Apparently one-upping State Sen. Pat Wiggins, John McCain today explained in the health care summit that “we Arizonans hate California because they stole our water.”

Aside from being a further example of how much McCain has descended into bitter old man territory, his remark is also massively inaccurate. In 1922 the Colorado River Compact was agreed to by the states that border the river. Notably absent was Mexico, which has seen the mouth of the Colorado almost totally dry up since the 1922 compact. The compact gave California 58.7% of the annual flow of the Colorado’s lower basin, Arizona got 37.3%, and Nevada (at the time populated by tumbleweeds) got 4%. Arizona didn’t call it “theft” at the time, and the Supreme Court upheld the compact in 1963.

Later, when Phoenix began to grow, Arizona wanted to revisit the deal, and did so in order to get the Central Arizona Project aqueduct built. The CAP helped fuel Arizona’s rapid growth, especially after 1980.

As anyone who’s spent any time in Arizona knows, a lot of that growth came from Californians moving to the Grand Canyon State in the ’80s, ’90s, and ’00s in search of cheaper housing or new business opportunities. (I was nearly one of them, until my parents thankfully decided to stay in Orange County.) Apparently it’s OK for Arizona to steal Californians, but not OK for Californians to drink the water they’re entitled to under the 1922 compact.

That compact is a deeply flawed document, but not for the reasons McCain says. It was written at a time of unusually high flows on the Colorado River – about 16.4 million acre feet per year. Recent studies indicate the typical flow is closer to 13 million acre feet per year. In short, California and Arizona and Nevada are all writing checks Mother Nature can’t cash. Lake Mead’s levels have been dropping for years, and the Colorado River rarely reaches the Gulf of California any longer.

So McCain’s reaction? He wants to steal Colorado’s water to allow Arizona to sprawl ever-deeper into the bone-dry Sonora Desert. In short, McCain thinks it’s wrong for CA to steal from AZ, but perfectly acceptable for AZ to steal from CO. Maybe he’s just bitter that he lost CO in the ’08 election.

Of course, McCain is being more than a bit hypocritical here. He and his wife Cindy own three homes in California – one in La Jolla and two in Coronado. For someone who “hates California” he sure does seem to like our coastline.

Which, as you might have guessed, gets some of its drinking water from the Colorado River.

In short, McCain may be stealing water from Arizona every time he turns on the tap, takes a shower, or waters the lawn at his California homes.

We’ve all had a good laugh at Carly “Failorina” and her completely inept campaign, particularly the lame websites and shockingly bad ads. But those are merely the surface reasons why Fiorina needs to be kept as far away from elected office as possible. Today she reminded us just how damaging she would be in the US Senate – and how harmful she would be to Californians and their economic fortunes.

The Senate today passed its version of the Jobs Bill which, while far weaker than it should have been, is a good start. Even 12 Republicans voted for it, including Fiorina’s new hero Scott Brown. Fiorina immediately criticized the bill’s passage in a press release:

Today’s vote represents yet another missed opportunity to pass a real jobs bill that cuts taxes or institutes a real suspension of the payroll tax – either of which would free up small businesses to hire people. Instead, the Senate opted to pass what amounts to nothing more than an expensive extension of the failed stimulus plan.

You mean this failed stimulus? The one that’s created or saved over 2 million jobs?

Of course, that IS the real reason Fiorina believes the stimulus failed – that it created jobs. To Fiorina, job creation is actually a bad thing. Higher unemployment is a very good thing, since it benefits the wealthy and corporate interests she represents. She claims the stimulus is a problem because it adds to the deficit, but the deficit is only a problem if you think raising taxes on the wealthy to deal with it is undesirable, as Fiorina surely does.

As we saw when Fiorina ran Hewlett-Packard into the ground as its CEO, she believes jobs are bad for the economy. She called offshoring “right shoring” and said that there is no “god given right” to a job. As with her former CEO counterpart Meg Whitman, Fiorina appears to be making higher unemployment as a core element of her campaign.

With Fiorina’s statement today, her stance is clear: she thinks Californians should have fewer jobs, because anything we might do with government to help create jobs would wind up hurting the wealthy, and they’re the ones that really matter in Fiorina’s world. Good to know.

This time last year, in the wake of the Legislature’s decision to slash $9 billion from the K-12 education budget, schools sent out nearly 30,000 layoff notices to teachers. In the end, most of those teachers were indeed laid off, though a significant number were rehired on one-year temporary contracts. Federal stimulus funds helped make that happen, but even so, the impact to schools was devastating. Class sizes have soared, some districts have closed entire schools (such as the elementary school three blocks from my apartment), and others have gone to a 4-day week.

With no renewal of federal stimulus funds for education in sight, and with the prospect of further education cuts at the state level, districts are gearing up again to make mass teacher layoffs. SF schools plan to fire 10% of their teachers and support staff:

District officials said the list is long given the mind-boggling $113 million budget shortfall expected over the next two years, a deficit requiring huge cuts to staffing and programs. It includes full-time and part-time employees representing nearly 800 full-time teaching and administrative positions for the most part. It doesn’t include such workers as clerks or school secretaries, who don’t have to be notified by the deadline.

Sacramento area schools face similar cuts particularly in the absence of federal stimulus dollars:

Understandably, the federal stimulus money was a godsend to the districts. Elk Grove Unified – the area’s largest district – used $26 million of its $39.5 million in stimulus funds to save the jobs of teachers, counselors, library technicians, vice principals and administrative assistants.

Officials from Sacramento City Unified spent about half of the district’s $43.3 million share to save jobs. The district spent another $1.5 million to keep Mark Hopkins Elementary open for another year and nearly the entire balance to offset other budget reductions.

Twin Rivers Unified School District reported saving 109 teaching jobs with some of its $19 million in stimulus funds. San Juan Unified School District spent at least $19 million of its $34.5 million to retain positions.

So far the Obama Administration has not yet moved to extend or even expand the education stimulus funds. And despite polling that shows Californians would pay higher taxes to avoid these cuts, so far nobody has yet come forward to propose following Oregon’s lead and taxing the rich and large corporations in order to avoid the destruction of our schools.

The collapse of California’s education system is going to generate more and more attention and activism over the coming year, as it hits a broad cross-section of California very hard. It therefore creates a political opportunity for progressives to act to restore our schools and ensure our children have a future in this state.

In 2004 Paul Krugman published a book that, at the height of the Bush Administration and less than a year after Arnold Schwarzenegger seized power in the 2003 recall vote, described 21st century America as embarking upon a “Great Unraveling” as the accomplishments of the 20th century were being undone by right-wingers.

As it turned out, the unraveling was only just beginning. It has taken the worst recession in 60 years to give that unraveling its full force and power here in California. Here in 2010, everywhere around us we see collapse, decay, and suffering – and a state government whose procedures are rigged to empower the small right-wing minority that is enthusiastically cheerleading the unraveling they’ve wrought.

Interestingly enough it’s two articles in today’s New York Times that show most clearly the depth of suffering and decay taking place in California. The first is Tom Friedman’s column, which riffs off of the insane news that Tracy is going to charge for 911 calls, an example Friedman uses to show the lack of desire to rebuild this country and pull us out of crisis:

But now it feels as if we are entering a new era, “where the great task of government and of leadership is going to be about taking things away from people,” said the Johns Hopkins University foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum.

Indeed, to lead now is to trim, to fire or to downsize services, programs or personnel. We’ve gone from the age of government handouts to the age of citizen givebacks, from the age of companions fly free to the age of paying for each bag….

Our parents truly were the Greatest Generation. We, alas, in too many ways, have been what the writer Kurt Andersen called “The Grasshopper Generation,” eating through the prosperity that was bequeathed us like hungry locusts. Now we and our kids together need to be “The Regeneration” – the generation that renews, refreshes, re-energizes and rebuilds America for the 21st century.

That isn’t going to happen as long as others in Friedman’s generation continue to prioritize wealth extraction and tenacious, even bitter defense of the status quo over “The Regeneration.” I see this all the time in my work in support of the high speed rail project, where prosperous homeowners in Palo Alto are doing everything in their power to try and stop the train project, merely because they think it will make their communities look ugly. They’ve even been able to convince the city’s mayor, Pat Burt, to reverse his position in support of HSR and to instead call for a delay in the project, despite a 30% unemployment rate among Peninsula construction workers.

The same attitude extends to our schools, which are facing a serious crisis as teachers are laid off, campuses closed, and educational opportunity shrinks; to our health care system, which careens from one crisis to another; and to our overall economy, which is increasingly dominated by a wealthy few who prefer to extract wealth that already exists, rather than invest in making new things that can create new wealth.

This isn’t a new phenomenon. But here in 2010, we’re seeing an almost colonial approach to economic development that destroys public resources and infrastructure combining with long-term unemployment (since wealth extractors have no interest in creating lasting jobs or prosperity) to produce a worsening social crisis. The NYT’s Peter Goodman explored this in Orange County:

Call them the new poor: people long accustomed to the comforts of middle-class life who are now relying on public assistance for the first time in their lives – potentially for years to come.

Yet the social safety net is already showing severe strains. Roughly 2.7 million jobless people will lose their unemployment check before the end of April unless Congress approves the Obama administration’s proposal to extend the payments, according to the Labor Department.

Here in Southern California, Jean Eisen has been without work since she lost her job selling beauty salon equipment more than two years ago. In the several months she has endured with neither a paycheck nor an unemployment check, she has relied on local food banks for her groceries.

The article is worth reading in its entirety, telling stories of middle-aged, middle-class Californians who are not only out of work, but do not have the resources to make some necessary adjustments. Food stamps, welfare, and Medi-Cal are being cut precisely when the middle-class and others need it to avoid homelessness and starvation. We’re cutting college classes and making it more expensive to even attend a community college and get some valuable retraining skills. Add in California’s ongoing lack of public housing and public job creation and you have a recipe not just for long-term unemployment, but for a massive expansion of an already-persistent underclass.

The stories Goodman tells are not new to California. They are familiar to anyone with any experience in East Oakland, South Los Angeles, or other communities that had been cut off from public support and economic opportunity for decades now, owing largely to the skin color of their residents. We are now seeing those problems grow deeper by becoming broader.

To bring it back to the great unraveling, the attitude of California’s right-wing politicians, who govern this state by virtue of the 2/3rds rule, is that this suffering is a good thing. Chuck DeVore believes the unemployed should just leave California. Meg Whitman has made a call for higher unemployment a key campaign pledge.

They have allied with the wealth extractors to reach out to some of those who still have some financial resources left – longtime homeowners, those still making good money – to recruit them to support the destruction of California. They argue against any and all tax increases because if they don’t, then the public might get the idea that some tax increases are indeed good and worthwhile, then California might follow Oregon voters and raise taxes on the rich and large corporations.

But it will take more than aggressively and persistently pushing for new investment in public services. As Friedman and Goodman both indicate, we also need to reorient our thinking. Our work and our society need to emphasize creating and making things, instead of making money on finances (rising home values, investment income, etc).

California has reached the end of a 60-year long model that emphasized massive consumption of non-renewable resources that caused major environmental problems, the most significant of which is global warming. We have the expertise, the workers, and the financial resources to address those problems by democratizing the economy, empowering more people to create sustainable ways of life, and building public services to provide the foundation upon which it depends.

Progressives will have to lead the creation of that new model for California. Nobody else will, because nobody else wants to.

(As I’m sitting in an SF Democratic Club meeting, this just seemed really important to me.   – promoted by Brian Leubitz)

There’s no doubt about it: public transit in California is facing a dire crisis. After three years of state budget cuts, the worst recession in 60 years, and deep declines in local sales tax revenue, it is becoming more difficult than ever to maintain the kind of public transit systems that California needs to survive.

It’s not just a matter of bus and rail service in the urbanized cores. As we learned in 2008, rising oil prices place all of California on the precipice of long-term poverty. For decades we have pursued land use policies that force people to drive to get to work, to school, to the store. However, since the 1970s, California has made some respectable strides in building up a public transit network that, while much less effective than it needed to be, at least helped absorb some of the impact of soaring gas prices. This was as true in Orange County as it was in San Francisco.

By 2010 that has changed. Arnold Schwarzenegger has used the budget crisis to do the bidding of his oil company buddies and destroy public transit in this state. Last year the legislature even eliminated ALL state funding for public transit, even as local transit operators faced rising demand and declining sales tax revenue.

The result has been a crisis for public transit systems the likes of which California has rarely seen. As Transportation For America shows, public transit cuts in America during the recession have been concentrated here in California. Despite a series of votes in favor of taxes to grow public transit in places like Santa Clara County, Los Angeles County, and Sonoma-Marin – votes that cleared the insanely high 2/3rds hurdle – the elimination of state funding has forced many local transit operators to make devastating cuts, or to increase fares to unfair levels – or both.

One of the most high-profile victims of Arnold Schwarznegger’s attack on public transit has been San Francisco’s Municipal Railway, aka “Muni.” Muni went into the recession in a weakened position. For decades SF residents have been complaining about infrequent service, unsafe conditions on buses, and a lack of high-capacity transit on key corridors. (Seriously – when I pored through neighborhood newspapers from the 1970s as part of my dissertation research a few years back, complaints about Muni were the most common thing I came across.) Efforts to fix Muni have run into various obstacles, none more troublesome than a lack of sufficient funding.

So when the recession hit, and when Arnold Schwarzenegger eliminated state funding for local transit, Muni was not in a good position to deal with the effects. Then again, I can’t think of a local transit agency in the entire state that has weathered the storm without experiencing major problems.

Like other local transit agencies, Muni has had to hike fares and cut service to deal with the loss of state funding. This in turn has understandably angered San Franciscans who put up with the other problems on Muni for years, only to see service decline instead of improve.

Clearly Muni needs help. Which is why the newest campaign claiming to support Muni reform, a boycott of the system, is such a stupid idea.

Called the March Against Muni, what is billed as a “protest” against Muni’s mounting problems is in fact nothing more than a deeply right-wing attack on the transit agency for problems that are largely out of its control. Instead of helping fix Muni, the planned boycott will merely accelerate its downward spiral, making it more difficult to fix what ails Muni and help San Francisco become less car-dependent.

As anyone with even a passing familiarity with the problems facing public transit in California would agree, the top priority for fixing Muni is to infuse it with new funding to restore and expand service, preventing fare increases and route cuts.

However, you won’t find that anywhere in the list of demands that the March Against Muni organizers are making:

1. No More Route Cuts

2. No More Fare Hikes

3. No More Overcrowding

4. No More Delays

5. No More Rude Drivers

6. No More Exploiting Seniors & Disabled

7. No More Filthy Conditions

8. No More Fare Theft

9. No More Excessive Pay

10. No More Paper Fast Passes

Aside from #9, these seem like reasonable demands (and demand #9 reveals the inherently right-wing nature of the entire enterprise – paying workers a decent wage in what is NOT an easy job is a good thing; there is nothing more friendly to a conservative agenda than workers attacking workers in a recession). But how the hell are these to be accomplished in a severe recession where Muni has faced at least a $129 million shortfall?

Preserving routes alone requires new money. Avoiding fare hikes requires more new money. Adding service to reduce overcrowding requires still more new money (to buy buses and hire operators). Reducing delays requires the same. A better funded system with more routes and service would itself lead to better working conditions for operators, reducing what rudeness exists. Keeping buses and trains clean requires even still more new money to hire more police and cleaning staff. I don’t know what the hell “fare theft” refers to, and if people want to upgrade beyond paper fast passes, they’ll need – you guessed – yet more new money.

So to see this silly boycott organized without any reference to the funding required to implement the desired reforms suggests to me this is not a serious effort to fix Muni. Instead, by reinforcing the notion that somehow government has failed and that we must attack government to produce change, the organizers are drawing upon and reinforcing right-wing narratives to justify and articulate the protest. The emphasis on driver pay would make Meg Whitman proud. The total absence of the name “Arnold Schwarznegger” or the term “state budget cuts” proves this is a ridiculous idea that will merely cause further damage to Muni by masking the true causes of its crisis.

It also ignores the fact that cities and local governments in California don’t actually have very much power. State rules, including but by no means limited to the 2/3rds rule for passing budgets and raising taxes, severely circumscribe and limit what localities can do. Perhaps if San Francisco became its own state it might have the flexibility it needs to fix Muni on its own – but good luck getting that through Congress.

Instead the only way to fix Muni is to either muster the 2/3rds majority to approve a local transit tax, or march on Sacramento and demand that the governor and legislature stop trying to destroy public transit in California.

In short, this boycott is the dumbest fucking idea I have ever heard for improving public transit in California. True friends of mass transit should shun it and instead organize to address the lack of revenue and Sacramento-based causes of the crisis that is hitting Muni and other local transit agencies across the state.

Over at the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Steven T. Jones raised questions about a Jerry Brown speech delivered to a crowd of Democrats and environmental activists on Wednesday night. Calling the speech “rambling,” Jones painted a picture of a candidate that was so unprepared that he raised concerns among Democrats:

The rambling, alternately vague and academic, and often pointless address did little to inspire or excite a large, sympathetic crowd that was loaded with top Democrats. In fact, some party luminaries were openly aghast at the poor performance, with one making this succinct (if off-the-record) assessment: “We’re fucked.”…

Brown started his speech by telling the crowd that he didn’t know what he was going to talk about, so when he arrived (late) for the speech, he asked San Francisco Democratic Party chair Aaron Peskin what he should say, and Peskin told him to talk about how there were more salmon in the streams and better overall environmental health back when Brown was governor in the ’70s.

But rather than taking that advice and giving a forceful call to strength environmental regulation or conjure up California’s better days, Brown meandered around and mused on that and other topics, feeding fears that the 71-year-old candidate might come off as a nostalgic, slightly senile former-Governor Moonbeam rather than an effective agent of needed change.

Not everyone in attendance shared Jones’s review of the speech. Raven Brooks, executive director of Netroots Nation, offered this take on the speech to Calitics:

The crowd was in general responding positively to both the content of his speech and all his mannerisms — everything from continuing to be coy about running to not knowing what he was going to talk about, etc. People he speaks to like that schtick which is part of his problem IMO, he thinks that’s the electorate and it isn’t. The average age in that room was definitely north of 65. This wasn’t like a fundraiser I’ve seen Obama speak at where everyone is jumping out of their seats giving him a standing ovation, but Jones isn’t accurately depicting the crowd’s reaction to Brown.

With that in mind, I get a somewhat different take than Jones on the speech. It’s not that Brown came off as “nostalgic, slightly senile” – instead he simply seemed unprepared. Showing up and not knowing what the hell you’re going to talk about shows that not only did he not prepare a speech, but that he and his campaign had given no thought whatsoever to the talking points and messaging they wanted to deliver.

If he’s talking to the state’s leading enviros, he should be letting them know the terms on which the campaign would be fought, especially when Whitman has given us ample ammunition to paint her as a global warming-denying wackjob with her desire to suspend AB 32. I’ve seen Brown give good, red-meat speeches before, such as at the 2008 CDP Convention in San Jose. But he needs to use these opportunities to communicate his core campaign narratives, instead of giving an unfocused if generally popular talk.

Most people hope that while Brown waits to declare his candidacy, he’s sitting with his inner circle in the Oakland loft planning out a thorough campaign strategy that includes everything from messaging to field to online. Episodes like this merely reinforce the concern that they haven’t started, and that he might actually run a Martha Coakley-style campaign.

Keep in mind how Brown won re-election in 1978, a year that in California generally favored conservative Republicans. Brown’s opponent, Republican Attorney General Evelle Younger, took a few weeks off after the June primary. Brown didn’t, and was able to define himself to the electorate and set the terms of the campaign in a way that was favorable to him. By the time Younger finally got engaged in the election campaign, he was behind in the polls and wound up losing by 20 points.

The 2010 race won’t be the same, of course – Brown won’t have the advantage of incumbency and he certainly won’t have more money than Whitman. But the basic concept is the same: candidates who wait to enter the race and launch their campaign have a greater hill to climb than is necessary.

Let’s hope Brown is taking this much time to launch his campaign for governor because he and his team are laying out a methodical campaign plan that can motivate progressives and turn out the casual voters who gave Obama a landslide victory here in 2008. In short, let’s hope he is prepared.

There’s still 9 months until the November election, but the early polling on the $11 billion water bond doesn’t look good at all for those who support its passage. Tulchin Research did a poll for a coalition of groups against the bond that found strong and widespread opposition to its passage:

Just one-third of likely voters (34%) support the water bond currently, while more than a majority of likely voters (55%) oppose it. That’s a very weak start for a bond measure, and some of the existing support is likely to drop off as a campaign against the bond ramps up later this year, in the view of opponents of the bond, who released the survey results today….

“The challenge for backers of this bond is monumental,” said Tulchin. “No statewide bond measure has ever won when a majority of voters opposed it at the outset.”

Support was weak in the poll, even among those voting yes, with just 12% saying they would “definitely” vote yes and 4% saying they merely “leaned” in favor. In contrast, there was greater intensity on the “no” side, with a third of all voters polled (32%) saying they would “definitely” vote no.

The poll shows that opposition is widespread:

As a result of numbers like this, some are floating the idea of postponing the bond vote, as was done twice with the high speed rail bond that was eventually approved in 2008, as Dan Walters reports:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger says that persuading voters to approve an $11.2 billion water bond issue this year will be “very challenging” but he hopes that they “know the difference between spending money and investing in the future.”…

Bond advocates are worried that the state’s continuing recession, its chronic budget crisis and the unpopularity of Schwarzenegger and legislators might make passage difficult, and there’s been some quiet discussion of postponing it until conditions improve. Schwarzenegger and legislators decreed that kind of postponement for a long-pending bond issue for high-speed rail service.

I really don’t see how this thing is going to pass this year. The combination of opposition from many environmental groups, public concern about deficit spending, and the heavy winter rains that might ease the drought could be enough to sink the package.

What do Meg Whitman, Steve Poizner, and Carly Fiorina have in common? Aside from their independent wealth, that is?

Each one prides themselves on their record of mass layoffs, plans to enact mass layoffs if elected – or both. All three are the true “job killers” in California. At a time when the state is still facing record unemployment, their emphasis on further job losses is bizarre, reckless, and a sign they are all interested in building corporate power instead of broadly shared economic recovery.

Let’s start with Meg Whitman, who is having even more trouble explaining herself to the public, this time about mass layoffs she presided over at eBay:

It’s true that there were regular, relatively small batches of layoffs at eBay during the dot-bomb when Whitman was CEO.

However, in 2008 the company laid off 10 percent of its employees. And though no longer acting as CEO, Whitman was on the board and still receiving paychecks. (The same board that provided lavish “golden parachutes” for executives while approving the layoffs.)

And, ironically enough, that same 10 percent number has been used by Whitman to describe how many state jobs she plans to eliminate if she becomes governor.

Let’s be very clear here – by serving on eBay’s board, she had responsibility for those layoffs. And as the NBC11 report noted, Whitman plans to make further mass layoffs if she becomes governor. She hasn’t explained why she believes an increase in unemployment is good for California – let’s hope someone asks her before she retreats to her lair in Atherton and spends several more months hiding from the public.

Steve Poizner also would like to initiate mass layoffs in California through his 10-10-10 plan, which would cut taxes and spending by 10%. The tax cuts would actually produce greater spending cuts, since the state would lose ongoing revenues. Poizner has targeted mostly health and human services for cuts, which will mean not only job losses for state workers who provide those services, but for health care workers as well. These cuts, of course, will cause children to suffer and more families to go under, but Poizner apparently thinks things like child starvation and untreated illnesses are somehow good for the state.

Finally, there is Carly Fiorina, who not only fired 18,000 people at a H-P before running that venerable company into the ground – she told Fortune magazine in 2005 that she should have fired more people more quickly. Fiorina compounded that by calling offshoring “right-sourcing” and claiming nobody had a “God-given right” to a job.

In short, Whitman, Poizner and Fiorina all represent the worst of CEO capitalism. They all believe that economic policy should be set for the benefit of the wealthy, no matter the cost. Even if it means mass layoffs of teachers and firefighters to ensure that we don’t raise taxes on the rich and on large corporations as Oregon voters did last month.

The message from the leading Republican candidates is clear: “A vote for us is a vote for unemployment.” We’ll see if Californians embrace it.