Valero CEO Bill Klesse, Meg Whitman, Carly Fiorina, and the other right-wingers and oil companies trying to destroy California’s economy and environmental future by “suspending” AB 32 indefinitely. They’ve gone around peddling debunked studies claiming AB 32 would hurt jobs (actually, it helps create new, green jobs that are harder to offshore).

And yet for all their efforts, they haven’t been able to change the fact that large majorities of Californians support the global warming law and its methods, as the Field Poll found:

In 2006 California passed a new law that requires the state to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases that cause global warming by about 17 percent over the next ten years. Generally speaking, do you favor or oppose this new law?

Favor: 58%

Oppose: 38%

One way to achieve this goal is to charge a fee to those companies that release greenhouse gases over their permitted level. The state would then return most of the money collected from this fee back to all state residents either directly or through a reduction in taxes. Generally speaking, do you favor or oppose this proposal?

Favor: 64%

Oppose: 31%

Do you agree strongly, agree somewhat, disagree somewhat or disagree strongly with the following statement: “I believe California can reduce greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming and expand jobs and economic prosperity at the same time.”

Agree: 69%

Disagree: 29%

I’d have liked Next10/Field to ask about using money generated from cap-and-trade fees to fund things like high speed rail, local mass transit operations, and solar panels, but this is still a pretty solid sign that the public is all in favor of the carbon reduction rules AB 32 set up.

In that latter question, “agree” was at 74% in 2008 and 83% in 2007, but 69% is still an enormous amount of support for creating jobs through green technology. There’s no way the right-wingers can spin that as anything but a huge rejection of their attack on California’s green jobs and global warming action.

Of course, they’ll try. That’s why Courage Campaign and CREDO are committed to Boycott Valero. Valero CEO Bill Klesse has responded to at least one Courage Campaign member so far – send him a message yourself and remind him that Californians don’t want a Texas oil company telling them what to do.

Plus, it’s good to see statewide Democratic candidates like Kamala Harris stand up for AB 32 as well.

Note: I’m the Public Policy Director at the Courage Campaign

Not content with Meg Whitman’s $59 million dollar spending, which has gone mostly to TV ads, the California Chamber of Commerce is jumping into the fray with their own ad, this one attacking Jerry Brown as some sort of tax-and-spend liberal. You can view the ad at right.

There’s just one little problem with the ad: it is fundamentally, massively misleading. The ad distorts Jerry Brown’s record as governor of California from 1975 to 1983, and leaves out key details and facts. It is as dishonest an attack ad as I’ve ever seen in my 30 years as a Californian.

The ad says that Brown opposed Prop 13. That is true. What it leaves out is that the day after it passed, he declared himself a “born again tax-cutter” in a press conference you can listen to for yourself. Brown promised and delivered cuts to state services to deal with the impact.

The ad goes on to say spending increased by “163%” – without explaining that most of that spending increase was Sacramento using the budget surplus to backfill lost revenues to schools and local governments as a result of Prop 13.

The ad then blames Brown for squandering the budget surplus – without explaining the surplus was spent on filling the Prop 13 hole, or even that the only reason there was a surplus in the first place was because Jerry Brown was very fiscally conservative, refusing to support liberal calls for greater spending on human services and instead cutting things like welfare payments. In 1975. See for yourself.

Apparently the truth is too much for the Cal Chamber to tell to Californians. Instead the Cal Chamber believes it has to mislead and distort history to smear Jerry Brown. If TV stations in the state had any ethics they’d refuse this ad and demand that Cal Chamber come back with something that was honest. We’ll see if that happens.

Proposition 15, the California Fair Elections Act, is widely known as the proposal to have the Secretary of State elected by a clean money system beginning in 2014 as a way to demonstrate the viability of the concept to Californians. But that’s not all Prop 15 does, and not the only way it can expand clean money to the rest of the state. Prop 15 also removes a 20-year old restriction on local governments adopting clean money, and makes it easier to expand the system in the future by not requiring a follow-up vote to create public financing for other statewide races.

Here’s the background. In 1988, Proposition 68 made it to the June ballot, an initiative that would have created a public financing system for statewide elections. Polls showed it was likely to pass, so the legislature under Speaker Willie Brown, and with the encouragement of Governor George Deukmejian, placed a competing proposal on the same ballot, Proposition 73. Prop 73 provided some campaign contribution limits, but also barred anyone from being elected to office who had received public funds.

The trick worked. Legislative leaders and Governor Deukmejian joined corporations that stood to lose influence under Prop 68 to fund a barrage of negative ads, including claims that the KKK would receive public funds under the clean money system. As a result, Prop 68 passed with 53% of the vote at the June 1988 election, but Prop 73 passed with 58%, superseding Prop 68. In 1990 a federal appeals court threw out the campaign finance reforms in Prop 73, but left the ban on public funding in place.

Several attempts have been made at the ballot box to reverse the Prop 73 ban on public funding, but so far they’ve all failed. Prop 131, a less restrictive term limits measure proposed to block the ultimately successful Prop 140 failed at the November 1990 election. And of course, Prop 89 went down to defeat back in 2006.

Prop 15 would reverse the Prop 73 restriction – which is why it has to go to the ballot in the first place. If Prop 15 passes, local governments will be able to create their own publicly funded elections systems, though they’ll have to also create the funding source. The state legislature could also expand public funding to other statewide offices as well, including governor, but they too would have to create a new funding source.

As Meg Whitman dumps another $20 million into her campaign, it’s another reminder of how Californians need publicly funded elections to return democracy to this state and power to its people. Prop 15 opens the way to such reforms, and should be strongly supported. For more info on Prop 15 and how you can help pass it, go to YesFairElections.org.

There are two kinds of adults in this recession: those who are overwhelmed by work, and those who have none. As those who still have a job are taking on more and more responsibilities, productivity rises, leading some to theorize this holds back job creation. While those workers are glad to not be in the ranks of the unemployed, they’re not happy with the work burdens, while other workers who might help out are sitting on the sidelines.

From the perspective of the employer, the situation isn’t that great either. Laying off a full-time employee means losing years of skills, knowledge, and expertise that is difficult to replace even when new hiring resumes.

In today’s LA Times, Dean Baker and Kevin Hassett argue for a better option: work-sharing, which is used in Germany to spread the recessionary pain throughout the workforce by reduced hours (and wages) for everyone:

In Germany, for example, which has used work-sharing aggressively in this downturn, a typical company might reduce the hours of 50 workers by 20% rather than laying off 10 workers. The government would then provide a tax credit to make up for most of the lost pay, with the employer kicking in some as well. In a typical arrangement, a worker might see his weekly hours go down by 20%, and his salary go down by about 4%.

This policy has kept the unemployment rate in Germany from rising even though the country has seen a sharper decline in GDP than the United States. The Netherlands, which also uses work-sharing, has managed to keep its unemployment rate near 4% even though its GDP also has fallen more steeply than in the United States.

Work-sharing should be familiar to Californians because it’s a variation of the furlough policy that state and local governments have used to avoid further layoffs. The big difference is that the furlough policy means workers take pay cuts that are proportional to the length of their furlough — 20% fewer hours, 20% less pay.

By contrast, with a work-sharing arrangement, workers would keep their jobs while effectively dividing up the unemployment benefits that they could receive if they were laid off. For example, if a furlough requires them to take every fourth week off, instead of a 25% cut in pay, their pay would fall only 5% to 10%. The additional money could come from either the state unemployment insurance program or a new federal tax credit.

It’s a very interesting proposal to consider. The current system of unemployment creates a lot of pain for a substantial number of people, but little pain for the rest. That in turn creates a social and political divide between the employed and the unemployed, in addition to the obvious financial divide. As we look at long-term unemployment, it will be tempting for those who still have jobs to simply ignore the long-term unemployed and their needs.

Under the work-sharing model, everyone takes a hit, but also enjoys unemployment benefits that make up some of the difference.

It’s not the only progressive proposal out there for dealing with unemployment. Over at the Realignment Project, Steven Attewell proposes a way to deal with the inflationary aspects of a full employment policy (i.e. spending billions of dollars to put people back to work tends to drive up inflation) is by turning to the Keyensian idea of “forced saving” – investing some of the increased wages in savings accounts that would pay out over time, providing more of a fiscal cushion for households especially when hard times return.

Whether or not you agree with one or both of these proposals – or reject them both – it’s good to see people taking seriously the issue of long-term unemployment, because we’re likely to be facing that issue for some time to come, perhaps the rest of this decade.

Note: I’m the Public Policy Director for the Courage Campaign

Two Texas oil companies, Valero and Tesoro, are the primary funders behind a drive to suspend AB 32, California’s landmark global warming solutions and carbon reduction law. Valero and Tesoro have spent over $500,000 on signature gathering to put this on the ballot – alienating one of the wingnut authors of the repeal in the process.

As Californians who support taking action to reduce our carbon emissions and stop global warming, Courage Campaign and CREDO Action think it’s time to do something to stop Valero’s attack on AB 32 in its tracks.

That “something” is launching a boycott of Valero gas. There’s no reason Californians should be supporting with their own money the effort to destroy our environment or our green jobs. The best way to get Valero’s attention is to show them that they will pay a price for their support of AB 32 repeal.

This isn’t going to take off in a day. But progressive Californians can start fighting back against the repeal of AB 32 by pledging to stop buying Valero gas as long as they’re funding the repeal.

Below the fold is the email we sent to our members this morning.

Dear Robert —

It’s outrageous. Texas oil companies like Valero Energy are going to spend millions on this November’s election to destroy California’s environment. We’re not buying it — their campaign or their gas.

When we launched our campaign in December to protect AB 32 — California’s “Global Warming Solutions Act” — from attacks by Meg Whitman and other oil company supporters, we knew they would say some appalling things to defend themselves.  

But check out what Valero Energy CEO Bill Klesse — one of the two main funders of the initiative to repeal AB 32 — said in response to our friend Adam Quinn of CREDO Action. Adam had emailed Klesse requesting Valero stop attacking the landmark legislation and was shocked to get the following response:

From: Klesse, Bill

Date: Wed, Mar 31, 2010 at 12:02 PM

Subject: Re: Stop Attacking CA AB 32

To: Adam Quinn

I assume you realize that we are discussing CO2. Many people do not realize this is a CO2 law. We are not willing to ruin our economy, our business, your life style and our country over AB-32.

Sent from my iPhone

As you can imagine, Adam was outraged by Klesse’s open hostility to the environmental values that most Californians share. So he asked if we would join CREDO Action and help them organize progressives to reject Valero’s attack on California’s global warming law.

We said “absolutely!” Now Courage Campaign and CREDO Action are coming together to send a message to Valero’s CEO:

We will boycott Valero gas stations as long as he continues to fund his Texas oil company’s attack on California’s environment.

Will you join the Courage Campaign and CREDO Action in boycotting Valero gas? Just click here to let Valero CEO Bill Klesse know by sending a short letter to him with CREDO’s easy-to-use tool. Maybe he’ll personally respond to you, too:

http://www.couragecampaign.org…

In 2006, California passed the Global Warming Solutions Act (AB 32), making California a global leader in reducing the greenhouse gases — including CO2 — that cause global warming. That law is now under attack from right-wingers like Meg Whitman and oil companies like Valero that are determined to continue polluting our environment.

Valero and another Texas-based oil company, Tesoro, have already spent half a million dollars gathering signatures for a November ballot initiative that would suspend the climate solutions law and destroy green jobs. We can stop them in their tracks and hit Valero CEO Bill Klesse where it hurts — his company’s bottom line — by boycotting their gas and showing there’s a price for wantonly destroying our environment.

Join the Courage Campaign and CREDO Action to tell Valero CEO Bill Klesse that attacking California’s global warming law is bad for business. We’ll deliver your message in support of the boycott immediately. Click here to send your message now:

http://www.couragecampaign.org…

This is just the start of our campaign to hold oil companies accountable. Thank you for standing up for green jobs, clean air, and meaningful action on the climate crisis.

Rick Jacobs

Chair, Courage Campaign

At the California Democratic Party convention in Los Angeles next week, a battle could be fought over who the party will endorse in the CA-36 primary. Currently the party is going to endorse the incumbent, Jane Harman – unless 300 signatures are gathered and submitted to CDP chair John Burton by the end of the day on Tuesday to remove the endorsement from the consent calendar for discussion on the floor.

In order to achieve that, Winograd supporters have launched a website, Oppose Harman’s Endorsement, where CDP delegates can download and sign a form indicating their support for pulling the endorsement from the consent calendar. The form then has to be scanned and emailed back, or faxed back.

It’s not only further sign of the proliferation of download-print-and-sign petition gathering in the California progressive movement, but more importantly would be a sign of how strong Winograd’s support is among delegates. It’s entirely unclear whether the conventioneers would indeed endorse Winograd, but it is quite possible that they will succeed in pulling the endorsement from the consent calendar and potentially even denying Harman an endorsement on the floor, leaving the CDP officially neutral in the CA-36 primary.

Winograd’s campaign has been hitting Harman hard of late – for example, using the recent federal court decision striking down Bush’s illegal wiretapping to remind voters of Harman’s support for the policy. Still, Winograd has a big hill to climb considering Harman’s own substantial financial advantage. Denying Harman the CDP endorsement could help close the distance.

This will be one of the more important stories of the CDP convention, if Winograd supporters succeed in getting their 300 signatures. In case you’re wondering, one of those 300 signatures will be mine.

California Republicans seem to think 2010 will be a favorable year for them. If that’s true, then they’re going to have to wake up to the fact that the electorate fundamentally does not share their right-wing anti-government, anti-immigrant values, as shown by the USC/LA Times Poll:

Health care

Will country be better off because of health care reform? 52% yes, 36% no, 12% don’t know

Will you and your family benefit from the bill? 47% yes, 41% no, 13% don’t know

Would you vote for a politician who voted for the bill? 46% yes, 26% no

Immigration

Would you support or oppose…

Denying ER treatment and public schooling to immigrants and their children? 47% no, 45% yes, 8% neither/don’t know

Temporary guest worker program but no path to citizenship: 70% yes, 24% no, 6% neither/don’t know

Path to citizenship with fines, must learn English: 67% yes, 26% no, 7% neither/don’t know

Obviously this poll is imperfect – they neglected to ask about a truly progressive approach to comprehensive immigration reform, one that provides a path to citizenship without forcing the undocumented to pay fines or learn a new language.

The poll also showed strong approval ratings for President Obama (64 favorable, 33 unfavorable) and reconfirmed the low ratings for Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Legislature.

Things get really interesting when the USC/LA Times poll looked at the governor and Senate races. The poll again confirmed that Meg Whitman has a small lead over Jerry Brown – 44-41 in this poll – but worryingly for Dems, the crosstabs show Brown is in very serious trouble with key Democratic base groups:

32% of African-Americans undecided? Whitman leading among Millennial voters? Brown only has 66% of liberals? Jerry Brown’s sleepwalking campaign is in deep trouble here if he doesn’t start working to address these problems with his base.

Compare that with Barbara Boxer, who is in a much better position – although the poll did not test her against specific Republicans (Campbell leads Fiorina 29-25, with DeVore at 9), it does show her with a good lead over a generic Republican:

The poll also showed support for marriage equality was 52-40, which strikes me as a tad optimistic but still another good sign of a trend moving in favor of equal rights.

Overall this poll tells me that Californians still want to elect Democrats – but that specific Democratic candidates have to show why they deserve to be elected, show the electorate that they will govern as Democrats and give voters something to get excited about. By delivering health care reform, Senator Boxer has done that. By sitting on his ass while Meg Whitman erodes deeply into his base, Jerry Brown is instead setting himself up for an unnecessarily difficult climb to win a third term as governor this fall.

Last year, when Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa won an underwhelming 55% of the vote in his re-election bid, David Dayen wrote here at Calitics that this was due in part to Villaraigosa’s inability to finish what he started:

The enduring image of the Villaraigosa tenure is a crane alongside a half-built skyscraper. He is full of good ideas that never get the follow-through they deserve.

In 2010, Villaraigosa is working to shed that image through one of the most important and innovative proposals California has seen in a long time. It’s known as the 30/10 plan and would deliver the long-desired build out of a true mass transit system for Los Angeles by the end of this decade. It is Villaraigosa’s moon shot – and is essential to Los Angeles’s future viability.

30/10 is a shorthand for building in 10 years the mass transit projects projected to take 30 years to complete that voters approved in the 2008 Measure R sales tax increase. The projects include flagship routes like the Subway to the Sea (at least as far as UCLA), but also important workhorse lines like the regional connector, Crenshaw light rail, extending the Green Line to the LAX terminals, and finishing the Expo Line out to Santa Monica. It also includes routes out to the suburbs, such as the recently-approved Gold Line extension to Azusa, the Gold Line eastside extension toward San Gabriel, and even commuter rail along the West Santa Ana Branch line – all the way into central Orange County.

The key to the 30/10 plan is getting the federal government to loan Metro (LA County’s transportation agency) the money to build these projects now, to be repaid using Measure R sales tax revenue over the next 30 years.

Congress is quickly warming to the idea. Senator Barbara Boxer was the first to champion the 30/10 plan, and is being joined by Senator Dianne Feinstein and other federal officials who hail the 30/10 plan as a model for accelerated funding of mass transit.

For all its innovativeness, the 30/10 plan isn’t the ideal way to fund mass transit. The federal government built the interstates on the 90/10 plan: the feds paid 90% of the construction cost and the states only 10%. That model ought to be applied to mass transit as well. Until it is, the 30/10 model is the next best thing.

That’s because LA, like the rest of the state, has no time to lose in building out a mass transit network that can handle the travel needs of its population. As oil prices rise later this year, part of a long-term trend upward that will lead to a sustained price of $175 a barrel by 2017 according to Deutsche Bank analysts, the LA economy will grind to a halt unless more effective mass transit options are provided.

Even without the price spike, the traffic-choked nature of Southern California means that there would be significant economic benefits to mass transit. Fewer time spent in traffic is more time spent with family or innovating new ideas. Fewer dollars spent on driving leads to a Green Dividend that has already pumped more than $2 billion into the economy of Portland, Oregon. It will also provide for greater housing affordability – the most affordable places to live in SoCal are those nearest mass transit. Villaraigosa isn’t just going to put people back to work with 30/10, he’s going to ensure that the whole economy can continue to function in a post-cheap oil era.

Notably absent from this is the role of the state government. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has been waging a war on mass transit, trying to kill it by slashing operating funds. Already he may have claimed a high-profile victim in the form of Caltrain.

The 30/10 plan will need those state operating funds to be restored, and that ought to include a higher statewide gas tax. If it was good enough for Tom Campbell it’s good enough for California. Prices at the pump will rise anyway, but voters won’t notice even a 10-cent increase. Trust me on this, I lived in Washington State when the gas tax rose by 10 cents between 2005 and 2007. Nobody noticed.

As we can expect Meg Whitman and Steve Poizner to continue Arnold’s war on mass transit (and therefore, a war on California’s future), we can hope that Jerry Brown wins back the governor’s office and that he will reverse this trend. If Brown loses, however, Antonio Villaraigosa’s 30/10 plan would make him an extremely compelling candidate for the governor’s office in 2014.

No matter who occupies the governor’s office, the 30/10 plan is a model not just in California, but around the world. As Jarrett Walker, an Australian transit blogger, put it this week, the 30/10 plan will make LA “the transit metropolis”:

The big-picture Los Angeles talking point is still an inspiring one: The most aggressive mayoral transit advocacy in America is coming from the largest American city that was mostly designed for cars. And because film and television will always tell this city’s story to the world, the rise of transit in Los Angeles will be a globally resonant event. Is anyone studying how film and television images of how people travel in Los Angeles are evolving over time? Those things really matter.

For those reasons and more, let’s hope Mayor Villaraigosa is successful in his push to make the 30/10 plan real and secure Los Angeles’s future prosperity. Villaraigosa’s “enduring image” would no longer be the construction crane and the unfinished skyscraper, but the Subway to the Sea and a more sustainable transportation system for the region.

(30/10 map from The Transport Politic)

California Republicans like to claim they are the fiscally responsible party, that they are better stewards of finances than us reckless and wasteful Democrats.

Anyone who looks at the details can see this is nonsense. Arnold Schwarzenegger is leaving a legacy of fiscal ruin for the state of California, aided and abetted by the Republicans in the state legislature who insisted on fiscally irresponsible policies of not generating enough revenue to pay for our public services.

Then there are Republicans like Carly Fiorina, whose record of failure is well known – having nearly destroyed Hewlett-Packard and being run out of her position as CEO is further evidence of Republican inability to manage money effectively.

As John Wildermuth explains today, the California Republican Party is also facing serious financial problems:

State finance reports released Thursday showed the California GOP is raising less and spending more than its Democratic counterpart, leaving the party in shaky financial condition four months into an election year….

So far this year, the state GOP has taken in $1.2 million in contributions, but spent almost $2 million. As of March 17, the party had $1.3 million in the bank and $320,000 in unpaid bills.

Republicans can thank Jerry Perenchio that the numbers weren’t worse. The reclusive former owner of Univision gave $500,000 to the party last month, adding a much-needed bit of gloss to the financial figures.

The Democrats, on the other hand, have better than $9.1 million in the bank and only about $3,000 in debts. They’ve raised $3.5 million this year, but, more importantly, they’ve only spent about $1.3 million, which means the war chest keeps growing.

Of course, Dems need that warchest since Jerry Brown and Barbara Boxer can’t just write checks from their own accounts to fund their campaigns. But it’s a powerful signal that even in an election year that’s not considered to be as favorable to Democrats as the last few cycles, Democrats are having far more success fundraising.

What this means going forward for the Republican Party isn’t clear, but it could portend a shift toward more self-funding candidates. We all know the Republican Party is a creature of corporate interests anyway, and with the impact of Citizens United, we might just see the GOP “middleman” bypassed as corporations simply give money directly to their chosen candidates, or just run their own CEOs for public office. The recent scandal involving RNC funds spent at a West Hollywood club may further develop this trend.

Ultimately, the answer to this is going to be things like Prop 15 and public financing of elections. A shift toward more direct corporate funding, not mediated by the Republican Party, may help that effort by drawing a clearer contrast between corporate money and democracy.