When business groups began to object to various provisions in the Parsky Commission effort to upend the tax structure in California, including anything that even smelled like an increase (even though the plan had to be revenue-neutral to clear the Legislature), I figured the effort was dead and buried.  It appeared that the entire effort was a complete waste of time, and the effort to Latvia-ize the state by shifting the tax burden from the upper class to the lower class had been sniffed out and extinguished.  However, the recent secrecy on the part of the commission, after a pledge of transparency, has many wondering if the shock doctrine is alive and well.

The plan is that, just about 24 hours from now – or 11 a.m. Thursday, to be precise – a state commission will consider and potentially adopt a proposal for an entirely new tax system for the state of California.

It would be a radical undertaking, slashing some taxes, eliminating others and establishing a new tax about which no one in California is familiar. No one can say with anything approaching certainty how much it would cost businesses and consumers or how much revenue it would generate to finance state services.

Yet, despite the significance of the task, despite all the unanswered questions and despite the imminence of a decision, as of this writing – midafternoon Tuesday – the details of the proposed new tax plan have not been made available for public review.

A spokeswoman told me a little after 3 p.m. there was still hope that the detailed proposal would be posted on the commission’s Web site before the day was out.

The Legislature has made no indication that they would take up whatever plan the Parsky Commission votes out, even after the Governor orders a special session to deal with it.  And with both sides of the aisle condemning aspects of the plan, liberals for the tax burden shift, and conservatives for the unknown tax increases that may be part of any deal, I wouldn’t call the prospects likely for a Parsky Commission plan to become law.  But the secrecy is certainly troubling, as well as the revival of provisions voted down by the people on multiple occasions.

But members of the tax commission are reviving the rainy-day fund idea once again. Most notably, the idea has had some of its strongest support from Democratic-appointed commissioners.

Former Assemblyman Fred Keeley said recently that while many commissioners believe the state can reduce its budget volatility through changes in the tax system, he believes the tax system isn’t so much the problem.

“My belief is that volatility of the general fund, to the degree it’s a problem, is due to the governor and Legislature with regard to spending,” Keeley said. “That can be solved by way of an appropriately designed rainy-day fund or lockbox.”

Another Democratic appointee, University of Connecticut law professor Richard D. Pomp, reminded the commission this month that he has long believed the reduction of volatility was a spending issue.

“From the outset, I have argued, and continue to believe, that volatility, which is a feature of every state’s tax system, is a spending problem and not a tax problem,” Pomp wrote. (That comes awfully close to the oft-used GOP line that California’s budget problems are “a spending problem, not a revenue problem.”)

I think these Democrats are trying to argue that volatility in the tax structure is a good thing, which it is.  But the leap from that to a spending cap doesn’t follow.  There’s a difference between spending wisely in good years and a third-party mechanism that limits the ability to restore chronic budget cuts from bad years, which is what a cap would inevitably do. (A rainy-day fund without a cap would be different, but may end up serving the same purpose.)

I stick with my prediction that the commission is doomed, but it still bears watching.

…Kevin Yamamura has more.

Everything that is corrosive and broken about California politics can be seen in this incredible article by Kevin Yamamura.  In it, he explains that negotiations on the budget are being held by the Assembly and Senate leadership in secret, so as not to upset the critical balance needed to pass it.

Five Californians are trying to solve the state’s budget crisis, in part by keeping the other 38 million residents in the dark.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the four legislative leaders have continued their negotiations behind closed doors for weeks, bypassing open legislative committees and offering the outside world few details as a precondition of their talks.

See, what happens is that the population of 38 million elects 120 representatives to go to Sacramento, and they vest all their power in the hands of four leaders, and they go off to run the state by themselves.  It’s such a brilliant program, not subject to personal ambitions or petty jealousies. Not at all.

Among the people the Big Five are hiding from are their own fellow legislators, and lobbyists:

They fear special interests will mobilize on every proposal they hear about, ramp up pressure on lawmakers and prevent any possibility of reaching a deal that could secure enough votes.

“Whether it’s education or labor or any of the other groups, when we get wind of something that has significant jeopardy for us, we fight against it,” said Kevin Gordon, a lobbyist for hundreds of California school districts. “It’s a (lobbying) system set up to defeat the latest idea that’s been hatched, which makes it that much harder to get a solution.”

When they do reach a deal, legislative leaders intend to hide it as long as they can until a floor vote, for fear that lobbyists may undermine the agreement by persuading key legislators to vote against it.

Wow, there’s an honest lobbyist.

So let’s get this straight: budget negotiations are happening in secret, because if they were even remotely public, special interests would scuttle the deal.  And when an agreement is reached, they’re going to SNEAK IT ONTO THE FLOOR so no wayward lawmaker gets in his silly little head that he wants to read it.

The increased secrecy behind this year’s “Big Five” leadership negotiations has made interest groups nervous and has alarmed open-government proponents.

“The thought that to be able to solve this you have to ram it down members’ throats just to lock something up before a constituency finds it outrageous is evidence of how bad the process has gotten,” said Terry Francke of Californians Aware, an open-government advocacy group.

Yep.  Keep in mind that there has not been one Budget Committee hearing this year.  When a deal is reached, that committee will probably meet in the middle of the night and rubber-stamp the deal, moving to the floor as fast as possible to outflank the special interests who clearly run the state.

The Big Five process is absurd.  There are ways to decrease the influence of special interests, the biggest being full public financing of all elections.  The best practice is NOT to hide from them so that the legislative process is like a team of burglars trying to rob a jewelry store without being detected.  And the less people involved in any negotiation, the more possibility for eventual corruption through backroom dealing.

The entire brief for a Constitutional convention can now be “Read A-1 of the Sac Bee on February 4, 2009.”

(Cross posted from the The Sunlight Foundation)

The Sunlight Foundation launched a new web site, Pass223.com, to harness the distributed power of the Internet to pressure the Senate into increasing disclosure of campaign contributions by passing a bill – S. 223, the Senate Campaign Disclosure Parity Act – requiring senators to file their contribution reports electronically.

We need your help to pass this bill. Please follow the link to Pass223.com and call your senators to find out where they stand on S. 223. The site has full instructions on who your senators are, how to call, what to say, and how to report back to us. For more detail on the bill, keep reading.

Currently, presidential candidates and candidates running for the House of Representatives file their campaign contributions in electronic form. Electronic filing speeds the process by which campaign contribution data reaches the public over the Internet, allowing citizens and journalists to more easily spot a conflict of interest or an inappropriate contribution. Filers in the Senate do not file electronically, delaying disclosure by weeks and possibly months.

Passage of S. 223 appears to be a “no-brainer,” and isn’t publicly opposed by any senator. However, at every step of the way over the past year and a half the bill has been interrupted and blocked for a variety of reasons.

Right now, Sen. John Ensign (pronounced en-sen) is blocking the bill by insisting on adding a poison pill amendment. This poison pill is meant to protect senators from legitimate ethics complaints filed by outside groups. The amendment would impose an unconstitutional burden on on charities, religious organizations and other nonprofits by forcing them to disclose their donors when they file ethics complaints against sitting senators. Ensign’s amendment is opposed by a group of non-profits, religious groups, and charities from the right and the left.

For S. 223 to pass, Ensign’s amendment must be defeated. And to do that, we need you help in identifying senators who OPPOSE Ensign and SUPPORT S. 223. This is a great chance to help pass a long overdue bill.

Go to Pass223.com and get started calling your senators (remember, you have two of them). Don’t forget to report back so that we know where these senators stand on increasing campaign finance disclosure.

Pass223.com is a joint project of the Sunlight Foundation, Public Citizen, Public Campaign, Center for Responsive Politics, Campaign Finance Institute, Change Congress, and Open the Government.

(Disclaimer: I am the Online Organizer and Outreach Coordinator for the Sunlight Foundation)

This week’s edition of the SF Weekly has an article on Stealth Bloggers which argues that our work is “compromised” because some Calitics writers were paid by campaigns this last cycle – specifically, Bob Brigham and Brian Leubitz were paid by Mark Leno’s campaign. The Weekly wants to believe this is some sort of scandal, perhaps to deflect from the Weekly’s own criminal practices.

But there’s no there there. As the article notes, Brigham and Leubitz were completely honest about their affiliations. Brigham repeatedly explained that he was proud to do work for Mark Leno. Leubitz said the same. How is it stealth when there is open and prominent disclosure?

There was nothing to prevent Joe Nation and his supporters from writing their own pieces here at Calitics. A blog such as Calitics encourages such contributions – the front page has prominence, sure, but other diaries can get recommended and even promoted.

The problem is that the Weekly author, Matt Smith, wants to put blogs in the same category as journalists, who supposedly maintain neutral objectivity about what they cover. We have NEVER made such a claim to objectivity. Our biases and positions are open. That’s the real difference between us and other journalists, who hide their affiliations and biases and pretend to be objective. Smith holds up traditional journalism as pure and ideal, when it is clearly no such thing – witness their fawning support for John McCain.

There are no hidden affiliations here. Some Calitics writers, myself included, work for the Courage Campaign. Others have worked for candidates and ballot proposition supporters or opponents. And many aren’t paid by any political group at all.

Our writing is positional. You know that going in. Anyone who reads Calitics and who is shocked to know that we espouse progressive Democratic causes is either not paying attention or being intentionally misleading.

Bloggers believe that the reader is intelligent enough to come to their own opinions on the matter. We disclose our affiliations so that the reader can make up their own mind about whether to take our opinions seriously or not. Matt Smith implies an intent to deceive that simply isn’t there – it’s a dishonest article.

Finally, there’s nothing to stop someone from starting their own blog to cover California politics. We believe more bloggers should be credentialed to the CDP convention, to the state legislature, to press conferences. The more the merrier. We’re not afraid of it, no matter what the position or opinion is of the blogger.

Of course, this IS the same Matt Smith who told his readers a few weeks ago to ignore who was backing Prop 98 and focus instead on its supposed benefits. Consistency doesn’t seem to be a strength of his.

 

There’s been a lot of noise about campaign expenditures, travel expenses, etc being too costly.  Well, one way to avoid that: Don’t disclose.  And that’s just what Arnold is doing.  It’s hard to imagine anything much worse for democracy than what was profiled in the LA Times today:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s office has avoided fully disclosing payments of $1.7 million in nonprofit funds for private jets, hotel suites and support staff for his trips overseas, according to state documents and interviews. Record-keeping for many of the governor’s luxury-class jaunts has been by word of mouth. Asked how the staff tracks the costs, subject to public disclosure laws, Schwarzenegger attorney Daniel Maguire said: “Orally.”

In late 2004, the multimillionaire governor stopped reporting the travel expenses on state disclosure forms that itemize gifts to elected officials. Instead, Schwarzenegger’s top aides recorded some of the costs — and made only general references to others — in memos they wrote to themselves and filed away in the governor’s legal affairs office. (LAT 12.10.07)

Uh, so let’s see here, how many things are wrong in this picture. Well, let’s start off with the obvious thing: They keep the costs orally? Are you freaking kidding me here? By word of mouth. Oh, there’s some real sunshine. Do I have to personally speak to Susan Kennedy to know what hotels he’s staying at and how much they cost? What expensive restaurants is he going to? All of this is hidden away in some black box somewhere deep within the bowels of the “horseshoe” in Sacramento?

What’s next? Oh, right, the non-profit, California Protocol Foundation, that funds most of his lavish expenses doesn’t disclose its donors, doesn’t really itemize its expenses, and as a kicker, is a 501c(3). Yup, that means all the donations to keep Arnold in his swanky Hollywood action hero lifestyle of the rich and famous are TAX-DEDUCTIBLE.  So, if you’re a Chamber of Commerce regular (which is tied to the CPF) and you want to reduce your taxes, you can choose to give your money to some Opera or something. Or you could get a little return and contribute to the purchase of a big-time politician.  Which do you choose?

Oh, and if you want to talk about expensive hotel suites, don’t forget about the $65,000/year suite where the Governator resides while in Sacramento.  Oh, yup, that’s paid for by the CPF as well (PDF).  But perhaps Trent Stamp, president of Charity Navigator , says it best when he describes Arnold’s use of charity dollars as “beyond the pale.”

In a decision handed down today, the California Supreme Court ruled that public employee salary information should be public information. The case pitted all sorts of interests against each other.

Flip it…

Basically, law enforcement officials argued that they didn’t want their data public for safety reasons. On that limited exception, when reasonably necessary for public and private safety, the data remains secret. Otherwise, it’s all public.  Interests as diverse as the ACLU and the Howard Jarvis Tax Payers Assoc. filed briefs supporting the release of information along side the Contra Costa County Times and all of the state’s daily newspapers.  On the other side were powerful public employees unions, specifically law enforcement unions like the California Correctional Peace Officers Association (CCPOA).  The CoCo Times has a expectedly-biased report:

The decision is a defeat for the public employee unions that had appealed a 2004 decision of an Alameda County Superior Court judge who ordered the records released.

“Despite the wrong-headed and persistent opposition of public employee unions, the court has reaffirmed a basic tenet of American democracy. that public business must be conducted in public,” said John Armstrong president and publisher of the Times.

The Times attorney Karl Olson said the decision upholds the long-held premise that salary information is public and it overrules a 2003 appellate court decision that governments have cited to blocking access to salary data.

Now, I’m generally for transparency in government. It’s important. Generally. However, the competing privacy rights and the interest of some officers in safety must be balanced against that. It is surely difficult to draw a bright line and say, boom, this is the category of public employees that should be released.  So, the Sup. Ct. is hoping that erring on the side of disclosure is the way to go. I suppose that’s cool, as long as you don’t work for the city, huh?

That being said, the public has a tremendous interest in this information. It reveals how well the city is managing its finances, it reveals the power structure of the government, particularly unelected officials.  This is all important data for those who regularly watch government (like, um, us). In my mind this data should be in the public domain.

I know there are some people who might see it the other way, so I welcome your comments…