I was on a conference call earlier with State Controller John Chiang and Rep. Hilda Solis about the Governor’s callous executive order, and both delivered predictably strong comments.  Chiang, who has told the governor he will refuse to comply with the order, blasted Schwarzenegger, saying “state workers shouldn’t be put in the middle of a political battle,” and that this was a nakedly punitive attempt against California’s state employee unions, which the whom the Governor has always held a grudge (they helped deep-six his “reform” agenda in 2005).  Rep. Solis was even more outraged, saying “let’s put him on the federal minimum wage, and get rid of the special interests paying for his hotel room across the street from the Capitol, and see how he likes it.”  She rocks.  

Chiang has made his decision, and now only litigation can force him to carry out the Governor’s order (and Chiang discouraged litigation as a “waste of time.”)  But we expect these kind of statements from Democrats.  Take a look at this one from Republican Greg Aghazarian:

“While I appreciate the Governor’s leadership on this budget crisis, I cannot support reducing the salaries of our state employees to minimum wage.

If our state workers had the power to pass a budget, then it might be appropriate to hold them accountable, but that’s not where the responsibility lies according to our State Constitution. I cannot predict when a budget will be passed, but I do know this, when it does happen it will be because we worked to achieve bipartisan solutions.

I understand what the Governor is trying to accomplish with this action, but I must respectfully disagree and urge the Governor to reconsider his executive order.”

Now, Aghazarian is talking out of both sides of his mouth.  He’s trying to win a Senate election against Lois Wolk in SD-05, and he wants to be seen as some kind of moderate when his record suggests the opposite.  But the fact that he’s gone off the reservation means that there’s a lot of pressure to come out against the Governor on this one, putting him alone on an island of his own making.  It’s important to keep pounding away and make him completely unpopular and unable to help his party in the fall as a result of this stupid, heartless action.

The Governor has set up a Web site to answer employee questions about the wage cut.  Predictably, it has no interactive function.  If he allowed comments on it the server would be down.

Tomorrow, John McCain will be jetting into Stockton, California, the foreclosure capitol of the US. But don’t worry. McCain’s not going there to meet with middle-class Americans who face the loss of their homes. Instead, he’ll be there for a big-buck fundraiser to be hosted by billionaire developer Alex Spanos. Spanos is perhaps Stockton’s best-known resident and a major donor to Republican causes ($8.1 million in 2003-04).

Hank Shaw of the Stockton Record gives us the lowdown on the Republican Central Valley aristocracy who will be in attendance at the gala:

The new news is that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger will be at the party, too, as will a who’s who of local Reeps. Congressional candidate Dean Andal will be there, as will his employer Gerry Kamilos. Andal hopes to beat Rep. Jerry McNerney this year, and the man Jerry ousted — former Rep. Richard Pombo of Tracy — is supposed to appear at casa de Spanos, too.

Other luminaries:

• Pat & John Quinn (supermaket moguls)
• Bah-zillionire investor John Calamos
• Shopping center tycoon and Scooter Libby fan Mel Sembler
• Assemblyman Greg Aghazarian
• State Sen. Jeff Denham
• Assemblyman Alan Nakanishi
• Local political consultant Don Parsons
• Claudia and Greg Pruett of the tomato processing plant Vaquero Farms
• Former California GOP chief Bob Naylor

…and a cast of thousands. The hootenany start at $1,000 a head, payable to “MaCain Victory California,” which is presumably the Arizona senator’s state fund. But it’ll raise lots and lots more, because — at least in theory — 13 “co-chairs” have agreed to raise at least $25,000 for McCain (that’s $325,000) plus 24 who have (again, in theory) promised to raise at least $10,000, adding another $240,000.

McCain is scheduled to arrive via private jet at the Spanos Jet Center at 4:00, attend another event, and then arrive at the Spanos residence for the 5:30 fete. As he travels around Stockton before arriving at the Spanos estate, though, McCain will be driving through a city that has for the last year been consistently ranked as the foreclosure capitol of the United States. With 8,376 homes currently in foreclosure, one in every 27 people in Stockton (pop. 290,000) has faced the loss of their home since the sub-prime mortgage meltdown began last year. The problem is so widespread that the City of Stockton has a special page on its website giving advice to its residents who face foreclosure:

Somehow, though, I’m guessing that McCain won’t be touring the parts of Stockton that look like this:

He just might, however, pass by one of the three (!) buses that are operated by the entrepreneurs at Stockton’s RepoHomeTour.com.

And you know, it’s really too bad that McCain will be seeing Stockton from the back seat of a limo and not from the inside of one of the Repo Home Tour buses. Maybe if he got out and mingled with the non-billionaires a little more regularly, he would be just a tad more sensitive to the problems that face real people. Instead, just two months ago, McCain scoffed at the idea of government relief for homeowners facing foreclosure.

Republican John McCain on Tuesday derided government intervention to save and reward banks or small borrowers who behave irresponsibly though he offered few immediate alternatives to fixing the country’s growing housing crisis.[…]

“I have always been committed to the principle that it is not the duty of government to bail out and reward those who act irresponsibly, whether they are big banks or small borrowers,” McCain said.

The same article went on to give the Democratic response to McCain’s laissez-faire attitude:

Democrats accused McCain of lacking the skills needed to lead a country on the brink of recession.

“Instead of offering a concrete plan to address the crisis at all levels, McCain promised to take the same hands-off approach that President Bush used to lead us into this crisis,” Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean said in a statement.

It’s clear that McCain and the elite guests who will be hobnobbing at the Spanos estate don’t have any problem with that hands-off approach. And they certainly don’t have any difficulty in averting their eyes from the crisis that surrounds them. After all, what’s the matter with all those irresponsible people in Stockton? Why can’t they just eat cake?

Penny

Online Organizing Director

California Democratic Party

Well, at least for another year. The Sac Bee reports that the Assembly Water, Parks and Wildlife Committee, chaired by Yolo County’s own Lois Wolk (D- Davis), just killed SB 27 until next year. The bill, sponsored by Sen. Joe Simitian (D-Palo Alto) would have established a committee to build a peripheral canal diverting water around the Sacramento Delta for export south, although it called it a “conveyance” in a modest feat of bureaucratic obscurantism.

Wolk, whose 8th Assembly District represents the northern half of the Delta, and who is running for the 5th State Senate district, which encompasses most of the eastern half of the Delta, recently spoke about Delta issues in a three part interview (1, 2, 3) in the Davis Vanguard:

We’ve asked the Delta to do many things and many of them are incompatible with each other. We want it to supply an unending or increasing supply of water to Southern California and to the Bay Area. We want it to be an extraordinary estuary to breed and facilitate fisheries. We want it to be the repository of agricultural and urban runoff. We want it to, I don’t, but it has become an area of increasing urbanization. We’ve asked it to do far too many things and it is dying, it is absolutely dying. Of course it is surrounded by levies that are basically 19th century piles of dirt, and they are failing. And it is seismically at risk. You can’t imagine an area that is of more significance and at risk.

What can we do? We can do a number of things. The people of the state of California voted for a bond in 2006 to repair the levies and to begin the process of improving the water quality in the Delta, and the fisheries, the habitat, and the agriculture. What we can do is to try to raise the profile of the delta. Most people know where the coast is and know why it’s important to protect it. Most people know about the Sierra Nevada, and they will protect it. They know about Yosemite and they will protect it. They know about their local parks and they want to protect those. But the Delta has very few people in it and very little political clout. So we need to be able to raise the profile of the Delta so that it takes its place as the key water and environmental issue for California.

Then we need to put in place structures that will protect it. It needs are steward. There is no steward-no body, no agency-whose sole purpose is to protect the delta. And if I’m elected to the Senate, that’s what I’ll spend many years trying to accomplish. It won’t be easy, but there has to be a body like the Coastal Commission that focuses exclusively on the Delta and has responsibility for all water decisions and all environmental decisions that affect it. That won’t be easy to do, but I am convinced that has to occur.

Of course, the Delta has to be preserved long enough to get such a commission to – ironically – preserve it, so it’s great news to see this bill killed in committee. Gov. Schwarzeneggar and San Joaquin vallley agribusiness were pushing to get this on the November ballot along with a $4 billion bond, as part of that whole extra special emergency session intended to ram through a bunch of dams funded with public bond money. Having this off the ballot may make the High Speed Rail Ballot measure, which also stands to be a boon for the Central Valley (even if the Altamont Pass route that was rejected would have been even better for the Delta commuter cities), more likely to pass, so this is good all around.

The Delta is dying, for a host of reasons, ranging from So Cal and the San Joaquin Valley stealing too much of its water, to a network of static 19th century levees that work at direct cross-purposes with the innately dynamic hydrological structure of a river delta, to cities and farms dumping all manner of pollutants into the water, to sprawl in the floodplain, (and that’s just the beginning), but the way to save the Delta isn’t draining it. The Delta is a stark example of the way that modern society ignores the hidden values of things just because they don’t overtly cost money to use. Until the state learns to see that incredibly complex ecosystem and hydrological system as something more than just a channel where a valuable commodity flows to the sea, and thus wasted, the Delta will continue to be in danger from hare-brained ideas like peripheral canals.

But for this year, it’s safe. And that’s worth remembering in November, when Wolk runs against San Joaquin Republican  Greg Aghazarian to represent the Delta.

(h/t to Aquafornia for the link to the Bee story)

originally at surf putah