California’s economy can’t really stabilize until the foreclosure crisis is resolved.

Yesterday I was honored to be on a call with America’s leading mayors and the US Conference of Mayors to talk about a huge problem affecting cities from coast to coast: the foreclosure crisis.

I’ve been talking about how a family is losing their home every 13 seconds for awhile now and the recent failure by Congress to enact bankruptcy reform to protect homeowners because of industry pressure was a real blow to stopping that clock.  

But the failure in Washington isn’t going to stand in the way of ACORN’s push to address the crisis at the heart of the economic meltdown and teaming up with some of the leading mayors in the United States is a major way we’re moving forward to help families stay in their homes.

Let’s set the record straight about one thing – mayors and ACORN tried to stop this crisis before it began, only to be preempted by federal regulators who did the industry’s bidding, and now we are left to clean up the mess.  It took the election of Barack Obama for the federal government to start helping families, but even his excellent Making Home Affordable program only aims to prevent 3 to 4 million foreclosures out of the expected 9 million over the next four years.

So it’s up to us – regular folks, community organizations, and local community leaders.  We cannot sit on the sidelines while 5 to 6 million families lose their homes.

Luckily there is a tremendously successful model already in existence in the city of Philadelphia. Called “mandatory mediation” it is based on one simple technique: having borrowers and lenders sit down and talk. The success rate is astounding.  As we have shown in our recent report, “Road to Rescue: How the Philadelphia Model Can Reduce Foreclosures Across the Country“,  fully 78 percent of homeowners who have participated in mediation are still in their homes today. 78 percent! Imagine if we could replicate that across the nation!  

The Philadelphia program works because it incorporates four pillars: (1) It is mandatory. (2) It involves extensive community outreach to struggling borrowers. (3) It has an easy threshold for participation. (4) It makes use of housing counselors to ensure affordability of workouts.  

On yesterday’s call, we heard from Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, whose office now coordinates this highly effective program.  He has raised money from the private sector to join city funds, but he needs more help, including from the federal government, especially as the foreclosure crisis lays at the heart of our recession.

President Obama himself understands this, and in his February speech laying out the foreclosure plan, said, “We are going to award $2 billion in competitive grants to communities that are bringing together stakeholders and testing new and innovative ways to prevent foreclosures. Communities have shown a lot of initiative, taking responsibility for this crisis when many others have not. Supporting these neighborhood efforts is exactly what we should be doing.”

Unfortunately, no such support for local foreclosure prevention yet exists.  ACORN will join mayors in fighting to make sure the federal government does as President Obama promised and funds these initiatives.  Despite a recent unanimous Senate vote on an amendment offered by Senators Casey and Gillibrand to open up some of the Neighborhood Stabilization Program funds for foreclosure prevention, rather than just buying properties after they’re foreclosed, the amendment died in the House.

Across the country, ACORN Housing counselors are waging daily battles just to get reasonable modifications and save homes, but the industry is still foreclosing on hundreds of thousands of families that could be helped but don’t live in a city with a mediation program. The efforts of mayors and ACORN to facilitate more affordable loan modifications will be critical in halting the national housing and economic downfall.  

Mayor Bloomberg is joining us in pressuring Albany to improve the state’s mediation law, Mayors Villaraigosa and Dellums are working with us to get needed changes out of Sacramento, and Mayors Slay (St. Louis) and Diaz (Miami) also committed to working with us locally, statewide, and nationally to help save homes.  

With millions more foreclosures staring us in the face, we have to act now to create sensible local solutions that will improve our communities, safeguard families, stabilize tax bases, and revive the economy.  With leading mayors stepping up yesterday, we’re starting to get the ball rolling.

I wrote an op-ed piece for the Capitol Weekly. It goes into the importance of the primary process, and why primary challenges are a good thing.  Rather than summarizing myself, I encourage you to read it. While I’m talking about the Capitol Weekly, I’ll go ahead and highly recommend that everybody should be checking out their site every Thursday.  It’s got great coverage of all the Sacto stuff without all of the MSM BS.

I also posted the piece in the extended.

Nothing has excited so many Californians like the idea of a February primary. Seemingly everybody wants this to happen for some reason or another. But, in the end, the only thing that all the political wrangling on the date of the primary really has shown us is that we need real reform for the primary process ASAP.

With all the talk of the February primary, I wouldn’t blame you if you just turn the page. But wait, hear me out: I’m here to discuss local primaries.

One of the arguments for the February primary that I’ve seen is that we have just become the nation’s ATM. I would argue that this isn’t solely due to the date of our primary, but also that we have few contested elections. In many California districts, the primary is the de facto election. If you want to challenge your legislator or representative, you have to do it from within the party. Until California’s apportionment process is revamped, the primary is the only outlet for change in California.

The primary, since its inception, has been a source of conflict; it creates intraparty disagreement visible to the voters, frustration for incumbents and perhaps too much power for activists. But for whatever reasons that critics protest its use, it is hard to deny that the local primary is democracy in its rawest form. Hilda Solis was able to successfully challenge Congressman Matthew Martinez by being a better campaigner and having a more effective grassroots organization.
Capitol
For a more recent example, see the once mighty Sen. Joe Lieberman, who was forced to leave his party because he was hopelessly out of touch with his base. Lieberman was able to use a quirk in state election law to run as an independent, but that loophole is not available to California elected officials.
Effective primaries should be forces of change in more than just name only; they should realign the interests of the representative with their constituents.

While some primary challenges are due to term limits, see Joe Nation, or political ambition, see Barack Obama, other challenges arise out of serious gripes with the representative in question. Illinois politics offers an interesting contrast with one primary challenge that crystallized an issue in the minds of voters, and one challenge that failed to gain any traction at all. Former Sen. Moseley-Braun defeated a Sen. Alan Dixon with a campaign that highlighted Dixon’s vote to confirm Justice Clarence Thomas. Sen. Barack Obama’s first federal race was an ill-fated and ill-conceived primary challenge to Rep. Bobby Rush.

Here in California, in 1970, Joe Cohelan was slow to criticize the pretext for and the prosecution of the Viet Nam War. Ron Dellums challenged him over this issue, and eventually become a stalwart in the Congress by more accurately representing his progressive district. It should hardly be surprising that similar pressures upon incumbents are arising out of the disaster in Iraq.

Primaries should not be feared. Rather, we should embrace the notion that our democracy is fluid. Voters should be presented with options on the ballot. If the incumbent has satisfied the voters and adequately represents the interests of the district, he or she will win. However, no legislator should assume that they are entitled to their seat simply because they have won in the past. When given a better choice, voters may opt for the candidate who believes as they do.
Some have argued that the party label should be a shield and that we should ignore malfeasance or the candidate’s position on the “issue of the cycle.”

However, it demeans our democracy to say that challengers get but one shot within the party process and then there shall be no more discussion. It cuts off the conversation before we even have a track record from which to judge. The argument goes that we should overlook issues of personal and philosophical disagreement to conserve resources. I agree that resources are critical, but are they so critical that we abandon our values? Or are values so fungible in the modern political economy that we will trade them for 30 pieces of silver?

In American democracy, we are only guaranteed a few opportunities to truly speak our mind, and for most Californians, that is exclusively through the ballot box. If we only have meaningless general elections, and our primaries are uncontested, do we really live in a democracy at all?

Brian Leubitz is publisher and editor of Calitics.com, an online source of news, opinion and political discussion.

I posted this earlier at dkos, and then realized I should also post it here.  It isn’t much of a diary, but enjoy!
Audio of the first 30 minutes:

I just got back from a Democratic Victory Press Conference in Oakland, CA.  Those in attendance (no particular order):

Jerry McNerney
Debra Bowen
John Garamendi
Ron Dellums
Jerry Brown
John Chiang
Art Torres
Loads more on down the list.

“When you are in the Majority, you get to cut the pie a little different.”
-Ron Dellums

I don’t remember the exact quote, but you have the feel.  My impressions on the flip…

First of all…

I got to shake Jerry’s hand!  (McNerney, not Brown)  yay!  And I got to have a nice chat with Debra.  She is fabulous and a VERY real person.  We haven’t seen the last of her!

There was a lot of energy.  A press conference just concluded at the Oakland CDP headquarters.  Present were just about every Democratic Statewide and local candidate you could think of.  And all the California Democratic Party staff and volunteers.

Everyone was really excited about “keeping 7 of the 9 constitutional offices” of California within Democratic control. 

I was most impressed with the speach that Ron Dellums gave.  He has just been elected as Mayor of Oakland, but he was the Representative to Congress for the Berkeley/Oakland area for more than 25 years, elected in 1970 (I think) as a black anti-Vietnam War activist with a ‘fro.

Well, I have to say: he still has it (the fire and energy, not the big ‘fro).  He is a very powerful and inspirational speaker.

He and John Garamendi listed off the Senators and Congressmen that were going to be heading the various committees.  I didn’t have anything to take notes with.  But I am sure that there are some that are reading this that can list them out in the comments.

But it is an amazing thing to consider.  John Conyers on Judicial.  Barney Frank on Financial Services.  You get the idea…

But we have to also realize that this is just a new beginning.

John Garamendi talked about coming back to this country in the late 60s after RFK was shot.  How he came back to a different country than the one he knew.  That there was a lot of unrest in the streets and a lot of violence, but that now he sees us starting to achieve a dream that was just starting to be concieved at that time.

Debra Bowen talked (of course) about taking a look INSIDE those black boxes of Diebold.  Of making sure that the process is transparent.  These are my words, but voting should be something that we, the people, own collectively.  Just as the air we breathe.  We expect government to protect our air, and we should expect it to protect our votes as well.  It shouldn’t be turned over to for-profit companies with proprietary software.  I am sure she thinks about it in the same way.

So, those are the highlights.

Did I mention that I got to shake Jerry McNerney’s hand?  He was great, too.  He said is going to focus on renewable energy and aleviating our dependance of oil.  He knows he and Pelosi have a lot of work to do, and he is ready for it!

I should add that McNerney was definitlely the star of the show.  The media was tripping over itself to film his every move and word!

Oakland will continue to wait on a new mayor.  Jerry Brown’s term doesn’t end until January, but Ron Dellums had hoped to avoid a runoff with Ignacio De La Fuente.

It will be at least several days before all votes are counted in the hotly contested Oakland mayoral election, county officials said Monday.  Former U.S. Rep. Ron Dellums is 214 votes short of the 50 percent plus one he needs to avoid a runoff against City Council President Ignacio De La Fuente, according to elections officials. There are at least 2,000 provisional ballots to be counted in the mayoral election, Acting Registrar of Voters Dave Macdonald said. Countywide, there are about 11,000 ballots left to tally and an unknown number of damaged or mismarked ballots.  Of the 76,496 votes counted so far, Dellums has 49.65 percent and De La Fuente 33.37 percent, according to the registrar. Councilmember Nancy Nadel (Downtown-West Oakland) has 13.24 percent of the vote.
***
  Despite delays created by the county’s switch from electronic voting to paper ballots, Macdonald said Alameda County is ahead of several other large counties in counting votes, including Contra Costa and Santa Clara.

The possibility of recounts — or lawsuits — that could extend the election drama for many more weeks still remains. However, the person or campaign requesting the recount would have to pay for the work, Macdonald said. (OakTrib 6/13/06)

It’s amazing what Diebold has done to our elections process.  Why, in the 21st Century, does it take us longer to count votes than it did in the 19th?  It’s pretty ridiculous that we can’t have election finality by a week after the election.  It’s just one more reason to get out and support Debra Bowen in what will be a challenging race against Bruce McPherson.