Brian mentioned this in the open thread, but it really deserves its own post, it’s such a ridiculous column. George Skelton today made a full-throated but deeply flawed argument for offshore drilling that as far as I can tell boils down to “well we did it in the past, and it’s not going to help in the future…so why not?!” and winds up arguing that we should sacrifice the future for hardly anything in return. The column doesn’t start off on a promising note:

On some beaches around Santa Barbara, you could feel the oozing tar between your toes — and that was long before a Union Oil platform five miles offshore spilled crud all over 20 miles of coast in 1969. For centuries, the tar naturally had seeped up through the sand, providing the native Chumash with caulking for their canoes.

Calling it “crud” is deliberately misleading readers about what actually happened in 1969. From UCSB:

Animals that depended on the sea were hard hit. Incoming tides brought the corpses of dead seals and dolphins. Oil had clogged the blowholes of the dolphins, causing massive lung hemorrhages. Animals that ingested the oil were poisoned. In the months that followed, gray whales migrating to their calving and breeding grounds in Baja California avoided the channel -their main route south.

The oil took its toll on the seabird population. Shorebirds like plovers, godwits and willets which feed on sand creatures fled the area. But diving birds which must get their nourishment from the waters themselves became soaked with tar….

Grebes, cormorants and other seabirds were so sick, their feathers so soaked in oil that they were not difficult to catch. Birds were bathed in Polycomplex A-11, medicated, and placed under heat lamps to stave off pneumonia. The survival rate was less than 30 percent for birds that were treated. Many more died on the beaches where they had formerly sought their livelihoods. Those who had managed to avoid the oil were threatened by the detergents used to disperse the oil slick. The chemicals robbed feathers of the natural waterproofing used to keep seabirds afloat.

In all 3686 birds were estimated to have died because of contact with oil. Aerial surveys a year later found only 200 grebes in an area that had previously drawn 4000 to 7000.

Skelton’s blithe dismissal of the ecological consequences of drilling is appalling. It’s not as if our oceans are healthy – oceans face crippling ecological crises and they’re in no position to withstand drilling.

Skelton goes on to turn “Big Oil” into a nostalgia piece (I’m guessing someone didn’t see There Will Be Blood):

Oh, another thing: My dad was an oil field roustabout, or driller or whatever job he could fill on a given shift. So were his dad, brother and cousins. They left their Tennessee farms and followed the migration to California for the 1920s oil boom.

My first summer job out of high school was in a Ventura oil field, an experience guaranteed to prod a kid into college if nothing else would. (But the oil job paid better than newspaper work, I soon discovered.)

So “Big Oil” never has been a big bugaboo for me. It was the producer of a vital commodity and provider of working-class jobs. Although oil derricks annoy many people as unsightly, I’ve always marveled at how they work, especially all lighted up at night.

Nostalgic memories do not count as a sound basis for public policy – unless of course he thinks we should go back to the days before OSHA, dump our toxic waste into the drinking water supply, and drive without seatbelts.

Worse is the conflation of Big Oil with working-class prosperity. Perhaps at some moment in the past this was true, but Skelton here merely reveals that he, like all the High Broderists, does not live in the 21st century, instead assuming that the conditions of the 1970s remain true today. They don’t.

Here in the 21st century Big Oil sucks precious income away form working-class families while returning hardly any in the form of jobs, taxes, or anything else resembling prosperity. And as anyone living near the Torrance refinery knows, they tend to actually have rather debilitating effect on working-class communities.

More below…

Skelton’s main thrust of the article is some weird attempt to argue that offshore drilling will actually produce self-sufficiency – since California uses so much gas, shouldn’t we drill offshore for more?

This argument has numerous flaws. First, Californians are reducing their gas consumption which has been relatively flat over the last 8 or 9 years. Conservation, not wasteful and useless drilling, is what brought prices back from the brink of $5 earlier this summer, and it alone is what will produce long-term savings.

Skelton tries to dismiss the correct argument that drilling now won’t produce usable oil for at least ten years:

Offshore exploration opponents point out that if the federal drilling ban were lifted today, there’d be no immediate effect on gasoline prices. It could take 10 years to get any crude to the gas pump. Fine. Most people driving today still will be 10 years from now.

This is a statement deeply ignorant of how oil works today. He is assuming that the supply of oil and the demand for oil will remain static so that in 10 years, the oil we drill off our coast will make it to the pump and reduce prices.

He is wrong.

The fact is that the demand for oil is soaring around the world, and it is becoming difficult if not impossible to increase production to match it. That is the phenomenon of peak oil at work and that is why gas prices have climbed by 30% every year since 2002. Supply can’t match ever-rising demand. The oil off American shores is so small an amount as to not be able to dent oil prices that, ten years from now, are very likely to be much higher than they are today. As demand rises around the world, oil companies will sell the oil we drill off our coast on a global market. The chances it will bring down the price of gas here in CA is next to none.

The only thing offshore drilling will accomplish is fouling our already suffering oceans and wildlife while lining the pockets of oil companies that sell the oil to China and India. How is that useful again?

Skelton does deal with the argument that lifting the drilling ban detracts us from the necessary long-term investment in alternatives – by dismissing it almost entirely:

Alan Salzman, founder of VantagePoint Venture Partners…adds, “The car industry is going to switch over to electric, and that’s a certainty. Hundreds of thousands of electric cars will be on the road in 2011.”

Let me know when one is affordable, practical and in the showroom.

People didn’t give up their horse and buggy until Henry Ford began making affordable cars. We’re anxiously awaiting our next transportation mode. Meanwhile, we’ll need to keep pumping gas — some of it from the Santa Barbara Channel.

Skelton needs to get out of the LA Times offices and take a look at the city around him. He might be surprised at what he finds. Hundreds of thousands of his fellow Angelenos have found alternatives to driving. That’s what enabled them to reduce their gas consumption and in turn bring down prices, albeit slightly. They bike. They walk.

His own paper reported on Metro Rail’s soaring ridership and again on Metrolink’s soaring ridership. Nowhere in Skelton’s drilling article is the MTA sales tax discussed, which would have the Subway to the Sea open by the time the first oil from the Santa Barbara Channel reaches Chinese gas pumps. Nor is high speed rail discussed, or clean bus technology, or greater urban density, or any other alternative to oil that is ready to go, right now, stalled merely for lack of political will that is currently being wasted on drilling.

Al Gore said it best at the TED Conference here in Monterey last March: drilling is “like a junkie looking for veins in his toes so he can get one last fix.” Drilling distracts us from the real problems our state faces, and for absolutely nothing in return.

Skelton doesn’t have to live in a future where the oil runs out and Californians, instead of building alternatives when we had the time and money to do so, are left with no viable alternative to oil. Unfortunately the rest of us do.

His plan for more drilling isn’t letting go of the past, it’s clinging desperately to the past in a blind refusal to accept the need to change in order to produce a better future. Just as California has failed its offspring by kicking the tax and deficit issues into the future, so too will it fail the future by drilling instead of developing alternatives.

If Skelton wants to live in the past, he’s welcome to do so. But he should not condemn the rest of us to do as well. California must change if we are to have a prosperous future.  

I will be on KRXA 540 AM at 8 this morning to discuss this and other California politics issues. Cindy Sheehan will be on at 9 – any questions you want asked?

The supposed budget deal that Don Perata claimed he had with Arnold and that we roundly denounced yesterday apparently was a figment of Perata’s imagination, according to the Sacramento Bee:

Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata began Wednesday saying he had made enough concessions to secure a budget deal with the governor and called for Republicans to sign on.

But the day ended with little progress, as Perata concluded that negotiations remained at “impasse.”…

In the five hours between Perata’s two comments, it became clear that Republican leaders were not joining Perata’s call for a vote. Neither were Assembly Democrats nor Schwarzenegger.

“I think we keep getting closer, but there are still issues to work out,” said Aaron McLear, Schwarzenegger’s spokesman. “We hope that the legislators have the same sense of urgency that we do. We need to get this done.”

Assembly Speaker Karen Bass was not ready to end budget talks, spokesman Steve Maviglio said.

“We’re continuing to negotiate on all the pieces of the puzzle,” he said. “Until they all come together, it’s premature to say what’s in and what’s out.”

Perata’s notion of a spending cap was apparently less rigid than the Republicans were demanding, although as far as I’m concerned any spending cap is a bad cap. Another sticking point is the Republicans’ insistence that any temporary increase in the sales tax to balance the budget be not only reversed after 3 years, but that the sales tax rate gets cut below its current level.

It should be made crystal-clear to California voters by Democrats that what Republicans are demanding is a further breaking of the budget process. They don’t want solutions, instead they are actively trying to make matters worse through a hard spending cap or a sales tax cut. Democrats need to be campaigning on the budget and turning the budget into a campaign, but it’s difficult to do that if you’re willing to agree to Republican-framed proposals like a spending cap, even if your details are different from theirs.

California voters deserve to know that Republicans are trying to implement Grover Norquist’s “drown government in a bathtub” agenda. Because as far as I can tell, budget negotiations are no further advanced than they’ve been in weeks, and since this is likely to drag until the fall, Democrats need to mobilize the electorate against Republican hostage-taking. We’ve begun to see some campaigning on the budget but it needs to be massively expanded and made a core element of the Sacramento Democrats’ daily routine.

It’s also time to mobilize the unions and other stakeholders, who have been quiet of late on the budget. The model for action must be the 2005 special election, which revolved around many of the same issues. Californians don’t want Republican budget proposals, but they won’t reject them unless Democrats ask them to do so.

Finally, it’s time for Don Perata to go. His “budget deal” stunt makes him look even more ridiculous than before and suggests he has no strategy or grasp of political reality and, as a lame duck Senator, has no place in these negotiations. He should hand over power to Darrell Steinberg now, not next week, and allow the state to get on with business without Perata’s silly theatrics or distracting legal issues or his unfortunate tendency to sell out the Democratic base.

David mentioned this below, but it deserves deeper elaboration. Don Perata’s agreement on a spending cap is one of the worst possible outcomes of the budget crisis. A spending cap has been a core demand of the Grover Norquist far right.  In Colorado, where a spending cap had been in place for several years, it nearly destroyed state government and had to be suspended.

If Democrats agree to this, they will be agreeing to the destruction of the state of California, finishing the job Prop 13 started 30 years ago. I cannot stress strongly enough how bad an idea this is.

It’s also unpopular with voters. Arnold’s spending cap, Prop 76, went down in flames in 2005 with 62% of voters rejecting it.

But what is the spending cap about? And why is is such a horrible idea? An excellent LA Times article from 2005 explains how spending caps are at the core of the right-wing plan to drown government in a bathtub:

Hard-line fiscal conservatives say they hope to reinvigorate the types of populist uprising that led to the approval by California voters of landmark protections against property tax increases through Proposition 13 in 1978 and the passage of term limits on politicians here and in several other states….

The proposals put strict limits on how much state budgets can increase each year. Anti-tax activists see such controls as a means to scale back spending on education, healthcare and social-service programs that even the staunchest free-market Republicans have been reluctant to cut.

Schwarzenegger and his advisors, already battling charges that their spending cap is part of a conservative agenda the governor is trying to force on Californians, have resisted forming alliances with the national groups. But the groups have eagerly embraced the governor’s crusade.

“We think California is very important,” Armey said. “It is a trend-setting state. Getting it done in California will set a very good example for all these other states.”

The article also mentioned the impact on Colorado, which enacted a spending cap in 1990. By the 2000s the cap was gutting government, as intended. The problem is that the spending cap readjusts to a lower level during a recession – but cannot be easily increased once the recession ends, meaning the spending that was cut during the lean times can’t be restored.

It is Grover Norquist’s way of drowning government in a bathtub. Even though Prop 13 has had a destructive impact here in California, leading to a structural revenue shortfall, we have been able to muddle through and protect education, transit, and health care from total collapse. Norquist’s spending cap would deal the final blow to those services.

It would not solve our budget problems – as Colorado found it would make them much worse. In November 2005 Colorado approved a 5-year suspension of the cap, as even Republican governor Bill Owens realized the state couldn’t survive with the spending cap in place.

For Democrats to consider accepting a spending cap is unconscionable. If Democratic leaders agree to a cap as part of a budget deal they deserve to be recalled from office. The current budget crisis is severe, yes. And we need a solution. But a spending cap will produce worse budget crises in future years while leaving California public services in ruins.

Dems should take comfort from the 2005 special election results. Californians do not want a spending cap. Don Perata is totally and completely wrong to agree to one. Let’s hope other Democratic leaders, especially those in the Assembly, refuse to give away the state to the Norquist crowd.

Added video at right; see below for explanation.

It’s 1995 all over again, as Republican-induced government shutdowns are all the rage. Congressional Republicans are planning a shutdown in September if they don’t get their way on drilling, which looks to be their core electoral strategy going into November.

Here in California the possibility looms as Republicans show no sign of budging on the budget. Saturday is the deadline for adding propositions to the November ballot, and as most budget solutions proposed have involved going to voters – whether it’s Arnold’s lottery bonds, his sales tax plan, or the Republicans’ spending cap demands, the deadline becomes all-important:

Taking lottery and budget overhaul off the negotiating table could aggravate the already polarized budget debate between the governor and the Legislature, capitol observers say.

“If that happens, you’ll see this budget dug in and you’ll see (the longest impasse) ever. And that’s unfortunate,” said Assembly Republican leader Mike Villines from Clovis (Fresno County).

It’s likely that Republicans in California feel, as do their counterparts in DC, that a government shutdown (which a long budget delay would eventually produce) is a winning electoral strategy. The conventional wisdom is that it hurt Republicans in ’95 when they did it, blunting their upward momentum and eventually helping Clinton get re-elected in ’96 – but it also forced Clinton to accede to many of their demands, such as welfare reform, while doing nothing to threaten GOP control of the Congress. Clearly Republicans believe it’s a win-win – either the Dems cave on policy or the Dems lose at the ballot box.

Of course we’re already witnessing a government shutdown in slow motion. Arnold’s unnecessary mass firing of government workers has led to impacts on public services from the DMV to health care. The even more radical Republicans in the legislature would presumably be happy to do the same to government more broadly – since they don’t believe in public services, breaking them via a budget shutdown suits their ideological agenda nicely.

In that respect it’s worth noting that this isn’t just a budget-produced attitude. Republicans really do want the government to be dramatically scaled back, even though good public services are essential to our modern society. After Hurricane Katrina the Grover Norquist “drown government in a bathtub” philosophy seemed discredited, but Republicans continue to espouse it.

The best – and the only – response from Democrats is to recognize that the budget and the fall election campaign are now one in the same. Dems need to be aggressively framing Republicans as government-destroying nutjobs who would happily shut down schools and hospitals in order to accomplish a far-right agenda. If a shutdown did happen that would fulfill the prophecy and damage Republicans further.

Dems’ failure to take a campaign approach to the budget is partly responsible for the ongoing delay, since Republicans feel no pressure from the public to cut a deal. It’s time for Dems to treat this like a campaign and push back hard on the Republicans before they do further damage to our state.

UPDATE – As if on cue, the California Faculty Association has begun running “Flunk Republican” ads against Republicans in ADs 10, 30, 78 and 80. The ads are a perfect example of campaigning on the budget. Dems take note: make the Republicans pay for their demands for massive cuts.

I’m heading down to Orange County for Labor Day weekend, and once I arrive at the old homestead in Tustin one of the first things I might just do is turn on the tap and have a drink of water. Seems like a totally unremarkable thing to do, right? Not in OC. As Elizabeth Royte’s article in the NYT Magazine explains, OC has become a world leader in wastewater recycling – or as it’s called by its critics, “toilet to tap”:

I gazed balefully at my hotel toilet in Santa Ana, Calif., and contemplated an entirely new cycle. When you flush in Santa Ana, the waste makes its way to the sewage-treatment plant nearby in Fountain Valley, then sluices not to the ocean but to a plant that superfilters the liquid until it is cleaner than rainwater. The “new” water is then pumped 13 miles north and discharged into a small lake, where it percolates into the earth. Local utilities pump water from this aquifer and deliver it to the sinks and showers of 2.3 million customers. It is now drinking water. If you like the idea, you call it indirect potable reuse. If the idea revolts you, you call it toilet to tap.

The article is a fascinating tour of the Orange County water infrastructure, including the Santa Ana River, the Prado Dam wetlands, and the Fountain Valley treatment plant where all the “magic” happens. Many cities in the Orange County plain, including the city of Tustin’s water department, will draw upon the water produced by the treatment plant – which is first put into the ground to “recharge” the aquifer.

Royte makes several important points along the way. ALL water we use is recycled, and it’s often not through purely natural processes – the millions of residents along the Mississippi River, for example, drink water that’s been taken out of and then put back into the river (after treatment, of course). Moreover, the “natural” flows of water are not particularly clean, as anyone who has had the misfortune of going into the ocean near the mouth of the Santa Ana River in Huntington Beach knows (the water has a funk to it that almost always gives me a rash). The water produced at the Fountain Valley treatment plant may be among the cleanest in the world.

But the real importance of the wastewater treatment project in Orange County is what it suggests about how we in California manage our dwindling water resources. Global warming is already impacting our water supplies and a drier state may well be our future. That means we have to expand conservation and recycling programs, instead of building dams to catch rain that isn’t falling or building desal plants that are more costly than they’re worth.

Here in Monterey we’re facing a much more severe water crisis than OC, and wastewater recycling may well be part of our solution. Other parts of the state are going to have to consider this – especially if people don’t start getting serious about water conservation. If I had a dollar for every idiot hosing down his driveway in Orange County…

Recycling and conservation are the best, most cost-effective and sustainable solutions to our water crisis. For once Orange County seems to have done the right thing, and it will be interesting to see how this experiment works out.

In an article that could have been a press release from the Howard Jarvis Association, the San Jose Mercury News has an article by John Woolfolk arguing that tax proposals are inherently bad “in these times.” While an analysis of the costs and benefits of tax plans would be a welcome product of the traditional media, Woolfolk’s article is instead a hopelessly biased attack on tax plans that rarely mentions the savings the plans would generate.

No wonder California is so hard to govern effectively – with these Republican talking points being passed off as journalism, Californians aren’t being given the full information that they deserve.

Like so many families these days, the Gravelles of San Jose feel squeezed. Their home has lost about $250,000 in market value, their monthly gasoline bill hit $394, they’ve got one son heading to college and another to Catholic high school.

But valley officials are urging them to keep their pocketbook open, with more than a dozen local revenue measures filling the November ballot. The county hospital needs an earthquake retrofit. A long-planned rapid transit extension needs operating funds. Schools and libraries need refurbishing. City budgets are potholed with deficits.

And Andrea Gravelle isn’t sure her family can afford to be so generous this year.

That last sentence gives away the framing used throughout the article – taxes are like charitable giving or Christmas presents – something expendable, to be cut back on when times are tough.

But look at the list of what would be funded. Hospital earthquake retrofits. In the event of a quake Andrea Gravelle’s family is going to need the hospital to be open – without it she’s going to spend a LOT more money otherwise. The hospital tax is a form of insurance. The BART extension might help her save money on gas, and the potholes require higher amounts of maintenance.

NONE of that is mentioned in the article. Woolfolk implicitly agrees with the far-right argument that one never gets anything in return from government. Look at his section on San Jose’s 911 dispatch fee:

So while families like the Gravelles might save $7 a year on city phone taxes if both city measures are approved, the savings could be three times that if the 911 fee were simply allowed to expire.

You mean they might save a whopping $21 if they sat back and watched the city’s emergency dispatch system be destroyed? I dunno about you, but $21 a year to enable police, fire, and paramedics to quickly reach the scene of an emergency sounds like a pretty damn good use of money, don’t you think? But here again, Woolfolk never mentions the value – literal or figurative – of what the taxes purchase.

The same happens when he discusses Prop 1, the high speed rail bond. He even gets the costs wrong as he tries to make minor costs look like budget-busters, in the absence of an explanation of what it will save people:

Critics of the biggest bond measure, $9.5 billion for high-speed rail, argue it will cost the state general fund a total of $20 billion, or $2,000 per average California family over the 30-year life of the bonds. It would require the state to pony up $67 million a year at a time leaders in Sacramento are already struggling to patch a $15 billion shortfall.

Actually, the bonds have a 40 year lifespan, which would make it even less than $2,000 total. But using Woolfolk’s figures that comes out to $66.66 a year, and that’s for a family.

Nowhere does he explain that high speed rail would save at least that much per family per year in travel costs. Airfares are steadily rising as the price of oil rises, and will price out families like the Gravelles if HSR isn’t built. Do the Gravelles go to the occasional Giants game in SF? It would save them both time and money in gas costs and travel times. But none of this makes it into the article either.

The article concludes by quoting San José mayor Chuck Reed as saying the failure of the tax plans would result in “cutting core services.” The article doesn’t report what those cuts might be but I suspect Reed gave Woolfolk some possibilities that somehow didn’t make it into the paper.

The total yearly cost to a family of the San José tax plans, based on the info in this article, is around $400. But the savings produced by the spending the taxes enable are not quantified or even mentioned. Woolfolk has given readers only half the equation, a false accounting that creates a notion that San Joseans are being taxed to death, even though $400 is a small price to pay for quality services.

And it’s the big picture that the article gets so very wrong. It’s no coincidence that in the 30 years since California went on a tax cutting binge that California has experienced a “generation of inequality” as reduced services erode the middle class into nothing. Economic security in America comes from wise government spending – the 20th century proves this. In its absence Californians have seen their wages stagnate and the cost of basic needs soar as they lose protection against catastrophic life events. Smart taxes, used for good purposes, save people money and help them become prosperous and secure.

Ironically the Gravelle family, held up as an example of a family being taxed into oblivion, plans to vote for most of the tax measures. They understand the importance of having a functioning hospital trauma center, for example. Their stance suggests that more Californians understand what I just described – that taxes bring savings – than do the journalists who write in their morning papers.

A major article in today’s LA Times alleges Tyrone Freeman and SEIU Local 6434 routinely misused local funds, including giving contracts to family members:

The Los Angeles-based union, which represents low-wage caregivers, also spent nearly $300,000 last year on a Four Seasons Resorts golf tournament, a Beverly Hills cigar club, restaurants such as Morton’s steakhouse and a consulting contract with the William Morris Agency, the Hollywood talent shop, records show.

In addition, the union paid six figures to a video firm whose principals include a former union employee. And a now-defunct minor league basketball team coached by the president’s brother-in-law received $16,000 for what the union described as public relations, according to the union’s U.S. Labor Department filings and interviews.

It’s not clear if there are any legal violations here, and Freeman and his family members deny that there was anything inappropriate in the contracts and spending:

“Every expenditure has been in the context of fighting poverty,” [Freeman] said…. Freeman, 38, said the union’s members have benefited from the money spent on the video production and day-care companies that his wife and mother-in-law operate at their homes, because of what he termed the high quality of the services.

The article goes on to detail the expenditures and flaws with them, some of which went to nonprofits in trouble with the IRS and “entities” associated with former LA Rams star Eric Dickerson that have been suspended from doing business in California.

Labor unions constantly have to battle the usually false perception that they misuse funds, and face a well-funded right-wing campaign that seeks to undermine unions for even the slightest error. Most unions, including those I’ve been a part of, are very scrupulous about how they use money to avoid even the appearance of impropriety, so I am very surprised to hear that this was going on.

And I’m not alone in that. The article quotes Nelson Liechtenstein, one of the nation’s leading labor historians, as follows:

It’s very important for unions not to do this kind of thing,” he said. “Union leadership is a public trust — all the more so when the people being represented are among the lowest-paid in America.”…

Lichtenstein said the [$418,000 golf] tournament spending was troubling under any circumstances.

“I don’t care if they’re making money or not,” he said. “It’s disconnected from the world of the people they’re representing. No one’s playing golf who’s a home healthcare worker.

And Joe Matthews at Blockbuster Democracy blog is even more critical, calling for Freeman’s resignation:

So this is going to be a difficult test of the union movement in LA and nationallly. But it’s a test. Freeman needs to step down and offer a full-throated apology. The union needs to ask for an independent audit of the local. And the public needs to hear immediately from union leadership — Stern, county labor chief Maria Elena Durazo, other top SEIU leaders such as janitors’ union chief Mike Garcia — about how such conduct must not be permitted in the movement. So far, the silence is deafening. Stern, in the story, refuses to address the conduct in question. That won’t cut it.

Why does the action need to be so clear-cut? Because the labor movement is on the rise in Los Angeles. To attend a city council meeting or a mayoral press conference is to watch the labor movement governing the city. As the journalist Harold Meyerson has written, the rise of the LA unions as a labor force has been aided by the widespread perception that our unions are not old-style, corrupt empires. This is supposed to be new labor. The public needs to see transparency and accountability in the response to this.

As for Freeman, I hope he can make amends for this conduct and have a future in the labor movement. But it can’t be as president of this local.

Matthews has it exactly right. The SEIU leadership needs to show that they won’t tolerate this kind of action within their ranks. Union democracy is important, and so is union accountability, union honesty, and union ethics. The misdeeds of one local unfortunately tend to get used to attack the labor movement as a whole – and Andy Stern and Tyrone Freeman in particular owe that movement answers and action.

California’s answer to David Broder, George Skelton, practically falls all over himself in today’s LA Times in excitement over a possible Dianne Feinstein candidacy. But in doing so he misses two crucial points – her poll numbers among Democrats aren’t that strong, and her “leadership” on major California issues has been weak to nonexistent. There’s just not much here to indicate that DiFi is the unstoppable force in 2010 that Skelton would have us believe.

Skelton writes:

You can almost feel the shudders and shock among the other Democrats gearing up to compete for governor when Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger is termed out in two years. Feinstein’s candidacy would be an earthquake on the California political landscape — likely burying the current front-runner, former governor and current state Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown.

A private poll taken in mid-July shows Feinstein trouncing Brown 50% to 24% in a hypothetical Democratic primary. A third candidate, Lt. Gov. John Garamendi, gets only 10%.

But Skelton’s missing a key point here. As the Moore poll was explained in the SF Chronicle last month:

But if you add Feinstein to the mix – and take out Newsom, Villaraigosa and O’Connell, figuring they might bow out if she jumps in – Brown drops to 24 percent, and the state’s senior senator grabs 50 percent.

That’s a weak number, not a strong number. Feinstein, one of the state’s most identifiable Democrats and a leading US Senator, only gets 50%? Among Democrats? Polling wisdom suggests that any incumbent polling at or below 50% is in trouble. These numbers suggest that Democrats aren’t nearly as enthused about a Feinstein for governor campaign as Skelton would have us believe.

In contrast to the rah-rah column Skelton wrote, Feinstein is in serious trouble with the California Democratic rank and file. Her weak polling numbers as described above suggest an inability to consolidate the base around her.

The reasons for this weakness are that, in contrast to what Skelton argues, Feinstein isn’t actually a good leader on California political issues. He quotes DiFi:

And she went on about California’s problems: “Think back, there’s been no major water infrastructure built since Pat Brown was governor. Everything’s drying up. . . . California sort of rests on its laurels. . . . You’ve got to move people, you’ve got to move goods. . . . I’d love to be the governor who builds the high-speed rail.”

It’s big talk, but it hasn’t been backed up with action. The US Senate is in a very strong position to help California address these problems, especially with money. But California remains a donor state, giving more to the federal government in taxes than it receives in spending. Feinstein is one of the leading Senators and has good relations with Republicans – more on that in a moment – but hasn’t used those relationships to help California address its problems.

To take one example, high speed rail. Feinstein doesn’t have to wait to be governor to help build it. One of the persistent criticisms of the HSR project is that federal funding isn’t guaranteed, so we’re taking a risk by passing the Prop 1 bond. Feinstein could have helped deliver federal money to the HSR project, even a small amount as a sign of future commitments, to defuse that argument. Harry Reid got $45 million to study a maglev train that will probably never be built – surely Feinstein could have done the same. Feinstein could also exercise leadership right now in resolving disputes between some environmentalists and the HSR project.

Instead of showing that leadership Feinstein has recently busied herself gutting the Fourth Amendment by supporting Bush’s FISA law. Her support of Attorney General Michael Mukasey has backfired badly. Her role in helping confirm far-right anti-choice justices like Leslie Southwick undermined her support among women’s rights advocates.

Over the last few years Feinstein has been piling up bad feelings among Democrats. To date Dems haven’t had a contested primary to vent that anger, but if she runs in 2010, they will.

Given the above it seems likely that a DiFi candidacy, rather than being a shoo-in, will more closely resemble the Hillary Clinton for president campaign, where the presumed front-runner ran into a deep well of discontent among Democratic voters that a smart opponent successfully exploited. Skelton thinks that DiFi’s possible rivals are worrying about her supposedly strong poll numbers. What’s just as likely is that they see what Hillary’s Democratic rivals saw earlier this year – a flawed candidate who is resented by lots of Democrats, providing an opportunity for a good challenger to deal her a bitter defeat.

Skelton’s love of bipartisanship seems to be blinding him to the very real struggles she will face if she runs in 2010. No wonder she refused to tell him she would run.

[UPDATE by Robert] The issue of DiFi’s favorables is worth a bit of exploration. In an email to me Skelton quoted the Moore poll as giving DiFi a 75% favorability rating among Democrats compared to Jerry Brown’s 58%. But the latest Field Poll shows her support only at 64%.

And even if you stick with the Moore numbers, she polls 75% favorable among Dems but only 50% would vote for her for governor. That’s soft support, folks. A strong campaign from several Democratic candidates, all focused on tearing down the frontrunner DiFi, would create a much closer race than Skelton suggests.

Crossposted at the California High Speed Rail Blog

In a move they’ve been telegraphing for weeks, a group of wealthy NIMBYs have convinced the cities of Menlo Park and Atherton to join forces with the Planning and Conservation League, the California Rail Foundation (which has all of 3 members) and “lawsuit-happy activist” David Schonbrunn of TRANSDEF and sue to block high speed rail. Their claim is that the EIR/EIS that was adopted last month by the California High Speed Rail Authority violates the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) – but what is really going on is that a small coterie of long-time HSR deniers are greenwashing themselves and using the courts to stop one of the most important projects in state history.

Menlo Park and Atherton’s objections are perhaps the most absurd. Driven by a handful of wealthy landowners, including Morris Brown and Martin Engel, their argument is that HSR would harm the aesthetics of their wealthy enclave:

The proposed route of the project runs down the heart of Menlo Park and Atherton on a narrow corridor occupied by CalTrain. The necessity of 4 tracks, where there are currently only 2 as well as needing the high 15 foot berm for the rail bed to accommodate grade crossings is of concern to both communities. With a minimum of 100 feet of width needed , as well as overhead catenaries for the electrical power to power the train, the impact in both communities is severe.

This is a comical, classic NIMBY objection. They’re arguing that clean, sustainable mass transit, which California so desperately needs, should be stopped because it might not look pretty in two of the state’s wealthiest communities?! That they’re making an environmental argument is even more ridiculous. Currently Caltrain is powered by diesel trains and has a high rate of accidents caused by cars and people wandering onto the tracks. HSR would solve both problems by electrifying the tracks and physically separating them from the surrounding landscape, eliminating air pollution and making the entire corridor much safer.

Morris and Engel are inherently opposed to this project, and have spent months trying to dredge up any thin reed they can find to kill HSR. They never have proposed alternatives to how California can deal with the energy and climate crisis, and seem to prefer the failed status quo. And why not? They’ve got their land already, who cares about the masses?!

NIMBYism is one thing. The involvement of the PCL and TRANSDEF, two groups that have done good work in the past on containing sprawl, in this lawsuit is another. It’s a profound disappointment to see them engaged in an effort to kill the HSR project. Surely they realize that a lawsuit filed three months out from the election jeopardizes the passage of Proposition 1. They don’t have an alternative political strategy either on this, either for passing the HSR bonds or for dealing with our state’s transportation issues.

Their reason for suing involves the choice of Pacheco Pass to connect the Bay Area to the Central Valley instead of the Altamont Pass. As this blog has repeatedly argued, both alignments had their good points and their bad points – but neither was clearly superior to the other. The most important thing for those who truly want to see HSR built in California is that we make a choice and stick with it. The California High Speed Rail Authority chose Pacheco, and so these Altamont supporters are choosing to sue.

The arguments against Pacheco are weak and by no means enough to suggest HSR should not be built. We dealt with the sprawl issue on Sunday but more detail is warranted. Much of the Pacheco Pass region cannot be built upon for topographical or legal reasons. A station at Los Banos has been permanently canceled. Gilroy has an urban growth boundary that could be stronger, but it exists. Moreover, HSR as a station-oriented system would primarily encourage growth near the station itself, not in far-flung exurban areas. Finally, these critics have consistently ignored or dismissed the reasons why sprawl is in mortal danger – without cheap oil and cheap credit, sprawl is simply not possible.

More to the point, sprawl is a problem whether we build HSR or not. So why hold HSR hostage to an issue that we have to solve no matter what? This really is a case of the perfect being the enemy of the good. HSR would mitigate against sprawl, would reduce carbon emissions, save on oil consumption, and promote mass transit riding habits. Why on earth would two organizations who are usually supportive of mass transit try to kill HSR?

The Altamont option isn’t perfect either. It would require a new rail bridge across the bay, which would bring environmental problems of its own. The cities of Fremont and Pleasanton promised to sue if it were built, while the cities along the Pacheco route are supportive. On the whole there is no clear and compelling case to choose Altamont over Pacheco – and besides, if we really want HSR to be built, we need to rally around the project and ensure it passes, not drag this out forever. It’s like Hillary vs. Obama all over again.

The deeper problem is that these groups have no sense of urgency. Al Gore and Van Jones have both explained the need for environmentalists and conservationists to come up with solutions NOW if we are to blunt the momentum of the “drill now, drill everywhere” crowd. We cannot build the public momentum for mass transit solutions if environmental groups spend their time in opposition, It is time to start showing Californians that high speed rail is a better deal for them than relying on wallet-busting oil prices, a failing airline industry, or carbon-spewing methods of travel.

The last group involved in the suit is the California Rail Foundation, headed by Richard Tolmach. Their opposition sounds dire, but the CRF has all of three members. The much larger – and therefore more representative – California rail organizations have chosen not to join the suit, such as TRAC, or openly support high speed rail and Prop 1, such as RailPAC and the National Association of Railroad Passengers (TRAC’s decision on whether to endorse will be made later this month). Several chapters of the Sierra Club, including many in Southern California, are also supportive of high speed rail, suggesting something of the broad support HSR has around the environmental community.

So it’s deeply unfortunate that a small group of people upset that their favored route wasn’t picked, or upset that their wealthy communities will have safer and cleaner trains, are choosing to sue. They don’t represent the California environmental movement, they don’t represent the California transit movement, and as the election results in November will surely demonstrate, they don’t represent Californians period. Their frivolous lawsuit is a nuisance, but it won’t stop us from making the case to Californians that high speed rail is a good and necessary project.

One of the newer entries into the California right-wing blogosphere is Fox and Hounds Daily, a project of the Small Business Action Committee and its head, Joel Fox. Fox was the longtime head of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, which helps explain Fox’s absurd anti-tax screed about various local taxes on the LA ballot.

Whenever right-wingers start expressing concern about how taxes will impact working people, those working Californians should immediately be skeptical. Since when have conservatives expressed genuine concern for the needs of the poor, or the shrinking middle class? Conservatives have long used taxes to attain populist credibility with working Californians but a close examination of Fox’s article shows that this is based on a lie. The right-wing anti-tax movement is directly responsible for the dire straits working Californians find themselves in today, and the proposals Fox criticizes would do much to help save them money.

This is the core point that Democrats and progressives need to be repeatedly hitting – taxes save you money. Take for example the proposed LA Metro sales tax that Fox uses as a prime target:

The MTA wants a ½-cent sales tax hike for thirty years to cover various transportation projects. When implemented (if passed), L.A.’s sales tax will be 8.75%. That assumes there will be no state sales tax increase that may come along in a state budget deal. If that happens, along with a successful MTA sales tax increase, Los Angeles residents will be looking at a sales tax over 9%.

Nowhere in the article does Fox mention what the tax would be used for. It’s a typical disinformation move – complain about higher taxes but fail to explain what it would provide. As gas prices soared, working Californians’ wallets were squeezed, perhaps nowhere moreso than in Los Angeles County, which has a growing mass transit system but remains overly reliant on automobiles for commuting.

The LACMTA proposal would address that by providing billions for desperately needed mass transit projects, whether it’s the Subway to the Sea, the Foothill Extension of the Gold Line, or some other project. Mass transit saves people money. Real money. That’s why ridership on the LACMTA’s rail lines soared this year. Southern Californians are desperate for mass transit options so that they can save money. Why does Fox want to deny them that option?

More over the flip…

Small businesses have an especially strong interest in mass transit. Many of their workers have been priced out of the LA city center and have to move to the suburbs. Rising gas prices hit them hard, and that makes it difficult for LA small businesses to retain workers. Of course, when people pay more at the pump, their retail spending drops. Big chains can weather that decline far better than small and medium businesses can.

Of course, Fox is merely advancing an ideological agenda under the cover of defending small business. Otherwise why would he oppose Antonio Villaraigosa’s plan to hire more cops? Small businesses can’t afford to hire their own security the way the big chains can. And small businesses need good schools to provide the trained workers that they need to survive.

It’s not just small businesses that ought to reject Fox’s concern trolling. Working Californians have seen widening inequality over the last 30 years – which just so happens to be the same length of time that anti-tax politics that have dominated our state. They’re suffering largely because they don’t have the same public services that produced the prosperous middle class in the 1950s and 1960s. Tax cuts have meant higher college fees, higher transportation costs, and higher health care costs for fewer services.

The legacy of tax cuts in California is a destructive one. But until Democrats and progressives start explaining that tax cuts actually cost more to small business and working Californians than higher taxes, conservative faux-populism will continue to dominate our state. Fox is overt about his strategy:

But turnout is unlikely to counterbalance the piling on effect taxpayers will feel from all these tax measures. Constant talk of tax increases will blur the different measures in taxpayers’ minds and some, if not all of the measures, could face a voter backlash.

The response, then, is to constantly talk about the savings that these public services will provide – and the costs of not approving these taxes. How much money will Southern Californians have to shell out at the pump over the next ten years without the LACMTA sales tax?

If we are to defeat folks like Fox, we need to provide the answers to those kind of questions.