All posts by Robert Cruickshank

Election 2010, Jerry Brown

The Case for a Contested Democratic Primary

12 Comments

Gavin Newsom’s decision to quit the race for governor has left California Democrats with just one option – two-term governor Jerry Brown, back for his third term after nearly 30 years. For the first time in a very, very long time (before 1934), there will not be a contested Democratic primary where there is an open seat in the governor’s office.

This is not a positive development for the California Democratic Party or the future of our state. A contested Democratic gubernatorial primary is essential to not only a strong Democratic campaign in the fall of 2010, but more importantly, to rebuilding the shattered ruins of a once-golden state.

We need to first look at the big picture. As we’re seeing in Virgina and New Jersey gubernatorial races, the deciding factor is whether the Obama voters of 2008 will turn out to elect Democrats in state gubernatorial races. The answer to that question is clear: where the candidate espouses openly progressive positions, as Jon Corzine has begun to do in New Jersey, he has some success in motivating the Obama voters to return to the polls and elect a Democratic governor. Whereas Creigh Deeds couldn’t distance himself from Obama quickly enough and took anti-progressive positions, and now faces a resounding defeat at the hands of a wingnut.

To those who say “it can’t happen here,” I say your understanding of California politics is superficial. For over a century California voters default to electing Republicans to the governor’s office. Since 1900 only four Democrats have served as California governor. Two of them served essentially one term: Culbert Olson was beaten by Earl Warren in 1942, and you know what happened to Gray Davis in 2003.

The other two were named Edmund G. Brown. The younger of the two Edmund G. Browns is the last man standing in the 2010 Democratic primary for governor. Now you might think that is a positive sign for Dems, that one of the only two Democrats to serve two full terms as CA governor since 1900 is likely to be the party’s nominee in 2010. After all, Jerry Brown has a decent poll lead over the three Republicans, so we should be fine in 2010, right?

I am much less confident. A contested primary will only make Brown a stronger candidate should he indeed win that primary – and more importantly, it would give Democrats and DTS voters a chance to weigh in on the future of California, to have a real discussion about how to fix a broken state.

Flip it for the full argument…

Jerry Brown’s current poll lead rests on two factors: name recognition and a belief among some Democrats that Brown is a truly progressive politician. Both are not likely to continue to fuel a Brown polling lead. By next August the Republican nominee will have a much greater name recognition, coming off a contested primary that will include a high-profile TV air war. They will be well-funded and will likely have closed some of the existing gap with Brown.

That’s where the VA/NJ factor becomes so important. If Brown can mobilize Obama voters with progressive policies, then he will be well positioned to withstand the Whitman/Poizner/Campbell barrage.

But that’s a big if. Brown was never as progressive as many Democrats assume. During his two terms as governor in the 1970s and early 1980s he often gave liberals fits by his inconsistent support for their causes. Sure, he signed the law giving farmworkers important unionization rights, and carried forward some high-profile renewable energy projects.

At the same time, Brown demonstrated conservative fiscal instincts. Upon taking office in 1975 he ordered budget cuts across the board, including to social services and schools, resulting in a massive budget surplus. When he and Legislative Democrats failed to agree on property tax reform in 1977, Prop 13 went onto the June 1978 ballot and passed, the surplus lulling voters into thinking the dire predictions of doom were false. The day after, Brown declared himself “a born-again tax-cutter” and set about constructing the basis of the existing system in California, where the tyranny of Prop 13 is unchallenged by Democrats who seek short-term technocratic fixes to the budget that don’t solve the underlying problem.

It would be one thing if today’s Jerry Brown were more progressive on these matters. Unfortunately, he continues to believe that to get elected, he must espouse conservative ideas on the state’s financial and economic crisis. He continues to claim taxes and regulation hurt business and has proposed further tax cuts. He has staunchly opposed drug policy reform and sentencing reform and joined Arnold Schwarzenegger in suing to stop the federal government from exercising oversight over our prisons. Instead of calling for eliminating the 2/3rds rule that empowers right-wingers, he positions himself as a centrist and argues both right and left are wrong. Instead of offering a new vision for the next 30 years, Brown continues to defend the catastrophically failed status quo of the last 30 years.

This centrist positioning is the same playbook Brown ran as mayor of Oakland, where he frequently battled progressives. In short, Brown is unlikely to offer the kind of progressive language and policies that are required to drive a favorable turnout in November 2010 to get himself elected.

A competitive primary could help turn that around. If Brown faced a more progressive challenger, he would have to clarify his positions on key issues facing the state, instead of keeping them under wraps until August 2010. A primary battle will help him keep not just his name, but his vision before the voters of California. And as it worked for Obama in 2008, it would help him become a better statewide candidate (aside from a low-profile 2006 AG race, he hasn’t run a major campaign for office since 1992, and hasn’t won a major campaign for office since 1978).

If Brown did ultimately win the primary, he would be a better candidate for it. He’d have experience debating the issues of 2010 California  against an opponent. He’d have his arguments and talking points honed. He’d have a campaign infrastructure ready to go.

The rest of us would be able to have an opportunity to hold Brown accountable, and get answers to the key questions facing our state. And if we decide we like someone else better, we can mobilize behind them as the candidate that will truly offer change. It wasn’t clear if Newsom was ever going to be that candidate, but at least he was talking about the issues that matter, and offered a chance to force Brown to go public on these things as well.

While the bruising, stupid, and self-defeating primary battle of 2006 between Phil Angelides and Steve Westly might give some Democrats pause, the experience of the 2008 presidential primary, and the fundamentally different nature of the 2010 race should give Democrats confidence that a contested primary would build the party, energize the base, mobilize volunteers, and perhaps most importantly of all, would allow voters to decide whose vision they prefer for California: a vision that acknowledges the present situation is a failure and that lays out a progressive path for the next 30 years; or a vision that eschews the future and tries to defend the status quo of the last 30 years.

And even if Brown does become the nominee, he’ll be better off having been challenged. Not only will he be a sharper candidate with a better campaign, he may actually come to realize that to get elected governor in 2010, he has to show us where we are going as a state, and stop explaining, justifying, and defending where we’ve been.

Election 2010, Jerry Brown

Gavin Newsom Drops Out of Governor’s Race

34 Comments

Wow. Statement sent via email:

It is with great regret I announce today that I am withdrawing from the race for governor of California. With a young family and responsibilities at city hall, I have found it impossible to commit the time required to complete this effort the way it needs to and should be done.

This is not an easy decision. But it is one made with the best intentions for my wife, my daughter, the residents of the city and county of San Francisco, and California Democrats.

When I embarked on this campaign in April, my goal was to engage thousands and thousands of Californians dedicated to reforming our broken system and bringing change to Sacramento.

I would like to thank those supporters, volunteers, and donors who have worked so hard on my behalf. I have been humbled by their support and am indebted to their efforts. They represent the spirit of change and determination essential to putting California back on the right track.

I will continue to fight for change and the causes and issues for which I care deeply – universal health care, a cleaner environment, and a green economy for our families, better education for our children, and, of course, equal rights under the law for all citizens.

My quick take: Someone else has to jump in the race. There’s no reason to believe anyone else will, or that Dianne Feinstein will. But neither California Democrats, the people of this state, or even Jerry Brown will be served well by an uncontested primary. There are a lot of issues that need to be discussed in this race, and a competitive primary can only produce a stronger candidate (well, as long as it doesn’t turn into a ridiculous mudfest like 2006).

UPDATE by Robert: Matier & Ross and Carla Marinucci cite money woes and “lack of momentum” as reasons for quitting.

…and Evan Halper at the LA Times offers this take:

Although Newsom had been effectively running for more than a year, his campaign never gained much traction. Even in his hometown, which Newsom touted as a model of cutting-edge policies, his candidacy was widely derided among civic insiders.

Perhaps most telling was the absence of support from the major San Francisco donors who helped underwrite Newsom’s successful campaigns in the city. He also drew relatively few endorsements from the ranks of his fellow elected officials.

Newsom had repeatedly told those close to him that he did not want to embarrass himself in the governor’s race.

Election 2010

Bay Area Council Files Constitutional Convention Initiatives

21 Comments

After a year of public discussion and behind-closed-doors drafting, the Bay Area Council has filed their two initiatives for the November 2010 ballot to allow Californians to call a Constitutional Convention.

The first and fairly noncontroversial initiative would change the existing constitution to allow voters to themselves call a convention. Currently only the legislature can do so.

The second initiative is the biggie, the one that actually convenes the convention and lays out how it operates, including how delegates would be picked and what the scope would be.

The delegate selection process would be as follows: 3 delegates randomly selected from each AD (total of 240) and delegates selected by county Boards of Supervisors, one delegate per every 175,000 in a given county, with cities of over 1 million (currently LA and SD, maybe San Jose) get to pick some of their county’s delegates. Federally-recognized Indian tribes get to send a total of 4 delegates (they decide themselves who the 4 will be). This is interesting, since tribes’ primary relationship with with the federal government, and states are very strictly limited from regulating tribal affairs or lands. Still, better to have them in the process than outside it, especially since they were banned from the 1849 and 1879 conventions.

Significantly, all delegates must be citizens. Permanent residents are not eligible to participate. There are a series of other restrictions designed to keep political insiders out of the convention – rules that exclude yours truly (since I serve on a party central committee), but those are much less problematic than the exclusion of California’s considerable non-citizen population.

Preliminary analysis offered to me by Gus Ayer over email, which I hope he’ll share in the comments, indicates that this structure would be highly likely to produce a delegate body that is right of center. California’s large-population counties tend to be in Southern California and have Boards of Supervisors dominated by Republicans.

The convention’s scope is also interesting, and skewed toward the right. Have a look at the language on “Government Effectiveness,” included as one of four items the Convention MUST consider (along with “Elections and Reduction of Special Interest Influence,” “Spending and Budgeting” and “Governance”):

Government Effectiveness, including a method for periodically reviewing each State agency, department, board and commission to determine whether it is performing its functions to meet the needs of the people of the State and whether it should have its enabling legislation modified, be merged into another new or existing entity, or cease to exist.

The convention it would also be barred from altering existing constitutional language regarding taxes (including but not limited to Prop 13) if there’s any chance that the alteration “changes the fundamental nature of” the tax or might cause the tax to rise. In his response to my question during last week’s live interview on Calitics, Gavin Newsom said Prop 13 should be part of a Con-Con.

The initiative also proposes to limit the scope of the convention in this way:

the convention may not include new language, or alter existing language, directly affecting marriage or abortion rights, gambling or casinos of any type, affirmative action, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, immigration rights, or the death penalty.

I don’t know if they simply forgot to include “freedom of speech” or the state’s Equal Rights Amendment or any number of other elements that make our state’s Bill of Rights far, far stronger than the federal bill of rights, or if they deliberately want that to be altered. (Businesses have never been very happy with the Pruneyard decision, which used the state’s freedom of speech constitutional language to extend many speech rights onto private property, specifically shopping centers.)

Needless to say, this is not how I would have written a Con-Con initiative.

UPDATE by Robert: Joe Mathews offers his take on the initiatives, noting that the FPPC will be in charge of the Convention, picking the staff and training the delegates. He also points out that the “clerk” of the convention will be an extremely important role, could be anybody, and can only be fired by a 2/3rds vote of the Convention.

Health Care

The Arnold Option

6 Comments

Arnold Schwarzenegger wrote a letter to California’s Congressional leaders today about health care reform. Most of it is a long extended whine about the feds not offering enough money to states to provide for health care, since Arnold believes California should not be spending much money to help people get health care.

But there’s also an interesting proposal from our governor about the public option. Basically, he wants to use the “opt-out” as an opportunity for California to design its own public option, one that would benefit fewer people than the federal option:

In terms of state coverage options, I support the inclusion of language that will provide states the option of developing state-based insurance options for people with incomes above 133 percent of the federal poverty level but below 200 percent. I believe this provision can be strengthened and made more effective by allowing states, especially those with higher costs of living, to serve populations up to 300 percent FPL, providing states access to at least 95 percent of the tax credits and cost-sharing subsidies available for eligible individuals in the state and ensuring sufficient state flexibility to enable continuity of care between Medicaid and the state-based option. Providing states with the flexibility to set eligibility to 300 percent of the federal poverty level recognizes different cost structures across states and is more consistent with existing income eligibility thresholds allowed under the federal children’s health insurance program, which will help support the policy goal of keeping families together for health insurance purposes.

Finally, creating transparent and user-friendly health insurance exchanges at the state level can help facilitate the enrollment process. At the same time, I believe these state-based exchanges must be more than simple clearinghouses of information, but instead allow states to certify plans and negotiate within broadly established federal parameters to help promote competition among health plans. I also continue to believe that states must remain the primary regulator of health insurance in order to maintain the strongest consumer protections possible.

What this means is that Arnold Schwarzenegger would have California exercise the opt-out in order to design a “public option” much more restrictive in who it is available to, provided in state-based exchanges instead of through a national system. Alongside protecting the customer base of his insurance industry allies, this would also enable California to force the people who would want a public option to jump through a number of hoops designed to discourage them from actually getting the benefit, as California now does with things like IHSS, food stamps, and such.

Some may argue that California would never go for this kind of “Arnold option,” but let’s consider some things here. First, the Senate language regarding the opt-out has yet to materialize. Arnold may well be mainstreaming right-wing and corporate talking points that could be used by conservadems in the Senate to shape the opt-out in a way that would have the program more closely resemble the Nixonian “block grants” that have given states too much power to restrict federally-mandated benefits. In short, Arnold might be saying “hey, here’s how the opt-out should look!”

Arnold may also be setting up the language and framing that could be used by Republican gubernatorial candidates to deal with federal health care reform. In a state where the public option concept is popular, Arnold could be showing how the public option could be neutered in practice while preserved in name.

In a state that has gutted much of its public sector over the last two years, with bipartisan support the entire time, it’s a strategy worth watching closely. Especially since the outcome of the federal health care reform project now appears to be a shifting of the battleground to the states.

UPDATE by Robert: John Myers reports via Twitter that “Guv’s ofc says his health care letter should not be interpreted as support for opt-in/opt-out public option” and that, quoting a governor’s office spokesperson, Arnold “is calling for state-based insurance options to offer coverage for lower income populations not eligible for Medicaid.”

Which to me reinforces two things: one, that this may well be ammunition for those trying to weaken the public option in the Congress, and two, that anyone who thinks an opt-out battle would never come to California because the public option is so popular is missing some key realities about state politics.

California

A Tale of Two Californias

7 Comments

In the wake of the Guardian’s article on whether California is a failed state we’re seeing a lot of other publications take up the same question, with varying results. Perhaps one of the most ridiculous and absurd attempts to discuss the issue was in TIME Magazine last week. The author, Michael Grunwald, claims California is “thriving,” that the California Dream is still alive, and that we should stop our “whinery.” The nut of the piece:

Ignore the California whinery. It’s still a dream state. In fact, the pioneering megastate that gave us microchips, freeways, blue jeans, tax revolts, extreme sports, energy efficiency, health clubs, Google searches, Craigslist, iPhones and the Hollywood vision of success is still the cutting edge of the American future – economically, environmentally, demographically, culturally and maybe politically. It’s the greenest and most diverse state, the most globalized in general and most Asia-oriented in particular at a time when the world is heading in all those directions. It’s also an unparalleled engine of innovation, the mecca of high tech, biotech and now clean tech. In 2008, California’s wipeout economy attracted more venture capital than the rest of the nation combined. Somehow its supposedly hostile business climate has nurtured Google, Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Facebook, Twitter, Disney, Cisco, Intel, eBay, YouTube, MySpace, the Gap and countless other companies that drive the way we live.

The article goes on for a couple pages in this vein, so I don’t want to dignify it with too much of my precious time. Suffice it to say that a state with a 12.2% unemployment rate is not “thriving” and that much more importantly – and totally ignored by Grunwald – is that the conditions that produced the innovation and entrepreneurial success he extols is gone. Our educational system is in collapse, meaning we won’t be able to produce the ideas and creators to sustain the next generation of products, technologies, and companies. Grunwald can’t look at a timescale of, say, 1995 to 2007 and assume that means California in 2009 is doing fine.

Especially since his article is little more than 2003-era boosterism that assumes if a few iconic business are doing fine (and many of them are not) then the state as a whole is doing fine. Grunwald’s notion of the “California Dream” appears to be one where a handful of well-known businesses are still identified with the state, and everyone else is just assumed to benefit from being near them, like the average joe who winds up at a Hollywood restaurant near a star and his agent. Grunwald prefers to sweep under the carpet mass unemployment, the collapse of social services, increasing inequality, and the evaporation of the hopes and dreams of millions. The article is a cruel insult to a state that is in very real crisis, and needs to find solutions, fast.

Of course, one can’t really expect much else from TIME Magazine. A more insightful look at California’s problems comes from, of all places, an article by John Judis in The New Republic. Titled End State: Is California Finished? it does a far better job of diagnosing California’s very real problems. Judis paints a picture of a state that is becoming the living embodiment of John Edwards’ (and before him, Governor Otto Kerner) famous claim about “two Americas.” Judis recognizes that the root of California’s problems is racial.

California’s crisis, as read in Judis’ article, is that its white residents have refused to include their Latino neighbors in the prosperity of the California Dream, and instead acquiesced to the Republicans’ demand to scale back Pat Brown’s California in order to prevent it from benefiting the non-white. He does not quite come out and say it, but he puts all the pieces on the table. The conclusion is not only obvious, but inescapable:

There are places in California’s Central Valley, and in the exurbs where Countrywide, Wachovia, and IndyMac sold subprime mortgages, that look like downriver Detroit, but, in Menlo Park and in Oakland’s Rockridge area, where I stayed during my recent visit, there were few visible signs of trouble. That’s because, like its educational system, California’s economy is pretty much divided in two….

What’s important are the huge disparities between regions. The unemployment rate in Silicon Valley’s San Mateo County is 9.2 percent, less than the national average, and unemployment is even lower around Santa Barbara or in Marin County. But it is 15.7 percent in the Stockton area, 16.7 percent in Merced, and a whopping 28.7 percent in Imperial County near the Mexican border–heavily Hispanic areas dependent on agriculture and home construction. The disparities in these figures largely reflect what is produced in those areas and who lives there….

In the past, immigrant farm laborers or roofers or grocery clerks could hope that their children would work their way up the occupational ladder–perhaps by getting a well-paid job in California’s auto or aircraft industry. But, for the last two decades, these kinds of middle-income jobs in manufacturing and office work have been disappearing in the state.

There’s no doubt that California’s economy exhibits a high degree of racialized inequality, which manifests itself in, and then is reinforced through, the state’s undemocratic politics. And yet I think Judis is wrong to assume that our state’s economic crisis is solely a product of racial inequality. Many in the white middle class, those who threw the nonwhite overboard from 1978 onward, are now experiencing some of the same problems that Judis ascribed to the nonwhite populations. The collapse of education, especially higher education, is a dagger aimed directly at the heart of the white middle class’s ability to perpetuate itself. As the California Budget Project realized in 2007, young college graduates have seen their incomes collapse during this decade. They too are being shut out of the California Dream by those who benefited from it. It’s not just white against nonwhite, but white homeowner over 45 in a coastal county against virtually everyone else.

Judis did make the initial connection between racial inequality and Republican politics, and understands that the GOP is a central part of California’s crisis:

The biggest reason for this paralysis is the radicalization of California’s Republican Party. By now, this is a familiar part of the American political landscape. But it all began in California. When Brown took office, California politics was still dominated by liberal Democrats and progressive Republicans. By the mid-1960s, conservative Republicans, fueled by the backlash against the civil rights movement, the campus rebellion, and the counterculture, began to oust Republican progressives.

As I  explained at the beginning of 2009, conservative racial backlash politics goes beyond the internal battles in the 1960s GOP. Prop 13 and the subsequent logic of anti-tax politics are still deeply intertwined with it, as white Californians believe that their tax money will be used by government to help the “undeserving.” The only difference between 2009 and 1979 is that today, many whites are now included in the “undeserving” class.

And that, along with the state’s rich diversity and the “post-racial” attitudes among the youngest generations in the state – we who never bought into the idea that for the California Dream to survive, it had to be defined as being for the benefit of whites and nobody else – we have the opportunity to renew California’s Dream by tearing down the entire edifice of Republican backlash politics. We won’t produce economic security for all unless we include all in the process of building it. We won’t fix our broken politics and broken government until we include everyone in the process of fixing it. That includes the state’s large and underrepresented Latino population, but it also includes African-Americans, Asian-Americans, and everyone else currently denied access to the prosperity and democracy that California once stood for.

California

Fixing a Government That’s “Designed to Fail”

6 Comments

There’s something fascinating about reading the columns of Dan Walters. You get the sense that’s deeply frustrated with how our state’s government fails, but he can never really bring himself to abandon his conservatism to truly diagnose the problems and offer the truly bold solutions this state needs.

His column today is a perfect example of this. He writes about a joint legislative hearing on state reform that, in his mind, didn’t quite articulate the reasons why state government failed. In that I would agree, but for very different reasons.

The most popular prescription, judging by how many times it was mentioned, was loosening up the state’s 19-year-old legislative term limit law. Democrats, Republicans and academics took turns criticizing term limits – six years in the Assembly and eight years in the Senate….

Even setting aside the reality that voters last year rejected modification of term limits, blaming them for the Legislature’s wheel-spinning is revisionist history. Voters adopted them because they perceived, accurately, that the Legislature of the 1980s was ineffective and corrupt, as demonstrated by a federal undercover sting that sent many Capitol denizens to prison.

Walters is misstating some things here. Term limits has always been a close battle – Prop 140 squeaked by with less than 1% in the November 1990 election, and Prop 93 got over 46% of the vote in February 2008. It might have received a majority had it not protected existing incumbents.

And Walters also misstates the reasons why Prop 140 passed. As I remember well, the debate was not about Capitol corruption, but about Capitol liberalism. Specifically, it was a discussion about one person: Speaker Willie L. Brown, Jr. Conservatives knew Willie Brown had their number, knew that San Francisco voters would never kick him out of office, and after the failure of the Gang of Five to remove Brown from office in 1988, it became clear Dems would never throw him overboard either. So SoCal wingnuts like Pete Schabarum put Prop 140 on the ballot to rid the state of Willie Brown. They achieved that goal, and more, causing massive damage to state government.

That all being said, Walters is right to say that term limits is just a tip of the iceberg. Unfortunately, he doesn’t quite get at the real problems:

In reality, California’s governmental dysfunction is much more fundamental than term limits, campaign contributions, gerrymandered legislative seats and other oft-cited factors, even though they have contributed to the institutional malaise.

Bill Lockyer, who’s held state office for 35 years and is now state treasurer, came very close to the truth when he told legislators, “We’re part of a system that was designed not to work.”

Walters doesn’t walk through the door Lockyer opened. If he did, he’d understand that the system was deliberately broken by a specific group of people: conservative Republicans who after 1978 became frustrated with the fact (and it is a fact) that Californians do not share their insane anti-government plutocratic ideology. So they saddled the state with a bunch of rules designed to give themselves veto power over everyone else, and prevent the majority from governing itself.

Walters does mention the 2/3rds rule, but he doesn’t draw the right conclusion from it. The damage that rule does cannot be understood outside the partisan political context. Clear majorities of Californians want to be governed by Democrats and want progressive policies. They will support the right kind of taxes to support the right kind of government services. The perversion of democracy that involves refusing to let the majority govern the state has to be discussed as part of any analysis of the California crisis for that analysis to be credible.

What makes Walters somewhat interesting is his willingness to throw some bombs, instead of simply defending the status quo as George Skelton usually does:

The much-vaunted checks and balances of the American system, designed by the nation’s founders who had revolted against a king and feared centralized power, create stasis in a society with as many rival factions as California has.

What may have worked in post-colonial, mono-cultural America doesn’t work very well in a postindustrial, multicultural state such as California, especially since we’ve added even more hurdles to decision-making, such as ballot measures and two-thirds votes.

Until and unless we realign government to 21st century reality, another Lockyer observation will probably prevail: “You are the captive of this environment, and I don’t see any way out.”

I too am a strong proponent of abandoning the stupid pretense that we can keep the 20th century alive and instead we should orient government, policies, and our worldview toward a 21st century reality. And it may be the case that an 18th century model of governance no longer suits a nation-state like California.

I’m all for exploring something like parliamentizing California government, where we have a unicameral legislature that elects a Prime Minister who fills some, though probably not all, of the slots that currently comprise the executive branch. I’m also down with exploring proportional representation.

But none of that is absolutely necessary at this point in time. The #1 problem with California, the reason our state government is “designed to fail,” is that it has become captive to a small group of wacko ideologues who want government to fail, who want mass poverty, who think Charles Dickens’ description of the 19th century poverty were utopian stories and not calls to progressive action.

To fix California, we must first break the back of that conservative ideology and rally the people of California to rediscover the progressive elements of the California Dream.

Los Angeles Area

Battle Brews Over Subway to the Sea

9 Comments

One of the most important transportation projects in California, aside from my beloved high speed rail project of course, is the Subway to the Sea. A long-planned effort to build passenger rail to Santa Monica via the Wilshire corridor, it has become a primary goal of LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. Few areas in North America are as congested as LA’s Westside, and a subway through this region would be a godsend, creating thousands of jobs and reducing dependence on oil while untangling the traffic mess.

But LA County also has several other passenger rail projects they’re considering, and with the passage of Measure R (a tax approved by 2/3rds of voters in the state’s most populous county last November) along with a transit-friendly White House, Metro can actually reasonably expect them to get built.

The question is what gets built and when – and with what federal funds. As with most other transportation projects around the country, Metro’s projects will need federal “new starts” funding. Villaraigosa wants Metro’s board to prioritize the Subway to the Sea and another related project, the “Downtown Connector” (finally linking the Blue and Gold lines, as originally intended).

Villaraigosa’s plans are getting some pushback from local members of Congress. 14 members of Congress, including Adam Schiff, Jane Harman, David Dreier, and Maxine Waters, wrote a letter telling the Metro board that if they follow Villaraigosa’s plan, they risk losing out on federal funding:

The 14 members of Congress who signed a letter released Tuesday said those two programs [Subway to the Sea and Downtown Connector] don’t have a good shot at immediate federal funding.

Further, they said the county risks not getting much from the federal New Starts program for several years unless it adds other regional transit proposals to the application, including the Gold Line extension east from Pasadena, a rail line down Crenshaw Boulevard and the Gold Line Eastside extension Phase 2 from East L.A. to South El Monte or Whittier.

“We are very concerned that Los Angeles County is not positioning itself well to receive its fair share of New Starts funding in the near- and long-term,” the delegation wrote.

The background is that there are three other projects that some Metro board members and legislators want funded: a light rail line down Crenshaw, connecting the Red and Purple lines to the Expo and Green lines; and two extensions of the Gold Line into the suburban San Gabriel Valley.

The battle reflects typical political debates in LA County, with the Subway to the Sea and the Downtown Connector seen as benefiting the wealthy Westside at the expense of the less prosperous and more diverse South LA and San Gabriel Valley communities. And as the legislators’ letter makes clear, it’s inconceivable that Metro could get new starts funding for all 5 projects.

Yonah Freemark, who runs The Transport Politic, one of the best transportation blogs out there, points out that the other 3 projects would serve far fewer riders than the Subway to the Sea and the Downtown Connector, and that from a transportation need perspective, those should be prioritized.

Of course, the US Congress isn’t a place where such sensible considerations rule the day. David Dreier, whose district includes the I-210 corridor along which one of the Gold Line extensions would run, has been particularly adamant about ensuring that project gets support from the Metro board. And South LA representatives understandably want to ensure that their communities get served by transit – as residents there have the greatest dependence on transit, their case is strong.

If it were up to me, I’d back the Subway to the Sea, the Downtown Connector, and the Crenshaw line and tell Dreier to shove it. As the LA Subway Blog notes, the Subway to the Sea will have enormous regional benefits. Just because it is located on the Westside doesn’t mean that’s the only place it will assist – just as the Port of Los Angeles-Long Beach doesn’t just benefit people living in San Pedro and Wilmington.

But the real issue here isn’t picking which of the 5 worthy projects gets supported and which doesn’t. Metro would be in better shape if the state of California wasn’t in the process of abandoning its support for mass transit. The state ought to be able to help fund construction of one or two of these projects, leaving the feds more able to support the other three. For example, the state should be able to help start the Crenshaw line and one of the Gold Line extensions, enabling the feds to fund the Subway to the Sea, the Downtown Connector, and the other Gold Line extension.

Southern California was the poster child for the 20th century sprawlconomy, and is now suffering greatly for having clung to that model for too long. Voters there now recognize it is time to change, and have put their money behind the kind of mass transit solutions the region desperately needs. It’s up to the state and federal governments to deliver their share. We’ll see what happens at today’s Metro board meeting.

UPDATE by Robert: The Metro board voted today to recommend the Subway to the Sea and the Downtown Connector for federal new starts funding. The board also passed an amendment by Mark Ridley-Thomas directing Metro to seek all other possible funding (aside from new starts) to build the Crenshaw and Gold Line extension LRT projects.

Election 2010, Jerry Brown

Jerry Brown Doubles Down vs. CNBC

10 Comments

Jerry Brown’s appearance on CNBC yesterday to explain the state’s lawsuit against State Street Bank turned into a battle between Brown, playing the role of a latter-day William Jennings Bryan in taking on the “Eastern financial elite,” and the CNBC anchors who were very clearly playing their role as defenders of the Wall Street orthodoxy. Brown’s combativeness earned him some favorable press, including from the folks at Calbuzz.

Now Brown seems set to milk this for all it’s worth, as he steps up his attack on CNBC at the Huffington Post:

If street thugs were to hold up a convenience store and drive off with $1 million, it would be national news. But when a venerable Boston bank rips off California’s two largest pension funds for $56 million, it’s business-as-usual — at least to the anchors of CNBC….

But, in a commentary post today, CNBC anchor Michelle Caruso-Cabrera sneered at California’s effort to recover $200 million in damages and penalties, using a made-up quote from Elliot Spitzer to call it “quaint.”

This follows an interview Tuesday that was straight out of the Daily Show. CNBC invited me on to talk about the case, and then Caruso-Cabrera asked why I would come on the air to talk about it.

Her co-anchors seemed to have no problem with the rip-off (“as long as they quoted you a dollar and you paid the dollar, what do you care what they got it for”) and questioned the integrity of the whistle-blowers (“that whistle-blower — is that a private law firm that you guys have hired to do this for you?”) Unbelievable. And for the record, the whistle-blowers are industry insiders who have yet to be named.

The tone and substance of the interview are symptomatic of the Eastern financial elite, who think that $200 million is small potatoes, and big business should be given the benefit of the doubt.

Jerry Brown has a knack for understanding which way the political winds blow, and ensuring he blows with them. Public anger at the Wall Street elite, which as Calitics alum David Dayen noted are now having British Lords explain that we all must “tolerate the inequality”, is rising fast. It’s smart politics to join the populist attack on Wall Street, and there’s no fatter target than their apologists on CNBC, which is the Fox News of the financial world and has about as corrosive an effect on our discourse and politics as does Fox Noise.

It also helps Brown solidify the belief – mistaken, in my view – that he is an inherently progressive person. Today’s Sacramento Bee carries an article looking back at Brown’s days as a host for KPFA, Berkeley’s legendary left-wing radio station, in the 1990s. Brown uttered some fairly progressive things at the time, including an attack on prisons.

Garry South seems to think these excerpts would hurt Brown, but I think they’ll only help him. Brown’s KPFA comments help reinforce the widespread notion among many Democrats that Brown is somehow a deeply progressive person – that the Jerry Brown of 1975 and of 1995 will be the Governor Brown of 2010.

Of course, as we know, the Jerry Brown of 2009 is not a supporter of prison reform (he strongly opposed Prop 5 last year and has joined Arnold Schwarzenegger in trying to remove federal oversight of state prison health care). He refuses to countenance tax increases, and has even called for new tax cuts.

Anything that distracts attention from those decidedly anti-progressive positions helps Brown maintain the support of progressive Dems who see him as someone who shares their values.

It certainly helps that Brown still is as media-savvy as anyone. So it makes perfect sense for Brown to continue to play the populist against the banks. It is very much the right thing to do from a policy perspective, and is only going to help his cause in the Democratic primary.

California, Prisons

Marijuana Decriminalization Goes Mainstream

3 Comments

Major policy changes often happen as a result of a sudden shift that is, in fact, not so sudden at all. Public attitudes and behavior steadily change over time, but a political system whose practitioners have made up their minds on a topic years ago, before that change became apparent, are typically unwilling to accept the new reality. Until something changes – a new generation of leaders takes power, a financial crisis causes people to become more open to new ideas. Or perhaps it’s just as simple as an idea whose time has come, an idea whose wisdom can no longer be denied.

We’re at such a turning point with marijuana. One of the state’s main cash crops, the economic base of many small towns in the North Coast (and of a growing but hard to track number of metropolitan households), marijuana is already widely available in California, whether on the black market or at a quasi-legal dispensary. As more and more Californians are comfortable with the use of marijuana, even if they do not partake of it themselves, the decades-old drug war has become seen as more and more absurd when it comes to marijuana.

When an April Field Poll found 56% of Californians back marijuana legalization, it became only a matter of time before the topic became a fully mainstream subject, deemed appropriate for “serious” conversation at everything from public policy summits to the dinner table.

And so this week California is witnessing a fundamental shift in marijuana policy, where for perhaps the first time it really is a question of “when,” and not “if,” the sale and use of marijuana will become legal in California.

The biggest news comes from the federal government, where Attorney General Eric Holder has followed through on his early signals and announced the Justice Department will no longer prosecute people for using medical marijuana in accordance with their state’s laws. Holder is not yet embracing full legalization, of course. But this is a significant shift that recognizes states do have a right to innovate when it comes to drug policy. Whether the Obama Administration intends it or not, the new policy will be further evidence that a strict federal “War on Drugs” is no longer desirable or viable.

Here in California, more fundamental changes are under way. As a judge rules LA DA Steve Cooley’s attack on dispensaries to be invalid, the movement for full legalization is well under way. Tom Ammiano’s bill to legalize, regulate, and tax marijuana, AB 390, will get its first hearing in the Assembly next week.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, speaking at a bill signing ceremony in Merced yesterday, said he is “basically opposed” to legalization but believes it’s time to have a debate about the issue. In Arnold-speak that says he doesn’t see legalization as a political loser, even if he’s not quite willing to go there himself. His comments show that legalization has gone from being a sensible idea on the fringes of our political discourse to something we can debate as easily and naturally as, say, water policy.

Meanwhile, armed with the Field Poll results – as well as the recent Gallup Poll which found support for legalization was highest in the Western US, with moderates and independents nationwide about split on the matter, California activists are not waiting around for the legislature or the governor to act.

Instead they’re going directly to the ballot. TaxCannabis.org is the headquarters for the effort to put an initiative on the November 2010 ballot to treat marijuana much like alcohol. The initiative would legalize possession of up to one ounce for all adults over 21, and give local governments the ability to determine whether to more broadly legalize and tax marijuana themselves. It would essentially create a “local option” instead of a statewide free-for-all.

It’s not yet clear if they have the money or the volunteers to put this on the ballot. And the fact that local governments would be the ones implementing the policy, instead of a single statewide standard, might limit the savings in prison spending and the overall tax revenues created. But it’s a clear step forward for sensible drug policy, one whose time has clearly come.

Budget

Darrell Steinberg: “I’m done cutting”

In the aftermath of the May 19 special election Senate President pro Tem Darrell Steinberg claimed a mandate from voters to make cuts – and as he said, “cut we will.”

As we’ve seen, that hasn’t worked out so well for California. Our economy has worsened as government has contracted, leading to increased unemployment along with the financial and even physical distress that comes with reduced availability of health care services.

Perhaps Steinberg has learned from these mistakes, because in an article in today’s Sac Bee, he says “I’m done cutting”:

Steinberg said he’s not at all happy he had to cast votes for cuts – and he added, “I’m done cutting.”

“I feel very strongly,” he said, “that we’ve gone beyond what is reasonable when it comes to cuts.”

But he is, as [Marty] Omoto suggested, proud that he pushed for “surgical” cuts and that California government remains standing despite all the talk about the state being ungovernable.

California’s government is like a punch-drunk boxer. Sure, it’s standing, but not for much longer. The cuts Steinberg agreed to have weakened the state immensely, leaving us not only deeper in recession but making it unlikely we will see economic recovery anytime soon. Most employers and economists I’ve spoken to are convinced California will be among the last states in the country to recover from this recession.

That will exacerbate the looming budget crisis in 2011, when the combination of the expiration of the temporary tax increases approved in February and the borrowing gimmicks done in the last three budget deals come together to produce a budget deficit that could be as high as $20 billion – assuming the economy doesn’t get any worse between now and then.

I’m glad to see Steinberg realizes we can’t make any more cuts. It’s time to embrace sensible, populist revenue solutions and become aggressive – even fearless – about selling them to the people of California.