Last week, Meg Whitman raised some eyebrows when she vowed to suspend implementation of AB 32, California’s landmark global-warming law.  This drew criticisms from the usual suspects, and also happens to be broadly unpopular in a state which supports action on climate change.  It was also a thumb in the eye of the current Governor and practically the only policy on which he can claim a legacy.  So Schwarzenegger came out today and said Whitman’s making an idle threat that she doesn’t mean.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger today dismissed a vow by Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman to suspend California’s landmark greenhouse gas law if she’s elected to succeed him next year as “just rhetoric that is going on among the candidates.”

“You will hear all kinds of stories,” Schwarzenegger told an audience at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. “What will happen in reality and what they will do when they go into office is probably a whole different ballgame, and I think she will probably reconsider what she said.

“I’m sure she does not want to be counted as one of those Republicans that will want to move us back to the Stone Age or something like that,” the Republican governor said. “So I would pay no attention to this kind of rhetoric.”

Of course, relics from the Stone Age are the target demographic for a Republican primary, so Whitman has to say what she said.  And she’s not being accused of political pandering by, of all people, Arnold Schwarzenegger.  Which should make for a fun weekend when the two appear together at the GOP convention in Indian Wells starting tomorrow.

Whitman’s more pressing problem is that she has virtually no voting record as a private citizen, apparently having not even registered to vote prior to 2002.  In an amusing moment of brazenness, Steve Poizner called on her to end her campaign as a result.

Poizner’s camp issued a statement in response to the story this morning, attacking the Whitman campaign for “refusing to answer simple questions and deliberately lying to cover up the facts” and calling for the candidate to “step aside” and drop out of the race.

“It’s understandable that Meg Whitman is ashamed of this record. But it’s unacceptable that she continues to run from the record and deceive voters. Though there is no shred of evidence she ever registered as a Republican before 2007, she insists she did, yet she refuses to provide any evidence. Her arrogant answer: ‘Go find it,’ ” Communications Director Jarrod Agen said in a statement. “In the history of America, no one has been elected governor of a state with Meg Whitman’s 25 year history of no-show voting. She is unelectable and has tried to cover her lack of honesty with millions of dollars.”

Hysterical.  By the way, if you think eMeg’s voting record is bad, take a look at iCarly’s.  Quite a team they’ll make on the GOP ticket next year…

It’s been a long time, nearly 50 years, since Governor Pat Brown‘s vision for California brought us what was so frequently dubbed the “California Dream.”  We had infrastructure that rivaled if not exceeded any in the world. We had a strong social safety net that enabled Californians to pursue careers in the burgeoning middle class. And we had the “Master Plan for Higher Education” that promised highly subsidized education for those Californians that met a basic set of requirments, and shut nobody out.

At the heart of the Master Plan, were the community colleges.  The community colleges allowed students who underperformed at high schools to get back on track for a higher degree. They were to be plentiful, high-quality, and cheap. The state was going to kick in 35-40% of the operating revenue, with a bunch of additional funding coming from the county level.  You may think that strange given the way the state works today, but back then, pre-Prop 13, counties actually had their own sources of revenue.  They could rely on the property taxes and other local taxes to provide opportunities to fund programs like the community colleges.

The community colleges were then to feed in to the newly upgraded UC and CSU systems.  At the time, UC was already on of the world’s leading research systems.  CSU would soon grow to take a very important “middle” place for students.  It was originally intended for only bachelor’s and master’s degrees, with the doctarates being issued at the UC campuses.  The various CSU campuses would focus on teacher certification and other public service functions, with the UC doing the bulk of the top-flight research. (Photo Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

And all of this was going to be free for Californians.  It was an investment in the future, and it paid off, big-time.  The quality graduates that came out of this public education system helped to grow the California economy at a pace far outstripping the rest of the nation.  Some like to call the 20th Century the American Century, well, if that was true, the last half of the 20th Century was the California Century.

But like all good centuries, they come to an end.  And with the election of Ronald Reagan, and later Deukmejian and Wilson, and to an extent, even Brown’s son Jerry, the Master Plan has been gradually chipped away.  As we stand right now, of the approximately $18 Billion UC budget, around $3 Billion now comes from the state.

All this is made even more evident today as a Mass Walkout is occuring on all of the UC campuses from San Diego all the way up to Davis, students, faculty, and staff are walking out on classes to picket the university and its administration.  And the administration is facing some tough questions of its own, particularly relating to admistrative bloat.

The latest blow to the system is the loss of about $110 million that the community colleges had been expecting from the stimulus bill. Unfortunately, the draw down requirements were not met by our 2009 budget, so those federal dollars go unspent as the community colleges cut classes and limit enrollment, a bitter irony when compared to their original goal of being the “open door” for California students.

But when you look at what used to be the grand scheme for California higher education, you can see the problem is far greater than any administrative bloat or lack of stimu-bux can really address.  While trying not to look like an apologist, instead of pointing the finger at Yudof and crew, we should be looking to Arnold and his Republican predecessors and cohorts.  

We have destroyed what was once the envy of the world, and are hard at work turning it in to nothing better than a mid-level private education system.  At least when you head to the Farm down in Palo Alto, you know you are going to get high fees and tuition. With the UC’s students are left in limbo, thinking they were going to get an affordable education.  I’ll leave you with the words of one of my professors at Berkeley, George Lakoff:

Lakoff, UC Distinguished Professor of Linguistics and author of several popular and scholarly books on the language of politics, said in a letter to UCB’s Townsend Center that “the privatization issue goes well beyond public education. It is about whether we have a democracy that works for the common good, or a plutocracy that privileges the wealthy and powerful. Privatizing the world’s greatest public university is a giant step away from democracy.”(Berkeley Daily Planet 9/17/09

With Arnold Schwarzenegger turning in an incomplete prison plan, I found some humor in this:

The tax commission will not submit its recommendations to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger this weekend, despite his executive order marking Sunday as the deadline.

While the main contents of the recommended package are generally known – a new form of value-added tax for businesses, lower income tax, no state sales tax – the Commission on the 21st Century’s staff is finalizing language around the edges on issues that were discussed in Monday’s final meeting, such as deductions for medical expenses. (CapAlert 9/19/09)

Back where I come from, you get 30% credit deducted if you’re a day late, and no credit after that.

Timm Herdt was on a conference call yesterday with a top official from the Department of Corrections, and that official acknowledged that the plan due to federal judges by midnight today on prison reduction will not meet the goal:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Friday will submit to a panel of three federal judges a plan that would reduce the inmate population at California’s overcrowded prisons by substantially less than what the court has ordered, a move that a top prison administrator acknowledged will place state officials at risk of being held in contempt.

Although the final plan will not be submitted until late Friday, administration officials have briefed other parties involved in the court proceedings on its major elements. They said exact projections of how much the prison population will be reduced have not yet been calculated, but the reduction would not lower the population to the court’s standard of 137.5 percent of the prison system’s design capacity.

“This plan will not meet the court’s requirements,” said Lee Seale, deputy chief of staff of the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, in a conference call Wednesday with legislative staff members. “I certainly don’t think this panel will be thrilled by this plan. I think we recognize we may be held in contempt.”

Under the plan the state will submit, they will get to around 27,000 prisoner reduction.  The judges want something close to 44,000.

The question is how the three-judge panel will react.  They may mandate a release of enough prisoners to get to that number, at which point the state will challenge the ruling and throw it to the US Supreme Court.  This is precisely was Tough on Crime member emeritus George Runner wants.

Sen. George Runner, R-Lancaster, who has intervened in the court case in the hope of preventing a judicial mandate to lower the prison population, believes the administration is taking exactly the right approach.

“I would like to see the state plan be as easily rejected as possible,” Runner said.

If the administration submitted a plan that came close to meeting the court’s order, Runner said, that could lead to a negotiated compromise. This way, he said, the court will be forced to propose its own plan – one that would set up a showdown before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Where Runner would pitch the “I’m right because I say so” defense.  And with this Supreme Court, who knows, that may work.

We don’t know when the appeal would come in the process.  The Governor’s office seem to think that they can appeal the initial ruling as soon as they offer their alternative plan, while others believe that they’d have to wait for the three-judge panel to issue a final order with the full reductions.  At some point, everyone agrees, an appeal is allowable.  Kevin Yamamura has more.

I don’t want to put this entirely on the Governor, though he’s clearly dragging his feet.  The Assembly forced the weak proposal you’ll see from the Governor today by scaling back the reform plan that would have come closer to the judge’s goal of reducing the population by 44,000 prisoners.  But the Governor didn’t actually have to follow the Assembly in submitting their plan.  They could have come up with one of their own making, putting pressure on the Legislature to conform it.  They chose not to stand behind their own plan and do so.  So while there’s plenty of blame to go around, I think the Governor needs to own this one, although he and everyone else want to take the blame off themselves.

By the end of the week, it will be apparent what all the posturing accomplished: nothing. That may suit lawmakers just fine — they can blame the coming prison reforms on the federal courts rather than taking heat from voters for being insufficiently hard on criminals. But the episode is further evidence that if California’s prison system is a national disgrace, its Legislature is a national laughingstock.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that, in this environment, Schwarzenegger seems to be taking on the characteristics of a dictator. On Tuesday, he rejected the Legislature’s plan to promote renewable energy and said he’d impose his own by executive fiat. He’s on surer legal ground when it comes to the prisons because his actions will be backed by the federal court. But it’s dismaying to watch the state’s democratic procedures break down so thoroughly.

As long as he now appears to be king of California, we humbly beseech our lord and Terminator to finally do the right thing by the prisons. His proposal to the court should be modeled on the one approved by the Senate and include a commission to review the unsustainable determinate sentencing system. Meanwhile, it’s time to drop the appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court of the federal court order so we can get on with the business of fixing the prisons and out of the habit of defending the indefensible.

But that’s not going to happen.  Seeing the Department of Corrections reduce the very rehabilitation programs by $250 million, that even the Assembly plan used as a means to let inmates out for completing them, show how the mission of corrections has been completely lost in this.  What the state is fighting by appealing the judge’s order is their privilege to let people die in jail needlessly in violation of the Constitution.  Today, they will continue to assert that privilege.

The wingnutosphere has been in high froth the last week or so about ACORN, the community organization dedicated to helping low-income Americans.  The freak-out concerns a series of videos showing ACORN employees engaged in nefarious schemes (it took lots of shoots for the right-wing activists to get the footage they wanted, incidentally).  This has led to the Census Bureau distancing themselves from ACORN and the Senate to block HUD funding for the group.  It’s interesting in and of itself that the right has decided the source of all ills in America is a relatively small non-profit community organization and not the banking and financial interests who destroyed the economy and took hundreds of billions in bailout money for good measure (lots more on this here).  But never one to miss a pile-on, the Governor has requested an investigation of ACORN:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger apparently has been captivated by recent news stories about a conservative filmmaker who exposed misdeeds at ACORN, the national organization that serves low-income residents and has been involved in controversial efforts to register Democratic voters.

The Republican governor sent a brief memo Wednesday to Democratic Attorney General Jerry Brown asking him to investigate ACORN’s activities in San Bernardino. Two conservative activists have posted videos of their visits to ACORN offices around the country in which they posed as a prostitute and a pimp seeking advice.

In San Bernardino’s ACORN office, a volunteer who claims to be a former prostitute is shown offering advice to the two activists on how to set up a brothel using underage girls from El Salvador. She tells them that they would be breaking various laws, but also explains ways to get around those laws. At one point, she claims to have connections to various Democratic lawmakers in the state Legislature and Congress.

It’s amusing that the Governor has honed in on the San Bernardino case.  Because that would be at least one instance where the guerrilla filmmakers – and now, the Governor – got totally played.  John Santore explains:

Most critically, it is clear that Fox News has made virtually no attempt to verify the authenticity of the tapes before broadcasting them — something no self-respecting journalistic organization would dare do. Consider the case of the San Bernardino ACORN office, which was featured in the most recent video to be released. The words of ACORN employee Tresa Kaelke appear to be damning. Not only does she offer assistance to Giles and O’Keefe, but she claims that she murdered her former husband following a period of domestic abuse.

On September 15, Beck and Sean Hannity both broadcast Kaelke’s assertion. Beck, who had reported breathlessly on the supposed confession during his radio program, added on Fox, “She never spanked her kids, but she did shoot her husband dead.” Later that night, Hannity played the same clip before commenting, “Specifically, now, she goes into this scenario about her husband and the killing of him.”

The following morning, on September 16, Fox News’ Gretchen Carlson repeated the allegation, saying, “She killed somebody? Despite this, some lawmakers want to keep funding the group.”

The problem, of course, is that Kaelke was deliberately lying. The San Bernardino Police Department itself has now confirmed that her claim regarding her husband was untrue. A department statement released on September 15 reads: “The San Bernardino Police Department is investigating the claims made regarding the homicide. From the initial investigation conducted, the claims do not appear to be factual. Investigators have been in contact with the involved party’s known former husbands, who are alive and well.”

Furthermore, Kaelke has claimed that when she made the statement, she was seeking to mislead the undercover videographers, whom she was suspicious of. “They were not believable,” Kaelke is quoted as saying in an ACORN press release. “Somewhat entertaining, but they weren’t even good actors. I didn’t know what to make of them. They were clearly playing with me. I decided to shock them as much as they were shocking me.”

But none of these simple facts stopped anyone at Fox from running with the story. Any cub reporter would have thought to actually call the San Bernardino police before effectively alleging that ACORN was staffed by murderers. But such an act never occurred to people like Beck, Hannity, or Carlson. (In her defense, Carlson later added that the husband was still alive, “according to ACORN,” but ignored the police report.)

Some of the other allegations have shown what may be wrongdoing, if the tapes are legitimate and not doctored (they are certainly edited for effect, and we know they were in some cases obtained illegally and therefore inadmissable as evidence).  It may even warrant an investigation.  But Schwarzenegger is specifically riffing off the San Bernardino incident, in which the main offense described there has been proven to be a lie.  This apparently doesn’t matter.  I’m wondering what other provable falsehoods have led to the Governor urging a criminal investigation.

This is at least not as embarrassing as Tim Pawlenty, who ordered agencies in Minnesota to “cancel all state funding for ACORN,” when there… is no state funding of ACORN in Minnesota.  But it’s pretty weak nonetheless.  And par for the course for a headline-chaser like Gov. Schwarzenegger.  But if he wants to get in line with far-right extremists with an obvious racial agenda who want to demonize people of color and the organizations that provide help for them, go ahead.  It did a lot for Pete Wilson.

Senate Democrats have sent a letter to Governor Schwarzenegger asking him to reconsider his veto of the renewable energy standard and subsequent executive order.  The strongly worded letter has about as much currency as the eleventy billion-dollar bill, but it does explain why the Governor’s hypocritical action is a bad deal for California.

Respectfully, an Executive Order does not have the force and effect of law. Additionally, such a proclamation will only cause confusion and uncertainty to California’s energy markets, jeopardizing California’s role as the world leader in renewable energy development and green jobs.

As you noted when you signed AB 32, the landmark “Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006,” administrative actions are no substitute for a statute that is permanent and enforceable.

Directing the California Air Resources Board to implement an RPS program is a fundamentally flawed approach. The CARB is not an energy agency; it is an air quality regulatory agency. There are numerous provisions of law which impair the CARB’s ability to implement a renewable portfolio standard. Assigning this new responsibility to the CARB will not result in new renewable energy being built soon–it will only lead to litigation, regulatory confusion, and delay.

In our view, it is essential to green businesses and the renewable energy investment community which bring jobs and capital into California, that California’s 33% RPS be statutorily established and not subject to the whims of changing administrations.

There’s only one reason that Schwarzenegger gave the CARB the ability to implement a renewable energy standard – so he can go on talk shows and crow that he’s instituted an environmental achievement.  Except, as is explained here, it won’t.  It will get tied up in court challenges and confusion, without a clear mandate for the standard or penalties thereto.  

Schwarzenegger has responded to this by calling the Legislature’s bill “protectionist,” and saying that if we get water from the Colorado River, we should be able to get renewable energy from other states as well.  The difference is that a commodity is not the same as a job.  The twin goals of a renewable energy standard are to spur the usage of renewables as a means to lower greenhouse gas emissions, and to build a green-collar economy that will create millions of new jobs.  Schwarzenegger would rather give those jobs away.  And given the perilous state of the economy here in California, we simply cannot afford that.

Job losses in the public sector will prolong the economic pain in California through 2010 even as a recovery gets under way nationwide, two forecasters predict.

Jeff Michael, a forecaster at the University of the Pacific, said Tuesday that California’s recession will be over before the end of the year. But the cutbacks in state and local government, along with the continuing fallout from the mortgage meltdown, will make 2010 feel like another year of recession, Michael said in UOP’s latest quarterly forecast.

Similarly, the newest UCLA Anderson Forecast predicts a sluggish recovery because of the weak public sector. UCLA senior economist Jerry Nickelsburg is more optimistic than Michael about the housing market, and says California will outperform the U.S. economy starting in 2011.

Yet both economists say Californians can expect continued high unemployment for a couple more years or so. The unemployment rate is currently 11.9 percent in California and 11.8 percent in greater Sacramento.

And yet here is Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoing the only major bill that would produce any semblance of an economic recovery for California.

We heard last week about outlines of the Parsky Commission report that would radically shift the tax burden in California.  We even heard that offshore drilling may have been snuck into the draft at the last minute.  Last week, the commission held a public meeting which featured more details, including the intimation that 3% of the population would see half of the tax break under the Parsky plan.  They made the public wait for seven hours and then gave one individual a minute to make a comment.  Yesterday, the final public meeting was held, and right before it, Jean Ross offered some facts and figures showing how the commission’s recommendation would amount to the Latvia-ization of the state of California, with a massive transfer of wealth to the upper classes at the expense of working families.

The biggest winners would be the state’s millionaires, who would receive personal income tax breaks averaging $109,000 per year. The biggest losers would be middle-income families who would receive a tiny, if any, reduction in their personal income taxes and who would pay substantially more for goods and services due to the new “value-added” tax the Commission proposes to replace revenues lost due to the tax cuts for the wealthy and repeal of the corporate income tax.

The magnitude of the shift proposed by the Commission is nothing short of stunning. The changes to the personal income tax structure alone would reduce income taxes paid by the poorest 62 percent of California taxpayers by $4 per year, on average, while providing six-figure breaks to the millionaires. The bottom 81 percent of the income distribution – the vast majority of all Californians – would receive 10 percent of the personal income tax cut, while the top 0.2 percent would receive 27 percent of the benefits.

And that’s the “good news.” The Commission would repeal the corporate income tax and the state’s portion of the sales tax and replace it with a new tax on business net receipts – a tax that has never been tried anywhere in the US – that the Commission’s own consultant notes would raise prices of goods and services, while exerting downward pressure on wages and benefits […]

Some might be willing to support these changes if they ended California’s persistent budget crises. But again, the Commission’s own estimates predict that revenues raised by the new tax system would grow more slowly over time than those raised by the state’s current tax system. Thus, the Commission’s recommendations would lead to larger, not smaller, budget shortfalls in the future.

At the committee hearing yesterday, commissioners requested an analysis of the impact of the recommendation for taxpayers, and it came out precisely as Ross stated – “The 10 million taxpayers making less than $50,000 would pay $100 million more in taxes while the 7 million taxpayers who make more than $50,000 would get $6.8 billion in tax cuts.”

This will not be a consensus document, most of the liberals on the panel won’t sign it.  And even the news reports today acknowledge that the changes would “largely benefit the wealthy.”  Clearly the Governor will put his weight behind it, but that’s meant nothing in Sacramento for several years.  The question is whether the Democratic Legislature would dare to massively reward the rich so nakedly by accepting these recommendations.  Because the business community is actually against it, worried about the effect of the net receipts tax, I’d still guess no, but people should be letting their Representatives know that they will not get away with a transparent shift in wealth from the middle class to the super-rich.

As Jim Evans, Communications Director for Sen. Steinberg, notes, the Governor is poised to veto a bill he championed, which would mandate the highest renewable energy standard in the nation, requiring utilities to get 33% of their energy from renewable sources by 2020.  But it’s far worse than just a veto.  Schwarzenegger wants to then set the standard himself by executive order.  You can see why this would please him – he would be able to say that he boldly moved the state forward in the renewable energy space, while vetoing the bill from the Legislature that would do the same thing.  And he wold significantly weaken the standard in a variety of ways.

The order presumably would set no limit on how much of the green power could be imported from other states.

Environmentalists who have been told about the governor’s still-evolving plans said Schwarzenegger also was considering directing the California Air Resources Board to look at broadening the state’s definition of renewable energy sources to include large hydroelectric dams and nuclear energy plants.

Critics questioned whether Schwarzenegger’s order would be binding once he leaves office at the end of 2010. The validity of the order would be subject to a variety of potential legal challenges, they predicted.

So Schwarzenegger would allow utilities to outsource all the green jobs that would be created if power needed to be created on California soil, ruining the one area of potential economic recovery in the bill.  He would put the standard on shaky legal ground, open to litigation and an unclear mandate.  And he would hand a gift to the nuclear power industry by twisting arms at the Air Resources Board to change their definition of renewable energy.

This isn’t just short-sighted, it’s downright criminal.  A high renewable standard could spurn all kinds of economic activity, but without a limit on importation, that activity will just go elsewhere instead of California.  This is an effort of questionable legality for Schwarzenegger to reward corporate cronies with lower purchasing prices for green energy at the expense of California jobs.

Astounding.

SB14, which would set a first-in-the-nation standard that utilities must receive 33% of their energy from renewable sources by 2020, passed the Legislature late last night.

“Increased development of renewable energy in California has tremendous potential as an economic development tool. These are clean, green jobs that belong in California. SB 14 sets a clear target with a real deadline, and then makes it as easy as possible to bring renewable energy on line.

In light of the state’s ambitious new carbon emission targets, SB 14 will give energy agencies the flexibility they need in order to meet those goals. Current law “caps” the amount of renewable energy that the Public Utilities Commission may order utilities to buy or build at 20 percent. This bill would remove this cap and require utilities to acquire 33 percent of their electricity from renewable resources by 2020.”

This would make California’s renewable energy standard one of the most aggressive in the world.  The Governor, feted in magazines and national media as an environmental leader, has vocally backed the 33% standard in the past.  But power plant generators have pressured Schwarzenegger to veto the bill.  And according to the LA Times, he will.

The Senate did manage to pass the energy bill, which would raise to 33% the amount of energy the utilities must get from renewable sources. Final approval by the Assembly of some minor amendments was expected.

However, a high-ranking administration official said late Friday that the governor may not sign the bill, SB 14 by Sen. Joe Simitian (D-Palo Alto), because of provisions limiting the amount of energy that could come from outside California. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the bills were not yet on the governor’s desk.

That would really be the icing on the cake to the worst Governorship in California history.  The one issue on which he staked his legacy, and he is likely to veto the bill most likely to drive the lowering of greenhouse gas emissions, mainly because it would keep too many jobs in the state.  Adding a renewable energy standard and mandating a majority of that energy be generated in state, is probably the only bill passed this year that looks to expand the local economy.  And because of that, Schwarzenegger will veto it.

And the same magazines will put him on the cover with the slogan “The Greenenator” and talk up his environmental credentials.