Today brings us a new Field Poll on California’s attitudes toward immigration. It makes sobering reading for the bigoted Minuteman types and should remind us who support human rights for ALL Californians that we are in the majority. From the SF Chronicle article on the poll results:

Support among California voters for legalizing undocumented immigrants rose to 83 percent from 75 percent last April…California voters increasingly oppose a federal plan for 700 more miles of border fence — with just 37 percent favoring it this year, down from 47 percent last April, the Field Poll found.

What I really liked was this quote from Angela Kelley of the National Immigration Forum:

“You guys are the most informed because you live and breathe this,” she said of California, a state with an estimated 2.5 million illegal immigrants, where more than one in four residents is foreign-born.

As we all know, “most informed” is an unfortunately relative term, with way too many state residents holding bigoted views on the subject not supported by any evidence. Still, these numbers are not just strong, but overwhelming evidence that supporting a path to legalization is shared across the political spectrum. One might even call it “post-partisan” were folks inclined (and I am not).

I hope that a good immigration plan can be passed in Congress this year. If we have to wait until 2008 then there will be more temptation for politicians to be persuaded by the bigots and haters – even though their numbers are vastly overstated, as this Field Poll proves.

In his 1998 environmental history of Southern California, Ecology of Fear, UCI radical historian Mike Davis argued that one of the major ecological threats to SoCal was massive drought. He cited recent scholarship that showed medieval California saw the Sierra snowpack drop to 25% of its norm (the 1986-93 drought saw the snowpack at 65%) for periods of over 200 years.

At the time some critics said Davis was being overblown and apocalyptic. But today’s LA Times suggests that not only was Davis right, but that we may be on the verge of such a megadrought:

The driest periods of the last century – the Dust Bowl of the 1930s and the droughts of the 1950s – may become the norm in the Southwest United States within decades because of global warming, according to a study released Thursday.

The research suggests that the transformation may already be underway. Much of the region has been in a severe drought since 2000, which the study’s analysis of computer climate models shows as the beginning of a long dry period.

As the article goes on to note, this will inevitably lead to more water wars, both among Southwestern states, as well as intrastate battles between agriculture and urbanites. These battles have, in fact, already begun. San Diego has been battling the Imperial Irrigation District for years over allocation rights, as SD needs more water for its sprawl and the Imperial Valley needs water to continue irrigating the desert. Recently SoCal water districts began paying farmers along the Colorado near Blythe to let their fields lie fallow in order to send more water to the Inland Empire. Monterey County is seeing increasingly intense battles between farmers of the “Salad Bowl of the World” and developers; and the Monterey Peninsula has been under severe water restrictions for 12 years.

Back in January a state water official was quoted in the Chronicle as stating that since the last major NorCal drought, 1976-77, the demand for water has soared. For those of you who don’t remember (or like me weren’t even alive) then, the 1977 drought saw such things like Marin County running a hose across the Richmond Bridge to tap EBMUD’s reservoirs since theirs had run dry. Obviously that will be less possible given the rapid growth in the East Bay since 1977.

Desalination is also mentioned in the article, and the authors (Alan Zarembo and Bettina Boxall) correctly note that CA will come under intense pressure to build such plants. Monterey Bay is witnessing this firsthand. The Monterey Peninsula has been under strict water limits since the state ordered them to stop pumping the Carmel River dry in 1995. To develop an alternative source of water, the region has begun planning a desalination plant right on the bay at Moss Landing. The environmental concerns are serious – after all, the entire Monterey Bay and the coastline for a hundred miles in either direction is federally protected. But it seems there is no other option.

A “permanent drought” will cause all kinds of problems for California. Mike Davis was absolutely right to strike an apocalyptic tone. Sure, it could be worse, we could be in Vegas or Phoenix…but CA is going to have to make some very hard decisions, and some significant lifestyle changes, if it is going to weather this crisis.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports a tentative agreement has been reached between the CSU faculty union and the administration. From early reports this seems a significant victory for the teachers:

A labor showdown between the California State University system and its faculty union was averted Tuesday with a tentative accord on a new contract that provides a guaranteed pay hike of 20.7 percent over four years for professors, lecturers, coaches and librarians.

“We expect our members to ratify this. We think it’s a good deal,” [union president John] Travis said. “We pretty much got everything that we asked for.”

What I like even more about this is that part-time and adjunct faculty are included in the wage increase, although the article says the rate of increase for those instructors – currently more than half of the overall CSU faculty – is undetermined.

This is fantastic news for the CSU workers.

In today’s San Francisco Chronicle, Matier and Ross report on a J. Moore Methods poll that shows Jerry Brown with a huge lead among theoretical Democratic 2010 gubernatorial candidates. The poll has to be taken with a whole shaker of salt – it’s only 2007, no candidates have declared, this is really just a poll of name recognition, etc.

But by a clause in CA’s term limits law, Edmund G. Brown, Jr. is eligible to run for a third term in office should he wish to return to it. In the M&R story he said he had “no plans” to run in 2010. Still, the 31% support – far outdistancing Antonio Villaraigosa who had 17% in the poll (although becoming the clear favorite when Brown’s name was not included) – makes this at least interesting Sunday morning coffee and donut speculation.

Jerry Brown was one of only four Democrats elected governor in CA in the 20th century, and was greatly helped by sharing a name with his popular father Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, as well as capitalizing on voter discontent with Reagan’s governorship in the 1974 election.

However, it’s my view that Brown was not a successful governor, and failed to provide leadership during the most pivotal moments in recent CA history. Brown entered office with some interesting ideas, but found his most immediate task to be dealing with a protracted economic crisis. Brown’s solution was austerity, cutting or freezing state spending on everything from social services to freeway projects. Half-finished offramps were left hanging in the air as Brown declared an “era of limits.”

While he was not totally wrong in recognizing the need to change, he failed to grasp the voter mood. His spending cuts led the state to amass a sizable surplus – over $1 billion by the 1977 legislative session. Meanwhile inflation had led local governments to hike property taxes to provide for local services, stoking a voter revolt over taxes.

Brown’s failure was to not find a way to cut property taxes or spend the surplus to forestall Prop 13, written and passed in 1978. In his 1977 State of the State address he called on the Legislature to provide tax relief, but Brown was unable to bring a fractious Democratic majority to agreement on the subject. And since he was unwilling to spend the surplus, voters saw the situation as absurd. Worse, critics of Prop 13 who pointed out its eventually disastrous effects on government finances were told by tax revolters that the state could simply use its billion dollar surplus to bail out local governments.

Facing reelection in 1978 Brown came out in favor of Prop 13, though not enthusiastically and after an earlier period of opposition. It passed by an overwhelming margin in June, and Brown knew that if he were to be reelected, he would have to embrace it. He did in fact use the surplus funds to bail out local governments, but though this was only a short-term fix, it set the precedent that the state has been following ever since, as more and more of the general fund has been going to pay for local government costs that property taxes used to cover.

Moreover, state projects never recovered from Brown’s spending freeze. A few were finished, but many others were postponed, a delay that’s now lasted over 30 years. While CA’s problems cannot be wholly laid at Brown’s feet, he did fail to provide leadership to solve them.

The above historical detour is valuable in shedding light on what kind of governor Brown might be. He has always preferred a centrist course, and though he is not especially friendly to corporations, neither has he been sufficiently skeptical of their power. His populism is real, but it has never found a clear manifestation in politics or policy. His term as Oakland’s mayor did not see significant improvement in its fortunes, although as anyone who’s driven down 880 near Broadway knows, he did prove a friend to developers.

My gut tells me Brown will not run in 2010, but in discussing this theoretical possibility, we can also determine what we DO want from our gubernatorial candidates. A commitment to single-payer universal health care seems paramount. Some sort of plan to fix this state’s chronic financial problems also would be good – a gubernatorial campaign built around a well thought-out and well-researched proposal could generate significant political momentum of its own. All governors who have taken office since Brown left in 1982 have merely offered as-needed solutions, which have typically only worsened our budget problems.

Our gubernatorial candidates need to address infrastructure questions, from transportation to water, in a way that emphasizes sustainability, not sprawl. They need to have a good grasp on the state’s economic situation and have some idea of where we can promote job growth for the next decade. They also need to be committed to equal rights, whether it’s equal marriage or protecting all immigrants’ human rights.

The above isn’t an ideal, it’s instead a sensible list of goals. Both the Westly and Angelides campaigns offered much of the above, although were inadequate on the long-range infrastructure and budget issues. Their 2006 platforms should be considered a minimum benchmark for 2010, while we also help build the more long-range and visionary answers to budgets and infrastructure that these times demand.

As noted here a few days back, the California Transportation Commission voted earlier this week to  allocate billions more from the recent highway bond to urban projects, including the widening of the 405 through the Sepulveda Pass.

Unfortunately, to do this, the CTC robbed the rural Peter to pay for the urban Paul’s freeway widening, and the folks in Mendocino, San Luis Obispo, and Fontana are *pissed*. Mendocino, which lost funding for the Willits bypass on Highway 101, had this to say, from the Ukiah Daily Record:

“This is clearly a blatant display of power politics disguised as a competitive process. There’s not any other way of saying it,” Dow said, adding that the nine governor-appointed commissioners, not one of whom lives north of the Golden Gate Bridge, acted as if their function was “to bring home the bacon to whatever community they came from,” rather than address the entire state’s needs.

As elfling pointed out last week here at Calitics:

I lived in Los Angeles for most of my life. The traffic in Willits easily compares to the worst of LA. At some times of day the town is in total gridlock. It’s a safety issue, since there are no alternate routes, and logging trucks and semis compete with people driving to Safeway or ambulances trying to get to the hospital.

If you are driving between San Francisco and Eureka, I suggest allocating 30 minutes to travel the 5 miles through Greater Willits.

Steve Lopez, at the LA Times’ Bottleneck Blog, also describes how Fontana feels the shaft:

Said S.B. supervisor Josie Gonzales: “I think it’s definitely a sign of big government versus small government. As the Inland Empire is becoming a force, we are competing one on one with Los Angeles for the same funds. We are a metropolis in the making, and we are trying not to experience the same problems as Los Angeles.”

Who else lost out? Lopez again tallies the casualties:

San Luis Obispo County watched in vain as $58 million to widen a bridge on Highway 101 across the Santa Maria River evaporated.

This bridge is OLD, and narrow, and a bottleneck between Santa Maria, one of the state’s fastest growing cities, and San Luis Obispo’s South County, cities like Nipomo and Arroyo Grande.

A recommendation that Imperial County get $29 million to build a freeway bypass in Brawley was rejected.

Imperial County, one of the state’s poorest, as well as its most heavily Latino, could have used this as a way to spur economic development and to better connect the El Centro-Calexico-Mexicali region north to the Coachella Valley.

Now I’m not saying that the urban areas couldn’t use the money, or that freeways are the best method of rural transportation (although as elfling notes, the Willits bottleneck IS a huge safety problem as well as an inconvenience). But it does seem unfortunate that urban areas won out over deserving rural projects.

I don’t believe the answer is for us to get involved in a fundamentally neoliberal argument of trying to determine who wins and who loses. We need to find ways to rebuild our infrastructure that don’t force urban and rural areas to fight it out.

Further, this suggests to me that the state and the metro areas need to work more closely on crafting solutions for moving people that don’t rely on freeways. You can only widen the 405 or the 101 so much, before you have a freeway too wide to be functional (and nevermind the inevitable homeowner revolts such a project would cause).

It doesn’t have to look like a dream map of SoCal mass transit – although that’d be nice – but to avoid these unfortunate fights, either we “grow the pie” or we find other ways to move people.

Of course, in the end, it comes back to things out of the control of cities and metro areas. The state needs to sort out its financial priorities, and with a federal government wasting nearly $500 billion on stupid wars, money that could otherwise have been used to build both the Willits Bypass and the subway to the sea, along with a whole bunch of other progressive land use projects.

(Mmmmm… Thinky! – promoted by jsw)

Yesterday’s LA Times had an intriguing – and, judging by the e-mail stats, popular – article on the future of toll roads in the state:

There is emerging consensus in the Capitol that the state should follow the path already blazed elsewhere and look to tolls to help bankroll new roads, public and private…

…
Under pressure from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has been pushing for the state to start shifting the cost – and some control – of road building to the private sector, lawmakers last May authorized government agencies to build four demonstration projects in partnership with investment banks, shipping companies and other businesses.

The companies would put up money for the projects, and in return could end up owning a share of them. Or at least be guaranteed some of the revenues they generate.

What is the significance of this to progressives like us? Well, let me explain.

California’s political history, and the system we live with today, was shaped through a titanic battle between the people and those who controlled transportation – railroads, to be exact.

The grip of the Octopus – the Southern Pacific – had nearly a monopolistic control on the movement of goods and people in California. Through this control they used rates to generate huge profits on the backs of farmers, workers, and professionals. Through their wealth they controlled state politics – Leland Stanford was one of CA’s US Senators in the late 1800s, and most legislators of both parties were on the SP’s payroll.

The backlash to the railroads shaped California progressivism. Labor, farmers, and urban professionals got together beginning in the 1890s to make reforms to the state’s political system designed to break the power of the railroads and to return some control of government to the people. This culminated in the 1910 election of Hiram Johnson as governor, and in 1911 Johnson pushed through reforms that gave us secret ballots, nonpartisan elections, crossfiling, the initiative, referendum, and recall. Although state elections are partisan and the hated crossfiling system, used by Republicans to screw Democrats, was ended in 1954, the legacy of the progressive reforms is something most of you who know CA politics is clear.

In the 1950s, then, when the state was laying out its automobile network, it insisted on public ownership. The memories of the fight against the SP were still that strong 40 years later. A similar view prevailed at the federal level, so when in 1956 federal funds rained on the state to build the interstates, and CA undertook the construction of its freeway network, there was consensus that the system had to be owned by the public, to prevent it from being used by private companies for their own enrichment and for the screwing of the public.

It’s against that backdrop that I read this article, and was disturbed to read things like State Sen. Alan Lowenthal, Democrat from CA-27, supporting the idea of giving private enterprise access to our public infrastructure:

We’re used to free roads and everything being free. That is a 1950s model. If we want to move forward, we are going to have to head in a different direction.

The reason we are used to them being “free” (and as several commentors at the LA Times pointed out, we do pay gas taxes, so the roads are hardly “free”) is because the state rightly went down the road of public ownership in the ’50s. Just because gas taxes haven’t kept pace with inflation and the cost of infrastructure doesn’t mean the theory is flawed.

But the true concern isn’t putting tolls on public roads – we have tolls on the Bay Area bridges, it works fine. The reason it works is because that money stays in the state and goes to other transportation projects. The $4 toll on the Bay Bridge goes to pay for bus and ferry service, as well as the cost of the new East Span. The $5 toll on the Golden Gate Bridge accomplishes the same end.

Nor is the concern here a desire to protect a state’s ruinous obsession with automobile travel. Although gas taxes are a better way to encourage environmentally friendly transportation – the worse mileage you get, or the more you drive, the more tax you pay – tolls could have their place too in encouraging better travel habits, especially if the tolls are partly used to finance mass transit.

No, the real concern is to prevent the turning over of our public sector to private companies interested in profit, not service. The article cites Indiana as an example, where the Indiana Turnpike was turned over to Cintra, a joint Australian-Spanish consortium, to run in exchange for a cash payment of a few billion dollars. Cintra will operate the tollroad, set the tolls as they like, and reap a profit. There are some guarantees that they must maintain the infrastructure well, but as we have seen in other instances, money can often be used to influence government to look the other way.

So instead of paying tolls to help provide buses, ferries, and trains, or tolls to help improve CA-99 through the Central Valley or help truck traffic move more smoothly out of the Port of LA-Long Beach, we would be paying tolls to, as I cited above, “investment banks.”

What is progressive about that?

Following such an approach leaves us running the very real risk of recreating the disastrous situation CA found itself in over a hundred years ago, when our transportation network – the bedrock of a modern economy – was in the control of a corporation led by people aptly named “robber barons” who used their leverage over the system to transfer wealth from working Californians to themselves.

The article itself, and the comments to it at the LA Times, show that many Californians instinctively oppose this shift. In Indiana, Democrats led the fight to stop the privatization of their turnpike. In California Dems would have a great deal of public support were they to lead a similar movement – instead they seem to be going in the wrong direction.

The big picture is always a good place to close an essay. Democrats have only elected four governors in California since 1900. Two of them were named Edmund G. Brown, and the other two had troubled administrations that ended after a single term. For whatever reason, our strength in the Legislature and our preference for Dems in federal races has not always translated into victories in the governor’s mansion. And one of those four Dems who DID win in the 20th century – Pat Brown – left as part of his stunning legacy a public infrastructure.

If Democrats are to change this in the 21st century, they need to be offering a clearer plan for managing the state’s growth, and especially its transportation woes. To go down the road of turning those public assets over to investment banks and corporations – in some cases foreign corporations – is to both alienate voters as well as make some catastrophically bad choices about transportation policy. California Democrats can do better.

Frontpaged at My Left Wing and posted at Daily Kos

Some Democrats get it.

Like Gavin Newsom.

In 2003 he was elected mayor of San Francisco, narrowly beating his Green Party opponent. Since then he has shown that being Democrat doesn’t necessarily mean being an idiot, collaborating with imperialism and ignoring the needs of their constituents, as his strong stand for gay marriage showed.

Now he is proposing a plan to offer all San Franciscans health care. It would make San Francisco the first city in the nation to do this, and if successful, would greatly boost his career.

The plan is not quite universal health coverage – not everyone is forced to join it. But it does expand the already-existing San Francisco Health Plan, designed to care for low-income residents, to include anybody living in SF who needs care – regardless of income, immigration status, or pre-existing medical condition. Under the proposal, anyone who needs care will be able to get it in the city at a low, subsidized cost. An example of how the SFHP already works:

Elaine Cain, 63, said monthly Social Security checks combined with her salary from a part-time job as a gift wrapper at Macy’s don’t give her enough to buy insurance — but she’s perfectly happy with the system in place now for the uninsured.

When she’s sick and needs to see a doctor, Cain pays $35 per visit at San Francisco General Hospital, and two years ago she had surgery there — for $150. She’s currently undergoing occupational therapy for a hand injury and pays nothing for three sessions every week.

“I fell into such a good thing, it’s not even funny,” Cain said. “You do have to wait a lot for appointments, but I’m so happy with General Hospital. I’ve never had such wonderful help and care.”

There are three main issues surrounding any universal health care proposal: funding, resources, and wait times.

Funding

Funding is the big one. It’s one thing to convince San Franciscans, or Americans, that universal health care is a good idea. It’s quite another to figure out how to – and who will – pay.

SF’s plan would ask those receiving coverage to pay for care. The rates and premiums would be a sliding scale – someone earning $50,000 could pay over $2,000 a year, but someone making less money would pay around $3 a month. As the above selection showed, there would still be costs for hospital visits and surgeries, but they are lower than what you’d pay with many HMOs, and again those too would be on a sliding scale.

Capitalism usually involves businesses getting rich by exploiting workers. This means that in a capitalist system there is always pressure to foist the burdens of providing services onto the average person.

We see this battle being played out in SF where it is still being debated how much businesses will be asked to contribute to this system via taxation. The local Chamber of Commerce would prefer businesses not be asked to contribute much if anything, but legislators to Newsom’s left, like Supervisor Tom Ammiano, want to require businesses to pay for employee health care and help contribute to the SFHP system.

This debate is currently being played out all across the globe. In Canada, Britain, and Germany, to name just a few places, fights over funding universal health care are dominating politics. It will be played out here too, especially as conservatives seek to link health care to taxes. They’ll most certainly argue that universal health care is bad because it would raise taxes, and seek to play on widespread anti-tax sentiment to defeat the plans.

In a city like San Francisco this may not seem like a concern, but even there taxes are a subject of debate, and many are loath to raise them. For something like universal health care, residents will likely be willing to do it, but whether this will hold true across the nation remains to be seen. It’s important to keep this in mind – universal health care is tied to the tax question, and until we turn around opinions on taxes, we may either never get universal care or will get a flawed system that rests on the backs of people unable to pay.

Resources

Another important element is resources – are there enough doctors and hospital beds to provide everyone with care? In San Francisco the answer seems to be a cautious yes – the city has several excellent hospitals, and is home to UCSF, the University of California’s campus devoted exclusively to medicine.

But more may be needed:

But if the plan is expanded to cover even a portion of the 82,000 adults believed to be uninsured, the network of 400 physicians will probably need to grow significantly, said Crystal Hayling, president and chief executive of the Blue Shield of California Foundation and a task force member.

This of course returns us to the financing question – in order to recruit doctors, especially in one of the nation’s most expensive cities, the pay will have to be good, meaning more money will have to be put into the system.

Or they could just treat doctors like teachers, pay them a low wage and hope they find a way to scrape by. But that would be more of what we don’t need – expecting people to supplant real wages with moral wages.

Wait times

Finally, we come to the issue of wait times. Americans are used to decades of consumerism, underpinned by the concept of instant gratification – if you are made to wait for something, you feel it’s wrong, somehow inferior, you get frustrated and annoyed. Particularly with health care. Stories of long waits for non-essential surgeries in Canada were circulated to help defeat Clinton’s proposal in 1994.

Wait times are a big issue in Canada, where provinces like Alberta are using the issue of long waits to try and weasel their way out of their obligations under the Canada Health Act and allow private care. In Britain they are also a major issue and the Labour government has tried to reduce wait times, not always with great success, to fend off Conservative attempts to further dismantle the system (it must be said that one reason Labour efforts have failed is their decision to rely partly on private financing to reduce wait times).

Once again this is tied to funding, and to the availability of resources. But if we’re going to be able to expand something like SF is proposing here to all of California and all the nation, we’ll need to make sure wait times are low.

Newsom ain’t perfect, and I still think Matt Gonzalez would have made a better mayor. But Newsom is doing the right thing here. Liberalism and the left are strongest in America’s cities. We should be turning our cities into laboratories of progressive policymaking. If we don’t control the federal government and have to battle to maintain a hold on state governments, we need to be doing all that we can to use our power in the cities to get good things like this done, to prove to America that liberal ideas are good and viable.

Universal health care is an excellent idea, and I hope we can use this as a starting point to get other cities in on the act. Time for me to see what Seattle is thinking about all this…