The California Budget Project’s report, A Generation of Inequality: The State of Working California, 1979-2006, has already started to grab public attention, such as a front-page article in the SF Chronicle.

It’s about time. Although neoliberalism has been hurting working Californians since 1979, it’s been in the last few years that the situation has become dramatically worse. Low wages, poor job growth prospects, and soaring costs of living are killing the California Dream for millions of residents of this state.

Below I offer an overview of the report, and some suggestions on what we can – and should – do about the growing crisis.

The CBP has identified several major factors that illustrate the widening inequality in California:

• 70% of job creation in California since 1979 has been in high-wage or low-wage jobs. The middle-income folks have faced stagnation or declining incomes.
• Wage gains are not only unevenly shared, but inflation and the soaring cost of living has hit low- and middle-income workers harder than their counterparts in other states.
• Workers are getting fewer benefits – health care has been slashed, as have pensions.
• Young Californians – those born since 1979 – have fared poorly in the state’s job market, and since 2000 those with college degrees have had *fewer* job prospects than those with only a high school diploma, though the latter group is still facing poor prospects of their own.

California is becoming a place where only the rich can afford to enjoy basic economic security – whereas everyone else must face high housing costs, rising energy, food, and health care costs with shrinking wages and poor job prospects.

It’s apt that this report focuses on 1979 to the present, as that corresponds to my own lifespan. Parts of this report ring all to true to my own cohort. Take my high school class, which graduated from an Orange County school in 1997. Today most of us work either in financial services, high-tech, or education, with many of the grads who did not attend college working in the service sector.

This is not a recipe for economic security. Those who work in financial services are facing the specter of widespread job losses as a 25-year long asset bubble starts to unwind. Those who work in high-tech already faced a bust in 2000, and know all too well how easily their jobs can be outsourced. Those of us who work in education are dependent on government funding, which Republicans are seeking to cut at every opportunity. Those who work in the service sector find their employment to be unsteady and their wages wholly inadequate to the cost of living in California. And most of us who attended college are saddled with student loan debts, cutting into our incomes even more deeply. And that’s just from a suburban high school – Californians from poorer backgrounds obviously have fared much worse than we.

Meanwhile the situation continues to worsen. The bursting of the housing bubble has already caused the state’s unemployment rate to rise every month in 2007. Gas prices have retreated somewhat from their spring highs, but remain around $3/gal in the state, still an unsustainably high level. At the same time Republicans successfully gutted state mass transit funds, effectively shackling Californians to their cars and to the oil companies. Arnold’s preferred health care plan would merely saddle these struggling families with hundreds of dollars a month in premiums, while still not actually delivering them affordable, comprehensive health care.

This report illustrates a state in crisis, lurching toward catastrophe. 28 years of neoliberalism has put us on the edge of a precipice. How do we deal with it, then?

Do we follow the advice of conservatives like Joel Kotkin, who in the SF Chronicle article about the CBP study called for more of the same – less regulation and taxation of business, implying though not saying that this will also require further cuts to vital public services? That would be like turning to the folks who broke Iraq and asking them to fix it.

Instead we need to revive the old progressive, New Deal era emphasis on economic security. Some believe that progressive politics remains amorphous and without a core agenda. Economic security, I believe, MUST be that agenda.

We must build a diverse coalition of all ethnic and racial backgrounds, of middle- and low-income households, to challenge the neoliberal economy. Instead we must demand and put into action policies that will help even out the balance in California, and save the state from impending ruin.

We need, at minimum, the following:

• Universal health care. Providing cost certainty to families, as well as health, is vital to providing for our future security.
• A redefinition of the California Dream – a new urban strategy for California life, providing for affordable housing, sustainable transportation, and better use of our resources. We must stop subsidizing suburban sprawl, one of the culprits behind this inequality, and instead redirect our energies to building up our cities.
• A new, long-term source of good jobs for California’s low- and middle-income families. The Green Jobs initiative pioneered by Rep. Hilda Solis could well be the prototype for this, providing for a clean environment, sustainable practices, and jobs for ALL Californians, across class and racial lines. California can become a leader in 21st century manufacturing, building on local resources to provide a sustainable and clean range of products for America as we face the dual shocks of climate change and peak oil.
• Root-and-branch reform of agriculture. Californians have already become major leaders of the Farm Bill reform movement and we need to ramp this up significantly. Agriculture is the backbone of California’s economy and, of course, of civilization itself. We need to shift CA ag toward sustainable, organic, healthy practices, linking city and country in a new network of local food production and consumption that provides income and jobs for rural counties and affordable, quality food for the cities.
• Educational reform and affordability. The cost of higher education – including technical and vocational training – has soared, and these costs represent a massive drain on earning power for working families. We need to put into place a plan to forgive ALL student loans, and redeem the promise we made in 1960 to give Californians free higher education. This will spur entrepreneurial activity, as well as ensure that the young can help pay for the needs of aged.

All of those solutions will help Californians of all backgrounds and class status. We cannot follow in the footsteps of those who will tell us that in the hard times that we now face, we must choose who to include and who to exclude – a choice that always seems to come down to race.

This is the challenge we face as California progressives. And these can be the solutions that we offer. This can be our opportunity to build a prosperous and secure 21st century state.

Fat cats smoking cigars while the masses suffer, demanding more for themselves and their cronies. Sounds like propaganda from the 1890s, right?

Nope. It’s the California Senate Republican Caucus in 2007. The tentative budget deal didn’t happen last night as planned, and once again it’s the Senate Republicans and their limitless greed that was the stumbling block.

The basic story, as culled together from the SF Chronicle, the SacBee and FDR at the California Progress Report, is this:

The “Big 5” thought they had a deal agreed yesterday afternoon. But once again, Dick Ackerman failed to sell it to his caucus. The Bee reports that the major sticking point now was Republican demands that suburban school districts get equalization payments now, not in 2008-09 as scheduled. Still, the deal appears close, and more negotiations are planned for today.

My thoughts over the flip.

As the Democrats waited for the Senate Republicans to respond, and attend a scheduled Senate session, several of the GOP Senators decided to enjoy themselves instead. From the Chronicle article linked above:

While members of the state Assembly waited patiently for an evening session to begin, a number of GOP senators – including Sam Aanestad of Grass Valley, Dave Cogdill of Fresno and Jeffrey Denham of Merced – were ensconced at one of the city’s fine restaurants across the street from the Capitol, enjoying cigars and fine wine.

I’m sure Denham’s constituents in Merced and Salinas will be pleased to hear this – especially when they learn that their own services are going to be cut, and payments for medical care and school delayed, so that suburbanites can get another handout. The SacBee explains the school funding issue (linked above):

In Monday’s developments, Senate Republicans took issue with the timing of when suburban school districts with historically low property taxes would receive about $130 million in “equalization” money to bring their funding in line with districts of a similar size and profile.

The current budget approved by the Assembly proposes to give those districts the extra money in the 2008-09 budget after annual growth is paid out to all school districts. But Republicans want equalization in the current budget.

Kevin Gordon, a consultant on education budget issues, said education advocates fear that Republican demands for equalization could jeopardize a 4.5 percent cost-of-living increase for school districts that advocates fought to protect in the current proposed budget.

What this means is that some suburban districts are able to keep their property taxes artificially low only because of state subsidies. The Republicans want to continue this by robbing the teachers of a promised 4.5% COLA. If there’s a clearer example of reverse Robin Hood out there, I’ve not seen it.

This entire budget hostage crisis has been provoked by Republicans simply so that they can enrich their cronies at the expense of working Californians. Whether it’s robbing public transportation funds to pay for tax cuts, and thereby forcing Californians to be shackled to their cars and the oil companies, or stealing needed money to keep teachers afloat so that wealthy suburbanites can keep their artificially low taxes, the California Senate Republicans are now out in the open with their demands that state government be used to channel wealth upward.

One hopes that the Democrats will not only continue to stand firm against this, but will start to educate voters as to what the Republicans in this state are really all about – stealing.

FDR at the California Progress Report reports that a budget deal seems near, and it may come at the expense of CEQA – or it may not. Depends on who you talk to, I guess:

[Villines] said that he had worked all weekend and that “all” had agreed that some fix needed to be made with respect to the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), the state’s basic environmental law, which he called an “AB 32 fix”.

And Núñez:

I specifically asked Nunez about changes to AB 32 and CEQA and he said flat out that there would be no AB 32 changes and none were proposed in the outline he had seen. The changes that have been bandied about by the Republicans all along are not squarely within the language of AB 32 but have been to CEQA. The Speaker did indicate that he was about to brief his caucus and that any changes to environmental laws would not be made without checking with the environmental community. He was reluctant to discuss what had been agreed to privately.

I cannot imagine in what world giving in to the GOP demands on CEQA, in any form, would be anything other than a catastrophic disaster, validating the Senate Republicans’ unconscionable hostage tactics.

Now, there could be no cause for such concern, and one hopes that our Democratic leadership understands the bad precedent and effect such a compromise would have. If anyone in Sacramento thinks that by giving the GOP any of what they want, they’ll ensure anything other than an even worse fight next year, they’re nuts.

[UPDATE] The SacBee has details on this “AB 32 fix” which involves protecting transportation bond-funded projects from AB 32/CEQA action. Details over the filp.

To soothe GOP concerns, staff has drafted a compromise proposal that would place a moratorium on greenhouse gas-related actions against transportation bonds, approved by voters under Proposition 1B last fall. It would sunset after the state Air Resources Board adopts new regulations to comply with a state initiative to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent by 2020.

We still don’t know if this is the specific key that will allow a budget deal that Dick Ackerman says now exists.

Personally I’m deeply skeptical of such a deal – how the hell are we going to cut greenhouse gases if we exempt freeway construction from it? Assuming that public transportation, from light rail to high speed rail to clean buses, are still facing a $1.3 billion cut, this is a massive step backward for California.

Yes, it depends on a fight at CARB – but as we’ve seen, from Arnold’s manipulations of that body to the new CARB chair’s significant oil company stock holdings, that’s not a place where we can be certain of strong action of auto emissions.

One of the hardest things about being a California historian is watching the same tragedies repeating themselves, nearly every generation. Ever since the Anglo conquest in 1846, non-whites have faced the brunt of scapegoating during hard economic times. And in almost every case, this immigrant-bashing has turned violent.

California’s ugly history of racial terror spans all 150+ years of US ownership. It includes the attacks on Mexican miners (here legally under the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo) in the Sierra goldfields in 1850, the state-sanctioned genocide of Native peoples in central and Northern California later in the 1850s, the forced disposession of Latinos’ land in the 1870s, the violent assaults on Chinese laborers and communities in the late 1870s and early 1880s, and the forcible deportation of 1 million Mexican residents of CA, including many US citizens in the early 1930s.

Now, in 2007, it is returning, with an ugly vengeance. Last Friday, day laborer Artemio Santiago Garcia was savagely beaten in Seaside, a majority-Latino city next to Monterey. Prosecutors are calling it a hate crime. We can call it the leading edge of outright terrorism, a predictable evolution in the already ugly immigration paranoia. And it’s spreading.

From today’s Monterey Herald (linked above):

Rather than cleaning houses or mowing lawns, what he got was a severe beating to the head and upper body that made him lose consciousness and could have ended tragically, he believes, had he not come to and found a pipe to scare his assailant….

  Santiago Garcia’s assailant entered an abandoned house, and they both began walking along a hallway, the man pointing out the rooms and telling him things he didn’t understand. When they reached the rear of the house, his assailant pulled out a flashlight and turned it on.

“I was then standing behind him, wondering what we would do, when he turned around and slammed me on the head,” he recalls. “I immediately fell and lost consciousness. Later I felt more blows, to my head and to my upper body. Then he dragged me outside the house.”…

“I ran away and then I hid under one of the houses. I was afraid that if he saw where I’d run to, he would come after me. I was hidden for a minute or two, then I walked into the street screaming and asking for help. I was bleeding through my nose and mouth.”

Santiago Garcia told the reporter that he wasn’t the first victim of such an attack – that last year an older man, also from Oaxaca, was also beaten – but that he did not feel safe in telling the police.

The article goes on to note that other Latinos – regardless of resident status – are feeling more vulnerable to this kind of hate:

A recent study by the Inter-American Development Bank found that Latino residents are feeling more discrimination than before. Pollsters attributed the results to failed immigration reform policies.

“All we want is a work permit,” worker Jose Perez said. “We don’t even want residency. All we want is to be able to work.”

If this isn’t chilling enough, the incomparable David Neiwert, a Seattle-based author who has studied racial hate and the far-right on the West Coast and the founder of Orcinus, has now come across a video apparently showing a group of white bigots shooting and killing a Mexican somewhere along the border. They may or may not be related to a San Diego offshoot of Jim Gilchrist’s notorious Minutemen organization – the San Diego group’s violent harassment of Latino day laborers was charted by Neiwert earlier in the week:

  Halloween or not, the San Diego Minutemen take year-round pleasure in scaring immigrants. On Saturday mornings, when they travel to the sleepy suburban gas stations where immigrant day laborers go to find work, they create scenes that would play well in a show called “Nativists Gone Wild.” They call immigrants “wetbacks” and “Julios.” They pull out Mace and threaten passing motorists who disagree with them. Calling those who hire day laborers “slavemasters,” they’ve been known to slap flashing amber police lights on their SUVs and chase the would-be employers down. When they’re not busy physically intimidating migrants, they take to the airwaves and the Internet to accuse them, without a shred of evidence, of running child prostitution rings and practicing “voodoo Santeria rituals.”

Unfortunately, it is not a great step to go from physically intimidating migrants, to beating them in an abandoned building along Monterey Bay, to shooting at them in hopes of killing them outright.

And how did this terror come about? Is it some ugly tangent to a more mainstream dialogue about immigration?

Sadly, that is far from the case. Ever since this current round of immigrant-bashing began around 2003, it has been driven by paranoia not about lost revenue or lost jobs, but about racial fears. Victor Davis Hanson’s 2003 book Mexifornia began the wave, stoking fears that California was somehow being “overrun” by Latinos who were going to undermine our civilization with their supposedly dirty, third world ways. From there these sentiments have taken off, with many immigrant bashers speaking of immigration as a kind of “invasion” or, in Michelle Malkin’s favored terminology, a “reconquista” to overturn the Anglo conquest of 1846-48.

An example comes from the comments on an article by Peter Schrag on the California Progress Report yesterday, where one “Steve” started off by citing poll numbers about border security but then threw in this telling item:

Also, it’s suggested that Californians don’t notice the ‘browning of our complexion’ anymore. Hmm. I wonder about that…. He [Schrag] then comes to the conclusion that Southerners and Midwesterners won’t mind handing their states over to the Latinos in the end, either.

While it is absolutely true that immigration reform is necessary and should be discussed sensibly, too much of the conversation is dominated by openly racist sentiments like this. And as we sit idly by while racism is spewed forth, it becomes easier for this hate to go mainstream, and for others to start acting on their violent xenophobia.

Why is it that the immigration debate stirs up this kind of terrorism? Precisely because of its origins in racist thought. Behind every moment of immigrant-bashing in California’s history is a belief that this state and its economic benefits are reserved for whites only. To adherents of this belief, the presence of people of color is to be tolerated at best and actively fought when they deem it necessary.

Some might argue that this violence against immigrants is the product of a fringe mentality, that the mainstream and “serious” anti-immigrant voices would never condone it. So why, then, are conservatives like Lou Dobbs and Debra J. Saunders campaigning to free two former Border Patrol officers who admitted to and were convicted of shooting a suspected drug smuggler?

Voices like these conflate smugglers and immigrants; they are all lumped in together as “lawbreakers” in their terminology. As long as they continue to cast immigration in terms of an “invasion,” condone the acts of the Minutemen, speak openly of racist fears, and call for the further intimidation of immigrants and Latinos by the Department of Homeland Security, they are not excused from their responsibilities either in the emerging anti-immigrant terrorism.

Last week Republican Senator Abel Maldonado, SD-15 (Central Coast) broke with his party to vote for the budget. Maldonado has a reputation as a moderate Republican, and he needs it – SD-15, which stretches along some of the most beautiful coastline in the world from Santa Maria to San Jose, has a majority Democratic registration (it’s close, 39.6% D to 37.3% R). Residents here in SD-15 gave 52% of their votes to John Kerry in 2004 and 53% to Boxer. That year, Abel Maldonado was elected to the State Senate with 52% of the vote – the Democratic candidate got 42%, as a Green pulled nearly 7% of the votes cast.

These numbers should all suggest that in a State Senate where we are only 2 votes away from the all-important 2/3 mark, allowing us to avoid crippling budget fights like the one we have now, we should be planning to fight and fight hard to win SD-15 in 2008. It’s a no-brainer, right?

Not so, according to Josiah Greene of the CA Majority Report, who indicates Maldonado will be – and should be – left alone next year. Why I think this is a bad idea, over the flip…

The broader context is absolutely important here. Many of us on Calitics came to blogging from national politics sites like Daily Kos and MyDD. Between 2003 and 2006 we fought hard against the Democratic establishment’s timid campaign strategy of picking just a few districts to focus on in pursuit of a narrow majority. Building on Howard Dean’s call for a 50 state strategy, Democrats at the grassroots, netroots, and more and more from inside the establishment came to realize that if Republicans were to ever be beaten, we had to be competitive in every single state.

This 50 state strategy initially evoked nothing but derision from the DC crowd. Paul Begala memorably denounced it as “hiring people to wander around Utah and Mississippi picking their nose,” a reflection of the unwillingness of many old-school consultants to think boldly and intelligently.

In 2006, as the DCCC seemed intent on repeating its narrow strategy that had failed them in the past, a whole host of campaigns sprouted up in districts across the country – including in California’s Central Valley, where “serious” establishment observers gave Jerry McNerney little chance of unseating the seemingly invincible Richard Pombo.

But it was precisely this shotgun, grassroots approach to the 2006 campaign that returned Democrats to control of Congress. The 30+ seat swing in the House came from all kinds of districts, where moderate and conservative Republicans were beaten in districts where nobody had given Democrats a chance. Even the paragon of moderate Republicanism, Chris Shays, nearly lost his seat.

Surely a national wave of revulsion at Republicans helped make this happen – but to win, you have to show up. Had Dems written off districts like CA-11 we wouldn’t have that majority we now enjoy.

And it also took the realization that no moderate Republican was better than an actual Democrat. Speaker Nancy Pelosi still has her hands full with Blue Dog Democrats, who behave like Republicans – but it’s a far sight better than having a Republican majority. And you can be sure Democrats will not be shy about going after Republicans to help build larger Congressional majorities in 2008.

It would seem sensible, then, that a similar logic should be applied here in California. Abel Maldonado’s district is ripe for the plucking. And despite the CW, Maldonado isn’t that moderate – the Capitol Weekly scorecard rates him at only a 20 (0 is conservative, 100 is progressive) – which is an even lower rating than Tom McClintock! (For the record, Jeff Denham rated only a 5.) On AB 32 – one of the most important pieces of legislation passed by the California legislature in a long time – Maldonado voted NO. How exactly is this someone we want to leave in office?

Greene argues that

Maldonado…is winning kudos across his Senate district for the move….[his] vote will make him palatable to independent voters and Democrats for a future statewide run. Education and labor have elephant-like memories and would be hard-pressed to find reasons to throw millions of dollars in a campaign against Maldonado, given his moderate leanings reflected in the budget vote.

This is the exact kind of thinking that was blown out of the water in 2006 – that we’ve been spending the better part of a decade fighting against. Maldonado is NOT a moderate, and one vote on the budget is by no means enough to suggest we should leave him alone.

Greene may have a point about education and labor, it’s unclear how much they plan to spend on SD-15 (and until the term limits extension initiative is decided on, we’re not going to know who the candidate is). Which brings us to another core element of the new Democratic movement we’ve been building – the need for coordination.

Markos Moulitsas Zúniga and Jerome Armstrong put this well in their 2006 book Crashing the Gate, as they documented how the various constituencies of the Democratic Party had too often refused to coordinate their strategies, and placed their trust in moderate Republicans who repeatedly sold them out instead of in Democrats who were FAR more reliable allies. They contrasted that with the experience of Colorado in 2004, where these progressive groups – from environmentalists to labor unions to educators – worked together to put Democrats in charge of that state’s once notoriously right-wing legislature.

We Californians are familiar with a similar success story – in 2005 a progressive alliance brought down a popular governor’s special election agenda. It required a lot of effort – but then, all political victories do.

It’s time we adopted such a strategy for 2008. Our goal MUST be 2/3 majorities in both houses, and we’re only two votes away in the Senate. SD-15 is a district full of Democrats, who don’t want to be betrayed by Sacramento insiders who haven’t yet caught up with the times. We want them to catch up, though – we need their help.

We have our own version of the 50 state strategy – a 58 county strategy. We have a growing netroots, and a broad and deep progressive activist structure that has delivered victories for us in the past. We have momentum on our side, and now a clear need to put more Democrats in office. Now is NOT the time to be letting any Republicans off the hook.

It may not be politic at this time for people affiliated with the Speaker’s office to be calling for the ouster of the one Republican Senator who has backed us up so far. I get that. But nor does that mean we give him a pass next year. Abel Maldonado is a smart man, he knows that his district is a Democratic district and that we’re going to come hard after him in 2008. We welcome his support on this budget – but we who live in his district are going to still work as hard as ever to kick him out of office in 2008 and replace him with an actual Democrat, one we won’t have to beg to vote the right way on a budget, one who won’t vote against global warming action, one who will rate far better than a mere 20 on the scorecard.

For nearly a hundred years, the “California Dream” has had a particular meaning: owning a detached single-family home with a bit of land around it, being able to drive anywhere you need or want to go without encountering traffic, and with enough money left over to spend on soaking up the sunshine. The cheap and widely available Model T crystallized this dream in the 1920s, combined with cheap and widely available land. The Depression wound up intensifying the dream, as Californians in bread lines and rural relief camps yearned all the more strongly for that dream they glimpsed in the Roaring Twenties. World War II provided the jobs and savings to make it a reality, and by the 1950s and 1960s the California Dream was in its Golden Age. Any white family that held down a steady job could buy a home and have more than enough left over to fill its garage with cars and its rooms with consumer baubles.

In the 1970s and 1980s the Golden Age had dimmed, as roads became crowded and housing became expensive. In response Californians tried all kinds of methods to prolong this version of their dream, from Prop 13 to NIMBY activism against new projects that were seen as ruining the detached suburban paradise, to reasserting the automobile and the freeway.

Here in the 21st century, though, this California Dream seems to have finally run its course. In Southern California especially – always the true home of this dream, its Bay Area expressions notwithstanding – cheap and available land simply no longer exists. Roads of all kinds are hopelessly clogged and new freeway lanes fill with traffic as soon as the ribbons are cut. Housing prices are beyond the reach of most Californians; only creative and ultimately dishonest lending supported real estate these last five years.

It’s fitting then that as the 20th century California Dream is dying, the 21st century Dream is slowly being born. And as two important articles in Monday’s Los Angeles Times suggest, SoCal is the birthplace of this new dream. But the old attitudes die hard, and in their meeting lies the root of the political battles that will define our adult lives.

Politics, of course, were the keys to the earlier California Dream. It took the Progressive coalition of labor, reform Democrats and Republicans, farmers, and middle-class professionals to break the power of the railroads and the large landowners over California’s economy in the 1910s; without this the easy construction of public roads and mass ownership of private homes would simply not have been possible.

Just as important was the political revolution of 1958. Sick of Republican do-nothing rule, Californians turned en masse to liberal Democrats like Pat Brown and Jesse Unruh to manage and preserve their prosperity, to build the freeways and aqueducts that sustained their suburban dream, to build the schools and colleges that would allow their kids to live the dream as well.

But when this dream ran into trouble in the 1970s, Californians faced a crossroads. Would they redefine the terms of the dream, to be more inclusive, but less focused on freeways, cars, and the single family home? Or would they find ways to artificially prolong the 1950s for as long as possible by protecting the existing homeowners at the expense of those on the outside and those not yet born? As we know, the latter course was chosen. Prop 13 created a homeowners’ veto over virtually all of state government, ensuring that California would never be able to do anything with its government that did not meet with the approval of a vocal minority of self-interested homeowners.

The 1978 system was about more than a tax revolt. It was about preserving the 1950s vision of white suburbia from any and all efforts to change it. Although Prop 13 wasn’t responsible for NIMBY efforts to kill affordable housing, or new hospitals, or LA subway lines, or urban density, it was done at the same time and for the same reasons.

The consequences are clear to us all. Our health care system is collapsing. College is unaffordable. Our roads are gridlocked and alternatives are only sporadically available. Our climate is changing for the worse – and Republicans are working to prolong all of those problems, and delay their costs for a few decades. California life has become unaffordable – only 60% of Californians own a home, with only 47% of LA County residents being homeowners. Us younger folks don’t ever expect to be able to afford a house.

Which brings me to the first of the LA Times articles, “Southern California is Becoming a Tight Fit,” which focuses on how multi-family homes like condos and apartments are now being built in larger numbers than single-family homes. Economics are the main force behind this:

Condos and apartments are cheaper to build than houses, largely because less land is required per unit.

They are also cheaper to sell or rent, and with the median price of a single-family residence in Orange County at $724,000, many potential buyers can afford only condos, [Kristine Thalman of the Cal Building Industry Association] said. They also appeal to younger buyers.

“They can live in a high-rise, go downstairs to a bar and restaurant and go to the baseball game,” she said

Greater urban density, then, IS the revised California Dream. For a wide spectrum of Californians to ever be able to afford to own their own home – long recognized as one of the keys to economic security in America – then we need more apartments and condos.

The environmental benefits of urban density should be obvious. If you can walk to the shops, to the library, or to public transportation, you’re driving less and thereby helping mitigate global warming. For many of us younger Californians, this is a preferred way of living. I much prefer living in an apartment building to the ranch home in Orange County I grew up in, being able to walk to where I need to go instead of having to drive everywhere. The popularity of cities like San Francisco and Oakland and central LA with people my age is proof I’m not just a lone nut.

But in neighborhoods where this new density is being built, like Studio City and Sherman Oaks, residents who still cling to the 20th century version of the California Dream are trying to strangle the new 21st century dream in its infancy:

In Studio City, where mid-century houses and small apartment buildings are being replaced by mega-condo projects, residents are worried that the village-like nature of the community will be squashed under a crush of large new buildings and thousands of new residents….

“We’re just trying very hard to preserve some semblance of human-scale life here,” said Barbara Burke, who is a vice president of the Studio City Neighborhood Council but who said she was speaking as a homeowner. “The congestion is huge.”

The idea that only low-density suburbs provide “human-scale life” is belied by the experiences of cities from Paris to Philadelphia, from Manhattan to Mexico City. But the notion that suburban homeowners have some sort of absolute right to that lifestyle, that they have a political veto over any attempts to shift urban planning in a newer direction, remains strong. Until we can convince these homeowners that they have nothing to fear from the new density, that only with density can any kind of California Dream realistically exist in the 21st century, they’re going to continue to fight us, and try and prolong the 1950s as long as they can, no matter the cost.

This LA Times piece raises an important point, however – that greater density in SoCal also tends to bring greater traffic congestion. What is BADLY needed is an alternative to the car – public transportation that serves these new densities, that is quick, efficient, and effective in getting residents where they want or need to go.

And that takes to the other article I wanted to highlight, also from the Times: “LA Could Look to Denver For its Transit Template.” The article explains the Denver metro area’s 2004 decision to begin the FasTracks project:

In November 2004, voters in the Denver metro region went to the polls and, much to the surprise of some political observers, decided to tax themselves to begin the nation’s largest ongoing expansion of mass transit.

If all goes as planned, the Denver region is expected to build 119 miles of light rail and commuter rail by 2016. Among the projects are six new lines from Denver to the suburbs, including one to the airport, the extension of two other light-rail lines and a new rapid transit bus line.

It’s a relatively unusual approach. Constrained by a lack of money, most cities build one or maybe two lines at a time. In Denver, they’re betting the entire system can be built at once.

Building it all at once is costly, but key – instead of a piecemeal line by line approach, an entire system provides a ready network that will allow residents of new urban density to move around the region with a significantly reduced dependence on the automobile.

Could LA adopt a similar approach? The article notes that in 1980 voters had attempted to do exactly that, voting to tax themselves to build RTD’s (now MTA) ambitious rail and subway plan. But this plan immediately ran into resistance from the NIMBY forces, who successfuly asserted a homeowner veto over this farsighted plan. LA’s subway to the sea was halted in its tracks by Westside opposition, for example, in the mid-1980s. But that opposition has now disappeared, with Henry Waxman working to lift the federal injunction on tunneling in the area, and cities like Beverly Hills clamoring for a rail line extension to their town.

The problem now facing LA is financial. The article notes that Antonio Villaraigosa has kicked around the idea of bringing a financing measure to voters. But why shouldn’t the state be expected to help develop the 21st century California Dream, as it did in the 20th century?

Localities cannot build the infrastructure that the new California Dream needs. The state must help. Democrats understand this, but Republicans actively are fighting it. And that brings us to the ultimate point I wanted to make, to show how this new California Dream is already at the root of our politics and will be for some time.

If we are to build an affordable, economically secure, and prosperous 21st century California Dream, we need new infrastructure investment. We need a robust regional rail system for SoCal. We need expansion of BART and a revived MUNI. We need high speed rail. We need clean buses.

Republicans, however, want none of this. To voters they present a face of defending the homeowner veto, the 1978 system that says the 1950s version of the dream will be maintained forever. But in reality they want something much darker. To California Republicans, their goal is instead a homeowner aristocracy. Where government exists merely to protect those lucky few who own homes and can service that debt – and nobody else. They actively fight efforts to make homeownership affordable, to make transportation more accesible. They want to shackle Californians to their cars to benefit their oil company friends, and lock the majority of Californians out of homeownership out of selfish greed. They use the budget fight to pursue this agenda, seeking to gut environmental legislation as well as public transportation.

As Democrats, as California progressives, it is our task to fight back against this. Our task is to help build the 21st century California Dream – a sustainable society where our agricultural lands are protected so that we can eat locally, where we live in new urban densities dependent on our feet, our bikes, our trains, so that we don’t ruin the climate we stayed her to enjoy. A California where people of all classes and racial/ethnic backgrounds have the opportunity to own a home and experience the economic security that offers. This dream suffuses our politics and our personal goals. California must adapt if it is to survive. Our job is to lead that project to fruition.

I doubt I was the only Californian who had some nasty feelings of déjà vu upon seeing the reports from the horrific collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge in Minnesota. I still vividly remember Game 3 of the 1989 World Series being knocked off the air by the Loma Prieta quake, and one of the first scenes shown by the news was of the collapsed Interstate 880 in West Oakland. I also remember being rudely awoken by the 1994 Northridge quake, and seeing the footage of the collapsed portion of Interstate 10 in LA, or of the destroyed CA-14/I-5 interchange in Santa Clarita. Nearly 50 people died as a result of these events. Living in earthquake country, we are acutely aware of how susceptible our bridges are to failure.

It is rapidly becoming clear that this is a tragedy caused by the preference of tax cuts over public safety. And sadly, irresponsibly, and indefensibly, the same situation prevails here in California. Last month, Assembly Republicans demanded and received a $1.3 billion cut in transportation funding, in order to provide tax cuts to industry as a condition of approving the budget. One of the items included in that $1.3 billion cut was funding for the seismic retrofit of BART’s Transbay Tube.

In the aftermath of Northridge, California embarked upon a massive program to seismically retrofit all bridges in the freeway system. It’s hard to fathom that in just over a decade, California Republicans have gone from being a party willing to help rebuild and provide for the safety of state infrastructure to being a party that is not only willing, but demands that funds be cut to do the same thing for other elements of our transportation system.

It’s not just the Transbay Tube that needs attention. BART’s elevated tracks are just as vulnerable to seismic risk. There are thousands of non-freeway road bridges that need attention; rail bridges and other elements of our transportation system are aging. And that doesn’t even begin to include other state infrastructure, from dams to aqueducts to buildings, that have deferred maintenance piling up.

Sometimes – most times, it seems – it takes a disaster to wake up the public. The aforementioned freeway retrofit program did not begin until after the rash of quakes in the late ’80s and early ’90s. In Washington State, voters who had never seen a tax cut they didn’t like instead voted FOR a 9 cent hike in the gas tax just weeks after Hurricane Katrina revealed the need to take better care of infrastructure. Seattle voters approved a property tax hike last year to rebuild old city bridges. And of course, California voters approved several billion in bonds last year to address infrastructure needs.

Yet despite the obvious need – and proven danger – Republicans still insist on cutting funds for these in order to give their wealthy friends more tax cuts. Their recklessness on public safety, and their determination to hold up the budget to ensure it, is something Californians will have to reject at the polls.

Last night the State Senate met again to discuss the budget. And there was drama – my Senator, Abel Maldonado, broke ranks with his fellow Republicans to denounce the budget delay. He sounded noble in this quote, via  the Chronicle:

“I think a vote for this budget is a vote for a fiscally responsible plan and No. 2, it does not raise taxes,” he said. “If I lose my election because of this, that’s a price I’m willing to pay.”

Well, Abel, you’re going to lose reelection because we on the Central Coast are sick of Roadblock Republicans. Which is what we saw last night, as Maldonado’s vote for the budget was still not enough. The other 14 Republicans refused to go along, leaving the poor, the elderly, children, and schools in the lurch.

Don Perata, saying there was nothing more he could do, adjourned the Senate but told senators to stay in town in case anything happened. If senators do go home, many will be greeted with protests by the people they are seeking to harm. One also assumes that pressure will be stepped up on Jeff Denham, who has deluded himself that his path to power lies in becoming McClintock’s best friend.

What can we do about this? Some thoughts on the other side.

Democrats need to now step up their game, and treat this like the final weeks of a political campaign – complete with rallies, a coordinated media strategy, and a unified narrative. There are some specific things they need to let the public know:

1. It is the Republicans and the Republicans alone who are blocking this budget. Arnold wants it done. All the Democrats want it done. And now even a Republican state senator wants it done. Republicans are being irresponsible and reckless is holding this up.

2. The Democratic budget IS balanced. Republicans are telling the media that their cuts are necessary to restore “balance” and if this takes hold in the media, the Dems are in serious trouble. Sacramento Dems need to be pushing back on this one in particular.

3. From that, we then emphasize what the Republicans want – unnecessary and spiteful cuts to necessary public services. Cal-WORKS was a bipartisan reform program that has been a proven success. Child health care – who in their right mind would oppose this? Aid to the elderly – why do Republicans want to cut that?

4. We also remind voters that one of the core reasons behind Republican obstruction is to gut the global warming action plans that the state passed last year. They’re using hostage tactics to gut AB 32. They want the state to be totally unable to act to save our environment and mitigate our carbon output.

5. Their delaying tactics are financially irresponsible, leaving workers unpaid, schools without money on the eve of the new year, and families without health care as a result of the Republicans’ unwillingness to do their job and pass a budget.

The 2008 campaign starts today. If Dems successfully show the public that Republicans merely block effective compromise, prefer hostage tactics to good faith negotiation, want to kill our global warming law through the back door, and want to cut families and the elderly and schools off from needed funds, then we isolate them, much as the Republican Congress had isolated itself in the months leading up to their 2006 defeat.

[UPDATE] Props to the CA Majority Report, and Matt Jones in particular, who demolishes a number of the Senate Republican talking points in this excellent post.

For the first time in over 10 days the sun is out here in Monterey. But hey, after 6 years in the Emerald City, I’m used to the gray…

• Is free speech being lost in privatized SF parks, asks a Fog City Journal guest op-ed? Given how little public assembly space that city actually has, and the corresponding need for free, accessible community organizing space, this is a major concern.
• Also from FCJ: SF Supes defeat 6-5 a measure to protect the health of Bayview-Hunters Point residents who are certain they’re falling ill from dust and possibly asbestos kicked up by Lennar’s redevelopment project. This is especially ironic to me, as my dissertation is in part about the earlier fight against redevelopment in the Western Addition in the 1960s. Then, as now, the city leaders chose to defend redevelopment in spite of its harmful impacts on the residents it was ostensibly there to help.
• From the Sightline Institute comes this graph of how various kinds of cars compare in their CO2 emissions. The difference between a Prius’ emissions and those of an average passenger car are greater than the difference between that average car and an average SUV.
• LAist is beating the drums for Ron Paul – and isn’t about to apologize for it. Sigh. He’s Barry Goldwater, Grover Norquist, and James Dobson all rolled into one. I dread the moment when the corporate powerbrokers see the opportunities inherent in Ron Paul’s 1890s approach to political economy, and how it motivates many Republican netrooters.

Whenever KEXP’s online stream gets choppy, or there’s a run of songs that don’t grab my interest, I switch the iTunes over to CBC Radio 3. Awesome stuff from our friends north of 49. This morning I heard something by Kwoon, a French band that bills itself as “post-rock” (sort of like Sigur Ros). A French animator, Yannick Puig, came up with a stunning, beautiful video for their song “I Lived On the Moon” – enjoy!

One of the few constants in California history is fighting about water. And in this, the worst drought since recordkeeping began in the 1880s, the fight is shaping up to be a big one. On Tuesday Arnold went to San Luis Reservoir and announced plans for a $6 billion water bond for the November 2008 election. It is based on building 2 new dams in the Sierra and reviving the old Peripheral Canal, one of the most contentious infrastructure projects in our state’s history, going down to defeat in the 1982 election.

Dems have blocked his bill so far, and Don Perata has offered a $5 billion bond plan that steers clear of either new dams or a Peripheral Canal. But Arnold’s interest in new water storage is clear, and so it is worth examining for a moment exactly why this is not the best way to respond to a drought, to climate change.

Over the last 30 years California has repeatedly experienced drought conditions. The longest was the 1986-93 drought, which any of us who lived here or grew up then remember clearly, from dead lawns and 3-minute showers; one of the worst was in 1976-77, when Marin County had to run a hose across the Richmond Bridge to get water from East Bay MUD and SoCal pools went dry, to the delight of skateboarders.

But these are a drop in the bucket compared to megadroughts that hit this state several centuries ago. As Mike Davis recounts in his crucial environmental history of Southern California, Ecology of Fear, researchers have discovered a 200-year period of drought hit the state around the 1200s, and suspect many more exist in the historical climate record. (This is the same drought believed to have forced the dispersal of the Anasazi culture in Arizona.)

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?

Further, as Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla, of Restore the Delta, notes at the California Progress Report, the dams and especially the Peripheral Canal will likely only cause further damage to the Delta, and Arnold’s water spending priorities do absolutely nothing to address the critical need to repair obsolete and vulnerable Delta levees.

No, the solution to our worsening water woes is not to assume that we can just add storage and continue our usual ways. As with energy consumption, reduction in demand – conservation – is THE vital piece of the puzzle.

Friends of the River, a statewide water advocacy group, points out that the state’s own water assessment plan shows that conservation can eliminate the “need” for these new dams.

Some might argue that Californians are too wedded to regular carwashes and hosing down their sidewalks and taking 20 minute showers to actually reduce their water usage. But this is not so. Here in Monterey County we have successfully met water conservation goals. Californians rose to the occasion during the drought of the late ’80s and early ’90s, as they had during the ’76-’77 drought. Explain to Californians the truth of the matter, that we are facing reduced supply and may be facing it for some time to come, and they will act.

Right now California, like the rest of the country, stands at a tipping point. We now agree that climate change is real. We know it is happening and we have a pretty clear idea of what its consequences will be. And we know what we can do to help us survive it without catastrophic disruption. Californians have shown that they can conserve. Will Sacramento fully embrace that ethic, or will Arnold’s “party on, dudes” attitude prevail?