(Cross-posted on the Live Wire)  

Five ballot measures on the November ballot could bring great changes to the state budget and the way revenues are raised in California: Propositions 21, 22, 24, 25 and 26. Proposition 24 would repeal $1.3 billion worth of corporate tax breaks enacted under Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

SEIU California and the California Labor Federation support Prop 24. Meg Whitman is against it.

According to a recent analysis by the non-partisan California Budget Project, the tax breaks that Proposition 24 would repeal, if

fully implemented, will cost the state $1.3 billion or more per year. … These tax breaks are distinguished by their cost, by the fact that they were approved at a time when the state faced enormous and ongoing budget shortfalls, and by the fact the [sic] most of the benefits would go to a tiny handful of corporations that will receive large tax breaks.

These tax breaks are the price exacted for passing a state budget under Schwarzenegger, the ransom for not massacring a roomful of public services entirely. Now, corporations can pick and choose how they’re taxed each year (“SSF apportionment”), even changing their mind each year depending on what’s most convenient for minimizing their tax bill. They can also transfer tax credits and carry back net operating losses (NOL), and take advantage of all three of these tax breaks at the same time.

The CBP report runs 12 pages (14 with footnotes), but here are a few highlights of what will happen under the Schwarzenegger corporate tax breaks unless Prop 24 is passed by voters. Read this, then get out your own 1040 for last year and see how well yours compares:

1) Nine corporations (yes, just 9, or 0.001 percent of all the corporations in California) will get tax cuts of more than $20 million each. 28 utility corporations (including San Bruno firebug PG&E) will receive tax cuts averaging $1.5 million each.

2) One-third of the total revenue loss — $420 million — would go to 210 “double dippers” (corporations claiming both SSF and NOL). Ten corporations (0.001  of the total) would get combined tax breaks exceeding $20 million, the average tax cut being $24.8 million per year.

3) More than one-quarter (28%) of NOL benefits would go to firms claiming more than $100 million in deductions, offsetting the tax on $1.1 billion in profits.

4) 80 percent of the benefits of SSF apportionment will go to corporations making more than $1 billion per year, or 0.1 percent of all California corporations.

5) 95 percent of the benefits of double-dipping ($399 million) would go to just 79 corporations grossing more than $1 billion a year.

6) “Most of the corporations that have advocated for California to adopt SSF apportionment have also supported efforts at the federal level … [so that] the profits of particular corporations would no longer be subject to tax in particular states. … Taken together, SSF and [federal law] would significant increase the share of corporate profits that are not subject to tax in any state.”

7) “The interaction between NOL carrybacks and the state’s school spending guarantee is particularly perverse. NOL carrybacks would reduce revenues that supported a level of school spending used to calculate the spending guarantee for the next fiscal year. … The magnitude of the revenue loss attributable to carrybacks — over $500 million at full implementation — is significant.”

8) While “profits reported for state tax purposes have increased significantly, … corporate tax payments as a percentage of corporate profits have fallen by nearly half since 1981.”

9) Despite claims by corporate advocates,

“state and local tax cuts and incentives are not effective for stimulating economic activity or creating jobs in a cost-efficient manner. On the contrary, by forcing reductions in public services, tax cuts and incentives may retard economic and employment growth.”

10) When your kids’ schools can’t afford to buy books or repair crumbling classrooms, when you can’t get decent health care because the clinics and hospitals you could afford have died of budget cuts, when you don’t feel safe walking down the street because your city can no longer afford police or animal control officers, when you wait hours/days/weeks for appointments at the DMV or any other public office …

… remember that this is the California that Meg Whitman wants for you: where we will literally pay with our lives so that the state’s richest corporations can grown even richer.

Download the full report from the California Budget Project.

Read “Part 1: A lesson from cephalopods”

Read “Part 2: The message isn’t medium”

Part 3: The many (actually just two) faces of Meg Whitman

Thanks in no small part to the 2/3 vote requirement for passing a state budget, this year’s is now the second latest in history — 10 weeks and counting — with no resolution in sight. But just a few weeks ago, the Sacramento Bee reported:

“About one of every 11 residents in the Sacramento region smoked pot during the last month, a usage rate roughly 30 percent higher than the statewide average, according to a new federal study. Local residents were more likely than the rest of the state to have a casual attitude toward pot use.”

This must be why passing a budget takes so long: the contact high from all that pot smoke (in and) around the Capitol just slows everything down.

The bright side to this stoner’s pace of progress is not just that slow readers like me can keep up with the news, but that I’ve been able to catch up on all the great cable TV series I don’t have time for during the rest of the year.

For instance, I got through all four seasons (so far) of “Dexter,” the grisly yet oddly touching story of a serial killer who works for the police by day and chops up the “deserving” by night. Normally, the story of a mass murderer with a government job would make me think of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, except that:

a) Dexter, unlike Arnold, is a sympathetic and principled character, living by a code that forbids killing the innocent; and

b) Michael C. Hall is a way better actor than Arnold ever was (at least before he got into office).

Then I watched both seasons of “Rome” and couldn’t help but think how the scheming, duplicitous Atia of the Julii (Polly Walker) reminded me of Meg Whitman. In their own ways, both selectively say opposite things to opposing camps, depending on which script most advances their personal power grab. That’s not new in political races, of course; the difference is that Whitman got called out all over the media this summer — and by critics both right and left — for flip-flopping her positions on immigration and the environment after the June primaries.

An open-or-shut case

Against attack-dog Republican Steve Poizner, who called her “soft” on the issue, Whitman swore to be “tough as nails” on illegal immigration; against Democrat Jerry Brown, however, she’s apparently gone soft and now claims there’s really no substantive difference in their positions (a claim Brown disputes). She conveniently forgets to mention in public that her campaign is run by former governor Pete Wilson, best known among California’s Latinos for tying his 1994 re-election bid to passage of Prop. 187, which would have banned illegal immigrants from receiving public services if a federal judge hadn’t found the proposition itself illegal.

Now she just wants to ban illegal immigrant children from receiving publicly funded higher education — the only kind they could ever possibly hope to get. Up against Brown, Meg says she opposes Arizona’s law targeting immigrants; against Poizner, she called it “right for Arizona.”

In a bruising half hour interview with Los Angeles talk show hosts John Kobylt & Ken Chiampou [on August 4], the Republican gubernatorial nominee said she’s against any path to citizenship for those who are in the country illegally, even though she seemed to be for such a path 10 months ago

reported KQED’s Capitol Notes. A spokesperson explained it away by saying Whitman hadn’t been talking about a path to citizenship back then, but a guest worker program, even though Whitman never mentioned any such program at the time.

Going for the green

Speaking to a small green-tech firm the day before the interview, Whitman called herself an environmentalist but in the very next sentence said she wants to do away with some of the environmental regulations that are “strangling” business (preferring, apparently, to let children strangle slowly from toxic emissions; at least Dexter kills quickly). She’s been wishy-washy on Prop. 23, a ballot measure to repeal California’s widely popular anti-global warming law (AB32), but said that if elected, she’d try to suspend the law anyway, just in case it might kill some jobs, a claim that only conservative Republicans and big business apologists are making.

(Brown opposes Prop. 23, and a recent PPIC poll found most Californians believe AB32 actually creates jobs, the opposite of what Whitman claims.)

“If Meg Whitman is an environmentalist, then BP is the socially responsible company of the year,” concluded the director of the Sierra Club California.

The more things change, the more they stay the same

The same day as her radio interview, union members staged a protest at the opening of Whitman’s campaign office in the largely Latino-populated East Los Angeles. Given the state’s record unemployment, cataclysmic deficit and chronically dysfunctional government, immigration is important but should not be the defining issue of the governor’s race. Meg Whitman’s two-faced politics, however, should be central. We’ll be stuck with it for four years.

That’s what’s so scary — because to be fair, there’s one issue on which Whitman has never wavered one iota: her intent to destroy public services and eviscerate, disembowel and break the backs of public employee unions. It’s why unions like mine [see my profile] are going all-out to bring back Jerry Brown as governor.

As if that weren’t enough, I’m facing another, arguably more daunting, personal task for the election season: With marijuana legalization on the ballot (Prop. 19), I’ve still got six seasons of “Weeds” to catch up on.

About me: I work for SEIU Local 1021 as (among other things) editor of its weekly e-newsletter, the 1021 NewsWire, and its political blog, the Live Wire (www.1021votes.org). I am also a vice president of the International Labor Communications Association (www.ilcaonline.org).

[The series “Queen Meg, eMeg, Nutmeg: A Summer Romance” is cross-posted on the Daily Kos.]

Read “Part 1: A lesson from cephalopods”

Part 2: The message isn’t medium

Marshal McLuhan famously said the medium is the message, and that was certainly true in late August as the release of a Hollywood blockbuster and two campaign ads drew attention to a central issue of the governor’s race, one of Meg Whitman’s favorite targets: public employees.

At theaters everywhere, state workers rallied in protest at the opening of “The Expendables,” a routine but top-grossing summer action flick made exceptional in California by the appearance of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in a cameo role. Playing on the movie’s title, state workers wanted the governor to know that expendable is what they are not.

Unlike his brief cameo, Arnold has made a long-running play out of hammering state workers in his increasingly desperate and aggressive budget gambits, smiting them with furlough after furlough like it were the only way to raise the annual tribute of a billion-dollar tax break the corporate gods demand and receive each year from the state’s Republican lawmakers. Whitman pledged long ago to sacrifice 40,000 state workers outright on the stone of actual layoffs — in a state whose unemployment rate could best described as vertiginous, a nosebleed-inducing 12.3 percent, three points above the nationwide rate. [Source: CA Employment Development Department]

It doesn’t ad up

The week “The Expendables” came out, a new Whitman radio ad tried to link Brown to the City of Bell scandal. The ad claimed that Brown’s “mismanagement” of Oakland while mayor differed not at all from the plundering of public monies by top Bell administrators.

The lameness of the comparison was almost palpable, but for all its targeting of Brown, the language and sneering tone of the ad made it sound like an attack on public employees too, despite the fact that all its horror stories concerned non-union city officials, not unionized city workers. In this regard, the ad is entirely typical in how the moniker “public employee” turns the abuses of “public employee managers” into the fault of “public employee workers.”

Whitman and Brown could hardly be farther apart on the issue of public employees and unions, but this conflation of “public employees” is one of the most confounding (for unions) part of the debate.

When voters hear that “public employees” in Bell basically got away with grand larceny at taxpayer expense, or others elsewhere by spiking their pensions, they blame the “public employees” who belong to “greedy” unions instead of the real culprits: greedy managers. It’s not so much guilt by association as guilt by wordplay, and it’s become endemic in political discourse; not just in California, of course, but in a state with powerful public employee unions, the attacks are especially virulent.

The result everywhere is that working people get pilloried in the town square for the crimes of their bosses. What goes reported and then forgotten, however, is that it’s usually people in the community (often union members) who first call it out. The Bell scandal was exposed by do-gooder local muckrakers, not the mainstream media or state legislators, who are finally looking into it.

For instance, members of the SEIU local I work for [Disclosure: See my statement below] have called out overpaid and intransigent CAO’s and human resources directors in counties like Marin and Sonoma; abusive hospital executives who endangered staff and patients at the Alameda County Medical Center; discrimination in big cities like Oakland and pension spiking in small ones like Lathrop, and many other places where we work and live; most of these led to the dismissal or resignation of top officials under public pressure that we helped to raise. Our members have received praise from local elected leaders for saving thousands of jobs and public services. As we see it, that’s part of a public employee union’s role in the community.

The last laugh

Long before the Bell ad, Whitman got nailed for another fabrication when the FAIL Blog castigated her for using a screen shot of the popular humor site in a video:

In fact, the screenshot portrayed in the video never existed because the Whitman campaign faked the content within the screenshot. … We demand a written apology from the Whitman campaign and the removal of the video.

Sincerely,

Ben Huh, Founder of the Cheezburger Network

P.S. Jerry Brown, you better not be thinking of using this image or post in your political ad either.

No worries on that score. By Labor Day, Brown had not aired a single ad of his own. It’s been like a huge, mismatched snowball fight of ads, with Whitman’s fort throwing its huge stockpile over snow-packed walls against a handful lobbed by the unions from behind a bush. Against Brown’s paltry spending, the cost of Whitman’s ad war only drew attention to the vast sums of her own money she seemed willing to throw at her campaign with complete abandon. By mid-summer, Brown had spent barely $600,000 on his entire campaign; the unions, about $6 million; Whitman, $104 million of her own, plus tens of millions from corporations.

Unlike Whitman’s corporate sponsors, however, at least the unions are willing to show their faces. Just days after Meg’s radio ad, days after California’s Fair Political Practices Commission said it would wait until after the November elections to crack down on political ads skirting disclosure requirements through carefully crafted issue advocacy, the Sacramento Bee reported:

…a business group took aim at Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown with a blistering example of such ads.

But because the advertisement does not explicitly mention Brown’s gubernatorial candidacy, the group does not have to identify who donated to pay for the effort.

By the end of August, the big news was not just the size of Whitman’s pocketbook, but the fact that after spending something like $3 million dollars a week for months, she had still barely broken even in the polls, even with former Republican rival Steve Poizner no longer a distraction. And Brown had barely even launched his own campaign yet. Speculation is that Whitman may have peaked early; perhaps too early.

Money where her mouth is

Even against Brown’s paltry war chest, all the money pouring into Whitman’s ad blizzard would make at least a little sense were it for a candidate who’s demonstrated a commitment to public service by actually voting during her lifetime.

On August 26, nurses, firefighters, truck drivers and other union members marked the 90th anniversary of women’s right to vote (the 19th Amendment) by calling out the hypocrisy of Whitman’s own voting record. After nearly 30 years living in California, Whitman has almost never voted in its elections, although she seems to recall voting for US President back in the 1980s.

“She is just almost precisely the opposite of the leaders of the suffragist movement,” said one union leader: The whole time she’s lived here, Whitman couldn’t be bothered to vote, but now that she wants to be governor, she thinks she can just buy the office with TV advertising.

Some of the signs the union members carried read “Women Vote for Women Who Vote.” The very wording captures that beat of bouncing a basketball, of bouncing between walls, of echoing inside your head, that’s mostly what California politics sounds like these days. It’s in the airwaves, and what it mostly says is: Meg Whitman doesn’t know how to be governor, just how to play one on TV.

Read “Part 3: The many (actually just two) faces of Meg Whitman”

About me: I work for SEIU Local 1021 as (among other things) editor of its weekly e-newsletter, the 1021 NewsWire, and its political blog, the Live Wire (www.1021votes.org). I am also a vice president of the International Labor Communications Association (www.ilcaonline.org).

[Cross-posted on The Daily Kos]

Part 1: A lesson from cephalopods

If you followed the World Cup at all, then you heard about Paul, the amazing octopus who, amazingly, picked the winner of all eight matches Germany played, including its final loss to Spain. Octopuses are considered the most intelligent of invertebrates, and yet, Paul’s astonishing knack for picking winners seems almost unimportant next to the mystery of why anyone was asking an octopus in the first place.

Maybe it’s because humans are the stupidest of mammals. Still, despite the vast gap in mental acuity and animal taxonomy, the common octopus closely resembles one human subspecies in particular — the common politician — in that both respond to threats by spilling a lot of ink to cover themselves while they flee. Indeed, politicians appear to mimic the eight-legged mollusk: Among animals with backbones, only politicians prefer to act like they don’t have one. Appearing to walk upright, their good posturing can be maintained without any backbone at all.

We see this a lot in the octopus called California politics: The many-tentacled budget crisis. Meg Whitman’s wriggling attacks on Jerry Brown and public employees. Choose your own.

Now that Labor Day is behind us, Jerry Brown has released his first TV ad, and the campaign has “really” started, I wanted to recap, from a union perspective, some observations on the governor’s race this summer — a time dominated in California politics by the state budget crisis and Meg Whitman. Dubbed “Queen Meg” by nurses, “eMeg” by the press and “Nutmeg” by a pair of crazed Los Angeles deejays, the Republican candidate filled California’s airwaves and bandwidth with an acid rain of ads and public statements against both Democratic opponent Brown and the unions supporting him. [Disclosure: I work for SEIU, a member of the labor coalition backing Brown; my full statement is below and will appear on my profile once I can add it.]

With the latest polls at roughly even, an octopus is at least as likely to guess California’s next governor as any pollster. But with Brown — a lifelong public servant — and Whitman — a flash-in-the-pan executive — promising very different futures for the people of California, voters can’t afford to leave the outcome to guesswork or luck. Or an octopus.

Officer Meg places nurses under cardiac arrest

Back in 2005, it was nurses who led the way by dogging Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s every step; and then they, along with firefighters, teachers, government workers and other public employees, who turned the tide of public opinion against his special election agenda, one aimed largely at breaking the power of public employee unions. Five years later, Whitman apparently decided the nurses had to be neutralized at the outset. (Just a few days ago, she renewed her attack on nurses in the Daily Kos.)

She began with a politely worded “request” that the California Nurses Association simply hand over its 85,000-member mailing list so she could send them all campaign fliers. The nurses rightly instructed her on how to use an enema tube and said, “If you really want to talk with nurses, come meet us at an open forum with Jerry Brown.”

It quickly escalated from there. Whitman responded by declining the invitation but inviting nurses instead to join her advisory board, a cover to make it seem like she’s on their side. Her campaign bombarded the nurses with mailers anyway, called them with a rigged phone survey, and launched a website devoted to attacking CNA. Lots of ink.

Put another way, the candidate who a month earlier had accused CNA of being “far more interested in partisan theatrics … than a civil discussion of the issues” resorted herself to partisan theatrics rather than engage in that very discussion.

Around the same time, Whitman launched her first attack on the labor coalition backing Brown, California Working Families, with a TV/Web ad attacking the CWF ad for attacking her previous ad attacking Brown for the labor ad attacking her record, which made the coalition release another ad ….

It was starting to look like a set of nested Chinese boxes, except it felt more like one of those Chinese finger traps — the harder you try to pull your fingers out, the tighter the trap closes — only for your head. I’d rather be hugged by an octopus.

Read “Part 2: The message isn’t medium”

Read “Part 3: The many (actually just two) faces of Meg Whitman””

About me: I work for SEIU Local 1021 as (among other things) editor of its weekly e-newsletter, the 1021 NewsWire, and its political blog, the Live Wire (www.1021votes.org). I am also a vice president of the International Labor Communications Association (www.ilcaonline.org).