The Green Party of California will hold it’s 20th anniversary celebration in Berkeley this coming Saturday, Feb. 6. It is appropriate that the party returns to the City where it all began.
I, for one, am very interested in hearing from Charlotte Spretnak. The book that she co-authored with Fritjof Capra, Green Politics, should remind us of why the formation of this party was a necessity.
Green Gary Ruskin paints a bleak picture of our political future in a post today at Green Change.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision today in Citizens United may bring an end to democracy in America. It is effectively a corporate coup d’etat.
By striking down a 103 year-old law that prohibits corporate contributions in federal elections, the Court is allowing giant corporations and their massive stores of wealth to purchase elections at all levels of government. This decision will devastate the integrity and moral legitimacy of our government and our elected officials. It will bring more corruption than our nation has known in more than a century.
Ruskin is a lawyer who spent over a decade as Director of the Congressional Accountability Project and also headed Commercial Alert.
Should we now give up all pretense that spending limits can be enforced, or that public financing of elections is a reasonable way to go? Even if the elections are officially publicly financed, there seems to be no limit on soft money contributions from corporations. Rick Hasen at Huffington Post doubts that this is the solution.
If we worry about corporate dominance of money in the political process, how about trying to subsidize some campaigns through public financing. Today’s opinion does not take public financing plans off the table, but an earlier Supreme Court opinion, FEC v. Davis, likely takes the most attractive portion of public financing plans out.
California has a good experiment going on with the financing of the Secretary of State race. While not perfect, it does go a long way toward getting big money out of the picture. Still, with the SCOTUS decision today, I would expect to see this challenged before we get to try it out.
We already have a dominance of corporate spending in CA elections. It really takes place in the machinations involved in the ever increasing number of initiatives, where the airways fill with misleading hyperventiated negative commercials that only Gary South could love.
Take any major issue we are dealing with: Health Care and Climate Change come most to mind, and figure out how the will of the people is anything more than the will of the corporation. Consider the power of Exxon-Mobil and or Chevron vis-a-vis climate change legislation and offshore drilling. Consider the power of Stewart Resnick regarding water.
I agree with Gary. It is the Democracy of the $$.
Wes
Laura Wells made her official announcement of her candidacy yesterday in Sacramento. It is a first step down a long road, but she has proven in past elections for Controller that she can attract votes far in excess of the number of registered Greens.
Her new web site is http://2010.laurawells.org/.
I was particularly interested in her views on the water policy issues that, despite all of the post stage show hype, did not get resolved in the past legislative session.
That, and the fact that Laura is willing to take on Prop 13 directly separates her from the rest of the so called progressive candidates.
One of my many amusements is to try and figure out the logic behind various organizations polls on any topic. Regarding the CA Gubernatorial Race, I would never have expected a site called Calguns to run a poll and have it come up favoring Jerry Brown, but that is the case. The numbers are so low as to be basically meaningless, but when Jerry Brown (66) leads Constitution Party’s Chelene Nightingale (28) by a significant margin, then it is worth exploring. In fact, Brown polled higher than Whitman, Poizner and Campbell combined.
Some of the comments on Jerry:
Being that he had so long been a Congressman that he lost all of his ability to make a living doing anything else, Richard Pombo will attempt to return to the only job he was every able to succeed at, being a corrupt congressman.
The National Journal indicates that the official announcement will be tomorrow.
The last I heard, there were no Democrats who had announced, or were even seriously considering a run for this seat. Someone, please tell me that my source was wrong, since they are not in district.
Leslie Stahl had a segment on 60 Minutes last night that purported to tell us the truth about the California Water Crisis and the Delta. She talked to Dr. Jeffrey Mount (UC Davis), Schwarzenegger and 2 farmers from the Westlands Water District who are dependent on getting more of the Delta’s Water.
At no time did she talk to anyone who lives in, works in or would be dependent on the health of the Delta as an estuary. That seems to be an unusual omissions… or just call it sloppy journalism.
Of all the clips in the show, the one that was the most impressive was a simulation of how an earthquake could cause massive levee failure and turn the Delta into a salt water containment pond.
Below the fold, you can find the comments posted to the 60 Minutes Site by Lloyd G. Carter, Fresno Lawyer and one time UPI Reporter who went national (60 Minutes / Ed Bradley) with the Kesterson Reservoir story.
As someone who has written about California water issues for 40 years I found Leslie Stahl’s report on California water remarkably naive. She doesn’t have a clue what is going on out here. First of all, she started by misquoting Mark Twain. The quote is not “Whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting” as she said. It is “Whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting over.”
A small point but telling.
Not once did she mention the selenium-tainted soils of the Westlands Water District. Drainage water from the Westlands fields contains selenium, which got into the food chain at the Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge 25 years ago and killed thousands of birds and triggered deformities in bird embryos. Thanks, in part, to an excellent report by 60 Minutes’ Ed Bradley on March 9, 1985, the poisoned evaporation ponds at Kesterson were closed. Sadly, this latest 60 Minutes report on Westlands is far off the mark. Twenty-five years later the estimated cost for providing drainage to the 600 growers who operate on a thousand square miles in Westlands is set at $2.7 billion. Leslie Stahl should have asked the governor what he is doing about the drainage problem. Answer? He’s doing nothing.
For those who want a different view of what’s really going in California water politics, I suggest you visit the following link to the Golden Gate University Law School Environmental Law Forum:
You will discover that the American taxpayers have showered a billion dollars of subsidies and cheap water on the problem-plagued Westlands. The fundamental problem of San Joaquin Valley agriculture is not lack of water, it is low prices caused by surplus. In the last four years, almonds have dropped from $4 a pound to $1-2 a pound. The San Joaquin Valley now has 650,000 acres of almonds. Do we really need to spend billions of dollars on new dams to grow more almonds? Which the Westlands should never have planted! Stuart Woolf should never have planted his almond orchards. At a congressional subcommittee hearing at Fresno City Hall a couple of years ago, Woolf threatened to take his 25,000-acre “family farm” operation offshore if he was not provided water.
Finally, Stahl failed to mention that big growers like Stuart Resnick, a confidante and major contributor to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, is making tens of millions of dollars re-selling farm water supplies to Southern California development interests so we can grow an ever larger population in the Mojave Desert. This is a prescription for disaster.
I knew Ed Bradley. He interviewed me for the 60 Minutes Kesterson show 25 years ago. Leslie Stahl is no Ed Bradley.
Lloyd Carter
www.lloydgcarter.com
‘Tis the season of scorecards. First we had the California League of Conservation Voters, then the Sierra Club California. Now Capital Weekly has produced one that purports to measure the voting performance of the state legislature on a Conservative – Liberal continuum.
Some comments below the fold.
It is interesting that the oft maligned (at least on Calitics) Able Maldonado has a more liberal voting record than several Democrats… notably Roderick Wright and Gloria Negrete McLeod. That is a likely reflection on the makeup of their districts. That confirms the CW bias for contested districts and centrist legislators.
For all of its imperfections, once again, we found this scorecard to be a worthy exercise. Terms like “liberal” and “conservative” are crude political shorthand, but we think the results give a pretty fair representation of the ideological makeup of the Assembly and Senate.
Also, our scorecard reflects what most Capitol observers know to be true: Democrats in contested districts like Alyson Huber and Lou Correa earn more centrist marks than those lawmakers in more solid, partisan districts.
As for the environmental scorecards, the two major ones scored differently. In some cases, they took the same position. e.g. AB 64. Others, they were on opposite sides of the questions, most notably on the Special Session Water Legislation, where the Sierra Club scored SBX7.1 and SBX7.2 (oppose) and the CLCV did not include it. Since this was the most publicly fought over ecological legislation of the year, it looks like the CLCV took the political stance of ducking hard choices, though they have put a lot of energy into promoting those two bills.
Typical of the results was a 100% score from the CLCV for Jared Huffman (AD-6) while the Sierra Club only gave him 12/15, reflecting his strong support of the water legislation.
Mike Fitzgerald begins his Stockton Record column this weekend with an invocation of the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens.
To live in the Valley is to live with the din of the old leaders’ bones. Pick your issue, the old ideas are beating a fierce tattoo, often drowning out wise new voices
While Fitzgerald gives three great examples of that phenomenon in Stockton: Water, the state’s drive to site three more prison facilities outside Stockton and blight in downtown Stockton, his message could apply almost anywhere, not just to Stockton or the San Joaquin Valley. In particular, there is maybe something else to glean from his conclusions.
An essential part of the Valley experience is the battle to admit new ideas, and to separate the valid conservative ideas from the dead ones propping up the status quo.
It wouldn’t be a problem if the dead ideas stayed dead. But, like zombies, they always come back to bite us.
Replace the word conservative in that quote with the word progressive and recognize that we must continually challenge and re-think our own assumptions of how the world works. Case in point, laurastrand’s comments on Free Breakfasts for yesterday’s open thread.
When Governor Schwarzenegger appointed Mary Nichols to head California’s Air Resources Board (ARB), I was skeptical. In fact, I suggested that she be fired.
Since then, the ARB has muddled along. The strongest action they have taken was to put controls on diesel engine emissions, long known to be a health risk and particularly bad in the corridors leading to the ports in Oakland and Long Beach / San Pedro. Now, even that is falling apart.
To begin with, the retrofit to older diesel exhaust systems is costly, as much as $11,000 per truck. There was a $15 million fund to provide assistance to independent truckers, but that was exhausted long before most of them got around to applying. Now those trucks would be banned from entering the port after Jan 1.
Having long ago criticized the ARB for being in-effective, Green Party of CA continued their criticism yesterday. The fact is that even if the State Government were to line up the trucks and pay for the retrofit directly, it would save the California Economy so much that it might be a good deal. After all, a study from CSU-Fullerton Economists Jane V. Hall and Victor Brajer put the cost of our bad air at $28 billion per year.
If this were not enough, we found out yesterday that much of the ARB’s analysis work on rulemaking for diesel exhaust was performed by a man who lied about his academic credentials, and ARB Board Chair Mary Nichols knew it. She just decided to let it slide. It is incomprehensible to this writer that a person in her position could be so tone deaf to the political realities that she would just pass this off or hide it.
Most would agree that there was nothing wrong with the analysis done, nor the conclusions reached by the ARB but Nichols must be politically tone deaf not to understand that this was dumb.
So, everything is now delayed even more, and the costs of California’s health care wil go up, emergency room visits for asthma will continue high, some might die, and there is no one to blame other than Nichols. Once again, I will repeat what I said a year ago. Nichols should resign.
(Cross posted from California Greening)
I have often noted that the progressive movement in CA is a coastal phenomenon while the real battle for the future of this state is being fought in the Central Valley. This is true for the Green Party, of which I am a member and it appears to be true for Calitics as the nexus of California’s progressive netroots.
Let me call attention to the 20th Congressional District, where Jim Costa campaigns like a Democrat, but too often votes like a Republican, especially when the issues are ecological: water, fresh air, extractive industries, etc.
Last night, I was reading the most recent issue of High Country News. One article was about the proposal to re-establish Tulare Lake as a cost effective alternative to building some of the dams called for in the Schwarzenegger Water Project passed by the legislature in the recent special session. Surprisingly, this story, from a Colorado based publication, mentioned that Steve Haze was going to enter the primary against Costa, and never a peep out of Calitics before this.
After reading the story, it seems to me that Haze has it right.
“We’ve lost more jobs in construction than we have in farming this year,” he says, piloting his granite blue Chevy pickup through clouds of fluffy bolls. “The real question is: How do we manage the water we have for farms, fish and people?”
That is a far cry from Costa’s message of fry the delta smelt. In fact, Haze is doing a lot more.
But it’s the feasibility study Haze completed last year that both the California Democratic Council and the California State Grange, a 137-year-old farmers’ advocacy group, quoted when they endorsed the plan. In that study, Haze’s team of engineers, hydrologists and economists argue that returning water to Tulare Lake would cost $1.3 billion — a fifth as much as a proposed dam that would capture flows from the Upper San Joaquin River at Temperance Flat. It would also store twice as much water.
For the life of me, I don’t see why Calitics is not paying attention to this race. Finally, there is a chance to break the hold that regressive agribusiness puppets have had on the Central Valley and to let new ideas grow like the tules that once covered the landscape.