Last week Arnold announced his health care reform plan for the special session – a plan that Anthony Wright of Health Access California describes as his January plan, except worse. By insisting on an individual mandate with few subsidies and hardly any cost controls or care guarantees, Arnold offered a plan that was certain to satisfy nobody.

As a result of this craptacular plan, as today’s LA Times reports, “Unions give up on governor’s health plan”:

Abandoning their facade of cooperation, a coalition of California labor unions and consumer groups says it is gearing up a campaign to discredit Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s healthcare proposal as too expensive for many workers.

Organizers say they will trail Schwarzenegger throughout California to challenge and rebut him, hold prayer vigils and news conferences, press elected officials to oppose his proposal and run critical ads on television. They plan to deride the governor’s program as the “Arnold Middle-Class Gouge.”

The coalition, which includes most major unions and two prominent consumer groups — Health Access California and Consumers Union — has hired one of the nation’s most aggressive Democratic strategists to run the campaign [that would be Chris Lehane – RinM].

The campaign represents a break from labor leaders’ strategy, which had been to encourage Schwarzenegger’s efforts while gently prodding him in their direction. Leaders say they no longer believe that the governor will ever agree to their priorities without pressure.

Jordan Rau’s coverage of health care in California has been excellent, but I think he’s been saddled with a bad headline here. It’s not the unions who are giving up on the governor – it’s Arnold who gave up on them, and on the state, when he reasserted his non-starter plan.

The article notes that “labor leaders walked out” of a meeting last week with the governor and his staff over healthcare, specifically the insufficient employer fees and lack of subsidies. Lehane is crafting a strategy that points out the obvious – that individual mandates are a recipe for widespread financial ruin:

Starting Wednesday, they plan to publicly argue that Schwarzenegger’s plan is unaffordable for many. It would require individuals earning more than $35,735 and families of four making more than $72,275 to buy insurance without any subsidies for the costs. Unions say those thresholds are at least $10,000 too low.

(Personally I think even higher thresholds won’t help make an individual mandate workable, but the unions are right that these thresholds are not very helpful.)

With the shift to outright opposition, it is difficult to see how a health care deal will be concluded this session – especially as Arnold, captive of the Cal Chamber of Commerce (as Brian and Julia have explained), is highly unlikely to move in the direction that Dems and labor would like him to.

Instead this, like everything else in California politics these days, is headed for the ballot:

The labor groups are threatening to bring their own proposal to the voters in a ballot initiative next year. Itwould place on employers most of the financial responsibility for providing insurance on employers, as did the Democratic healthcare overhaul vetoed by Schwarzenegger last week.

A similar measure that passed the Legislature in 2003 was narrowly rejected the following year in a referendum brought by business groups, but labor groups thinks Californians’ concern about health care has risen to the extent that the public would accept such a measure now.

And of course, when we speak of taking things to the ballot – a costly project in terms of money, effort, and time – it raises the question of why we should not instead expend that effort toward a successful single-payer ballot initiative.

As those of us who have had the wonderful opportunity to live in Berkeley understand, the city isn’t always as liberal as it’s cracked up to be. The city consistently fought against affordable housing, homeless shelters – it even threatened to stop BART from being built unless it was built underground (a battle Berkeley finally won).

In these instances Berkeley has shown that it is no different from other parts of California that oppose progressive urbanism. Homeowners who are convinced that they can maintain a 1950s style urban landscape even in the face of population pressure, housing costs, and environmental/energy crises tend to dominate public discussions about urban change, and insist that their views be privileged over all others. This is true in supposedly liberal, progressive Berkeley, as much as it is in the San Fernando Valley or – dare I say it – Orange County.

It’s from that regressive mindset that, as today’s San Francisco Chronicle reports, a proposed bus rapid transit project is being blocked by Berkeley residents.

That’s what AC Transit is proposing for its busiest route in the East Bay, the 15-mile-long stretch from Bay Fair BART Station in San Leandro to downtown Berkeley.

The $400 million bus rapid transit project would look a lot like light rail, with elevated stops in the middle of the street and dedicated lanes free of cars. Buses would run every 10 minutes and sail through intersections.

But the project may hit a roadblock in Berkeley, where some neighbors and merchants are lobbying furiously against it, saying it would worsen traffic and be the death knell for the beleaguered Telegraph Avenue shopping district.

And if Berkeley rejects the plan, the entire project is imperiled – which leaves some people in town wondering how one of the region’s most green-thinking cities could say no to public transit.

There’s more…

The article quotes some locals opposed to this visionary project:

“It’s a gigantic waste of money,” said Mary Oram, a longtime Berkeley resident who lives south of the UC campus.

“To me, it looks like they’re preparing for light rail. Light rail is wonderful if you’re in the middle of nowhere, but we already have BART just a few blocks away. It doesn’t make any sense to me.”

Oram and other opponents said AC Transit buses aren’t brimming with passengers through Berkeley, while merchants worry that customers will shop elsewhere, deterred by the traffic or lack of parking if the city decides to eliminate parking along Telegraph to create an additional lane for cars.

I don’t think this person really understands much about public transportation. Light rail is NOT terribly useful “in the middle of nowhere” – instead its best use is actually in densely populated urban areas. Like Berkeley.

And yes, BART is “a few blocks away” but it serves a totally different corridor. The AC Transit line that connects Bay Fair BART to Downtown Berkeley BART is already one of the system’s most popular lines, largely because it serves corridors BART does not. Anyone who has traveled along International Boulevard / East 14th Street, or Telegraph Avenue, is well aware of how isolated they are from the BART system.

More important is the effect on Telegraph Avenue. The Southside neighborhood in Berkeley has fallen on hard times of late – imagine my shock when last weekend I discovered that Cody’s had closed! – and part of this is in fact because it’s not terribly easy to get to. Driving down Telegraph is already very difficult, and parking is nearly impossible to find, especially on a busy weekend.

Mass transit, such as bus rapid transit (BRT) is directly designed to address these problems. By providing dedicated lanes, it allows the system to avoid traffic. That in turn allows it to be quick and reliable. And that is what attracts riders, who above all else prize those factors when deciding to use public transportation.

Ultimately, cities like Berkeley need to embrace this if they are to have a meaningful impact on climate change, on energy independence. The views of Berkeley residents who oppose these projects are shaped by their faith that the 1950s can last forever – that California’s urban landscape can continue to be dominated by low density, by traffic, by cars. This is simply not the case, and one would assume that of all places, Berkeley would understand that better than others.

Sadly, Berkeley doesn’t seem to understand it. If density’s main problem is traffic, wouldn’t a BRT system be a sensible method of cutting down traffic? Doesn’t Berkeley need to lead the way in the state, becoming a model to other cities in the fight against climate change?

As long as a small but powerful group of homeowners continues to get their way, imposing their unrealistic belief that the 1950s are still viable and desirable, cities like Berkeley will continue to struggle to break free of the auto-dependent lifestyle, will have an uphill battle in trying to bring in alternative forms of transit. And if Berkeley cannot be convinced to join the 21st century – how are we to convince the rest of California to do the same?

I’ll give the last word to a Berkeley urban planner who understands the importance of this issue:

“The City of Berkeley would have to be out of its mind to turn down a multi-million-dollar investment in public transit,” said Robert Wrenn, a city transportation commissioner and proponent of the rapid bus plan.

“We’d be the complete laughing stock. It would be a great embarrassment to the city.”

California sits at a crossroads. We’re there for many reasons, one of the most fundamental of which is water. 2007 has been a drought year here in California, and even though three Pacific storms are lined up to sock Northern California with rain, the fundamental problems of rising water usage, limited storage capacity, a stressed Delta, and climate change aren’t going away with just a few October rains.

So how do California Republicans respond to the water crisis? The same way they responded to the budget crisis: demand their way, or no way at all. Today they refused to support Sen. Don Perata’s water bond proposal, preventing this $6 billion package of Delta restoration and support for innovative, practical local water storage solutions from being submitted to voters on the February ballot.

At a press conference on Monday, Sen. Perata explained the Republicans’ thinking on the matter. As quoted by Frank Russo:

This feels a lot like what we went through this summer with the budget when we had a seven week delay because we couldn’t arrive at a conclusion. I don’t know how to solve the dams or us approach. We’ve been working on that. Maybe we could come to some conclusion on that. But my Republican colleagues have said very clearly, ‘It’s our turn.’ And by ‘our turn’ they mean to build dams.’

Republicans are willing to hold up the entire process because they feel “it’s their turn.” Forced to settle for only half the crippling cuts they demanded in the summer budget, they now insist that we break the state’s borrowing capacity for a $9 billion dam package simply to assuage their bruised egos.

This is par for the course with contemporary Republicanism. Whether it’s SCHIP, the war in Iraq, or California’s water crisis, practical and affordable solutions are rejected in favor of irresponsible, financially reckless plans whose only benefit is to reward Republican ideology and its narrow base of supporters. Doesn’t matter if the state, the country, or Iraq falls apart in the process.

In 1960, the Master Plan for Higher Education in California was adopted, with Democratic Governor Pat Brown having played the key role in brokering the deals that produced the remarkable document. Among its core principles were access – from the guarantees of UC or CSU acceptance for students in the top levels of their high school classes, to community college transfers – as well as affordability with an outright ban on tuition and the expectation that “student fees” would be limited, and used for things such as student activities and dorms. The state would provide the support for instruction.

But ever since Reagan took office in 1967, these promises have been under attack. In a political or especially an economic crisis, state politicians have repeatedly undermined the Master Plan, limiting access by reducing affordability. After a truce in the 1990s, the budget crisis of the 2000s saw another sustained attack on higher ed and the first acknowledged abrogations of the Master Plan’s promises. Today, a UC or CSU education is no longer affordable, and reduced state support not only limits access, but is impoverishing those who work in its ranks.

All this is the subject of a fantastic LA Times article this morning titled “Less to Bank on at State Universities: Educators fear a 2004 funding deal has schools sliding toward mediocrity.” But the article is about more than just the problems of reduced funding. Instead it outlines how this is a deliberate policy of the Schwarzenegger administration, an effort to privatize California colleges and put them out of the reach of those who have been promised access to them.

The story does not end there. An unstated, but equally important aspect of the piece also shows how this crisis is also the product of a stunning failure of public officials to protect the institutions and historic policies they have been charged with defending. Whether it is the UC Regents, the State Legislature, or the Democratic Party, these officials have done little to nothing to protect one of the most important projects in California history.

One of the best aspects of this article is how it foregrounds the suffering of those working at the colleges. Many of us are familiar with the costs of college facing a student in California – hell, most of us were or still are students at a California public university in the recent past – but the problems of university staff have gone comparatively unrecognized.

Library assistant Linda Snook isn’t usually someone to stand up in front of hundreds of people and discuss her personal finances. But when the UC Board of Regents met here this summer, she pleaded for help.

Snook told the regents that she makes $26,000 a year working full time at UC Santa Barbara and pays more than half of that in rent. Her supervisors have recommended her for raises, she said, but there is never enough money in the budget. She’d like to enroll in graduate school at UCSB, but, on her pay, that’s a distant dream.

“I am barely making it,” she told the regents. “We’re not paid what the private sector would make. We desperately, desperately need help. Please.”

As anyone familiar with Santa Barbara knows, $26K is WOEFULLY inadequate. And her inability to pursue a graduate degree shows just how much access has been reduced. These days, when one needs not just a BA, but a Master’s degree, to be competitive for professional jobs, denying workers such as Linda Snook the opportunity to get that education is a direct failure of the state to meet its promises.

Higher education is the key to a strong, successful, and prosperous California. It promotes long-term growth, provides new technologies and entrepreneurship, trains skilled workers, and itself keeps economies afloat in towns as diverse as Riverside, Chico, and San Luis Obispo.

Without affordable access to higher education, California will slide into a kind of caste system where only those who already have wealth can afford to send their kids to college, and everyone else either cannot go at all, or must take out so many loans that they become shackled to their debt, unable to contribute meaningfully to the state economy.

The bulk of the article is dedicated to explaining this problem. In previous financial crises, such as those in the early ’80s and early ’90s, cuts made in lean times to higher ed budgets were restored in boom years. The crippling cuts of 1991-92 were reversed by 1996-97, for example. As recently as 2001 “the universities were in relatively good fiscal health.”

But that changed with the most recent budget disaster. Both Gray Davis and Arnold Schwarzenegger hit higher ed with massive cuts, partly enabled by the fact that neither the UC nor the CSU have guaranteed funding minimums, a necessity in this age of a foolish unwillingness to consider new taxation.

As a result of this crisis, UC and CSU leaders sought a new “compact” with Arnold, and in May 2004 they got it:

The two university chiefs struck a deal with the governor: They agreed to slash spending that year by hundreds of millions of dollars in exchange for a funding formula lasting until 2011. Titled the “Higher Education Compact,” the agreement calls for modest annual increases in state funds, private fundraising to help pay for basic programs, and large student fee hikes, especially for graduate and professional students.

There was no hearing on the pact; no legislative discussion; no vote. Many UC regents were not told of the deal until it was done. Richard C. Blum, who became the regents’ chairman this year, called the lack of disclosure “an error in judgment.”

The problem is that the amount of funding Arnold promised is LOWER than what was given in 2001. For 7 years – 2004-2011 – UC and CSU have to either accept this lower amount that leaves them at least $1 billion short of what is actually needed, or break the deal with Arnold and thereby face worse cuts.

The effect of this is to cut back the level of state support for public education – privatization through the back door:

In 1970, the state spent 6.9% of its budget on the University of California. Today it spends 3.2%. In 1965, the state covered 94.4% of a UC student’s education. Last year it paid 58.5%.

This year, California will spend an estimated $3.3 billion to operate UC. It will spend three times as much — $9.9 billion — to run the state’s prisons.

And it is a deliberate privatization. ALL of this is in fact quite deliberate. It is not a reaction to a fiscal crisis. Instead it is a carefully planned effort to destroy mobility and access for the mass of Californians in order to allow those who have already prospered to keep their wealth while shutting the door behind them to those who wish to follow.

It goes back to Donna Arduin. Brought in as Arnold’s finance director in 2003, she is an ardent advocate of privatization. In order to “balance” budgets in Michigan, New York, and Florida under Republican governors, she advocated the gutting of social and educational spending so as to prevent a tax increase. As the LA Times notes, she took a similar approach to higher ed in CA:

Her budget plan for UC and CSU called for hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts for the third consecutive year, major student fee hikes, a reduction in enrollment and a plan to steer thousands of students to community colleges instead of the universities.

And in fact that is what happened. The results have been catastrophic.

• Students are burdened with enormous loan debt, but as the California Budget Project noted in its recent report A Generation of Inequality, young college educated Californians have had a harder time finding work than those with just a high school diploma. Students are saddled with debts they cannot pay off.
• Workers are left behind as the California economy and even its society are increasingly geared toward serving those who have wealth. The library assistant described above trying to survive on $26K in Santa Barbara is but one example of how higher ed workers are increasingly treated as servants – people expected to work extremely hard, but not paid enough to live in a state with a high cost of living.
• The quality of education suffers. In order to continue to educate students, all three branches of higher ed are turning to part-time, adjunct instructors – the “field hands” of academia. Although these part-timers work diligently to provide the best possible instruction, their working conditions are very difficult, and as a result the use of part-time instructors has been proved to adversely affect graduation rates at both community colleges and four-year schools.
• The privatization plan also overwhelms community colleges, who have a more difficult time handling the influx. I currently teach at a community college, and will defend its quality of education against any critic. But without more resources – from classrooms to tech equipment to full-time faculty – it is nearly impossible to keep up.

Arnold Schwarzenegger and Donna Arduin’s privatization plans are a major culprit in all of this. But their plans would not have had success if they didn’t have help. Leaders at the UC and the CSU system, the state legislature, and Democrats have all played their role in abandoning California’s commitment to affordable, accessible higher education.

UC and CSU leaders have frequently gone along with budget cuts, refusing to rally the public against them. The tone was likely set in 1967, when one of Reagan’s first acts as governor was to fire UC President Clark Kerr. UC Regents, CSU Board members, and all the other campus heads, are very aware of their dependence on politicians.

So instead of fighting these cuts, university administrators have instead chosen to fight others in the university community over the remains, massively increasing student fees and trying to gut workers’ wages and benefits. Just last week the graduate student employees’ union, UAW 2865, won a contract protecting their benefits and wages, providing even an annual cost of living increase. Earlier this year CSU faculty won a major victory in getting a wage increase, as high as 20% when it is fully phased in. And the campus staff, from those who work in the offices and libraries to those in the food service sector, have been continuously organizing to get wage increases.

As the university administrations fight students and workers instead of rallying to their cause, neither the state legislature nor Democrats have put up a meaningful fight to reverse this alarming trend. Legislators are afraid of reopening the tax question, despite the fact that the question of taxes usually only ever comes up when Republicans are trying to win a particular election. Democratic legislators make a major error when they think that voters are interested in holding the line on taxes at the cost of soaring college costs – the middle and lower-class households that still make up the bedrock of the Democratic coalition in California are hurt far more by the planned privatization of California higher education than any tax increase.

Ultimately this privatization, planned in the governor’s office, signed off in secret by the UC and CSU leaders, and tacitly accepted by Democratic legislators, is nothing more than an effort to preserve the wealth of those who currently have it and to ensure that nobody else in this or future generations will ever have the opportunities they had again.

Bill Lockyer, who recently proposed outright privatization of UC as a budget deficit “solution,” graduated from UC Berkeley in 1965. He and/or his family would have only paid $880 in student fees for his 4-year education from 1961 to 1965. The equivalent of that in 2007 dollars would be, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, $5,808. Currently undergraduate fees at UC are $6,141 – a four year total is $24,564. That’s over a 300% increase beyond the rate of inflation. That’s nearly $20,000 that individuals must pay now that the state, through distributed taxation, paid in previous years.

It is shameful that so many who benefited from state subsidies are now arguing that current and future generations should not have the same opportunity. Perhaps we should ask Bill Lockyer and other California politicians who argue for privatization to reimburse the state $20,000 for the cost of their education.

Or perhaps we should instead demand that California live up to its historic promises of affordable, accessible higher education. If a strong economy with a equitable distribution of wealth, financially secure families, and opportunities for advancement and creativity is what we want in our society, then we must restore the broken promises of the 1960 Master Plan. But if we instead want a neo-feudal California, where those with wealth are the only ones able to enjoy security and prosperity, where everyone else is not only poor and struggling to get by but also shut out from the education they need to get out of that condition, well, all we have to do is…nothing. Maintain the status quo, and that ugly outcome will quickly become an ugly reality.

Of course, we *could* look to other solutions, such as those wu ming proposed, to deal with the state’s budget crisis an enable us to restore these broken promises. But why do that when it’s so much easier to create a new inequality?!

It’s not a new idea: Raise the gas tax as a method of both funding public transportation, as well as encouraging people to use it instead of their cars. Discussions of climate change, peak oil, and sustainable development usually always at some point or another emphasize a gas tax as a particularly effective carbon tax. And as the San Francisco Chronicle notes today, the SF Bay Area is starting give the idea serious consideration:

Regional officials are taking a close look at trying to increase the Bay Area’s gasoline tax by as much as 10 cents a gallon and believe voters might agree to it as a way to help combat global warming, The Chronicle learned Thursday.

Although the regional Metropolitan Transportation Commission has been able to ask voters for a higher gas tax since 1997, a decade of polls indicated there was little chance such an unpopular idea would ever secure the necessary two-thirds approval in the nine Bay Area counties.

Now, however, with public concern building over climate change, the electorate might not be so opposed to a new gas tax as long as voters see it as a way to help the environment, officials said.

A 10-cent-a-gallon increase in the Bay Area could generate an estimated $300 million a year or more to pay for transportation-related projects. Although the money could be used for roads, the emphasis probably would be on public transit and efforts to reduce auto pollution.

But is this a workable plan – workable in both policy and political terms?

As we are well aware, any tax increase in California must get 2/3 approval, whether in the state legislature or at the ballot box. The Metropolitan Transportation Commission, which plans and helps fund transportation in the Bay Area, has found that it’s difficult to meet such a high threshold.

But apparently, linking the tax to global warming makes some difference:

The Bay Area Council, a business-backed public policy group, favors the fee approach, council spokesman John Grubb said. His organization last polled Bay Area voters three years ago about their feelings on raising the gas tax. Support then was around 50 percent. Tying the issue directly to global warming would help boost support, he said.

Whether it would boost support to 66.6% is another question entirely. One option is to charge a gas “fee” instead of a “tax” – it only requires a simple majority but, as the article notes, is much more restricted as to how funds raised can be spent.

Still, a gas tax brings with it significant costs as well as benefits.

The first is affordability. Although some opponents claim “this is probably the wrong time to raise the gas tax, given how high the cost of gas is now,” the fact is gas prices are not coming down anytime soon – if ever. Not only is peak oil a factor – increasing demand + finite supply = higher costs, but the devaluation of the US dollar is also pushing prices higher. Neither trend is going to ease anytime soon.

Because of the volatility of gas prices, I do not believe voters and drivers would actually notice the tax increase – especially if it is implemented in phases. In 2005 Washington State enacted a 9.5 cent gas tax, implemented via 3 3-cent increments between 2005 and 2007. Drivers barely noticed this, especially at a time when prices were swinging 40-50 cents a gallon.

Those who WOULD be most hurt by a gas tax are those hurt by any tax increase – the poor, the lower-income. Their neighborhoods have tended to be those least served by public transportation, although recent projects such as SF’s T-Third line have begun to address this.

That leads into my second point, which is that for a rise in the gas tax to have its intended effect of causing a shift away from single-occupancy internal combustion commuting toward public, mass transit, those alternatives need to already be in place. London has had dramatic success with a congestion charge, but it also already had the Underground, frequently rated as one of the world’s best public transit systems.

The Bay Area is better off as a whole than Southern California in terms of transit availability, but the remain both large gaps (especially in the Santa Clara Valley, but also in the East Bay) as well as places where current capacity needs significant rehabilitation (as in much of SF). This has not been helped by Arnold’s penurious funding of public transportation, evidenced by his $1.3 billion cut of mass transit funds from this year’s budget.

A gas tax, I believe, should be Step 2 of a comprehensive program to encourage sustainable, environmentally responsible transportation. Step 1 needs to be state-funded investment in public transportation to extend its reach. If there aren’t usable alternatives already in place, Californians will simply wind up paying more in gas taxes without making behavioral changes.

Also, a higher gas tax would also make sense paired with other methods to encourage public transportation and discourage driving, such as the congestion charge that SF has been considering.

You don’t need to explain the looming water crisis to John Laird (AD-27). For his district, there’s nothing “looming” about it. His home city of Santa Cruz has recently implemented water restrictions due to the dry winter of 2007. Down here in the Monterey Peninsula portion of his district, we’ve been in Stage 1 rationing since 1999 and I am only able to take a shower in the morning or get a glass of water as I sit to write this post because we pump the Carmel River dry.

It’s fitting, then, that Laird has become the Assembly’s point person on water as the special session kicks into high gear this week. A combination of growth, overpumping in the Delta, drought and the specter of climate change has forced California to face its water crisis. And as such, it’s worth taking a bit of time this Sunday afternoon to get everyone up to speed on where things currently stand in Sacramento.

First, the issues. Not only does California face a long-term problem in providing water to residents, but it has been overpumping what resources it already uses – particularly the Delta.

The Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta provides drinking water to over 20 million people, is the basis for California’s agricultural industry – and is in peril. Overpumping has threatened several endangered species, and by reducing the amount of fresh water in the delta, results in an increasing amount of inundation by salt water. This threatens the reliability of Delta water for the millions who depend upon it. Already a federal judge has mandated significant cuts to the amount of water pumped out of the Delta this summer, and cities from San José to San Diego are facing mandatory rationing.

There are two main solutions. Republicans, led by Arnold and in the Legislature by Senator Dave Cogdill (SD-14, Modesto), want to revive the Peripheral Canal, which would take water from rivers like the Sacramento and Mokelumne and divert it around the Delta to the California Aqueduct near Tracy. They would have the state float a $2 billion bond for an “alternate conveyance” system – aka a Peripheral Canal.

This idea has been floated before, in the late 1970s. It deeply divided the state – Northern California was convinced it was a SoCal plot to steal their water – and the idea was soundly rejected in a statewide referendum in 1982.

The problem with the Peripheral Canal, however, is that it will not solve the Delta’s problems. Taking more fresh water out of the Delta would only make the salination problems much worse – it would be sacrificing the Delta once and for all in order to continue allowing California users to overuse what they already have.

As Hannah-Beth Jackson notes, Senator Don Perata’s proposals are much more favorable to the Delta. Groups such as Restore the Delta support Perata’s plan which offers $600 million for levee repair and other improvements to Delta habitat.

In contrast to the canals and dams solution the Republicans offer, John Laird has instead proposed several core principles that must govern the water special session (SacBee Capitol Alert, subscription req’d) that seem to suggest that they would prefer other solutions:

(b) Water agencies and local governments within each region should collaborate to develop, to the extent reasonably possible, regional reliance on water resources within their region, in order to minimize reliance on water resources from other regions.

(d) Water use efficiency, including conservation, recycling, reuse, and stormwater capture, provides one of the least expensive and least resource-intensive methods to enhance water supply reliability.

(e) Safe and reliable drinking water for all communities, including disadvantaged communities, should be among the state’s top water policy objectives.

(i) State and local agencies should consider the effects of a changing climate on the reliable availability of water resources for beneficial needs in the years ahead.

In other words, Laird insists that we look at conservation, at sharing the costs, at ensuring that disadvantaged populations are not made to spend money they don’t have to ensure a reliable water supply, and that climate change is considered in the process.

The plans offered by both Laird and Perata also emphasize local control and local planning. This is itself important in getting Californians to again live within their means. The 20th century solution of simply building a canal to some other watershed and taking that water will no longer work. It has failed the Delta, failed the Klamath Basin, and will soon fail the Sierra itself if we do not shift priorities.

The Planning and Conservation League has weighed in with its own plan that emphasizes conservation programs, watershed restoration, and groundwater retention (in other words, pumping the water back into aquifers to be stored underground, a more environmentally friendly and sustainable solution than dams). If properly funded, they note, several million acre feet of water could be produced through these more sustainable methods. One acre foot typically equals the annual water usage by a family of four. The state’s own water assessment plan shows that conservation can eliminate the “need” for these new dams.

As I explained back in July, California is a very drought-prone climate. Climate change in California is expected to produce a hotter and drier climate, with a reduced snowpack. Precipitation in the Sierra is expected to fall as rain more often than snow, forcing significant shifts in how water is stored.

But the problem isn’t just that the Sierra will see less snow and more rain, but that it will see less water, period. And the problem isn’t limited to the Sierra – as anyone who’s been to the Southwest recently knows, the whole region is suffering from reduced rainfall. Some experts suggest we may be on the verge of a 90 year drought in the US Southwest, and that Lakes Powell and Mead may never return to their previous levels.

Faced with the prospect of prolonged drought, it seems foolish for California to assume it can solve its problem merely through added storage – why build more storage for less rain?

So far in 2007, there has been way too much backsliding on the critical issues that face our society. Congressional Democrats failed to do anything meaningful to end the war in Iraq. Arnold helped force through major cuts to public transportation at a time we should be starting to move California away from dependence on the automobile.

We face a major crossroads in California in this special session, on both health care and water. It’s important to our future that we get it right.  We need to ensure that our water solutions are right for our watersheds, right for the Delta, and right for we who rely on water for survival.

The newest PPIC poll is out, and it contains data on a wide range of national and state subjects, including showing that 55% of likely voters support the term limits extension proposal, whereas only 39% currently support getting rid of the 2/3 rule (with small majorities in favor among Democrats, this suggests a lot of voters aren’t informed about the matter).

But some of the most important data is on health care, especially as the Legislature enters into its special session. The poll shows 69% of Californians want “major change” in health care, and is now the second most important issue they feel faces the state, behind the overblown immigration issue.

Specifically, the poll claims 72% of Californians and 61% of likely voters support Arnold’s reform plan. 61% of Californians support AB 8, but only 47% of likely voters back it, with 49% opposed.

However, we should be cautious before reading too much into those results. As it turns out, the way the PPIC asked questions on each proposal was…well…interesting.

Frank Russo at the California Progress Report notes that the AB 8 question had a little addendum to it that might well have skewed the results:

Here is the question asked about the Democratic (AB 8) approach:

“Would you favor or oppose a plan that requires employers to provide health insurance to their employees or pay a fee to the state to cover all working Californians, and that also guarantees health insurance for all children regardless of immigration status?”…

Note that the question asked on AB 8 references immigration whereas there is no mention of immigration in the Schwarzenegger question, even though the governor’s plan would include all immigrants employed in the state regardless of their status. Neither of these plans include all Californians as one might think from the descriptions of both.

It would make sense that AB 8 polled less well than Arnold’s plan, seeing as immigration paranoia remains commonplace in this state. But that’s not all about the wording of the questions that should give us pause. Consider the language used to ask about Arnold’s plan:

“Would you favor or oppose a plan requiring all Californians to have health insurance, with costs shared by employers, health care providers, and individuals?”

They might have well as asked “Do you favor all Californians having pie?” Of course most Californians want some form of universal health coverage, and when it’s described as having shared costs, shared responsibility, that appeals to folks’ sense of fairness.

Arnold’s plan, though, provides all Californians with health insurance merely by mandating that they purchase it. It’s like ordering people to buy food and saying you’ve cured hunger.

As I explained in a post back in February, individual mandates are a terrible idea. In Massachusetts, Mitt Romney’s individual mandate plan has resulted in premiums that cost as much as $3000 a year, while at the same time lacking comprehensive coverage. Individual mandates are a recipe for widespread bankruptcy, and what’s worse, they do not come with any firm guarantees that insurers will not be able to continue to deny claims and coverage, as an article in today’s San Francisco Chronicle describes with respect to vaccinations. As SiCKO showed, the problem with health care in America is that insurance is no guarantee you will actually get the treatment you need.

One wonders how Arnold’s plan would have polled if the PPIC had asked “Would you favor or oppose a plan requiring all Californians to purchase health insurance out of their own pocket, without guarantees that the premium will be affordable or guarantees that insurers will actually provide health care?” California Democratic voters don’t like the idea of forcing people onto the mercy of private insurers, and Republicans tend to oppose government mandates on principle.

Combined with the fact that the PPIC did not ask anything about single-payer, it’s hard to use this poll as a reliable guide to Californians’ attitudes about health care reform. And it’s important we realize that as the negotiations begin in Sacramento over the details of reform.

For all his “post-partisan” bluster, Arnold is a right-wing Republican at heart. Sure, he sometimes calls the GOP a “obese person in denial”, but away from the glare of media lights he busies himself gutting public transportation, or removing folks from state commissions who don’t toe a firm right-wing line.

It comes as no surprise then that Arnold is now engaging in one of the core right-wing practices – trying to roll back civil rights legislation by gutting state enforcement power.

Sheila Kuehl, proving that she’s more than just a force for single-payer, has been trying to draw attention to a proposal by Secretary of Consumer Affairs Rosario Marin that would eliminate the Fair Employment and Housing Commission’s administrative law judges (ALJs) and instead make FEHC staff responsible for handling discrimination complaints. This would have a crippling effect on state civil rights laws.

As Sheila Kuehl explains, these ALJs are essential to the effectiveness of state civil rights protections:

In 1992, under Governor Pete Wilson, the Legislature specifically authorized the Commission to hire its own ALJs. This was done because the OAH, which had been hearing cases and which Secretary Marin and the Schwarzenegger administration want to put back in charge, had proven to be both uneconomical and ineffective. The legal staff of the Fair Employment and Housing Commission had been required to use its time and financial resources to revise and rewrite over 90% of all OAH decisions in this area as incorrect on both the law and Commission policy One decision would have overruled the Commission’s own regulations. Another allowed an employer to ban all women from his workplace.

In other words, staffers untrained in the nuances of the law and with other duties were being forced to handle these complaints, making them both ineffective workers and ineffective enforcers of the law. By eliminating the ALJs and returning enforcement to the staffers, Marin and the governor’s administration are in effect trying to prevent the proper enforcement of state anti-discrimination law.

A commentor on one of the California Progress Report’s articles on the issue notes that Marin has been pushing this change for a while:

Marin has been pushing this for a while, even though she keeps inventing new reasons for it. First they claimed they wanted to move the current judges to Sacramento, because Chief Justice Ron George asked to take over the FEHC’s San Francisco office space for court admin. When that lie was exposed, they claimed it was all about the cost saving. Then they worked out a back-room deal with the head of OAH — the ALJ’s at OAH would hear the cases, but the cases would only go to ALJ’s with no knowledge about civil rights.

Ken Scudder, a SF attorney, left this comment in the same thread:

I’ve always admired the ALJs who work with state boards and commissions; they have somehow managed to survive and to persevere in their efforts to provide fair hearings and adjudication to employees, injured workers, the disabled and sick. They’ve all been the targets of right-wing Republican attempts, over the past 25 years and more, to gut and silence any essential state action for administrative remedy of the injuries, discrimination, and injustice that is so frquently [sic] the lot of those without power or wealth.

Enforcement is THE KEY to civil rights law. Activists learned this the hard way – although a raft of anti-discrimination laws and constitutional amendments were passed in the 1860s and 1870s, when the federal and state governments refused to enforce them, segregation, discrimination, and widespread inequality was the result.

By the 1950s and 1960s activists had finally gotten government to recognize the need to pass stronger laws, but they still had to fight to get them properly enforced. The result on the federal level were laws like the Civil Rights Act of 1964, or the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which contained extremely strong enforcement provisions, like the EEOC and the Department of Justice oversight of elections in specific areas targeted by the Voting Rights Act.

California saw similar struggles. The fight for a state-level anti-discrimination law and adequate enforcement power consumed activists in the 1940s and 1950s. By the 1960s California had strong laws, even though the best of them – the Rumford Fair Housing Act – was repealed by voters in 1964. In the early 1990s, with the FEHC staff overworked and the law not receiving adequate enforcement, Willie Brown helped strengthen its work by creating the ALJ system that has since proved effective in protecting all Californians from unfair and illegal discriminatory practices.

The need for a strong FEHC and effective enforcement is still clear to many Californians. At a time when anti-Latino bigotry is on the rise, when GLBT Californians still face hostility and the governor’s refusal to accept their basic human equality, the last thing we need is a weakening of the ability of Californians to get justice and fair treatment.

As Kuehl notes, a strongly worded letter opposing the elimination of the ALJs was sent to Secretary Marin, and its signatories included:

Senate Pro Temps Perata, Speaker Nunez, Senator Kuehl, and the chairs of Senate Judiciary Committee, Senate Labor Committee, Senate Budget Committee, Assembly Labor Committee, Assembly Judiciary Committee, Assembly Budget Committee, Latino Legislative Caucus, Legislative Black Caucus, API Legislative Caucus and the Legislative LGBT Caucus.

Kuehl reports that “the proposal to dismantle the panel of Administrative Law Judges has been removed from the Commission’s agenda with no word on how the matter will, ultimately, be resolved.” But given the longstanding desire of the right-wing to have the FEHC defanged, we cannot be certain yet that we’ve beaten back this attack on Californians’ basic rights.

A little activism goes a long way, and more is needed to ensure that this proposal is and remains dead.

Contact:

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger
State Capitol Building
Sacramento, CA 95814
Phone: 916-445-2841
e-mail

Rosario Marin, secretary of the State and Consumer Services Agency, (916) 653-4090.

George Woolverton, chairman of the Fair Employment and Housing Commission, (323) 935-6669.

And thanks to all the California Democratic legislators, from Perata and Núñez to Kuehl, Mervyn Dymally, John Laird, and many others who have fought to prevent Arnold from setting back the cause of freedom and equality in California.

Over the last few days there has been significant legislative movement on AB 8, the Núñez/Perata health care reform bill. Anthony Wright of Health Access California describes some of the crucial amendments that passed on Friday, amendments which Randy Bayne notes garnered the Cal Labor Fed’s support of AB 8 as the bill now includes some cost containment protections (though not as much as hoped, since caps on hospital billing weren’t included).

AB 8 seems set for legislative passage, but after that an Arnold veto is expected, writes Bayne. So what next for health care? As the legislature and the governor plan a special session, the details of any final compromise will be absolutely important – and will determine whether the bill will actually be useful, or will be a cure worse than the disease. More…

In today’s Sac Bee, Daniel  Weintraub suggests that a health care deal “is coming into focus” and describes the details:

The agreement would likely come in two pieces — legislation that lawmakers would approve this week or soon after in a special session, and a separate measure that would appear on the November 2008 general election ballot to finance the plan.

The legislation would outline a program requiring nearly everyone in California to buy insurance, with subsidies for people making less than four times the federal poverty rate, or about $80,000 a year for a family of four. Insurers would have to cover everyone who applied, regardless of pre-existing conditions, and could not charge customers more because they had been sick in the past.

The subsidies, along with an expansion of free care for the poorest of the poor, would be financed by a new payroll tax, an increase in the sales tax, a special fee on hospitals and an infusion of federal money. [A tax that would have to be put to voters – Robert]

It’s not clear where Weintraub is getting this from – but it is a major cause for concern, because such a compromise includes the thoroughly odious individual mandate. The centerpiece of Mitt Romney’s reform, individual mandates have proved a disaster in Massachusetts, with sky-high premiums and insufficient guarantees of care. Even if subsidies materialize – and as the current plan depends on federal funding of programs like S-CHIP for this that is being opposed by the Bush Administration, it seems those subsidies are far from certain – it will not be enough to prevent the premium costs from ruining many who are underemployed, work part-time, or face other sources of financial stress.

An individual mandate is poison, and must NOT be a part of any final health care plan. All it would accomplish is a massive transfer of wealth from struggling individuals and households to insurers, who would still be able to deny care, slash benefits, and raise premiums. At worst it would be junk insurance that folks would be forced to buy.

I have expressed my skepticism of AB 8 in the past. I think it suffers from a common misconception in America, that the problem is a lack of health insurance, when in fact insurance is by no means a guarantee that people will receive the care they need, or that they will get that care at an affordable price. As it stands now, AB 8 does appear to be a worthwhile plan. Even though the California Nurses Association is right that it won’t do much to solve the core problems, and that we should be trying to get rid of the health insurers, AB 8 seems like it would be able to extend to more Californians some kind of coverage with sufficient, though incomplete, cost containment provisions. As a stopgap until we get single-payer, AB 8 may work, although I am also skeptical about whether it’s worth a ballot fight – those resources should be reserved for a single-payer ballot effort.

That conditional support of AB 8 would vanish entirely if an individual mandate were to be included as part of a final compromise. And as that idea keeps getting floated, it becomes all the more important that we let our Democratic legislators know that an individual mandate is completely unacceptable.

As someone who is currently uninsured, I would be willing to fight against an individual mandate plan, and would certainly vote against a ballot measure to fund a plan that included an individual mandate. Californians want health care reform – but that doesn’t mean any reform is good reform.

A poll by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner for Democracy Corps, surveying us folks in the 18-29 age group, show that 50-60% of us believe the Democrats are better on any given issue than the Republicans. It’s a portrait of a generation that grew up under conservative rule – and by witnessing its effects and costs firsthand, has utterly rejected it.

But in the first traditional media article on this quite significant poll, Carla Marinucci tells a rather odd story about this. To her, the only story here is that young voters dislike the Republican Party. Which we do, no doubt about it. But her article is filled with quotes from Republicans young and old about why we’ve abandoned them.

Nowhere does she ask the more obvious question: why are we so strongly identifying with Democrats? If it was just alienation from Republicans why don’t we become apathetic? Why aren’t we identifying as independents?

I’ve got more to say, but before the flip, I want to cut to the chase: we have a lot of people here age 18-29. In the comments, do what Marinucci refused to do: explain why you don’t just reject the Republicans, but also why you so strongly embrace the Democrats. Why are you a proud Democrat?

Some examples of Marinucci’s rather odd framing of these poll results:

Young Americans have become so profoundly alienated from Republican ideals…The startling collapse of GOP support among young voters…The anti-GOP shift for this generation…

The only Democrat quoted is our old buddy Garry South, who has this to say:

Schwarzenegger’s success at the polls won’t translate to other Republican candidates.

South pointed toward the recent state budget battle, which pitted Schwarzenegger and Democratic legislators against conservative GOP senators who delayed the $145 billion budget for almost two months to pressure for more cuts and protections for businesses against environmental lawsuits.

The demands of the state senators, South said, were so far to the right of the average voter that “the Republican brand in California now is so tainted and toxic that the only way you’re going to win is to buy yourself out of the brand.”

Here, South is absolutely right about the suicide pact that is the California Senate Republican caucus. But wouldn’t it have made sense to give readers some other sense of why we young folks are flocking to the Democrats? Couldn’t Marinucci have spoken to some young Democrats as well as young Republicans, young conservatives?

Consider it a kind of political migration. Demographers and historians have long understood that in any migration, there are two factors that must be explained if you are to understand that migration: push factors, and pull factors. Marinucci explains the push factor, but has nothing at all to say of the pull factor. In framing the story as she does, she misses a chance to educate her readers about what is actually behind this phenomenon.

The number of young voters is rising, both in raw numbers as well as our percentage turnout. And we’re voting for Democrats, in large numbers. If Marinucci really does believe this could have an effect on electoral politics for “generations to come” then shouldn’t she explain why we are embracing the Democrats?

I’m 28 years old, still in the age group this study showed had turned so far left. Why do I vote for Democrats? Why do I favor them on the issues? Why do I believe they are better for California and America than the Republicans?

I did not always support the Democrats. Although I abandoned my youthful, immature conservatism in high school, when I first registered to vote in 1997 I registered as a Green. I was an active campaigner for Ralph Nader in 2000, believing the Democrats to be too close to the Republicans on most major isuses.

When I moved to Washington State in 2001 I learned that one does not declare a party affiliation at registration. Which suited me fine, I considered myself a left-wing independent, still alienated from the Democrats, although I still rejected the Republicans utterly.

But when I returned to California in June, I did indeed register as a Democrat. What changed?

While I still find myself in passionate – and sometimes bitter – disagreement with the actions of elected Democrats, I believe they represent my own values far more than any Republican ever can or will.

Republicans have destroyed California, I’ve seen it happen over the course of my life. They call themselves a political party but are in truth little more than a protection racket for a minority of residents: white suburban homeowners over the age of 40. Although not all in that group are Republican – many in fact are Dems – it is that group that Republican policies and rhetoric are designed to aid. (Even if, in fact, those white suburban homeowners don’t benefit from Republican government – the only consistent beneficiaries are the wealthy, and large businesses).

Republicans have destroyed our infrastructure, our schools, our health care system, our public services. Their zealotry on tax cuts has saddled us young folks with huge loan debts and yet their tax cuts have also failed to create jobs or earning power for us, as a California Budget Project study revealed last week. And they insist on attacking us, or our friends. When we see attacks on gays or on Latinos or on African Americans, we see not scapegoating of outsiders, but vicious assaults on ourselves, or on people we have always been close to.

But we don’t just reject the policies that have screwed us younger folks. We actively embrace the Democrats. In stark contrast to the Republicans, the Dems offer actual solutions. These solutions aren’t always good enough – but it’s the promise that the Democrats can be convinced to embrace our agenda, the belief that the old Democratic Party of the mid-20th century – liberals of the New Deal – can be reborn.

Many of us young people lack health care, or find that what coverage we do have leaves our wallets empty. Democrats, led by Senator Sheila Kuehl, offer us a single-payer universal health care program. Dems fight for more funding for schools, so that we can get an affordable education. They fight for more infrastructure projects, especially mass transit, so we can get around safely, without having to rely on a car (thus saving us money). Led by Rep. Hilda Solis, they want to create green jobs, so that all of us can have a better economic future in the 21st century.

And Democrats embrace us. They aren’t a protection racket for well-off middle-aged white folks, the Dems instead welcome and support young voters, and their rich diversity.

It is because we believe the Democrats can offer us a better future that we embrace them. All the Republicans have to offer is a continuous extension of the 20th century, a model that has failed for most Californians. But as I’ve argued, it’s not just that we reject Republicanism. We embrace the Democrats. And as long as Carla Marinucci refuses to recognize that fact, the changing nature of California and American politics will escape her.