The story – it shouldn’t even be called a “scandal” – unfolding about Joe Sestak’s “job offer” from the White House is only interesting as far as it serves as further evidence of the basic political incompetence of Rahm Emanuel. But since the national news media is back to its usual ways of being the partners of the Republican Party in trying to generate scandal against Democrats, it’s worth exploring this whole “job offer” concept in a bit more detail.

Specifically, the fact that President Ronald Reagan tried to offer a job to sitting U.S. Senator S.I. Hayakawa, a Republican from California, in advance of the 1982 election.

Matt Ortega unearthed this article from 1981 about the offer made by the Reagan Administration ahead of a contested GOP primary that year:

Sen. S.I. Hayakawa on Wednesday spurned a Reagan Administration suggestion that if he drops out of the crowded Republican Senate primary race in California, President Reagan would find him a job.

“I’m not interested,” said the 75-year old Hayakawa. “I do not want to be an ambassador, and I do not want an administration post.”

Polls in California show Hayakawa trailing other candidates seeking the GOP Senate nomination in next year’s primary election.

Among Republicans seeking Hayakawa’s seat are Rep. Barry Goldwater Jr., R-Calif, Maureen Reagan, the president’s daughter, and Pete Wilson, the mayor of San Diego.

Hayakawa was elected to the Senate in 1976, beating incumbent Democrat John Tunney.

Before the election, Hayakawa became nationally known after taking a tough line against student demonstrators at San Francisco State College where he was acting president.

A fuller version of the article indicates it was Ed Rollins who made the offer to Hayakawa.

The backstory is this: Hayakawa made a name for himself in 1968 as the president of San Francisco State University who fought against a long, bitter student strike that year. He was held up as a “law and order” figure and during the 1970s espoused his own brand of conservative politics, becoming a better known figure as a result. In 1976 he ran as a Republican candidate for US Senate, taking on and beating one-term incumbent Democrat John Tunney (who had himself barely survived a primary challenge from Tom Hayden).

Senator Hayakawa was something of an oddball, and seen increasingly as out of touch with his constituents. Republicans crowded the primary field, and Governor Jerry Brown declined to run for a third term in 1982 in order to take on the vulnerable Hayakawa, leading to the Reagan Administration’s job offer.

As it turned out, Hayakawa eventually decided not to run for re-election, but didn’t get a Reagan Administration job. San Diego mayor Pete Wilson won the GOP primary and beat Jerry Brown that November to take the US Senate seat, becoming the last Republican to be elected to the US Senate from California.

Of course, as with amnesty for undocumented immigrants, this is likely another move by President Reagan that his latter-day acolytes will refuse to acknowledge in their zeal to bring down Democrats.

We’ve been arguing here at Calitics that budget cuts merely worsen the state’s real problem, which is the economic downturn. Instead of addressing unemployment, budget cuts are increasing the ranks of the unemployed. That further delays economic recovery and worsens the state budget deficit.

Now we have some academic backup for that common sense explanation. The UC Berkeley Labor Center has produced a study on the impact of Arnold’s budget that shows just how much economic damage the governor’s plans would do to the state:

We estimate that the Governor’s proposed budget would result in a loss of 331,000 full-time equivalent jobs, increasing the unemployment rate by 1.8 percentage points. More than half of the jobs lost would be in the private sector. Because many of the jobs lost are part time, the actual number of Californians affected would be much greater. The number of jobs estimated to be lost is much greater than the entire employment growth for the state projected by the Legislative Analyst’s Office for 2011.

An alternative approach that mixed spending cuts with $5.4 billion in targeted revenue increases would save an estimated 244,000 jobs compared with the Governor’s proposal.

The greatest part of the job loss due to the Governor’s budget would result from cuts to major health and human service programs that bring in significant federal matching funds.

This evidence confirms what we know from history – that Hooverism merely worsens economic problems in a severe recession. Many in Sacramento, and especially in the media, are still stuck in an obsolete, outdated 1970s mentality that budget cuts are a necessary solution to any recession. It’s debatable whether that was ever correct, even 30 years ago, but it is beyond question that budget cuts now are probably the worst possible solution to our state’s budget and economic crisis.

The UCB Labor Center study is further evidence in support of the proposed budget solutions coming from both the Senate and the Assembly Democratic caucuses. We can and should discuss and debate whether the specific means employed in each of those budget proposals are the right ones, but both have the basic approach right – we cannot allow these cuts to happen.

California’s economic prosperity and our future are on the line. These cuts will worsen the recession, causing damage to a far greater number of Californians than is assumed. The governor’s budget may have been designed to wedge the middle-class and the poor, but as this study indicates, the middle-class has every incentive to oppose these cuts as well. Any increase in unemployment will reverberate around the rest of the economy, leading to middle-class job losses and further cuts to schools and other things the middle class cares about.

This study and its conclusions deserve a wide audience. Let’s hope it gets it.

Well, well, well. For years now we’ve been hearing that California’s budget problems exist because we “overspend.” Others claim it’s because our taxes are so high that companies and jobs move to low-tax states. Texas is often held out by those making these claims as an example of what California should emulate – a low-tax, low-services, low-spending state that supposedly has government figured out.

Except they don’t. California faces a budget deficit of about $18 billion. And how much is Texas’s budget deficit?

That’s right. $18 billion:

But as the state’s budget shortfall widens-to as much as $18 billion, or about 20% of the next two-year budget, according to the state legislature’s latest analysis released earlier this month-critics are complaining that Mr. Perry’s policies have left the state with little room to reduce spending.

“There is no way that they will be able to come up with $18 billion in cuts,” said Eva DeLuna Castro, a senior budget analyst at the Center for Public Policy Priorities, a nonprofit that advocates for low-income Texans. “They would have to shut down our prison system.”

Suddenly Texas doesn’t look like such a great model for California. They don’t have an income tax, yet their revenues have collapsed just as California’s have. Texas spends a lot less per resident, with a much smaller level of public services, yet they are still facing a budget deficit about the size of our own.

This news should put to an end once and for all the lie that California’s budget deficit stems from overspending, or that we should cut our income taxes to “stabilize” revenues, or that we should follow Texas’s model of low services.

Instead what Texas shows us is that the real problem – as in Greece – is that taxes are too low, especially on the higher end of the income bracket. Higher taxes help balance the budget, sustain the services we need to attract and retain companies.

Think that last part is nonsense? Just ask two California companies that are moving to Colorado:

As for quality of life, “there’s less traffic, less stress, the people are more grounded here. My kids aren’t going to school where all the kids drive Porsches and Mercedes,” he said. “I should have moved sooner.”…

One final thought from Hansen: “It’s not that we hated Orange County … We love it. But here we’re not spending our time sitting on a freeway. There are trails right by our office.”

The OC Register article wants to make it sound like Colorado’s lower taxes were the key driver. But it sure doesn’t sound that way from the quotes. Traffic is a truly massive economic problem here in California, causing lost time and lost money. Had these business owners not had to deal with traffic, because we’d spent our money building alternatives, they may well have decided to stay, since they clearly enjoyed life in the OC.

Most decisions made by companies about where to locate their businesses don’t revolve around taxes. Cost of living, ability to recruit and retain skilled employees, quality of local schools, infrastructure, and other similar issues tend to dominate the list. Since California has systematically starved those services of revenue, it’s becoming harder to create the jobs that will produce recovery.

What we’re seeing is the “Texas is better” model proven to be the lie that it is. California should look to the model of Pat Brown, who understood that investment in our state’s services, schools and infrastructure produced prosperity, for the way out of our budget and economic crisis.

As the special election here in the 15th State Senate district gets underway – the primary is still scheduled for June 22 and unlikely to change – it’s clear that offshore oil drilling is one of the primary issues of the campaign. And Sam Blakeslee, the Republican candidate and former leader of the Assembly Republican caucus, is on the wrong side of public opinion on this key issue.

John Laird is out with his first TV ad of the campaign, which you can view at right. In the ad, Laird contrasts Blakeslee’s support for drilling with his own work opposing drilling and protecting the coastline and the jobs that depend on our beaches and oceans not being fouled by oil slicks, as we’re seeing happen in the Gulf of Mexico.

Here’s the background. Sam Blakeslee has extensive connections to the oil industry. He worked for Exxon as an executive, hired by the company in 1989, the same year of the notorious Exxon Valdez spill. He has received tens of thousands of dollars in campaign donations from oil companies, including BP. And in his time in the Assembly, Blakeslee has embraced offshore drilling.

In 2009 he played a key role in attempting to reopen the California coast to offshore drilling, 40 years after the 1969 oil spill caused such widespread damage to the Santa Barbara coast. Blakeslee, whose district includes coastal San Luis Obispo and much of coastal Santa Barbara County, took up the fight for the Tranquillon Ridge project. Here’s how the Santa Barbara Independent explained it last fall:

Assembly minority leader Sam Blakeslee (R-San Luis Obispo) resurrected legislation to authorize the lease, using what is called a “gut and amend” move; that’s Sacramento-speak for grabbing a pending bill, which typically is going nowhere, removing all of its language and substituting the text of the new measure, bypassing pesky procedures for actually introducing a bill.

The bill was AB 1536, and although it thankfully died in committee, it would have opened the California coast to drilling long enough to allow the controversial Tranquillon Ridge project to go forward.

Blakeslee isn’t exactly proud of his work to open California’s coast to offshore drilling. Last summer, you may recall, the Tranquillon Ridge project was included in the July 2009 budget deal. The bill allowing that drilling was shot down by the Assembly, with 43 votes against it. Blakeslee, of course, voted “yes.” But you can’t find the record of that vote – it was immediately expunged. As Capitol Weekly reported at the time, sources claimed the vote was expunged at Blakeslee’s request.

Sam Blakeslee is willing to risk the economic livelihoods of his constituents and put their coastline and oceans in jeopardy in order to please his oil company friends. John Laird stands strongly against this.

Laird has a long record of opposition to offshore drilling. When he was a Santa Cruz city councilmember he led the effort for a successful strategy to block offshore drilling by requiring a vote of the people to construct drilling facilities along the coast – a strategy that was eventually adopted by 26 local governments in California. And in the Assembly, he authored a bill to strengthen California’s oil spill response funding.

There are many other reasons why we need to help send John Laird to Sacramento. He is a strong progressive leader, particularly on the state budget. He fought against Arnold’s cuts, and has proposed sensible methods to fund our core services, such as using a small increase in the vehicle license fee to fully fund state parks – and enable Californians to go to the parks for free.

Laird was a leader in the LGBT equality movement, authoring a series of bills strengthening anti-discrimination law and providing for  training on how to stop discrimination and hate in our schools. And of course, if he and Anna Caballero get elected to the Senate this year, Democrats would have a 2/3rds majority, enabling them to end Republican obstruction in that chamber.

On those merits alone, Laird deserves our strong support in the SD-15 race. When you add in Blakeslee’s reckless support of offshore drilling – especially when we are witnessing a massive, devastating tragedy in the Gulf of Mexico that came as a result of offshore drilling – it becomes clear that John Laird is the right person to protect our coastline and beat back the “drill, baby, drill” crowd that Blakeslee represents.

If you want to help get this ad a wide airing, or otherwise want to support the campaign, you can donate on ActBlue. More information about the campaign is available at LairdforSenate.com.

Note: I do some work for the Laird for Senate campaign

The San Francisco Chronicle’s article on the Alameda parcel tax for schools vote posits a false choice. The article by Carolyn Jones makes it sound as if Alamedans have to decide between their schools and their businesses. In reality, the choice is between good schools and strong businesses on the one hand, and bad schools and declining business on the other.

If it passes, many small business owners, already struggling with the recession, say they’ll be forced to close, stripping Alameda of its mom-and-pop charm. If the measure fails, the district’s superintendent warns that half the schools in town would close.

“If this doesn’t pass, all bets are off in Alameda,” said Encinal High School Principal Mike Cooper, a fifth-generation Alamedan. “We’re watching the collapse of public education. We’ve been trying to make this work, but something’s got to give.”

Business owners agree that at this point, all bets are off.

“If this passes, then God help us, there’ll be no end,” said Ed Hirshberg, who owns numerous commercial properties in Alameda but lives in Oakland. “The schools want more money from us, but the problem is there’s no money available.”

The article goes on to make it clear that to most Alameda residents, good schools are the foundation of the community. And that makes sense – people want a good future for their kids, want them to be educated, want them to have opportunities and a better life. Only a sick and demented human being would choose profits over that better life for their kids.

Alameda businesses should want that as well. If Alameda schools close, it could trigger a flight of parents with children to other districts that have not been so reticent to fund their schools. And Alameda businesses will suffer as a result, when their prosperous customers, especially those with families, leave.

So the complaints of Alameda businesses are misguided. The parcel tax is necessary for their own survival as well as that of their own community. However, Alamedans do have a very good point when they say it should never have come to this:

The 9,500-student district has managed to scrape through the past few years, but with the latest round of state cutbacks, the district now finds itself on the precipice of disaster, Superintendent Kirsten Vital said.

“It’s devastating and abysmal,” she said. “We’re looking to Alameda voters because the state of California is not funding education as it should.”

That is exactly right. Because of Republican opposition to taxes, schools and students have been punished with massive cuts. Of course, poll after poll after poll shows that big majorities of Californians will support new taxes to prevent cuts to schools. If Sacramento wanted to stop cities like Alameda from having to raise local taxes, they could do so by proposing or even enacting a statewide tax increase on the wealthiest Californians and the largest businesses to support schools. It will pass.

It’s time for the defenders of public education in California to make this move. CTA has been planning to bring the corporate tax breaks to the ballot, but that’s just $2 billion a year. The public is willing to approve much more, especially if the upper income tax brackets of the Pete Wilson era were restored, especially if the corporate tax rates of the 1980s were restored.

Of course, one wonders if Alameda businesses that are complaining about the Measure E proposal support these kind of solutions. If not, it’s time they did so, because their survival depends on California restoring and improving the funding we give to our schools. There’s no justification for being cheap with our children’s future.

This is welcome news from Capitol Alert:

Senate Democrats today plan to roll out a $4.9 billion package of tax hikes on cars, alcohol, income and corporate profits.

According to a budget committee analysis, the Democratic 2010-11 plan includes:

— Suspending corporate tax breaks scheduled to begin Jan. 1 (worth $2.05 billion)

— Extending a 0.25 percent income tax surcharge that is scheduled to end Dec. 31. (worth $1 billion)

— Extending a $217 per dependent reduction in the state’s dependent income tax credit, also scheduled to end Dec. 31 (worth $430 million)

— Raising the vehicle-license fee on cars 0.35 percent starting July 1 of this year (worth $1.2 billion)

— Increasing the state’s alcohol tax by an inflation-adjusted amount; this rate currently remains at 1991 levels (worth $210 million)

Democrats see the tax hikes as a way to avoid safety net cuts proposed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to bridge a $19.1 billion deficit in 2010-11. The Republican governor and GOP legislators already have said they refuse to consider new taxes.

So it’s clear that Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg has been paying attention to what went on in Oregon and Arizona, and is not afraid to buck the completely inaccurate conventional wisdom that the public doesn’t support new taxes – they DO support those taxes, including to prevent health and human services cuts, as proved by last week’s PPIC poll.

We can discuss whether these are indeed the best kind of tax increases to embrace. But we as progressives should keep that debate in context. The most important question is whether we have new revenues or not. Once you answer “yes” it’s much easier to decide what the revenues are.

The Senate proposal includes eliminating a new corporate tax break, restoring the taxes to 2008 levels, and extending a current income tax surcharge. It also includes a VLF increase and new alcohol taxes.

Some may claim that those latter taxes are “regressive” and would hurt the poor. That is not true, and we progressives must strongly reject such thinking. Spending cuts are the regressive solution. Every form of taxation is more progressive than a spending cut. Income taxes and corporate taxes are more progressive than a VLF increase, but a VLF increase is FAR more progressive than cutting CalWORKS spending or Medi-Cal spending.

Here’s why. Whereas a VLF increase will bite, it’s easier for a struggling family to manage that cost than it is to deal with losing their health coverage entirely. Or, as the New York Times showed today, cuts to child care such as those Arnold proposed would make it nearly impossible for many working families to get a job – whereas if they had child care and could get a job, a higher VLF is affordable.

Overall, the Senate Democrats deserve a standing ovation for realizing that California needs prosperity, not austerity, and that new revenues must be part of the picture. We can expect Republicans to fight this tooth and nail, but that’s only because they realize that if this proposal – or something like it – became part of the final budget deal, it would prove that Californians will support other progressive revenue solutions to save our public services and provide prosperity to all.

Arizona – the same state that held an orgy of anti-Latino racism masquerading as a legislative session – should have made headlines last week for a different reason: voters there approved a sales tax increase to avert further crippling state budget cuts:

The 1-cent-per-dollar sales-tax increase that Arizona voters approved Tuesday affects everyone.

While even lawmakers who fought the tax increase expected Proposition 100 to pass, almost everyone was surprised at its hefty 64 percent approval rate. It passed in 14 of the 15 counties and drew healthy “yes” margins in some of the state’s more conservative outposts, such as Yavapai and La Paz counties, according to unofficial results.

The willingness of Arizona voters to tax themselves contrasts starkly with the state Legislature, where tax cuts have been a feature of almost every session since the mid-1990s. Lawmakers fought Gov. Jan Brewer’s call for a tax vote for more than a year, never buying her argument that they should raise the tax on their own, and only reluctantly later referred the matter to the ballot.

Observers say Prop. 100’s passage is due to the state’s dire budget situation, the threat of further cuts to education, and a lopsided campaign in which the “vote no” message was eclipsed.

So let’s get this straight. Arizona – a state McCain carried in 2008 and that is making a name for itself as the vanguard of the new racism, with a very conservative governor and an extremely conservative legislature – saw a whopping 64% of its voters, including those in the most conservative counties, approve a tax increase.

And people still say tax increases are unpopular?

The Arizona Republic article excerpted above mentioned the Oregon tax increase approved in January, and said that California voters “rejected” a tax increase in 2009. But that latter statement is misleading. Californians probably would have extended the temporary taxes by approving Prop 1A in May 2009 had that not been linked to an unpopular spending cap. Recent PPIC polls have shown widespread public support for new taxes, especially if they are linked to saving our schools.

Two of California’s neighbors have now shown that their electorates do not want austerity. They instead want good public services, particularly good schools, and are willing to pay for them. The question before us is whether or not Sacramento will heed the lessons of Oregon and Arizona as we head into another budget dealmaking session. Californians will support new taxes. It’s time for Sacramento Democrats to make new revenues their core negotiating demand.

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s staff must be pleased with this Marisa Lagos article in the SF Chronicle on the role of courts in the state budget. Lawsuits and court rulings have exposed many of the governor’s preferred budget “solutions” as being straightforwardly illegal. Last summer Calitics covered many of these lawbreaking cuts. But instead of respecting the law, the governor’s office has decided to attack the courts instead:

Courts in recent years have crushed attempts by California to cut spending by billions of dollars and have forced the state to spend hundreds of millions more than planned….

“The judicial branch is now a full player in the budget because the decisions they are making have an impact on what the governor and Legislature can or cannot do,” said H.D. Palmer, spokesman for the Department of Finance. “The judiciary does not have to deal with the fiscal consequence of the rulings – they say you can’t do a spending reduction, but we have to come up with another $100 million in cuts somewhere else.”

Palmer is framing the judiciary as not really a part of governance in California, as a kind of mini-branch that is supposed to remain silent when the executive breaks the law to cut the budget. It’s an absurd claim, but also one that is very typical of this governor, who has constantly sought increased power for himself, following the unitary executive theory embraced by Dick Cheney and the rest of the Bush Administration.

The fact is that the governor and the legislature are bounded by the law. That’s the entire point of the law. If they want to change the law, they can go ahead and do so, but unless that happens, they are bound by what they’ve made. And in many cases, that means they can’t just cut a budget unless they engage in a wholesale rewriting of state law that they’re either unwilling or unable to do.

Other budget cuts, such as those to prisons, run afoul of the state and/or the federal constitution. In those cases it’s completely out of bounds for the governor to believe his desire to cut budgets and avoid a tax increase trumps the law and the constitution. But that is indeed what he believes.

John Adams once called the United States an “empire of laws, not men” and yet the governor appears to have instead decided Howard Jarvis is the state’s true Founding Father, holding the line against taxes by any means possible, even illegal means.

Americans are becoming inured to the systematic ignorance of the law by their political leaders. The Bush Administration and their Democratic enablers have set the tone – when your path is blocked by a law, ignore the law. It’s deeply damaging to our democracy, to our institutions, not to mention to our economy. We keep being told the state must “live within its means” – and yet those means never seem to include the law.

In what has to be described as a huge piece of good news for Bay Area workers, Tesla – the manufacturer of electric automobiles – is going to partner with Toyota to build electric cars, and they’re going to do it at the recently-closed NUMMI plant in Fremont:

In a deal expected to create hundreds of jobs, Tesla Motors will announce Thursday afternoon that it is teaming up with Toyota to build its all-electric Model S sedan at the shuttered NUMMI plant in Fremont.

The news will be officially announced at a 5 p.m. news conference with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

For months, the city of Downey in Los Angeles County has been working with Tesla in the hopes that the automaker would locate its factory there. The Downey City Council was hours away from voting on the terms of a lease for Tesla at the site of Downey Studios, just outside Los Angeles. The plant was expected to initially create up to 1,200 jobs.

But Thursday, Tesla executives finally told Downey city officials that they were going to Fremont instead.

Downey isn’t pleased, but Fremont and many of the workers recently laid off at the NUMMI plant when Toyota closed it will be ecstatic. Not every former NUMMI worker will be rehired (and it has to be said that so far there’s no deal that ANY will be rehired, but those workers are the skilled labor needed to make this plan work), but if the Tesla/Toyota partnership succeeds, then it becomes a possibility that a big portion of that the workforce can be rehired.

It also further disproves the right-wing claims that California is a bad place to do business. From the Siemens plant in Sacramento that builds light rail vehicles for customers in the entire Western Hemisphere to this new Tesla/Toyota plant, it is absolutely clear that California remains an excellent place to locate a business, especially a major manufacturing business.

This is how economic recovery will happen – by embracing green jobs, renewable energy, and the infrastructure and industries needed to make both those things happen.

In 1972 the California Supreme Court ruled the death penalty unconstitutional, the same year the US Supreme Court did so. But as the 1970s went on, and a crime wave fueled law and order politics, the death penalty experienced a revival. The US Supreme Court reversed itself in 1976 and the California Legislature restored the death penalty in 1977, with voters approving a version of their own in 1978. When California Supreme Court Chief Justice Rose Bird was recalled in 1986 for her opposition to the death penalty, it seemed that executions would become a common part of state prison practice.

But it didn’t turn out that way. Since 1992, when executions finally resumed, only 13 people have been executed, with 702 people on Death Row. And executions have been on hold since 2006 when the lethal injection method was blocked by a judge.

Crime rates have declined over the last 20 years, but not due to the death penalty. Other factors appear to be at work, and given the state’s slow pace of executions, hardly anyone can claim that the death penalty’s “deterrence” role was responsible for the decline.

So it was the right thing for the California Democratic Party to finally add a plank it its platform last month calling for the abolition of the death penalty. The San Francisco Chronicle finally took notice in an article today, wondering what the impact will be on Jerry Brown and other candidates. CDP Chair John Burton has a pretty good response to those who think the CDP’s position may hurt Brown:

But state Democratic Party Chairman John Burton, a death penalty opponent, said he thinks the issue has lost its potency. He said Brown’s opponents tried to use his position on executions against him in the 2006 election for attorney general, to no avail.

“I think people have respect for deeply held beliefs as long as you’re up front about them,” Burton said.

Burton is absolutely right about this. And I believe it holds true for the candidates currently running to replace Jerry Brown as AG – particularly San Francisco DA Kamala Harris. Harris opposes the death penalty, keeping in line with both common sense (it’s a failed policy) and the CDP platform.

But not all AG candidates share Brown’s and Harris’s principled, sensible position. Chris Kelly, the Facebook privacy czar (heck of a job there, Chris!), has been criticizing Harris’s opposition to the death penalty and touting his own support of it.

As David Dayen realized last summer, Chris Kelly is making a fool of himself with his tough on crime rhetoric. And now Kelly is proving he’s deeply out of touch with his own party and its base.

The death penalty is a failure. Jerry Brown and Kamala Harris deserve credit for realizing that fact. Chris Kelly, on the other hand, needs to explain to Californians why they should continue to support a failed, costly, pointless policy.