So there is going to be a reconvening of the State Senate today at 10am.  I know, that’s what they said yesterday.  But the plan from Sen. Steinberg is to keep the Senate on the floor until 27 members vote for passage and the crisis is (temporarily) averted.  Meanwhile, 20,000 layoff notices and the closure of $3.8 billion in state public works projects will take place today.  Things like projects to eliminate arsenic in Live Oak in the Central Valley.  You know, dispensable things.  And the Times has a bead on the three Assembly members who plan to vote in favor – Roger Niello, Anthony Adams and Minority Leader Mike Villines.  This is a representative sample of the countervailing forces that Yacht Party members have to deal with.

Adams, a bearded 37-year-old who was elected in 2006 after working for San Bernardino County as its legislative liaison to Sacramento and Washington, has said he would provide the Assembly’s third GOP vote.

“It’s unconscionable that we let this state go over the cliff,” Adams said in an interview. “My job is to get the best possible deal for Republicans.”

Adams faces reelection next year, and his support for the budget package has antitax advocates interested in lining up a challenger in the GOP primary. And because he represents a swing district, Adams must also worry about a general-election challenge from a Democrat.Adams said he had not asked for specific concessions for his vote, or for assurances that he would get assistance to fend off election challenges.

“I’m not trying to find some soft landing,” he said, “although my wife is going to kill me if she hears that.”

They are not rewarded for their vote, and they fear their own “head on a stick” party members more than the opposition.  And so you get this gridlock.

It occurs to me that what Steinberg is doing is what progressives have asked Harry Reid to do in the US Senate for years now.  When GOP obstructionists threaten to filibuster key legislation, we always say “Make them filibuster!  Make them stand up in the well of the Senate and talk endlessly about how we can’t afford to provide health care for children, or how we have to offer more tax cuts to the wealthiest 1%.  Let the whole country see it!”  Well, we’re basically doing that.  The 15 members of the Yacht Party caucus in the Senate will be locked down and forced to reiterate their arguments indefinitely.

Problem is, the whole country won’t be seeing it, the whole state won’t be seeing it, in fact almost nobody will be seeing it.  This is the true failure of a lack of political awareness in California, and a lack of political media.  The pressure points are nearly impossible to hit.  A lot of lawmakers will get tired and need to “bring your toothbrush,” as Steinberg said, but there’s precious little drama outside of Sacramento.  And yet the decisions made in that chamber will undoubtedly impact the entire national economy, not just us.

But that is also good, in a sense, because it means that a sliver of opinion makers descending on the phone lines of the legislature can seen like an army.  I’m going to reprint the email alert that Brian sent out last night, which you may have received, because I think he captured the situation perfectly.  The leadership is making them filibuster.  Now it’s up to us to put on the pressure.

Hey there, registered Calitics user –

If you have been watching Calitics or the news this week, you’ve heard about the budget debacle going on in Sacramento.  For the last three days, we have remained one vote short of the required two-thirds majority for a budget deal, with only two Republicans being willing to join the Democratic caucus in the Senate. You can follow our coverage of the Budget here:

http://budget.calitics.com

To be blunt, the budget deal on the table is a mess. It consists of over twenty bills in each chamber. It guts environmental protections on several major projects, it offers gifts to corporations and a few powerful industries.  It relies on cuts and borrowing far too heavily, and does not provide the real long-term fixes of our revenue stream that we so desperately need. And the spending cap that will go to the ballot in the spring represents a major step backward, and progressives will have to expend substantial resources to defeat it. Yet despite all that, only one thing is really clear:

If we do nothing, the state faces systemic collapse.

Because Republicans refused for years to look at new revenues to balance the state’s budget, California is being hit harder by the economic crisis than any other state. We face a $40 billion deficit, and already the state is running out of money. Schools are looking at cutting classes and laying off teachers. Tomorrow, if there is no budget, 276 infrastructure projects will be halted – affecting 38,000 workers in the state, and the governor has announced that he will issue layoff notices to 20,000 state workers. And the state’s credit rating, already low, will suffer further downgrades, effectively costing taxpayers more money.

The media has now taken notice that the Republicans are trying to bring the state down with them. But the media has little power if we aren’t watching and if our leaders don’t know we are watching them. So, here is what we need to do:

Call Senator Abel Maldanado (R-Monterey County, 916-651-4015) and tell him to give up his list of demands and end this hostage situation.

Call Senator Dave Cox (R-Fair Oaks, 916-651-4001) and tell him that the state deserves better than a Senator who goes back on a deal when threatened by his own party’s extremists.

Tell as many people to do the same thing. Use every tool at your disposal, Twitter, facebook, or just word of mouth. The more people that know about this Republican extremism threatening our state, the better.

The Senate is set to once again resume session, and we might be in for another all-nighter. However, keep at it, because this is simply too important to let Republicans play their dangerous games with the lives of Californians.

The final numbers on the stimulus package are trickling out.  Some of the baseline investments are here:

* Investments in Infrastructure and Science – $120 billion

* Investments in Health – $14.2 billion

* Investments in Education and Training – $105.9 billion

* Investments in Energy, including over $30 billion in infrastructure – $37.5 billion

* Helping Americans Hit Hardest by the Economic Crisis – $24.3 billion

* Law Enforcement, Oversight, Other Programs – $7.8 billion

It’s unquestionable that the conference report is worse than the House bill but better than the Senate.  It costs less than the Senate bill while providing more stimulus.  Some bad spending like the clean coal “FutureGen” project is out, along with some of the worst corporate tax breaks.  Mass transit spending is up, the child tax credit was partially restored to House levels (now kicking in after $3,000 in income), and the state fiscal stabilization fund gets around $54 million (but that includes funding for school construction).  You can find the full summary here.

There are some very solid elements to the bill.  White House economists estimate that the package will create or save 396,000 jobs in California and 3.5 million nationwide.  This is a down payment on a new generation of investment in America.

However, like with most Congressional sausage-making, there may be some rough patches.  The worst is the allegation that Dianne Feinstein is trying to include filtering into the stimulus as part of the program to expand broadband capacity across the country.

The Open Internet Coalition – which includes groups like Public Knowledge, Free Press and the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) – is applauding the more than $2 billion expected to be in the stimulus bill for broadband build-out in rural or underserved areas. They say not only will building out high-speed Internet instantly create jobs, but giving people in those areas more access to the Internet will spur small-business creation and other growth […]

These groups are also over-the-moon about the fact that the Senate bill has a non-discrimination, interconnection requirement that essentially says any provider receiving stimulus funding has to make sure they provide equal access to everyone over their network (part of the so-called “net neutrality” debate). The House version requires the FCC to define “open access,” which essentially calls for carriers to share their networks with competitors.

But they’re worried Hollywood is still trying to insert a content filtering provision via Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., at the last minute. Feinstein has been trying to add language specifying that Internet service provider (ISPs) may engage in “reasonable network management” … “such as” efforts to combat illegal activity like “child pornography and copyright infringement.” In essence, some argue, ISPs would be able to monitor any content coming to and from your computer, just in case there was some copyrighted material violating fair use, or kiddie porn in there.

But groups like the Motion Picture Association of America stress the “network management” angle of the bill (“filtering” is a nasty word around these parts). After all, it’s hard to argue against stopping kiddie porn from being sent over one’s pipes. I’ve left a message with Feinstein’s press office to see what the status of her amendment is. It doesn’t appear to be in there, but I’ll let you know if she plans on trying to stick it in at some point.

“Of course we see huge privacy invasions from this sort of thing,” said Cathy Sloan of CCIA.

Now, some caveats.  There was a hyperventilating story in the UK Register claiming that this would kill net neutrality.  As stated earlier, there are open access provisions in the stimulus, and it doesn’t appear that this amendment even made it into the final version.  This looks to me to be more of a privacy and anti-competition issue.

In another part of that story, Henry Waxman was implicated.  His office has assured multiple constituents, including yours truly, that he has had nothing to do with any filtering amendment.

That’s not to say that we shouldn’t be concerned.  DiFi is allegedly trying to pay back a corporate constituent with a highly invasive amendment that would certainly violate the spirit if not the letter of privacy laws.  And of course this kind of monitoring is a slippery slope, as are most IP issues.  At the root I agree with John Cole:

As baseball season is getting close, I would like to propose a trade. We give the Republicans Dianne Feinstein and a PTBNL and they give us Olympia Snowe. This is a solid trade for us. With Judd Gregg at commerce, we would almost complete the New England rout, and Feinstein, as a newly minted Republican, will go down to certain defeat in California. Additionally, there is nothing in this agreement that says the PTBNL can’t be Nelson or Lieberman.

Right now, the number one job of every public official, including state legislators and the governor, our representatives in Congress and our new President, is to revitalize our economy and put our people to work.  Here in California, that means promptly passing a budget that solves our state’s budget crisis, stimulates the economy and creates jobs.  We’re facing a $40 billion budget shortfall and the real possibility of insolvency within a month or two if we don’t get a budget in place.  With 9.3% of Californians unemployed and many more struggling, nothing should get in the way of helping get California’s economy back on track.   Any distraction from solving our budget crisis is a dereliction of duty.

Unfortunately, the Governor Schwarzenegger is stalling a solution to the budget crisis by pushing legislative leaders to accept unrelated and potentially dangerous measures to privatize vital infrastructure projects.  For instance, California, like most states, funds infrastructure through the low-cost, tax-exempt municipal bond market, where private investors’ money helps build schools, roads, flood-control and other necessary projects while paying those investors a fair rate of return.  

Now the governor wants to force the Legislature to experiment with a dangerous scheme for private firms to raise the money for transportation projects, only to be paid back later by Californians, undoubtedly with quite a bit of profit.  So instead of a low-cost, tax-exempt way of raising the money, the governor is pushing to spend more of your money to profit of private investors.  Doesn’t make sense, does it?  The U.S. Government Accountability office recently reviewed the deceptively-named public-private partnerships and concluded: “While private investors can make billions of dollars available for critical infrastructure, these funds are largely a new source of borrowed funds, repaid by road users over what potentially could be a period of several generations.  There is no “free” money in highway public-private partnerships.”

That approach may be a dream come true for ideologues who want to privatize our vital public services, and it may be easy for those politicians who want to pretend that they are not raising taxes.  But sooner or later we’re going to have to pay for the roads, schools and other infrastructure that our state needs and the public-private partnership proposals mean we’ll pay more in the long run as those private contractors seek profit from the deal.  That has been demonstrated across California.  The price tag for San Diego’s public-private partnership toll road (State Route 125) went from $360 million to $843 million by the time it opened a year late in 2007; the cost overruns will be paid by Californians with ten years of additional toll costs.

The governor also wants to be able to outsource vital public services in packages that won’t necessarily generate or save any money to address California’s budget problems.  The so called design-build proposal would effectively eliminate competitive bidding on construction contracts and might compromise quality in vital infrastructure.  That scheme has increased costs to California taxpayers: in four design-build projects, $2.2 billion has been wasted without expediting project completion.  For example, Orange County’s State Route 22 ballooned from a cost of $271 million to over $600 million after becoming a design-build project.  Why does the governor want to spend more of our money while potentially risking quality?

These ideas have been defeated in the Legislature because they just don’t work and they just don’t serve California.  California State Treasurer Bill Lockyer wrote in January in the Sacramento Bee “In fact, the single-minded drive to gin up a gold rush by increasing private companies’ share of the public infrastructure market has helped push California closer to fiscal calamity.”

Now, for whatever reason, the governor is delaying steps toward economic recovery and job creation by trying to push these failed schemes to privatize state government functions as part of the resolution to our budget crisis.  You and I know there’s no such thing as a free lunch.  But by pushing these schemes, Governor Schwarzenegger is trying to pretend that there is.

After decades of state and local government experiments with contracting out, the benefits of private delivery of our vital public services have proven to be elusive.  Contracting out often results in higher costs, poorer service, increased opportunities for corruption and diminished government flexibility, control and accountability.  Governor Schwarzenegger’s privatization schemes offer more of the same for California – more risks with little promise of benefit.

Governor Schwarzenegger is trying to push a bad idea on the state.  It’s bad for California’s economy, bad for our infrastructure, and bad for Californians’ pocketbooks.  These risky privatization schemes won’t stimulate California’s economy.  They may well cost California jobs.  Even more importantly, this is a distraction from the important work we need to be doing in Sacramento to fix what’s wrong with our state.  And with our floundering economy and budget crisis, that’s something we can’t afford. And as long as he keeps trying to shoehorn them into the budget bill, Governor Schwarzenegger is delaying the important resolution of the state’s budget crisis that will stimulate the economy and create jobs.  It’s time for the governor to be constructive by agreeing to a reasonable budget without irrelevant extras.

————-

Willie L. Pelote, Sr. is an Assistant Director of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), AFL-CIO.  AFSCME is the largest public sector union in the country representing 1.4 million members nationwide.

Both the Washington Post and the LA Times have stories today about the budget crises facing the states, where governors and legislatures have exhausted every gimmick and now must enact painful cuts that will work against the federal program to bring us out of the economic downturn.  The personal stories are significant:

Nevada resident Margaret Frye-Jackman, 71, was diagnosed in August with ovarian cancer. She had two rounds of chemotherapy at University Medical Center, the only public hospital in the Las Vegas area.

Soon after, she and her daughter heard the news on TV: The hospital’s outpatient oncology services were closing because of state Medicaid cuts. Treatment for Frye-Jackman and hundreds of other cancer patients was eliminated […]

“If this is what it’s like in Nevada, with cancer stuff closing, is it like that everywhere?” said Frye-Jackman’s daughter, Margaret Bakes, accompanying her mother to the doctor’s recently. “Are all the other states closing stuff too?”

The answer, in at least 39 states, is “yes” — or “soon.” With personal, sales and corporate income tax revenue plummeting, state governments — which recently trimmed their budgets to cover a cumulative $40.3-billion shortfall for the current fiscal year — are now watching in horror as a $47.4-billion gap opens for 2009.

And for fiscal year 2010, they will face a $84.3-billion hole, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. The total shortfall through fiscal 2011 is estimated at $350 billion, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington.

This article frames it as there being “no choice” but tough budget cuts or tax increases for states facing shortfalls, states that cannot print money or run budget deficits.  But that’s not entirely true.  There was a good deal of help being offered by the federal government in the House stimulus bill, which included $79 billion in state fiscal stabilization aid.  But among their other cuts, the Axis of Centrism cut that aid in half, by $40 billion dollars, and in so doing guaranteed additional layoffs to teachers and firefighters and cops and nurses and all sorts of other professions which rely on a state paycheck.

California law mandates that layoff notices to teachers be given out by March 15 for the next school year. Arnold Schwarzenegger is proposing $10 billion in education cuts. Republicans, which use our state’s rule requiring a 2/3 vote of the legislature to pass a budget, are demanding these cuts as the price of a tax increase to close the remaining $40 billion and ensure that the cuts aren’t bigger.

But all of us were hoping and expecting that the US Congress would come through with aid to stabilize state budgets, to help ameliorate the problem and save teacher jobs by providing stimulus money. It must be in the stimulus because, as I just noted, the layoff notices will go out within 5 weeks – there is no time to include it in another bill.

Now we are told that Ben Nelson and Susan Collins, two Republican Senators, have reached a deal to cut that education assistance and that the Senate is likely to accept it.

In short, what they have done is guarantee to my sister and to thousands like her that they will receive a pink slip within five weeks.

To call this fearmongering, as John Ensign did on Meet the Press today, just denies reality, par for the course for both Republicans and bipartisan fetishists like Claire McCaskill, who was at first giddy about cutting 600,000-700,000 jobs in the stimulus, and then passive-aggressively “defended” it by saying the alternative was no bill.

Claire McCaskill is now defending herself against Krugman on Twitter:

Just saw Krugman’s comments on reduction in recov act. Question for him. Would no stimulus act be better than one thats 800 B instead of 900.

She follows that up with

Compromise had to happen or we would NOT have 60 votes. Period.

And for further evidence of how much the bill is the same, she claims:

Original Senate bill was 60% appropriationss, 40%tax cuts. Compromise was 58, 42.Senate bill is 90% the same as House bill.

I’m glad that’s she expressing herself here, and that we’re able to somewhat have a dialogue. But I’m not sure how much in good faith it is. McCaskill began by stating how glad she was that they got a $100 billion cut out of the bill, that the “silly stuff” that Republicans didn’t like is now out. She then switches to a passive aggressive mode in defending the cuts – it’s basically the same bill and it wouldn’t have made it through the Senate – but glosses her own role in making the cuts. From the way she talks about the bill, wouldn’t she have been among those voting against the bill if the cuts hadn’t been made and new non-stimulative tax cuts hadn’t been added in?

McCaskill doesn’t want to admit her role in putting 600,000 Americans out of work on Friday, which will harm public safety and increase class sizes and shut down bus and rail lines and send the sick and uninsured looking in vain for treatment and a host of other inadvisable outcomes.  And there’s no rational economic reason for it, just that the Axis of Centrism choked on the price tag and had to compensate for the non-stimulative tax cuts the Senate tossed into the bill.  Massive job loss or increased property tax rates (as states compensate for the loss to education funds) is on McCaskill and Nelson and Collins and Spector’s hands.

The big question is what will come out of the House-Senate conference next week, whether the cuts, especially the state government relief, will be restored at the expense of things like the $70 billion dollar patch to the alternative minimum tax.  Larry Summers left that an open question on ABC this morning.

One of President Barack Obama’s top economic advisers forecast Sunday a difficult struggle with Congress over Senate cuts of $40 billion for state and local governments from the administration’s massive spending and tax cut package to stimulate the failing economy.

The $827 billion Senate version of the plan — designed to bring the economy out of the worst downward spiral since the Great Depression — was expected to pass the Senate on Tuesday. The House had already passed its $819 billion version of the measure.

And in the opening moments of This Week, an exchange between George Stephanopoulos and Larry Summers went like this:

STEPHANOPOULOS: …does that mean the President prefers the Senate version to the House version?

SUMMERS: No, the President feels that above all, we need a major program enacted very quickly that would create 3 to 4 million jobs. He believes we need to perfect it in every way we can.

If the cuts are restored, suddenly the sense of urgency works back in the direction of passing a bill more like the House version.  The Republican business lobby is urging passage.  I don’t think the moderates signed on to the bill could break ranks on the final vote if the changes in conference are limited to, say, swapping the state cuts for the AMT patch, combined with an assurance from the President that they will make that fix down the road.

The action needs to be entirely directed at the Speaker, who has spoken out against these cuts and ought to appoint conferees that will get the House version at least partially restored.  Being from California, she knows exactly how hard-hit the states are and what the consequences will be.  

Californians cannot find work anymore.

California’s unemployment rate jumped nearly a full percentage point from November to December, settling at 9.3 percent, the highest rate in 15 years.

Only a year earlier, in December 2007, unemployment was 5.9 percent, according to twin surveys by the California Employment Development Department.

My guess would be that double-digit unemployment is on the way by next month, February at the latest.  Because the greatest problem with state government is that the tax structure is too closely tied to a boom-and-bust economic cycle, with no stable revenue sources (2/3 just enforces that insanity), less jobs means less income tax revenue, so watch that commonly cited $41.8 billion dollar budget deficit number to expand greatly.  So a lot of money from that State Fiscal Stabilization Fund will just fill the hole between assumed revenues and reality.  Then people who are trying to count on any money source are going to get an IOU in the mail instead of their tax refund.

We.  Are.  Screwed.

Those who read this site understand the effects of a budget crisis – on teachers, firefighters, cops, state employees, public health clinics, practically everything that regular citizens interface with on an almost daily basis.  I write about the real-world consequences often.  However, it’s very easy to be oblivious to these facts, especially when daily life is so understandably difficult that just getting through it is a struggle.  It’s hard to know for sure, but this SacBee article is probably pretty accurate.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is to deliver his State of the State message Thursday in hopes of galvanizing public opinion to pressure lawmakers to agree on a budget to keep California’s government from going broke.

But his challenge comes as many Californians are too busy and too worried about effects of the larger national economic calamity to be consumed with details of budget wrangling in Sacramento.

Sacramento lobbyists, state worker unions and advocates for health, education and welfare may think of little more than the state’s financial mess. Yet the Capitol isn’t being overwhelmed by calls or letters from average Californians demanding a budget […]

“Certainly voters are aware of the (state budget) problem,” said California Field Poll Director Mark DiCamillo. “But it hasn’t really reached their own pocketbooks or own lives in a direct way. You’re just waiting for the train wreck to happen.

“At the point when the state stops paying its bills or starts issuing IOUs to creditors, that’s when this will really hit the fan.”

I wouldn’t discount this.  People have a hard time connecting the specific hardships they face to a specific failure of the state legislature – many couldn’t tell you the responsibilities between the state and the feds.  In fact, as economic anxiety increases, people retreat more into self-preservation mode and neglect the larger issues at play.

There are a variety of reasons for this.  No public demystification of the process is certainly one.  Without a responsible media detailing the consequences instead of the “pox on all of their houses” attitude that is neither informative or true, I wouldn’t expect citizens to comprehend this very well.  The state party and individual lawmakers have a communications role to play in this as well – just because it isn’t election time doesn’t mean it’s not a time for effective communication to people outside the base on what is happening and why.  The veil of secrecy around Sacramento disheartens people who might otherwise believe that their knowledge of it would make a difference.  In addition, the relatively few members of the legislature (40 Senators for a population of 38 million is bigger than a Congressional district) further dislocates and alienates the population from their government.

As DiCamillo says, when those expecting a tax refund get an IOU, when the state files for bankruptcy (a very real possibility), there will be some recognition.  And the dynamic of the state will change, perhaps quite drastically.  People will want to find answers, maybe a scapegoat.  Hopefully, people are thinking about that moment.  It will either be an opportunity or a prelude to a nightmare.

You don’t have to constantly refresh or check your RSS feeds for the next couple days – budget talks have been called off for Christmas.  There is a meeeting between the Big Three tentatively scheduled for Friday.

In my view, just that we’re talking about a Big Three instead of a Big Five is progress, suggesting that the Gov will go along with the work-around budget if he can save face on a few “stimulus” items (like, you know, taking people’s overtime and meal breaks away.  They can eat while working!).  The Governor never appeared in a movie about schizophrenia, but that’s how he’s been acting the past few days, holding press events at key sites where infrastructure improvements are being shuttered (a levee in Sacramento, the 405 Freeway in Karen Bass’ district in LA) blasting the legislature, while at the same time claiming that progress is being made toward a budget solution.

During a press conference along Interstate 405 in Los Angeles, the Republican governor said he and Democratic leaders made “some great progress” Sunday and that it may only take two more meetings of the same sort to reach a compromise this week. Schwarzenegger had been calling for a solution by Christmas, though he acknowledged Monday that a legislative vote would not take place until next week at the earliest.

“It could easily be that before Christmas Eve or Christmas Day that we have an agreement, that the legislators can be brought back between Christmas and New Year’s to vote on it,” Schwarzenegger said.

(UPDATE: Kevin Yamamura reports that the negotiations have come down to three issues: “rollback of environmental review for construction projects, greater use of private investment and contractors, and deeper spending cuts, including those affecting the state work force.”  These have almost no impact on the budget as a whole – you’re talking about cutting two state worker holidays – and are designed only to reward private business interests.  Arnold has always been in the pocket of the Chamber of Commerce.)

You’ll notice that none of these press events are being held in front of any state employee offices.  That’s because, in general terms, people don’t look kindly on mass layoffs and cutbacks right before Christmas.  It gives them the impression that the person making those layoffs is kind of a Scrooge.  Of course, the immediate halt to all public works projects, at a time when we should be encouraging stimulus projects of this type, also have an impact on jobs.  Not only does every contractor working on those projects get fired, but vendors get stiffed for work that they’ve already completed, leaving the state open to lawsuits.  The Governor should kind of be ashamed to stand in front of any backdrop with cancelled projects behind him, considering his epic mismanagement is partly to blame.  This is particularly true when considering that the voter-approved infrastructure work is vital to public safety and the state would undoubtedly be liable in the event of catastrophe.

Communities nationwide have repaired fewer than half of the 122 levees identified by the government almost two years ago as too poorly maintained to be reliable in major floods, according to Army Corps of Engineers data.

State and local governments were given a year to fix levees cited by the corps for “unacceptable” maintenance deficiencies in a February 2007 review that was part of a post-Hurricane Katrina crackdown. Only 45 have had necessary repairs, according to data provided in response to a USA TODAY request. The remaining unrepaired levees are spread across 18 states and Puerto Rico – most in California and Washington.

The Governor is cleverly casting this as a problem of “the legislature” hoping nobody will notice that he performed the veto, he blocked the very plan that could get these projects restarted.

Fortunately, grassroots Californians are noticing, and you can see the contours of a coalition forming, perhaps resembling the 2005 special election coalition only with more staying power.  Groups like Courage Campaign and the local blogosphere have the reach to engaged communities starving for information.  The California Budget Project provides the statistical heft.  Labor and environmental groups have the ear of the legislature.  And there’s a new member of the coalition – former Obama organizers in California who are moving with unusual speed to support a sane budget solution and slam the Governor for his intransigence.  At Schwarzenegger’s 405 Freeway presser, you can hear a small band of protesters in the background noise.  That was organized by Obama volunteers through their new Facebook-like application, CommunityOrganize.com.  Pam Coukos distributed a letter-writing tool urging a budget solution.  California for Obama has done the same in an email blast, asking it to be distributed to the various volunteer teams.  And there is already talk about veterans of the Obama movement running for state and local office.

This is pretty new and early.  But you can see how this network of committed organizers can gradually become a state political force, especially if the coalitions are built and networks made between the groups mentioned above.  I have long said that what is missing in California is a popular grassroots movement that can go around the media filter and whip up support for progressive values through direct action.  It is said that California is too big for such a movement to catch fire, but in political terms, we all know that the state is very small, and a committed movement can make an outsized difference.  This won’t happen overnight, but we’re moving in the right direction.  Now we just need a gubernatorial candidate to ride the grassroots wave…

I appreciate Bob’s sentiment that the time is now to fight the Governor and the Yacht Party and bring some sanity into the fiscal process, but my fear is that the time for that was three years ago, when the successful fight against the special election should have been built upon, and at this point, we’re already swirling in the bowl.

Let’s just get you up to date.  All infrastructure projects are currently shut down.  Unemployment nudged up to 8.4% in November, the state lost 41,700 jobs last month, and up to 200,000 more jobs are on the chopping block from the public works freeze if it continues.  Meanwhile the Governor is ordering up layoffs and furloughs for state workers, so just add those on top of the pile.  You’re likely to see a 10% cut in state employees, and a 10% reduction in the salaries of those who remain.  More job loss means less income tax and probably less sales tax, as well as more need for public assistance.

And that’s before a budget which could have further reductions to state employee paychecks, elimination of overtime and meal breaks, etc., is signed.  Not to mention the billions more in cuts that the Democrats included in their work-around plan which the Governor threatened to veto.  Schools, which were slated for $4 billion in cuts in that budget, have already gotten the jump on the state by cutting back their local budgets.  After-school sports, libraries, and new teachers are probably all going to go.

This is a nightmare beyond the ability of many, even myself, to comprehend.  It’s so big that it’ll affect everything, and the idea that a ragtag band of liberals have the power to stop the freight train from coming down the track is precious, but I think wrong.  This is the accumulation of 30 years of bad policy and worse government structure, and that’s not going to be turned around in the time it needs to be to avoid catastrophe.  Even George Skelton, poohbah of all poohbahs, admits that the Yacht Party is so nakedly ideological that they have made the state dysfunctional.  This work-around budget is good for the time being, but Schwarzenegger is clearly committed to hijacking that process.  It’s a large game of chicken that none of us can afford.  And as I’ve noted, even balancing the budget – which the work-around does not do – will not necessarily restart infrastructure spending, and even federal help might not be able to do that.  

Changing the constitution with a convention is a nice idea, but not so easy in practice, as we all know.

Talk of calling a constitutional convention has been banging around California for at least the last few decades – maybe since 1851, for all I know – and it’s gotten a lot louder recently. Here, however, is the rule for calling a convention:

The Legislature by rollcall vote entered in the journal, two-thirds of the membership of each house concurring, may submit at a general election the question whether to call a convention to revise the Constitution. If the majority vote yes on that question, within 6 months the Legislature shall provide for the convention. Delegates to a constitutional convention shall be voters elected from districts as nearly equal in population as may be practicable.

In plain English: you need a two-thirds vote of the legislature to put an initiative on the ballot and then you have to get it approved by the voters. The problem is that no matter how sweetly liberals might croon about what a convention could do, conservatives all know the truth: the whole point of the thing would be to get rid of our insane two-thirds requirements for passing budgets and raising taxes. Unfortunately, our whole problem is that Republicans control (slightly more than) one-third of the legislature. And if we can’t get them to vote for a tax increase in the first place, what are the odds we could get them to vote for a constitutional convention called for the express purpose of making it easier to increase taxes? About zero.

OK, but how about a simple initiative? We could get rid of the two-thirds rule just by collecting signatures and getting a majority vote, right?

Right. And we tried that just a few years ago. Prop 56 was supported by all the usual good government groups and would have reduced the majority needed to pass budget and tax measure from two-thirds to 55%. A bunch of other fluff was added to make it more popular (“rainy day” funds, no pay for legislators if they don’t pass a budget, etc.), and in the end…..

….it got whomped 66%-34%. No one was fooled for a second. Everyone knew the whole point was to make it easier to raise taxes, and so it lost in a landslide.

I think a similar proposition to 56 wouldn’t crash so hard today, but it would certainly go in as an underdog, because the majority of the state still doesn’t understand the consequences of all this failure.  It’s a “dysfunctional electorate,” as K-Drum puts it, as well as a dysfunctional government.

Do we need to fight?  Yes.  But we need some arms shipments from Washington (metaphorically speaking) before we can do that.  A rescue package for the state is desperately needed, and it got a whole lot more so yesterday when the Governor vetoed the work-around.

Scott Gold at the LA Times reports today on a massive solar project that may alleviate some of the pain felt in the Antelope Valley:

The buzz in the Antelope Valley these days is about a company called eSolar, which is putting the finishing touches on a thermal solar energy facility here — 24,000 mirrors that glitter like diamonds when you approach on Avenue G. There are plans for several more facilities in the area, all larger, the company says.

Local officials are atwitter at the possibilities. Visitors and investors are expected from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. A slew of jobs would be created; there were 225 people working last week on the Avenue G facility alone, most of them locals. Lancaster Mayor R. Rex Parris said the solar plants could be the catalyst to restoring the sort of “intellectual excitement” that existed when aerospace, still a vital industry here, was the only game in town — when “if it went up, it came out of here,” he said.

“Now, we’re going to go a long way toward saving this world,” the mayor said. “Right here in Lancaster.”

I think it’s important to classify projects like this as what they are – INFRASTRUCTURE projects.  Too often we confine ourselves to thinking about infrastructure as solely referring to fixing roads or building physical structures like bridges.  A 21st-century energy creation system is the most important infrastructure improvement we can make, one that will not only create jobs but save billions in public health and environmental degradation costs.  Any stimulus from the federal government that includes infrastructure improvements should help incentivize companies like eSolar, as well as laying down high-speed broadband lines throughout the country, building a transferable energy grid, etc.

In the recent past in California, the way a depressed city could revitalize their economy was to bring a prison into town.  Now, the potential of green jobs is being realized, making the future (pardon the pun) sunnier:

It’s heady talk, and people are listening. Lancaster and the surrounding valley are suffering, even by the standards of a community that long ago acclimated to a boom-and-bust cycle. Many here are living on the edge, and some beyond, with tens of thousands more expected to arrive in coming years.

There is a sense that development cannot come fast enough, not with shops closing, one in five people living in poverty, high unemployment and the highest mortality rate in Los Angeles County. Not with so many houses falling into foreclosure that the city of Lancaster has gone into real estate — buying and renovating empty homes to slow the decline of neighborhoods.

“It’s bad,” said William Turner, 21, who got a job installing eSolar mirrors through a temp agency. He is among those vying for one of the full-time positions the company will offer soon; competition will be fierce and many of those hired will be overqualified for their jobs, officials said.

“People around here are really hurting,” Turner said. “We need a change.”

The new energy economy is California’s way out of the economic crisis.  Whether it’s building solar and wind plants or transferable energy grids or carbon capture and sequestration retrofitting or green building add-ons or the next generation of green cars, the potential for bringing hope to downtrodden communities, creating millions of jobs and protecting the planet is great.

The national unemployment news is grim – 533,000 jobs lost in November, with the September and October numbers revised downward. Over 1.2 million jobs have been lost in the last 3 months.

The California figures are even worse. The US unemployment rate is at 6.7% but we blew past that long ago – 8.2% as of October 31 and likely to be significantly higher after November’s numbers are in.

Those figures don’t paint a picture of the true distress in California. The California Budget Project reported that 2.3 million Californians are underemployed or outright unemployed – many who have jobs are working part-time when they’d rather work full-time, or have begun to give up their job search.

This is exacerbated by the erosion of the safety net:

Government programs in place [during the last major recession, 1981-82] to cushion and counter recessions have been scaled back sharply, raising questions about whether they are up to the task as the economic outlook darkens today.

Unemployment insurance is not as generous now. Yet the unemployment rate is at 6.5 percent and some forecasters say it could top 8 percent next year. It hit 10.8 percent in the early 1980s.

This is also the first severe economic slump since President Bill Clinton overhauled the welfare system and made it tougher to qualify for, and keep receiving, benefits. Many people who lose their jobs now and fall into poverty may not qualify for public assistance. Other programs designed in part to counter hard times – like job training and housing subsidies – have also been cut back.

Here in California the erosion of that safety net has been severe. Unemployment benefits have been cut. Health care subsidies are being cut. Education, which is necessary to provide workers with job retraining and to producing entrepreneurs, creators, and inventors, is being cut. Senior citizens are seeing their drug and even housing benefits cut, which places the burden on their families.

And the Republicans’ demand for massive spending cuts threatens to dramatically increase the ranks of the unemployed in California. If the budget deficit is solved by spending cuts, in whole or even in part, the result is likely to be an outright Depression in California.

Government’s job is to provide counter-cyclical economic stimulus. Spending cuts are what’s known as pro-cyclical – they exacerbate a slide into recession rather than counter it. Spending needs to be increased right now to bolster the safety net and ease the worsening recession.

As the California Budget Project explained, citing leading economists like Joseph Stiglitz, “tax increases on higher income families are the least damaging mechanism for closing state fiscal deficits.”

That kind of framing needs to be placed at the center of the state budget discussion – a discussion that itself is really about the economic future of this state.