Those of you who were out in Pittsburgh may have attended our panel, “California – How Process Creates Crisis.” If you couldn’t make it, I’m pleased that video from the panel is now available online for all to see. Great thanks to Raven Brooks and the gang at Netroots Nation for making that happen. Check it out if you have a spare hour or so. For a larger version, visit the Netroots Nation site.
Below are what will approximate my opening remarks at today’s Netroots Nation panel on the California budget and political crisis. If you’re in the room (or not), you can participate in the session by submitting questions on Twitter using the #cabudget or the #cabudgetNN09 hashtags, or posting in the comments here. Consider this an Open Thread for the panel, featuring myself, Robert Cruickshank, Kai Stinchcombe and Jean Ross of the California Budget Project.
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Over the last several months, we have started to see a lot of attention at the national level devoted to this topic of the California budget crisis. And this would be pleasing to me, if it wasn’t for the minor point that all of it has been wrong. One hundred percent, no exceptions, wrong. You can start by the insistence on referring to it as a budget crisis. I’ll give you a related example. Right now we’re seeing this debate over health care, and the intensity of the town hall meetings and misinformation provided by Republicans and their allies in the health care industry. But really, none of that has to happen. With a Democratic President, and large majorities in the House and Senate, there should be no problem finding a majority that supports some form of decent legislation which includes insurance reforms and a public option to provide competition. But you have the hurdle of the filibuster in the Senate. In fact, the very undemocratic nature of the Senate itself, where the state of California and the state of Wyoming have the same representation despite one having over 70 times as many residents as the other, distorts the debate and creates abstractions from the expressed will of the people and the political will in Washington. Now, that ought to be understood as a political crisis, not a crisis over what to do about health care but a crisis about how to leap the institutional hurdles. Well, take that situation, multiply it by 10 orders of magnitude, and you start to understand the nature of the problem in California.
We have a center-left electorate and a center-right political system in which they must operate. And sure, Democrats in the state could do a much better job at negotiation and advocacy. But my contention is that this is not a problem of personality but process, and that process has created the crisis which we now face. We could elect Noam Chomsky Governor next year and still be saddled with the structural hurdles that must be jettisoned before we can even return to a baseline of sane and responsible governance in California.
And while the worst economic hole since the Great Depression certainly accelerated the problem, this is not the result of a perfect storm of factors contributing to the demise. It was a 70-year bout of rain, and at every step of the way, nobody properly challenged this slip into an ungovernable system. So it’s going to take a lot of time to restore democracy to California, just as it took so much time to take it away. But I believe that we can solve this problem in a way that can truly be a harbinger for the country at large, which is the state’s reputation. If we can really work to figure out the proper model for government that allows for the will of the people to be reflected in policy and provides the accountability for the public so they know whether or not they like the policy results, we will not only have saved California, but the whole nation. So that’s what we’ll be talking about today.
Just a note to mention that Sec. of State Bowen is addressing the convention right now. She mentioned a project to create a Wiki at the Secretary of State’s page to use social networking toward participatory democracy. “Voters deserve transparent and verifiable elections… ‘Just trust us’ is not the basis of a viable democracy, just check out Iran.”
Yeah, I’m back.
…Bowen talks about the correlation between voter confidence and voter participation. Also, she is talking about how she isn’t co-chairing anyone’s Presidential campaign while running Presidential elections.
On exceedingly rare occasions we divulge ever so little about our personal lives here on Calitics. It’s what makes a community a community. Plus I didn’t want anyone to send out the search parties.
So I will be away from blogging and the online world for the next week. That’s because, in between posts over the last couple years, I met a wonderful girl, and we will be getting married in her hometown of Pittsburgh on Saturday. Somehow she likes the chained-to-the-computer-and-occasionally-unresponsive type. I don’t know. But I’m pretty pleased about it, as I’m a lucky man.
After the wedding and a little “mini-moon” (a word I’ve coined for “shortened honeymoon,” how do you like it?), the wife and I will go back to Pittsburgh for the annual gathering, Netroots Nation. So seek me out there and say hello. After all, you’ll be on my honeymoon!
By the way, I should again plug the panel discussion I’m running at Netroots Nation on Saturday, August 15 called “California: How Process Creates Crisis,” in room 317 at 3:00pm. The panel features myself, Robert Cruickshank of Calitics and the Courage Campaign, Jean Ross of the California Budget Project and AD-21 legislative candidate Kai Stinchcombe. I’ve created a Facebook event for the panel, and for more information visit the Netroots Nation event site. If you’re heading to the convention, I hope you can make it.
And that’s it for me.
We often engage in the day-to-day combat of intracacies of the budget or campaign news here at Calitics. But we should never lose sight of the long-term questions. Is California governable? Does the erecting of procedural barriers to sensible governance in this state prefigure a political crisis for the rest of the nation? Can we build a movement for reforming this broken system and produce a model that allows majorities in the legislature to reflect the intended will of their constituents?
I’m pleased to announce that I have put together a great panel that will tackle all of these questions at the blogosphere’s signature event, Netroots Nation 2009 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, from August 13-15. On Saturday, August 15, at 3:00pm, we will discuss the California budget mess and its implications for the nation at large in a panel entitled California: How Process Creates Crisis.
California is the nation’s largest state, and is often seen as a bellweather for economic and social change. However, the peculiar dynamic of state government institutions has threatened that role, as the state has slipped into an almost perpetual crisis mode. Despite an overwhelming majority of progressive lawmakers in the state legislature, the two-thirds rule for passing a budget and tax increases, among other issues, handcuffs them and empowers a radical conservative minority. Thirty years of short-term fixes and failed leadership have only exacerbated the problem and put the state-and the nation-in real danger. As Paul Krugman recently said, “Years of neglect, followed by economic disaster-and with all reasonable responses blocked by a fanatical, irrational minority … This could be America next.” In this session, we will look at the reasons for California’s budget tangle, the larger implications for the progressive movement at large, and what some organizations are doing to change these outdated rules and take back state government for the people.
In addition to myself, the panel will feature Robert Cruickshank of Calitics and the Courage Campaign; Jean Ross of the California Budget Project; and Kai Stinchcombe, a candidate for State Assembly in AD-21 in 2010. There may be an additional special guest, which I will reveal later.
If you have not registered for Netroots Nation, you can do so at their website. If you have, please join us for a wide-ranging discussion on California, a kind of 75-minute blog post on the challenges ahead.