On the heels of the national equality march and the momentous changes in our movement so evident from this weekend in Washington, DC, we want to share with you an update on our work around marriage equality in California.   Read More »

Six years ago this month, California voters threw out an unpopular governor amidst a recession and a severe budget crisis, replacing him with a Hollywood action star who promised to fundamentally change the way the state does business.

Instead the people of California got a governor who actually is as a bad as Gray Davis was incorrectly assumed to be. And finally, the public realizes just how bad he is. The latest Field Poll shows a state that is fed up with the failure currently occupying the governor's office. Only 27% approve of Arnold Schwarzenegger's job rating, and 65% disapprove.

The lowest approval rating Gray Davis ever sustained was 22% in August 2003, 2 months before he was recalled. And that remains the lowest approval any CA governor has sustained since at least 1958 (Field Poll doesn't offer stats before that year). Arnold Schwarzenegger is now in Davis territory.

This will likely spark more talk in the comments of a recall of Schwarzenegger. But in fact, such a recall is scheduled, just 385 days from now. The November 2010 election will be California's chance to decide whether they want to continue Arnold Schwarzenegger's policies in the form of either Meg Whitman, Steve Poizner or Tom Campbell.

It would be nice if the Democratic candidates offered a meaningful change away from Arnold's policies of "cut for cuts' sake, no matter the damage it does to our economy" and his overall right-wing approach to governance. Jerry Brown might have signed AB 98 but he has stated his preference to continue the totally failed Schwarzenegger "no new taxes" policy that is wrecking our state's finances and our economy. Gavin Newsom has made some interesting statements about the need for structural reform, but he has yet to offer a specific solution to the economic and financial crisis.

Which is unfortunate, because Californians clearly, desperately, want change. The candidate that offers a different and better path than the failed legacy of Arnold Schwarzenegger will be the one to sweep into the governor's office in January 2011 with a mandate for change.

We'll see if there is any such candidate willing to step up and play that role.

Yesterday was the deadline for Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to veto or sign nearly 700 bills passed by the Legislature. It was a mixed bag, with some great news for the cause LGBT rights but some very bad news for health care reformers and women across the state.

Among the vetoed bill was AB 98, which would have mandated that all health insurance plans offer maternity coverage. The governor's veto message:

Maternity coverage is offered and available in today’s individual insurance market. Consumers can choose whether they want to purchase this type of coverage, and the pricing is reflective of that choice. While the perfect world would allow for all health conditions to be covered, including maternity, I cannot allow the perfect to become the enemy of the good.

This is, as I noted back in March, is untrue:

When Wendy Root Askew of Monterey started looking for a doctor she hoped would be her gynecologist as well as deliver her future children, she was shocked to discover her health insurance policy didn't include a single OB/GYN in her county.

The 31-year-old considered changing health plans. But then she learned that while 85 percent of the plans available in Monterey County offered maternity coverage five years ago, just 15 percent offer it now.

She found only two individual policies that included maternity, but they were three to five times as much as the policy she already had and came with annual deductibles of up to $15,000.

Wendy is a very good friend of mine. And now she, like women across the state, have fallen victim to Arnold Schwarzenegger's greed.

Given his veto of AB 98 and a number of other similar bills designed to produce meaningful health care reform, it was somewhat surprising to learn early this morning that the governor signed two bills advancing the cause of LGBT rights, including a bill he previously vetoed. The governor finally signed the bill declaring May 22 as Harvey Milk Day. And even more importantly, he signed Sen. Mark Leno's SB 54 allowing California to recognize same-sex marriages performed outside the state. If a same-sex couple gets married in Massachusetts, under this law, that marriage will be recognized as valid in California. Equality California did some excellent work on both of these bills, and deserves credit for getting them signed.

We can expect right-wingers to challenge that law as well, as part of their campaign to take away rights from LGBT Americans.

Ultimately this very mixed record on bill signings shows us how much damage Arnold Schwarzenegger has done to California - and how much better a governor he could have been. As we begin to look toward the 2010 election, when we will pick Arnold's replacement, progressive Californians should seek candidates who will embrace LGBT rights and health care reform at the same time - for we need both at once if we are to have a progressive state that cares for and respects the rights of all its people.

I'm in the Danceboutique at 2009 8th Street, NW in Washington, DC. Yes, the bar is open even though it's only 2:30 in the afternoon. But no one is drinking. No one is dancing. There's no music, no thump of house music banging away. In fact, you can hear a pin drop, and even my the noise from my typing. It's Camp Courage DC.   Read More »

Just a few months into the 2009-10 fiscal year, and after three excruciatingly painful rounds of budget cuts (September 2008, February 2009, and July 2009) we learned today from John Chiang that California's budget is again in the red:

State revenue has already fallen more than $1 billion short of assumptions in the budget lawmakers passed less than three months ago, according to a new report from the state controller.

Disappointing income tax receipts are the main culprit, falling 11% below what lawmakers and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger expected when they agreed on a patchwork budget during the summer, halting the state’s issuance of IOUs. Sales and corporate taxes have also slid below projections.

"While there are encouraging signs that California's economy is preparing for a comeback, the recession continues to drag state revenues down,” said Controller John Chiang in a statement. He called the new figures “a major blow to a budget that is barely 10 weeks old.”

Even before the bad fiscal news, policymakers were bracing for a big budget deficit next year. The Department of Finance anticipates a $7.4-billion deficit in 2010-11. That’s a conservative estimate, because lawsuits have tied up or reversed some planned budget cuts.

As we've made quite clear here at Calitics, the previous budget deals did absolutely nothing to solve the state's economic and fiscal crisis. Despite those who would have us believe the problem is somehow caused by "overspending," we are actually seeing the effect of state budget cuts that have laid off thousands of workers, and caused them as well as those who remain to spend less money in the state. It was entirely predictable that the massive budget cuts would merely weaken the economy further and thereby exacerbate the cycle of decline in revenues.

But it should come as no surprise to us that such an outcome has taken place. At no time during the present recession have legislators and the governor given any thought to how they will produce economic recovery. The dominant impulse in Sacramento is to cut, to cut for its own sake, to cut when it costs money to do so, to cut when it is illegal to to do, to cut when it further weakens an already disastrous economy.

The last thing California needs are the further and deeper budget cuts that we're likely to hear suggested in the wake of this news. California instead desperately needs jobs, particularly unionized, well-paid and high-benefit government jobs.

Californians also need affordable health care. They need affordable transportation. They need also more educational options. As Paul Krugman pointed out today, the cuts to education are weakening our economy and will cause permanent damage:

For example, the Chronicle of Higher Education recently reported on the plight of California’s community college students. For generations, talented students from less affluent families have used those colleges as a stepping stone to the state’s public universities. But in the face of the state’s budget crisis those universities have been forced to slam the door on this year’s potential transfer students. One result, almost surely, will be lifetime damage to many students’ prospects — and a large, gratuitous waste of human potential.

Krugman calls for an emergency package of aid to state and local budgets, a call we at Calitics heartily second.

But we must also work hard to stop the 121 Herbert Hoovers in Sacramento from doing further harm to an already stressed state. We've tried Republicans' neo-Hooverite solution. Democrats have insisted we had no choice to go along with it, but they have instead caused untold suffering and pain to the people of California without gaining anything in return.

As we prepare for the next budget battle, we need to also prepare to demand that Democrats abandon neo-Hooverism and stop embracing policies and budget deals that merely make the economic and fiscal crisis worse.

Yes, our state has severe structural governance problems that make truly progressive solutions difficult. But the first step toward fixing those structural problems is to articulate a clear vision for a fairer, more prosperous, and more economically secure California. Only then will Californians be willing to dismantle the structural barriers that have strangled our state over these last 30 years.

Rev. Eric Lee, author of "Marriage Equality: The California Proposition 8 Divide," moved the crowd with the passionate delivery of a lesson in how to frame the argument in support of marriage equality to faith leaders and the African-American community at large, tonight at the Washington, D.C. home of a prominent African-American LGBT opinion-leader.

The living room filled with almost three dozen LGBT activist and staff from leading nationally recognized organizations including: The International Federation of Black Prides, Courage Campaign, Gertrude Stine Democratic Club, The Victory Fund, National Black Justice Coalition, Human Rights Campaign, and Democracy for America (DC,) recieved the message and messenger with open arms.

"I am leaving this event tonight without any doubt that we have a strong ally that's willing to stand up for Black justice and LGBT justice all at once without hesitation, said Jasper Hendrick," a D.C. political insider.

Earlier in the day, the Human Rights Campaign hosted a luncheon in honor of Rev. Lee with local African-American church leaders and the Dean of Howard University Divinity School at their national headquarters to discuss the intersection of Black justice and LGBT justice issues.

Rev. Lee, who has been threatened with dismissal from his post as President of SCLC-Los Angeles by the National Southern Christian Leadership Conference Board due to his support for same-sex marriage in California, calls his book a blueprint designed to empower all people but especially Black straight and LGBT people with the tools to articulate a compelling argument for justice.

###

Rev. Eric Lee, President of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Greater Los Angeles, and I arrived in D.C. Thursday night on what has been a non-stop mission to engage the nation’s most influential African-Americans in U.S. politics. From a White House briefing with nationally known African-American faith leaders and community partners to the National Newspaper Publishers Association (Black Press) reception to the Annual Congressional Black Caucus Faith Roundtable and Phoenix Award Gala, we have been working tiressly to frame the issue of marriage equality as a morally imperative justice issue in need of their attention.

President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama attended the Congressional Black Caucus Phoenix Award Gala on Saturday night, walking out on stage to a thunderous applause and standing ovation by almost four thousand of the nation’s most influential African-American politicos before the President passionately made the case for health care insurance and education reform as defining issues for the Congressional Black Caucus and U.S. Congress at-large, after highlighting the budding success of his administrations actions to stem the hemorrhaging job losses of The Great Recession that continue to challenge communities across the country.

“Bringing hope and opportunity to places where they are short in supply—that’s not easy. It will take a focused and sustained effort to eradicate the structural inequalities in our communities—structural inequalities that make it difficult for children of color to make a success of their lives, no matter how smart or how talented or how driven they are,” said President Obama.

While President Obama’s remarks shed great light on the challenges facing people of color in great proportions, Rev. Lee sees these challenges as an opportunity to better inform the marriage equality and greater progressive movement.

“Marriage equality is not a priority in African-American community when we have the highest levels of unemployment, health care disparities, high rates of HIV/AIDS infections among young people and African-American women, a growing cribs to prison pipeline, and education inequity in public schools. Justice however is always a priority and marriage equality is a justice issue,” said Rev. Lee during today’s Washington Post interview.

The Courage Campaign, Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Greater Los Angeles, and International Federation of Black Prides have been working closely since the “Meet in the Middle” march and rally in Fresno, CA designed to chart a course for justice that would become increasingly more inclusive of communities habitually left out of LGBT coalition and agenda building efforts. The support of Rev. Lee by Courage Campaign and the International Federation of Black Prides offers advanced evidence of the growing repudiation of the narrow and self-serving politics that fractures communities, creates distrust, and keeps us from becoming a progressive state and country that affirms the dignity of all Americans.

Rev. Lee left a copy of his recently published book, "Marriage Equality: Proposition 8, The California Divide" with a high-level Obama Administration staffer following our Friday afternoon White House briefing as a resource for President Obama.

###

Earlier today at Calitics David Dayen leveled his criticism of the Sacramento Democratic establishment for their apparent failure to produce an initiative to roll back the 2/3rds rule and start fixing California's broken government.

Here I want to offer a slightly different perspective on the issue of what we need to do to win the battle. This isn't a disagreement with David, but instead a discussion of something related - the question of how it is we win this battle.

My own views on this have evolved somewhat over the last 6 months. I very much think we need to be "making the argument" for majority rule, and that so far this hasn't yet been done.

And the way that has to be done is to place the 2/3rds rule into a broader effort to emphasize progressive values. This is a twofold approach that requires us to do two things:

1. Show Californians where progressives want to take them: Universal health care, free higher ed, eliminate traffic, create sustainable jobs, etc. Articulate our end goals and get people excited about them, since it's hard to excite people about procedural questions.



2. Show Californians how we want to get there. Go populist and hammer the shit out of the corporations and wealthy folks who benefit from the current tax structure, and push for sensible revenue solutions consonant with that populism that can achieve the promised goals.

I think that to emphasize the procedural problems (the 2/3rds rule) before emphasizing the fundamental injustice and inequality of our tax code is to put the cart before the horse. If we are going to reverse the polling and win this, we need to first mobilize Californians behind the notion that our state's economic problems and our inability to properly fund schools or healthcare or parks or transit is because we are letting those with the money escape their obligations.

The PPIC and Binder polls (the one from the May 19 election) have both shown the public is willing to support certain taxes to preserve important services. So the move should be to push hard for an oil severance tax to fund schools, or closing corporate tax loopholes to expand Healthy Families, or to jack up taxes on the wealthy (particularly taxing unearned income) to bring down higher ed tuition, or something to that effect.

Dems should plan to move these things in the next legislative session and spend several weeks beforehand making this argument. Back Republicans up against a wall, make them defend the unpopular tax breaks for the unpopular bandits that have ruined out economy. And when the Republicans predictably use the 2/3rds rule to block those revenue solutions, then we will be in a much better position to win public support for majority vote on revenue.


We will have the opportunity over the next 12 months to move on this strategy, especially as outrage builds over the existing cuts. That outrage is not about process, but about the basic values of this state being violated and cast aside in order to enable the wealthy to get tax breaks at the expense of everyone else.

There are some folks in Sacramento who seem to get this. Lt. Gov. and future Congressman John Garamendi has been calling for an oil severance tax to fund higher education.

I know that leads some to criticize "ballot box budgeting" and argue that dedicating specific taxes to specific services doesn't help the problems with the general fund. I have always been much less critical of ballot box budgeting than others, partly because I see it as a necessary holding action until we resolve Prop 13 itself.

But more fundamentally, we need to overturn 30 years of anti-tax rhetoric that has sank very deeply into the minds of many Californians, including those who otherwise call themselves progressive. One of the core tenets of the anti-tax mentality is the notion that government would just waste new revenues. Public hostility to dumping money into the general fund is significant.

So what we have to do is rehabilitate the notion of using taxes to provide services. Californians need to see the connection between low taxes and failing schools, jammed roads, a lack of health care, and a lack of jobs. And they need to see that it is Republicans that are blocking those things from getting done, by the 2/3rds rule.

The only reason anyone in America knows about "reconciliation" in the Senate, or the "mark-up" process, or even the "filibuster" is because those things stand in the way of key progressive goals. Those Senate procedures have screwed us and have needed to be eliminated for a long time, but only when they stood in the path of something people wanted did awareness rise.

In short, we are not going to win this if it is framed as a procedural problem, or even as a way to fix a broken state. We win the majority vote by enfolding it within a broader narrative and a broader campaign that uses progressive populism to beat the stuffing out of the large corporations and their allies in the Republican Party, in the service of clear goals that people actively and strongly desire.

Doug Manchester played a relatively unsung role in qualifying Prop 8 for the ballot. His $125,000 donation came in at a critical time when the proponents were running out of cash during the signature gathering process.

It is conceivable that Prop 8 would not have made it on to the ballot if it were not for Doug Manchester. In response to that donation and the poor treatment of his workers a boycott of his hotels was established a year ago, and has now cost Manchester upwards of $7 million in canceled reservations.

He has hired gay heavyweight PR crisis man Howard Bragman to respond to the boycott. Their genius idea was to offer up $100,000 in hotel credits and a $25,000 contribution to any 501c3 organization that supports civil unions.

It was a cynical attempt to try and buy-off and divide the LGBT and labor communities. And it's not working. No way. No how.

Today, the Courage Campaign, Equality California, UNITE HERE and Californians Against Hate have teamed up to launch the "Say No to Manchester" website, asking our members to sign a pledge to uphold the boycott of the Manchester Grand Hyatt and Grand del Mar Resort.

It's a relatively unique campaign with labor and LGBT organizations coming together to support workers rights and equality.

Flip it for the email we sent out to our members today.   Read More »

Steve Wiegand of the Sacramento Bee telegraphed his intention yesterday to spread the right-wing myth that California has a spending problem. And sure enough, that's what we got from Wiegand today in an article with the stunning title of "State officials spread loot like Santa." That quote comes from Dave Doerr, head of the right-wing California Tax Association, and furthers the myth that California "overspends" and is, unfortunately, *not* a reference to the "two Santa Claus" theory.

Wiegand's article repeats many of the right-wing frames about state spending - yet at the same time it actually examines the structural revenue shortfall. The two are related, of course - Wiegand's study of the structural deficit is vague and lacking much detail, and is used to buttress the argument that California overspends. In short, Wiegand is taking as gospel the right-wing claim that our state budget mess is a product of overspending, when in fact it is a problem of undertaxing. Take this section of the article, for example:

Doerr's observation is borne out by a Bee analysis of California's spending and debt patterns compared to other states', which found California spends more per capita than the national average in every government program except highways and public welfare - but consistently runs budget deficits and takes on more and more debt.

Why would that necessarily be a bad thing? Most other states are penurious with their public spending, and have economic and social problems that reflect such miserly policies.

Doerr appears again:

Doerr's reference is to a penchant of lawmakers and governors over the past three decades to spend whatever money they have on hand - and promise even more - then let succeeding budget drafters fend for themselves.

This is in fact a core conservative frame. They believe that when it comes to budgets, you can spend whatever you take in, and nothing more. If you have $100 billion in revenues one year and $80 billion the next, then you just have to cut $20 billion in spending, no matter the effect.

A progressive budget frame is that it is government's job to see to it that certain tasks get done because they are inherently valuable or necessary. This might include keeping open 220 state parks, or ensuring children under age 10 learn in classrooms of no more than 20 students, or that our state's children and poor families have access to health care no matter the state of the economy.

Under that frame, the "overspending" claims are rendered even more absurd than the Wiegand article shows them to be, given its lack of explanation in most places for what actually caused the spending spikes. California needs to find the revenue to maintain core services, and to maintain and even expand government employment as a counter-cyclical recovery measure. The UCLA Anderson Forecast showed that budget cuts have worsened CA's recession - but none of that seems to have made it into Wiegand's article.

Given the dearth of media coverage of California politics, it's especially unfortunate that when a major paper chooses to devote so much time and space to examining the budget crisis, they have not only gotten it so deeply wrong, but have wound up reinforcing right-wing dogma in the process.

Anytime a member of the media says there are "inarguable facts" about the state's economic and financial crisis, that's usually a sign that you should be extra dubious of their claims. Steve Wiegand uses that phrase in his Sunday SacBee article to essentially make the Parsky Commission's case for it, in advance of whenever it is exactly that they're going to produce an actual final proposal. Wiegand's article essentially rehashes the basic center-right argument about state government: our taxes are too volatile, and combined with "reckless spending" and the severe economic crisis, that explains the state budget mess:

Three inarguable facts dominate California's system of financing state government:

• It's a mess.

• It's currently a mess in large part due to the deepest and most pervasive global recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

• It's been a mess for much of the past three decades because the combination of an out-of date tax system, reckless spending and fickle voters has made state government extremely vulnerable to the ebbs and flows of the economy.

I'll grant Wiegand the first two points. Since 2007 California has had a total of about $60 billion in budget deficits. $47 billion of that is due to decline in taxes. But much of that decline is led by collapsing sales taxes. This recession is a balance sheet recession led by consumers working feverishly to pay down debt. Until the debt is purged and wages grow, the massive consumer spending binge of the last 20 years *is never coming back*.

That starts us down the path of realizing just how wrong Wiegand is in making his third point. Wiegand repeats the discredited "volatility" argument to infer that the reliance on personal income taxes is flawed:

Since California relies so heavily on those revenues – more than half of general fund income comes from income taxes – it makes state government extremely susceptible to swings in the economy.

"When the market tanks, those taxpayers sneeze," said H.D. Palmer, the veteran spokesman for the Department of Finance. "And when those taxpayers sneeze, the state budget catches pneumonia."

One of the reasons CA relies on that income is because Prop 13 has meant the state does not capture the wealth temporarily created by two massive real estate bubbles since 1978 (one in the 1980s and the other in the 2000s).

But Wiegand misses two other crucial points about income taxes. Both personal and corporate income taxes have held up better than sales taxes during this recession. This is an especially important point during this so-called economic "recovery" where those at the upper end of the income scale, along with large corporations, are weathering the storm pretty well. It is nutty to assume that they need their tax burden reduced.

Wiegand's entire embrace of the "volatility" argument is of course flawed from conception, since there is no government budget out there that I'm aware of that has been able to resist the stress of the economic downturn. Those states that haven't had significant budget crises, like North Dakota, also haven't been hit as hard by the recession. The underlying economy in California is volatile and has been since about 1980. It makes perfect sense that tax collections would reflect a boom-and-bust economy.

The rest of Wiegand's article focuses on the sales tax. As I argued above, any examination of state tax policy that does not examine the collapse of consumer spending, likely to be a long-term trend, is probably not going to be a very useful guide to what's actually happening. After mentioning in passing the notion of modernizing the sales tax, he quickly shifts to a trip down memory lane, to the widely-mocked 1991 "snack tax" that Pete Wilson and the Legislature used in their solution to the budget deficit that year. The "snack tax" was repealed at the ballot box in 1992, and Wiegand uses it to argue that California voters are reluctant to extend taxes to untaxed goods and services.

But is still actually the case? Polls from 2009 suggest voters are willing to raise taxes to protect existing state services. Taxing accounting services, for example, in order to keep teachers in classrooms or taxing soda and junk food to keep parks open may well be more popular today than it was 17 years ago.

Wiegand closes his article by letting David Doerr of the right-wing California Tax Association repeat the totally unverified and undefended claim that the other element in our state's fiscal crisis is "overspending":

"The tax structure has been pretty consistent in providing income," Doerr continued. "It's spending. They (elected officials) just can't say no."

This claim isn't supported by any evidence in the article, and as it's the very last sentence in the article, it is not rebutted. California's media takes it as a given - an "inarguable fact" as Wiegand said at the outset - that we have "reckless spending." They believe this is so self-evident that they don't actually have to prove it or explain it or justify the claim.

In fact, California's spending over the last 6 or 7 years has been flat. The largest amounts of spending have actually gone to tax cuts, with Arnold Schwarzenegger's $6 billion per year backfilling of the VLF cuts in 2003 being the most obvious example.

When will California's major media outlets start questioning the "reckless spending" myth? As long as they treat that myth as an "inarguable fact," it's not something I'm going to hold my breath to see.

You wouldn't know it by paying attention to the goings-on in Sacramento these days, but California is mired in one of the worst economic crises we've experienced in several decades. Over the Labor Day weekend our friends at the California Budget Project charted the depths of that crisis in a new study, "In The Midst of the Great Recession: The State of Working California, 2009."

The CBP's study has already been getting media coverage for its stat that 2 of 5 working-age Californians are jobless. But the report gives a fuller picture of just how bad things are out there. Among the conclusions:

• California has about the same number of jobs in July 2009 that it did in January 2000 - in other words, the recession has wiped out a decade's worth of job growth. Add in the fact that we have 3.3 million more people of working age and you can see how severe the recession is.



• Job losses have been more severe - in both overall number and the rapid rate of decline - than in any previous recession (at least those with available data).



• Wages are declining across the board, but the top wage earners have seen increases, and the top 1% is taking a share of the overall wealth at a rate unseen since the Roaring '20s, which as we know ended so well.



• More and more people are beginning to exhaust their unemployment benefits, a situation likely to worsen as high unemployment lingers for several more years.

There are several important conclusions I take from this study. You're unlikely to ever see these in what's left of the major media in this state, and even Democrats in Sacramento don't seem to be touting these stats or conclusions as evidence of a need for change.

1. Arnold Schwarzenegger is a job killer. He and his allies at the Chamber of Commerce like to tout their opposition to so-called "job killer" bills that usually increase taxes or regulations on businesses. And yet after 6 years of these policies California is far worse off than we were at the depth of recession that ultimately cost Gray Davis his job. If Democrats ever wanted evidence that anti-tax, anti-regulation policies are an economic disaster, California in 2009 is it.



2. Sacramento has nothing - nothing whatsoever - to offer the jobless or to this state's future. As I often remark, the only words forbidden to be spoken within the halls of the state Capitol are "economic recovery." Both Republicans and Democrats have agreed that their #1 task isn't economic recovery but to eviscerate government when it is most desperately needed; they merely disagree on the particulars. Economic recovery should take precedence over nutty demands to cut spending, but in Sacramento, it's been the other way around.



3. Specifically, we have yet to see *any* plans from either party in the state legislature for producing meaningful, lasting economic recovery. California voters took matters into their own hands last November by voting for Proposition 1A, to create 160,000 short-term jobs and 450,000 long-term jobs by building a high speed rail system. But HSR, to name but one example of possible government job creation programs, has very few defenders in the Legislature, and plenty of opponents (including Democrats like Sen. Alan Lowenthal).



4. Lacking any plan for economic recovery or job creation, the factors identified in the CBP report are going to get much worse. Wages will continue to drop for everyone who isn't already wealthy, as persistent unemployment perpetuates a weak economy and fuels a deflationary cycle.

So what do we do about this?   Read More »

There's an interesting generational phenomenon at work here. The age group that currently enjoys the benefits of a single-payer system, those over 65, are among the least likely to support health care reform. The age group most likely to support reform is the other end of the spectrum - people age 18-29, as the LA Times reported yesterday:

Adults 18 to 29 are the group most supportive of President Obama's plan to overhaul healthcare, according to a recent poll by SurveyUSA. They are also the age group that most supports creating a government-run health insurance option.

Young people account for 30% of the uninsured population, according to a report by the Commonwealth Fund, a health policy research foundation. They are least likely to be offered health insurance through employment benefits -- just 53% of working young adults are eligible for employer-based coverage. And since their incomes tend to be low, buying coverage on their own is usually too expensive.

As the article explains, much of the support for health care reform among younger people is as function of our drearier economic prospects. We tend to have high debt loads or low wages - or both. We don't have assets to fall back on, we couldn't buy a house during the affordable years and have that asset be subsidized by Prop 13.

And yet there are deeper factors at work here. The health care crisis affects every generation, especially those who thought they were living a comfortable middle-class lifestyle until medical debt their insurance didn't cover wiped them out. Many of those older homeowners are barely surviving the recession with their finances intact. We younger folks may be feeling the recession's bite harder than most others, but there is plenty of misery to go around.

So why is it that younger people are more supportive of reform? Part of it is that we are more progressive than virtually every other age group, by virtually every measure out there. Because we weren't raised in an era of McCarthyism, because those of us under 30 have only vague memories of Reagan, and because we have recoiled so strongly from the Republican who has dominated our conscious lives the most - George W. Bush - we are not trained to see government as the enemy. We are more willing to see government as the solution because we aren't carrying around the burdens of the 1950s or the 1980s, because we do not take the New Deal state for granted.

But there's another factor at work here as well. We can call it the *boiling frog effect*. Older generations of Americans were socialized into a society where the economy generally worked, at least for most people middle-class and above. If you had a job, you could expect to have health care. You could expect to own a home, and enjoy a basic level of economic security.

That is not true today, not for any American outside the wealthiest percentiles, no matter what your age. But for folks who were socialized to think of America as the awesomest economy in the world, where you could expect to have security and health care if you held down a job, the present crisis snuck up on people the way heat snuck up on the frog in what had been a cold pot of water. They didn't expect it, and they still haven't adjusted their expectations to the new reality. They still see the present crisis as a temporary but difficult spot.

Us younger folks, though, have been thrown right into the boiling pot. We're entering an economy that doesn't offer anything of use to anyone who isn't rich, and we can see that right off the bat. Unlike older generations who may have seen the system as offering realistic opportunities for security and advancement when they first entered, we are under no such illusions. We know things are fucked and that we are not likely to see any meaningful improvement in our fortunes anytime soon.

Moreover, we're thrown into this crisis at a crucial moment in our lives - when we want to build lives, families, communities. The number of people I know who have delayed having children because of dire economic straits is staggering. And when you take away someone's future like that, you create a cohort of people who quite clearly and instinctively understand the need for fundamental, root and branch reform.

We're the natural foot soldiers of reform. But we're not being spoken to by the reformers.

The LA Times article also examined how the current reform proposal might affect the young:

Michael Tanner, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, says a requirement to buy insurance would hurt young people most, forcing them to subsidize the healthcare needs of older people without making health insurance more affordable for them.

"Young people are probably one of the groups that's going to come out the worst on this," Tanner said. "They're going to pay more in the short term because they're going to have to go out and buy health insurance. And they're going to pay more in the long term."

Genevieve Kenney, a health economist at the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan Washington think tank, disagrees.

"I think many more uninsured young adults stand to gain from healthcare reform than stand to lose," Kenney said, citing plans in Congress to provide insurance subsidies for low-income people, many of whom are young.

As much as it pains me to say this, the guy from Cato is right. Mandated insurance without a public option offers nothing of value whatsoever to younger people. That's because it's not designed to help us. It's designed to extract even more money from our already meager bank accounts and deliver us virtually nothing in return. It is a classic case of screwing over the young in order to preserve a zombie economy that is dead, but is still being clung to by those who refuse to admit it, who cannot envision a new economic policy, and who are deathly afraid of change.

Because the Obama Administration seems to have repeated the flaw of most Democratic political leaders that preceded it and chosen to ignore younger voters, even though we were *by far* the group of voters that backed him the most strongly in 2008, we are feeling left out of a debate that is primarily focused on appeasing seniors and right-leaning boomers. The more transformative approach, to build a coalition of change that unites seniors, the young, and those in the middle under stress in support of an expanded Medicare for all, has been ignored.

Obama will suffer the consequences for that. Us younger folks will stagger on, even more determined to build political movements and to assert political power. Eventually we will be the ones to lead the implementation of a universal single-payer system in America.

I only hope it comes sooner and rather than later. I don't intend to become a part of a new Lost Generation.

One of the most despicable yet effective attacks on public services and government spending made in the last two years of the budget crisis is the argument that spending cuts are necessary because public employees are overpaid. I am certain we'll see at least a few such comments pop up in response to this post.

We've made the argument that this is just not so, that the overwhelming majority of public employees are barely hanging on to their middle-class status (if that), and that spending cuts are merely exacerbating the recession instead of helping resolve it.

Over the weekend Shane Goldmacher showed us the true impact of spending cuts on public employees. It is not a pretty picture.

Reporting from Sacramento - State worker Rochelle Johnson's $38,000 salary never allowed her family to live in luxury. Then the furloughs hit, cutting her pay by 14%.

Now Johnson, an appointment scheduler at a California agency that reviews disability applications, finds herself at the mercy of payday lenders, utility companies' patience -- they shut off her power once already -- and co-workers who share their lunch leftovers....

Carrie Ann and John Quintos of Chino work for California's workers' compensation insurer and earned a combined $70,000 before the furloughs. The pay cut made their $3,200 mortgage unaffordable.

Selling the house was impossible; they owed more than it was worth, so they rented it out and took a town house. But their tenants missed a payment and the couple, in turn, missed payments of their own. Then their car was repossessed in the office parking lot.

"It was the most embarrassing moment that I've ever endured," said Carrie Ann Quintos.

The couple got the car back but gave up the town house. Now John lives with his parents in Moreno Valley; his wife and four children are with an aunt in Chino some 30 miles away.

"I don't know how anyone can be expected to live like this," said Carrie Ann.

These Californians are innocent victims of a malicious and virulent strain in our politics - a demand from those who have means and resources to make other people suffer so that they don't have to pay another penny in taxes. "Beggar thy neighbor" was a common national policy response to the Great Depression. It was a complete failure.

The last thing California needs is fewer people able to pay their mortgages, able to service their debts, able to spend money at local businesses, able to pay their taxes. Government's role in a recession is to provide countercyclical stimulus to flood the economy with money. Instead California, led by Arnold Schwarzenegger and with the full compliance of both parties in the state legislature, has decided on a pro-cyclical strategy of worsening the foreclosure crisis in one of the state's hardest-hit regions (Sacramento).

It's not just public workers, of course, but Californians of a wide range of backgrounds and occupations are financially and materially worse off because of budget cuts. Meanwhile, those who already had wealth and privilege are not being asked to sacrifice one bit to deal with the state's financial and economic crisis.

As Simon Johnson has concluded the US is increasingly becoming a two-track economy. Perhaps it's not news to John Edwards, but Johnson's point is specific to the context of 2009, that the Wall Street bailouts and spending cuts that affect everyone else are producing a massively unstable and unequal economy that is almost certain to lurch into another crisis before much longer:

The two-track concept overlaps with, and builds on, long-standing issues of inequality in the U.S., but it’s also different. Within existing income classes, some people find themselves in relatively good shape and others are completely hammered....

If you’re on the outside track, you are experiencing a version of Naomi Klein’s “Shock Doctrine”. Some (former) members of the elite are in this category – this is another standard feature of emerging market crises and “recoveries”. But mostly, of course, it’s nonelite on the outside track and a more concentrated, reconfigured version of the elite on the inside.

This can lead to short-term growth – the speed of recovery in many emerging markets surprises many, from about 12 months after the crisis breaks. But it also leads to repeated crisis, to derailed growth, and to a loss of income, status, and prospects for most of society.

California is becoming the poster child for this two-track economy, as we are now experiencing the shock doctrine in full swing. The successful attacks on schools, health care, transportation, public safety, jobs, and other vital services are producing a state that will almost certainly be suffering prolonged economic malaise. Economic recovery, the phrase that is forbidden to be discussed within the halls of the Capitol, is nowhere in sight. California was once the epitome of the American dream. There are few dreamers here now.

And yet there may be some hope that California's political leadership, the Democrats in particular, might someday realize that strong public services are a winning political position. (Or they could just look to the results of the May 19th special election and the Binder Poll.) After years of deflation and depression, Japanese voters threw out the longtime center-right government of the Liberal Democrats for the Democratic Party of Japan in Sunday's election.

The DPJ ran on a platform of reversing the Liberal Democrats' massive budget cuts, promising to expand public services and hire more government workers. In a remarkable op-ed published in last week's New York Times, incoming DPJ Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama called for a new economics based on human dignity:

In the fundamentalist pursuit of capitalism people are treated not as an end but as a means. Consequently, human dignity is lost.

How can we put an end to unrestrained market fundamentalism and financial capitalism, that are void of morals or moderation, in order to protect the finances and livelihoods of our citizens? That is the issue we are now facing.

In these times, we must return to the idea of fraternity — as in the French slogan “liberté, égalité, fraternité” — as a force for moderating the danger inherent within freedom....

Under the principle of fraternity, we would not implement policies that leave areas relating to human lives and safety — such as agriculture, the environment and medicine — to the mercy of globalism.

Hatoyama now has an opportunity to put these ideas into action, thanks to a massive landslide election victory. Let us hope that it does not take California 20 years to go from crash to enlightened economic policy. We must not continue to let our government be used to produce human suffering, whether it's that of a state worker of anyone else hurt by the cruel and exploitative budget cuts.

That's what the Courage Campaign, Credo Mobile and Democracy for America are asking today. We are teaming up to urge Senator Feinstein to come out with a definitive statement in support of the public option.

The response you get on Senator Feinstein's position on the public option varies, depending on what staffer you get on the phone. Not true of Senator Boxer (from her campaign's blog) who isn't afraid to be clear about her support for the public option:

She laid out where she thinks these complex negotiations will lead and why it’s so important: “I do think we’ll have a public interest option at the end of the day because we have to contain the costs.” And “what is the best way to keep down the cost? I think it’s competition and I think a public interest plan will do just that.” Which is exactly why Boxer has long been a cosponsor of Sherrod Brown’s Senate resolution declaring that “any efforts to reform our Nation’s health care system should include as an option the establishment of a federally-backed insurance pool to create options for American consumers.”

With the Senate about to return from the August recess, it is crucial that Senator Feinstein take a firm stance on the public option and work to get it passed.

There are some rumors that she will be issuing a statement about the public option tomorrow. The best way to ensure that it happens is to keep the pressure up on Senator Feinstein. So sign the letter. Check the flip for the full email we sent out to our members today.   Read More »

State Senator Jeff Denham is warming up for his 2010 Lt. Gov. bid by suggesting the solution to the state's crisis of democracy is to break government even further by making the legislature part-time:

State Sen. Jeff Denham, R-Merced, introduced a constitutional amendment Friday aimed at shortening the legislative session by several months. The amendment would also separate the budget and policy-making processes into odd years and even years, respectively....

Denham proposes that legislators work half the time for half the pay. Each legislator's office budget would be cut in half, according to his proposal.

To call this a bad idea is to insult all the other bad ideas that have been floated over the years. California's vast population, complex economy, crippled finances and numerous other ongoing challenges require a full-time legislature with a professional support staff. A part-time legislature will not be able to handle the load. Problems will go unattended, and government's ability to meet the people's needs will be limited.

Which is entirely the point. What better way to scale back government and prevent it from doing anything at all than to turn its legislature, the key policy-making body, into a part-time collection of wealthy dilettantes? For right-wingers who are convinced that government is inherently evil (except when it helps enrich themselves) it's a logical step.

As states like Texas have found, it is also a recipe for disaster. Texas's part-time legislature is a study in dysfunction. Because the legislature does not have the resources of a full-time body, ongoing issues remain unaddressed. Wind insurance problems stemming from Hurricane Rita, which hit in 2005, still have not been addressed by the part-time legislature. Policy problems that crop up when the legislature is not in session either go ignored, or the governor has to call so many special sessions that the legislature is a /de facto/ full-time legislature without the staff and financial support it needs.

In 1965 Speaker Jesse Unruh pushed through a ballot measure creating a full-time legislature for California. At the time our state government was the pride of California, seen as one of the nation's best governments. Unruh understood that a state as big and complex as ours needed a professional legislature that could make informed decisions. He also recognized that unless the legislature was full-time, with the pay to match, that average Californians would never be able to enter the legislature. Only the wealthy would be able to take months at a time off from their jobs to do the people's business.

A part-time legislature would only be open to people like that. People like Jeff Denham:

After graduating from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, Denham chose the agriculture industry for a career and now owns and operates Denham Plastics, the leading supplier of reusable containers in the agriculture industry. He and his family also farm almonds at their ranch in Merced County. Denham has amassed a large fortune from the success of his business ventures.

I'm sure that a legislature full of wealthy ranchers like Jeff Denham would be a realistic reflection of the actual diversity of the state of California.

Perhaps I'm being too generous to Denham in taking his idea seriously, since it is little more than a temper tantrum:

If this Legislature is going to use a puppet sentencing commission to release prisoners then its usefulness as a 'full-time' institution no longer exists," he said in a statement. "One of the Legislature's top priorities should be to enact laws that protect the public, not authorize back-door delegation of early releases of criminals." (from the Salinas Californian article linked above)

I suppose next on Denham's list is a part-time judiciary, since it was the courts that have forced the Legislature to address the prisons crisis?

Of course, if Denham were serious about streamlining government, he would be campaigning to abolish the mostly useless Lt. Gov. office. Instead he is going to spend millions to get himself elected to that same office. I'm glad to see Denham puts his principles before his career.

Over the last few days it has become quite clear that the initiative in health care reform is passing to us. Progressive activists have become organized and energized to ensure that the public option, itself the minimally acceptable compromise, remains a part of the health care bill. Thanks to the work of Caliticians like David and Dante Atkins, Bob Brigham, and the rest of the progressive netroots, we are now having a great deal of success at drawing a firm and hard line.

Of course, we also must remember the reasons why a public option matters. A strong public health insurance option that any American can choose to join is one of the only ways to ensure that the private insurance companies remain honest.

Particularly because the private insurers have been operating their own "death panels" for some time now. As we saw in the high-profile cases of Nataline Sarkisyan and Nick Colombo health insurance companies routinely deny coverage and care to insured patients once they get a terminal illness.

One such patient was Patsy Bates. The Courage Campaign decided to dramatize her story last year in an ad we call Insurance Jive - the impenetrable language of insurance companies that obscures their deadly effect.

Today the Courage Campaign relaunched that video in order to provide a strong visual message about the need to act for the public option. Wendell Potter, a former Cigna executive who has been making the rounds explaining his insiders' view about why we need major health care reform in America, wrote an email to our members calling on them to watch the video and to call their members of Congress to shore up support for the public option.

The video and click-to-call action is Courage Campaign's contribution to the broad progressive netroots mobilization on behalf of real health care reform. Make no mistake, the public option is at best a compromise position, and only a halfway step toward full single-payer care. But it is important that we win this fight and show the insurance companies for what they really are - a danger to our very survival.

Below the flip is the email Wendell Potter sent to our members today.   Read More »

We get a lot of questions here at the Courage Campaign about the budget crisis - why it exists and what needs to be done to resolve it. Here I lay out an overview of the topic. This is by no means in-depth. One of the best resources for further information is the California Budget Project.

Because the governor and the legislature have traditionally crafted budgets without much public input, and have frequently resorted to complex gimmicks to balance the budget, most Californians have been left without a good understanding of how our state funds its public services, and misinformation has spread rapidly. Assemblymember Noreen Evans has put together a very good overview of this, which you can view via YouTube at this link:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogfNEw2XSbY&feature=player_embedded

The current budget mess stems from two problems: the severe recession and a broken government that is designed to produce fiscal shortfalls. Like every other state, California is experiencing significant revenue declines as a result of the recession - revenues have fallen by the largest percentage since the Great Depression. At the same time, the recession generates greater demand for public services, from unemployment insurance to health care to education. The state is left with less money to provide more services.

Although virtually every other state faces this problem, it is exacerbated in California. Ever since Prop 13 passed in 1978, California has been running a structural revenue shortfall. While the residential property tax protections of Prop 13 are sensible, Prop 13 went further, giving corporations the same tax exemptions and imposing a 2/3rds requirement on governments to raise revenues. This was exacerbated in the 1990s when the legislature used the economic boom to cut taxes even further - tax cuts made during the good times have left us without the funds to ride out the bad times. As a result we haven't brought in the money needed to keep our services running. Significant budget cuts in the 1980s and 1990s eliminated many of the so-called "unnecessary" spending programs. By the 21st century the state was spending most of its money on core services - health care, schools, transportation, and parks. And even those services have been reduced in scope and effectiveness.

More importantly, the rule requiring a 2/3rds vote of the legislature or the voters to raise revenues has enabled Republicans to block new revenues, making it virtually impossible for the state to find money to keep these services functioning. This is despite the fact that poll after poll shows voters support fair and sensible new taxes, such as a tax on oil companies or elimination of corporate tax loopholes, that could help solve the budget crisis. Further, California is one of only 3 states requiring a 2/3rds vote to pass a budget. This also enables Republicans to obstruct fair budget solutions.

Conservatives have also had success at spreading misinformation about how California raises and spends its money. Contrary to their claims, California is not actually a high tax state. Our income tax rates are higher than most, but our sales tax is average, and our property taxes are significantly lower than other states. When you combine state and local taxes California ranks about 15th in overall taxes. However, because of Prop 13, the burden of that taxation has shifted away from the rich and the corporations and onto everyone else.

Further, California has not been "overspending" in this decade, despite claims to the contrary. Most of the "new" spending done since Arnold Schwarzenegger took office are not actually new spending at all. $6 billion per year comes from the cut to the Vehicle License Fee that was Arnold's first act as governor. Cities and counties used to receive that money, so Arnold promised to backfill their losses out of our general fund. Another $6 billion per year comes from an accounting shift in how schools get their money (more of it comes from the state than from local districts, even though the overall amount of school spending remained unchanged).

California has already made plenty of spending cuts. Since tax revenues first started declining in 2007, the legislature has cut at least $30 billion from the budget, mostly hitting schools (which have lost over $10 billion), transportation (mass transit is no longer funded at all by the state, a cut of $5 billion), and health care. Despite claims that there is waste and fraud in state spending, all studies, including Arnold Schwarzenegger's own performance review, have indicated that these add up to only a tiny fraction of the overall budget deficit. The same is true of legislative pay. What this means is that there is nothing left to cut aside from services people need to survive and thrive - services that, if cut, will prevent an economic recovery while causing widespread suffering.

So what would we do to solve the crisis? There are two kinds of solutions that are necessary - short-term revenue solutions, and long-term structural fixes.

Short-term revenue solutions are necessary to avoid crippling and economically ruinous cuts. These new revenues need to be fair, of course, and they need to not overburden an already stressed middle-class and working-class. That's why we believe we need to increase the income tax for those making over $250,000 a year, as President Obama has planned to do at the federal level. We also support closing corporate tax loopholes, and enacting an oil severance tax (California is the only oil-producing state in the country that does not tax the extraction of oil from our lands).

Long-term structural fixes are necessary to prevent this mess from happening again. The 2/3rds rule must be repealed and replaced with rules allowing the legislators the people have chosen to represent them to make financial decisions for our state. We need to fix a broken initiative process that has allowed those with money to use the initiatives to help themselves at the expense of the rest of us. We need to consider calling a Constitutional Convention to fix a broken governmental process.

California's crisis is severe. But it would become an outright catastrophe if we let that crisis be used to make innocent and sick people suffer. That's why we must oppose these budget cuts, and implement the solutions that will help California survive this recession while positioning us to recover quickly, fully, and fairly.

Last week the annual Netroots Nation conference was held in Pittsburgh, and the Courage Campaign was there to share our knowledge of online organizing and progressive activism with bloggers from across the country.

Managing Director Eden James spoke about turning red districts blue, sharing his experiences from the successful effort to elect Jerry McNerney in California's 11th Congressional district in 2006. Online Political Director Julia Rosen spoke about applying the lessons of the 2008 presidential campaign to state and local races, as well as on where the marriage equality movement needs to go in the aftermath of Prop 8's passage.

The Courage Campaign also helped convene a meeting of bloggers to do specific work planning for the Maine marriage equality battle coming up this fall.

For my part, alongside participating in the above, I joined fellow Calitics blogger David Dayen, candidate for Assembly district 21 Kai Stinchcombe, and the incomparable Jean Ross of the California Budget Project for a panel to discuss California's economic and political crisis.

I received a lot of feedback from panel attendees that it was one of the best panels of the weekend - which, aside from being flattering, is quite a statement considering how good the other discussions had been.

Dante Atkins, an LA-based blogger and activist, transcribed our panel's discussion, and that transcript is offered below. The panel was a good opportunity to build momentum for the coming battles over taxes, public services, the state budget, and the future of our democracy. The Courage Campaign staff fully intend to continue helping our members play a central role in solving these problems.   Read More »

I've been noticing a trend over the last few budget cycles - the frequent use of illegal actions to claim that there is a balanced budget. Arnold Schwarzenegger is the worst offender here, though the Legislature as a whole has proven too willing to go along with these practices.

Thankfully Californians hurt by these reckless and economically indefensible budget cuts are not taking the lawbreaking lying down. Evan Halper at the LA Times reports on the rising number of lawsuits being filed and, increasingly, being won to block the cuts:

Lawyers are being drafted in droves to unravel spending plans passed by the Legislature and signed by the governor. The goal of these litigators is to get back money their clients lost in the budget process. They are having considerable success, winning one lawsuit after another, costing the state billions of dollars and throwing California's budget process into further tumult.

In the last few months alone, the courts added more than a billion dollars to the state's deficit by declaring illegal reductions in healthcare services, redevelopment agency funds and transportation spending. Another ruling threatens to deprive California of all its federal stimulus money if the state does not rescind a cut to the salaries of home healthcare workers.

Unfortunately Halper's tone makes this sound like a bunch of ambulance chasers are taking advantage of the state's financial crisis to enrich themselves and reverse a fair outcome of a democratic process. Nothing could be further from the truth. The lawsuits are typically filed on behalf of working-class Californians who are being made to bear the brunt of these cuts, whether it's a reduction to their already paltry pay, loss of their health care, or loss of their means to get to work.

Halper's article goes further in stacking the deck against Californians affected by the cuts. Instead of emphasizing the fact that numerous court cases on a variety of budget subjects have found major pieces of recent budget deals to be illegal, instead of questioning why the Legislature and the governor feel they can blithely ignore the law whenever they feel like it, Halper lays the blame for this at the feet of voters, who he casts as being reckless and profligate:

The attorneys are seizing on state laws that were drafted in sunnier economic times, some of which were put in place by citizen initiative. They created new programs or expanded existing ones and contained language intended to solidify the place of those programs in state government. Now, the state is broke, and lawmakers and the governor are finding their attempts to take money from the programs rebuffed by the courts. Just the lawsuits themselves cost the state millions of dollars in attorney salaries and other legal fees.

Of course those efforts are being rebuffed - the law and the state constitution are unmistakably clear here.

What Halper leaves out is the fact that most ballot-box budgeting isn't due to voters who don't know what they are doing. Instead it is typically a reaction to legislative failure to protect vital services. The grandaddy of all "ballot-box budgeting", Proposition 98, was passed in 1988 as a reaction to a series of cuts in education funding during the 1980s. Voters, who have never been offered an opportunity to revisit the core elements of Prop 13 and have only once been asked to revisit the 2/3rds rule, understandably grow frustrated with the legislature's unwillingness to protect the core services of state government and those that depend on those services to survive and thrive.

What the frequent lawbreaking makes clear is that in Sacramento, the only laws that truly matter are those laid down in 1978 by Howard Jarvis, and enforced by the kangaroo courts of the California Chamber of Commerce and the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association. The legislature and the governor are so determined to avoid tax increases, even when they make more economic sense than spending cuts, that they will break the law rather than offend Jarvis's ghost.

Legislators and reporters may not like it, but this is precisely why American governments have three coequal branches - to enable the judiciary to uphold rights and laws when the legislature and the executive choose to ignore them out of a misguided concept of political expediency.

Let a thousand lawsuits bloom.