches in pink.
Too bad that this spring there’s also a foul odor of Sacramento political pollution.
In a nutshell, the local state senator — Republican Jeff Denham of Merced — didn’t vote for the state budget last summer. That contributed to a 52-day stalemate and angered the Senate leader, Democrat Don Perata of Oakland. So Perata now is trying to recall Denham.
Not just a payback, but the political death penalty.
Funny, I don’t remember such high dudgeon back in 2003, when the recall of Gray Davis was viewed as a victory for democracy and an opportunity for the people to have their say.
Here’s what’s actually going on. Professional hack Kevin Spillane is good at getting his propaganda into the papers. And the media obliges without any historical perspective whatsoever. If Republicans want to put forth a measure ending recall petitions and allowing any state officer to finish out their term, go ahead; I’d probably support it. But they don’t. They want to use the recall when it suits them and whine about “fairness” and “power grabs” when it doesn’t. There could not have possibly been a bigger power grab than the Darrell Issa and Ted Costa-funded recall of Gray Davis. Anyone in the so-called liberal media dumb enough not to understand this notion of asymmetrical warfare isn’t worth reading.
I fear that the Spillane hack-o-thon is bearing fruit in scaring off Democrats from pressing forward on this recall; there certainly wasn’t a lot of talk about it or enthusiasm at the convention, nor was there any potential challenger in sight pressing the flesh. The Denham recall, in fact, is what the process was invented for: when legislators protect their own or their party’s interest at the expense of the people they should be held accountable. Jeff Denham is part of an effort to stop California lawmakers from doing their jobs and eliminate, for practical purposes, the role of government in the state. The Iron Law of Institutions dictate that “people within institutions act to increase their own power rather than the power of the institution itself.” The only way to deal with that from the outside is use the legal tools available to exact leverage on the institution. If it was OK for a Republican to use, so too for a Democrat.
So these media types and their hacktastic Republican spinmeisters can shut their whiny little mouths and defend their role in the shutdown of democracy in California to the voters. Jeff Denham ought to be able to defend himself instead of crying about the “process.”
I’ve been focusing on talking to as many challengers and elected officials as possible. And I get two almost contradictory opinions. The presidential primary is great because it brings new energy and attention to the party and new voters into the process; and yet at the same time, the downballot candidates find it difficult to raise money, secure staff and get attention, because it’s all being forced upwards. This is particularly a problem in California, where we think we run the country, sad to say, and where we get hung up on national issues. We have to come back home and take advantage of these opportunities we have at the local level.
The encouraging factor is that we have won the budget conversation in the state legislature, and when I say we, I mean those of us who wanted a posture that finally said no to a cuts-only approach, that focused on the 2/3 requirement and the need to either overturn that legislatively or win at the ballot box. I had the opportunity to have dinner last night with a large group including Asm. Ted Lieu (AD-53), the chair of the Rules Committee, and he was able to designate those targeted seats where we can flip districts (AD-80, AD-78, AD-15) and talk about the oil extraction tax and the yacht loophole in a very direct way. This is the year we take back the conversation over the budget and call the Yacht Party out for their obstructionism. That is very exciting.
Obviously there are the endorsement fights. Outside of the Leno-Migden battle royale, let me just quickly talk about AD-40, which is near where I live: Bob Blumenfield is an associate of Rep. Howard Berman, who kind of runs Valley politics. He reportedly told Lloyd Levine that he had to support Blumenfield to get his endorsement in Levine’s State Senate race (in my district of SD-23, against Fran Pavley). Stuart Waldman, who is also running in AD-40, was working for Levine at the time. So Levine fired Waldman and threw his support to Blumenfield. So it’s all crappy machine politics of the most odious kind, and it’s not limited to Sacramento. Our new leadership in the Senate and Assembly offers some opportunities to change that to an extent, but this is still how California is run for the most part. You’re already seeing here the beginning of the 2009 State Party Chair race and the 2010 Governor’s race.
That’s transactional politics, and it bores me. I’m interested in a transformational politics that changes the conversation and inspires those who don’t attend a convention. Getting single payer in the platform is an example. Talking about the 2/3 majority and splitting Prop. 13 is an example. Talking about the budget in a compassionate way, as a document that reflects our priorities, is an example. The rest is bluster.
As I said, we’ve talked to a number of candidates, and we’ll have audio (and video) up in the next few days with Charlie Brown (CA-04), Russ Warner (CA-26), Bill Durston (CA-03) and Debbie Cook (CA-46), who we’re interviewing this morning. But I wanted to give the line of the night that I overheard, in a conversation between Russ Warner and Rep. Diane Watson. She was talking about David Dreier’s shameful conduct as chair of the Rules Committee under the DeLay machine, where he blocked nearly all Democratic amendments and ran the committee with an iron fist. Watson talked about an anti-terrorism bill the Republicans wanted to pass, and she said to a Republican colleague, “You guys can’t tell me from Maxine Waters, how are you going to tell what Middle Easterner is a terrorist?” Classic.
• I truly think that the governor’s mansion is Jerry Brown’s if he wants it. I always aprreciate a guy who’s been marginalized and demonized by the right for so long, and just keeps going, shoving it right back in their faces. Brown’s speech at the convention, delivered without a teleprompter, was great for red meat but also reflected an agile mind that has been right about so many issues for so long. I like a guy who takes “Governor Moonbeam” as a compliment. I really think that if he wants to be Governor again the seat is his. Outside of President I don’t believe he’s ever lost a political race. (Plus I still remember that Joe Trippi ran his campaign against Bill Clinton in 1992.)
• I don’t have a connection to the Leno-Migden fight outside of what I read on Calitics and what I hear from my friends on the site. But I have to say that, looking at it from the outside, this is the biggest waste of resources I’ve ever seen in my life. What would happen if these hundreds of volunteers walked precincts in the district, instead of providing “visibility” while fighting for an endorsement in a high-information area that won’t ultimately matter much? The battle is swamping the entire convention, and it’s clearly become a giant pissing contest between the Assembly and the Senate, with each side taking up for their colleague. As you’ve read here, Migden is nuts, and I have pretty strong opinions about who should serve, and in particular the principle of the unbalanced endorsement process, where an incumbent needs a lower threshold to get the party endorsement than a challenger. That’s ridiculous, and in fact Joye Swan of the Progressive Caucus is leading an effort for a bylaw change to address just that. But this is a waste.
• Relevant to that, I think Bill Clinton has NO IDEA what he’s about to step into on Sunday. The Leno-Migden thing is sucking up most of the oxygen out of this convention. Clinton and San Francisco DA Kamala Harris are speaking for Hillary and Barack Obama tomorrow, but there’s going to be less focus on that than he’d expect.
• We are doing several interviews with Congressional and legislative candidates. So far we had a good chat with Bill Durston, a candidate in the rapidly purpling area of CA-03. We have interviews with Charlie Brown (CA-04), Hannah-Beth Jackson (SD-19) and Russ Warner (CA-26) later on. We will be posting the audio as we get it in. We also had a nice chat between bloggers and Mayor Gavin Newsom. His effort to sue for restoration of Medi-Cal reimbursements is a very strong stand. What I didn’t get a chance to ask him about is why he’s trying to curtail free speech when the Olympic torch relay comes to San Francisco on April 9.
