We are a new organization focusing on these three areas of need:

1. Chapters and Support groups for those with emotional issues. LGBT chapters are now being formed and we are looking for partners in your areas.
2. We seek out community unmet needs and form innovative initiatives to bring communities together.
3. We offer educational and empowerment programs through seminars, classes and workshops.

The San Francisco Chronicle's article on the Alameda parcel tax for schools vote posits a false choice. The article by Carolyn Jones makes it sound as if Alamedans have to decide between their schools and their businesses. In reality, the choice is between good schools and strong businesses on the one hand, and bad schools and declining business on the other.

If it passes, many small business owners, already struggling with the recession, say they'll be forced to close, stripping Alameda of its mom-and-pop charm. If the measure fails, the district's superintendent warns that half the schools in town would close.

"If this doesn't pass, all bets are off in Alameda," said Encinal High School Principal Mike Cooper, a fifth-generation Alamedan. "We're watching the collapse of public education. We've been trying to make this work, but something's got to give."

Business owners agree that at this point, all bets are off.

"If this passes, then God help us, there'll be no end," said Ed Hirshberg, who owns numerous commercial properties in Alameda but lives in Oakland. "The schools want more money from us, but the problem is there's no money available."

The article goes on to make it clear that to most Alameda residents, good schools are the foundation of the community. And that makes sense - people want a good future for their kids, want them to be educated, want them to have opportunities and a better life. Only a sick and demented human being would choose profits over that better life for their kids.

Alameda businesses should want that as well. If Alameda schools close, it could trigger a flight of parents with children to other districts that have not been so reticent to fund their schools. And Alameda businesses will suffer as a result, when their prosperous customers, especially those with families, leave.

So the complaints of Alameda businesses are misguided. The parcel tax is necessary for their own survival as well as that of their own community. However, Alamedans do have a very good point when they say it should never have come to this:

The 9,500-student district has managed to scrape through the past few years, but with the latest round of state cutbacks, the district now finds itself on the precipice of disaster, Superintendent Kirsten Vital said.

"It's devastating and abysmal," she said. "We're looking to Alameda voters because the state of California is not funding education as it should."

That is exactly right. Because of Republican opposition to taxes, schools and students have been punished with massive cuts. Of course, poll after poll after poll shows that big majorities of Californians will support new taxes to prevent cuts to schools. If Sacramento wanted to stop cities like Alameda from having to raise local taxes, they could do so by proposing or even enacting a statewide tax increase on the wealthiest Californians and the largest businesses to support schools. It *will* pass.

It's time for the defenders of public education in California to make this move. CTA has been planning to bring the corporate tax breaks to the ballot, but that's just $2 billion a year. The public is willing to approve much more, especially if the upper income tax brackets of the Pete Wilson era were restored, especially if the corporate tax rates of the 1980s were restored.

Of course, one wonders if Alameda businesses that are complaining about the Measure E proposal support these kind of solutions. If not, it's time they did so, because their survival depends on California restoring and improving the funding we give to our schools. There's no justification for being cheap with our children's future.

In 2009, 16,000 teachers and other public school employees lost their jobs. The devastating effect on the quality of education in this state is just beginning to be felt. Now we learn that insane policy of mass firings of teachers and school employees is going to be renewed, as 23,000 more have received pink slips this month:

Faced with another year of potentially deep budget cuts, California's public schools have sent out 22,000 pink slips to teachers and school employees, according to the state's superintendent.

"Our state budget crisis has forced districts to lay off thousands of teachers over the past few years," said Jack O'Connell, the state superintendent of public instruction. "The governor has proposed cutting another $2.4 billion from public education. While the education community opposes these cuts, our schools are forced to prepare for this potential outcome by issuing a massive wave of potential layoff notices."

(Note: CTA reports today that the number of layoffs is now 23,225)

Arnold Schwarzenegger's office tried to spin this as not their fault, and even claimed the governor wasn't making further cuts to K-12 budgets:

Still, a spokesman for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Aaron McLear, took umbrage with O'Connell's characterization of the governor's January budget proposal, noting that Schwarzenegger has proposed allocating the same amount of money for K-12 and community colleges as he did last year.

What McLear didn't say is that because of the (senseless) expiration of federal stimulus funds, keeping K-12 budgets the same in 2010-11 as in 2009-10 is a /de facto/ budget cut. Last March over 30,000 pink slips were issued, and it appears stimulus funds helped about half of those employees to get rehired for this current school year, most of whom were on 1-year temporary contracts. Without stimulus funds, and with a freeze in education spending, those teachers will get laid off for good this summer.

So far none of the gubernatorial candidates have addressed the destruction of our schools. Sure, Meg Whitman pledges to "fix education" but also pledges to blow an enormous hole in the state budget deficit with her tax cuts for the rich. How will she do both?

As Joe Garofoli points out, it might have something to do with her attack on public employee unions. Apparently she thinks teachers and other public workers, who make a middle-class living and retire with a decent though by no means generous pension, make too much money and should learn to do with less.

That's not going to solve the problems of our schools. If teacher pay decreases, it will become even more difficult to keep qualified teachers in the classroom to provide the education students deserve.

But that seems to be Whitman's approach, since she is on record as opposing new taxes. As California's schools suffer, Meg Whitman is showing no sign of wanting to help reverse the trend.

Yesterday's outpouring of protest against the deliberate decision to destroy California's public education system was characterized by one dominant emotion: anger. And that was exactly as it should be. If you're not angry at the collapse of our schools, colleges, and universities, and the stealing of an entire generation's future, then you're really not paying any attention.

I spent the day at Cal State Monterey Bay, hearing student after student take the microphone to express their anger at what has happened to their dreams. This was not a violent anger, but instead the kind of deeply rooted anger that anyone would quite rightly feel when they have been betrayed. The state of California has betrayed these students, having asked them to work hard to succeed in school and promising an affordable quality education, only to yank that promise away from them in order to deliver tax cuts to huge corporations.

On other campuses, anger was clearly the dominant emotion, such as the students at UC Santa Cruz who shut down the campus, or the students at UC Davis who tried to block Interstate 80 in order to show the rest of the state what it feels like to have your life disrupted by forces beyond your control.

Anger can be a very healthy emotion. It focuses the mind, and can create a sense of determination. That too was on display at the events I attended - a belief that this anger was being expressed in order to build a mass movement of students, faculty, staff, parents, and other Californians who know that this state has no chance whatsoever at prospering in the 21st century if these cuts are not reversed. It is further evidence of how effective and valuable the March 4 actions were.

Students now understand what is happening to them and why. Their education is being gutted and their already meager financial resources are being stolen from them by a state government that believes corporations matter more than students. That propping up the failed status quo matters more than building California's future. Most of the speakers I heard understood this very clearly, almost instinctively. It has been beaten into them these last two years.

The question now facing this nascent movement is how to channel that anger into action. A movement is being built, but what are its goals? And how will it achieve them? It is both easy and right to say "fuck the budget cuts." But unless the movement starts working on the solutions, this moment will be lost just as each preceding moment was lost.

In my own brief remarks to the rally at CSUMB, I noted that we had all been here before. In the late 1960s students protested against Governor Ronald Reagan's fee hikes, but they happened anyway. In the early 1980s students protested against Governor Jerry Brown's and Governor George Deukmejian's fee hikes, but they happened anyway. In the early 1990s students protested against Governor Pete Wilson's fee hikes, but they happened anyway. In the early 2000s students protested against Governor Gray Davis's and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's fee hikes, but they happened anyway.

It is time to break that cycle with action.

The core goal for colleges and universities should be to restore the core pledge of the 1960 Master Plan - that a high quality public college education will be free to all Californians who qualify for it. The core goal for K-12 schools should be similar, that a high-quality public education will be free to all Californians, period. In pursuit of that goal, the movement must be willing to pursue actions and policy changes that will provide the new public funding that a restoration of truly affordable and quality public education requires.

One starting point is AB 656. The Courage Campaign, along with Assemblymember Alberto Torrico (author of AB 656), the California Faculty Association, the University of California Student Association, the California State Student Association, and many other groups have come together to support this bill and to launch a campaign to pass it. $2 billion a year for higher education would go a very long way to helping reverse the recent cuts and fee hikes. It would be a downpayment on the full restoration of the Master Plan, and will need to be followed by other methods of collecting the revenue that our state's wealthy and large corporations currently control.

Another starting point would be proposals to roll back the $2 billion in corporate tax cuts given in the February 2009 budget deal, the same budget that slashed $9 billion from public schools and began this present downward spiral.

Still another starting point would be the restoration of majority rule to California, whether it's for the budget in the legislature or for votes to raise revenue at the ballot box, or some combination of these.

These goals must be placed at the core of education movement organizing in the coming weeks and months. Those goals have to be pursued in concert with the necessary defensive actions that have to be fought against people like US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, whose "Race to the Top" program served as bait to lead California to weaken some of its core educational standards. Those who want to privatize education in order to turn it into a vehicle for profit must be fought as well. No Child Left Behind must be reformed, teachers must become better paid and freed from onerous, pointless, and stupid burdens that so-called reformers are trying to place on them.

And this movement must remain unified as its enemies seek to defeat it through the divide-and-conquer strategy. Attacks on teacher's unions have become all too common, even among Democrats. Others may try to leverage higher education against K-12 education, or leverage education against other budget priorities such as health care and human services. These too must be resisted.

A "grow the pie" ethos must be embraced by this movement. Student speakers at CSUMB well understood that other kinds of budget cuts, including to health care programs, bite every bit as deeply as the education cuts. That should not hold the movement back from pursuing the goals of taking our money back from the wealthy and the large corporations who took it from us in recent decades, and should instead motivate the movement to ensure that battles such as AB 656 and majority rule are to be cornerstones for the campaign to provide the kind of robust and high-quality public services that used to characterize the California Dream during the era of Pat Brown.

For that to happen, the movement must figure out how to channel anger into action. Determining the agenda for battle will help this movement become the vehicle by which we end 30 years of right-wing policy that has destroyed our state and stolen our future from us.

As protests unfold across the state and the nation today against cuts to education and fee increases, more attention is finally being drawn to the massive crisis facing our students, our schools, and our future.

20 years ago a year at UC Berkeley cost just over $1,000 in fees. Even that was much higher than the $0 cost that the 1960 Master Plan pledged. The early 1990s saw a big rise in fees, and by the time I started at UCB in 1997 the cost had risen to over $4,000 a year. Now the cost is slated to rise to a whopping $10,000 per year, something many students and their families cannot afford to pay. And even as those costs rise, including at CSU and community colleges, classes are being cut as educational quality declines.

It's no way to run a state. California's current prosperity is owed largely to the investments Pat Brown made in the 1960s, building a public higher education system that was the world's envy - and that fueled our innovation and economic creativity. But instead of renewing those investments for a new century, Arnold Schwarzenegger is destroying them. The fee increases are a massive tax increase on the young and on the working- and middle-classes. They must be reversed.

The only way they will be reversed is to generate new revenue. That's why the Courage Campaign, where I work as Public Policy Director, is joining the California Faculty Association and the University of California Students Association in launching our pledge to support AB 656, the oil severance tax for California.

AB 656, authored by Assemblymember Alberto Torrico, would generate $2 billion a year for higher education by levying a 12% tax on the extraction of oil and gas in California. Texas uses this tax to fund higher education there, and Sarah Palin increased Alaska's oil severance tax in 2007 in order to buy the love of her constituents. Every major oil producing state in the union has an oil severance tax - except California.

The result of this massive tax break we give to oil companies is the destruction of our public colleges and universities. Fees have risen since the early 1990s only because of cuts in the amount of state funding the schools receive. The only way to make college affordable again is to increase that funding. An oil severance tax is a good place to begin.

Stand up for students, for faculty, for staff, and for higher education today by taking the pledge to support AB 656. We will use these pledges to help convince the legislature to pass the bill, adding to the fact that 2/3rds of Californians said they'll pay higher taxes for education. Our next steps will be to target specific legislators, but for now, we need a show of force for AB 656. Let's tax oil companies, not students.

Below the fold is the email the Courage Campaign sent to our members today, supported by CFA and UCSA.   Read More »

The Field Poll is out with a new look at Californians' attitudes on the state budget crisis. The results are being reported as "Californians prefer spending cuts, not taxes" as a way to solve the budget deficit. And even though that headline misstates what is in the poll, the bigger issue is the general and vague nature of the poll itself.

Here's what Field asked:

California lawmakers face a deep budget deficit again next year, with a gap that may reach $20 billion between projected revenues and current spending levels. How would you prefer to have this deficit closed – only through tax increases, mostly through tax increases but with some spending cuts, through an equal mix of tax increases and spending cuts, mostly through spending cuts but with some tax increases, or only through spending cuts?

The responses, of statewide registered voters:

Cuts only: 31%
Mostly cuts: 19%
Equal mix of cuts and taxes: 29%
Mostly taxes: 9%
Taxes only: 4%
No opinion: 8%

So the way this is being reported in the media strikes me as being pretty flawed. The way I read this says 61% of voters want taxes to be some element of the solution to the budget mess, and only 31% want cuts-only.

Sure, those numbers could and should be better. But even in spite of progressives' inability to deliver those messages to Californians, 61% don't want an all-cuts budget. It should be noted that such a budget is exactly what Arnold Schwarzenegger and Meg Whitman propose for California.

What the poll didn't ask is about specific programs. In January PPIC found that 2/3rds of Californians would pay higher taxes if it went to education. That suggests that the rather vague and unspecific nature of this Field Poll means its utility for driving policy is very, very limited.

Field Poll also examined attitudes on the upcoming initiative to change the 2/3rds rule to a simple majority on budget (but not on taxes) that may make the November ballot. They found it was close: 43% support, 47% oppose. The initiative likely to go forward would include financial penalties to legislators if a budget isn't passed on time, which as I understand it boosts the poll numbers for this proposal significantly.

But what we also see is that just as Democrats in Washington, DC have failed to drive home the message that Republican obstruction is responsible for a large part of the political problems the country faces, Democrats in Sacramento have had similar problems. When Field asked about whether we could solve California's problems "if lawmakers are willing to compromise and work together" or if we needed constitutional changes, they found 20% said "constitutional change" and 75% said "politicians should work together."

While the construction of that question is iffy (of course voters will say they want their politicians to work together), it does indicate that Sacramento Democrats have not done an effective job of explaining that Republican obstruction is the reason why nothing gets done.

Ultimately this poll gives a roadmap to Speaker Pérez: insist that taxes be part of the budget solution, link them to specific programs that people want (particularly education), and make sure Californians know that it is Republicans who are standing in the way of that happening.

In 2004 Paul Krugman published a book that, at the height of the Bush Administration and less than a year after Arnold Schwarzenegger seized power in the 2003 recall vote, described 21st century America as embarking upon a "Great Unraveling" as the accomplishments of the 20th century were being undone by right-wingers.

As it turned out, the unraveling was only just beginning. It has taken the worst recession in 60 years to give that unraveling its full force and power here in California. Here in 2010, everywhere around us we see collapse, decay, and suffering - and a state government whose procedures are rigged to empower the small right-wing minority that is enthusiastically cheerleading the unraveling they've wrought.

Interestingly enough it's two articles in today's New York Times that show most clearly the depth of suffering and decay taking place in California. The first is Tom Friedman's column, which riffs off of the insane news that Tracy is going to charge for 911 calls, an example Friedman uses to show the lack of desire to rebuild this country and pull us out of crisis:

But now it feels as if we are entering a new era, “where the great task of government and of leadership is going to be about taking things away from people,” said the Johns Hopkins University foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum.

Indeed, to lead now is to trim, to fire or to downsize services, programs or personnel. We’ve gone from the age of government handouts to the age of citizen givebacks, from the age of companions fly free to the age of paying for each bag....

Our parents truly were the Greatest Generation. We, alas, in too many ways, have been what the writer Kurt Andersen called “The Grasshopper Generation,” eating through the prosperity that was bequeathed us like hungry locusts. Now we and our kids together need to be “The Regeneration” — the generation that renews, refreshes, re-energizes and rebuilds America for the 21st century.

That isn't going to happen as long as others in Friedman's generation continue to prioritize wealth extraction and tenacious, even bitter defense of the status quo over "The Regeneration." I see this all the time in my work in support of the high speed rail project, where prosperous homeowners in Palo Alto are doing everything in their power to try and stop the train project, merely because they think it will make their communities look ugly. They've even been able to convince the city's mayor, Pat Burt, to reverse his position in support of HSR and to instead call for a delay in the project, despite a 30% unemployment rate among Peninsula construction workers.

The same attitude extends to our schools, which are facing a serious crisis as teachers are laid off, campuses closed, and educational opportunity shrinks; to our health care system, which careens from one crisis to another; and to our overall economy, which is increasingly dominated by a wealthy few who prefer to extract wealth that already exists, rather than invest in making new things that can create new wealth.

This isn't a new phenomenon. But here in 2010, we're seeing an almost colonial approach to economic development that destroys public resources and infrastructure combining with long-term unemployment (since wealth extractors have no interest in creating lasting jobs or prosperity) to produce a worsening social crisis. The NYT's Peter Goodman explored this in Orange County:

Call them the new poor: people long accustomed to the comforts of middle-class life who are now relying on public assistance for the first time in their lives — potentially for years to come.

Yet the social safety net is already showing severe strains. Roughly 2.7 million jobless people will lose their unemployment check before the end of April unless Congress approves the Obama administration’s proposal to extend the payments, according to the Labor Department.

Here in Southern California, Jean Eisen has been without work since she lost her job selling beauty salon equipment more than two years ago. In the several months she has endured with neither a paycheck nor an unemployment check, she has relied on local food banks for her groceries.

The article is worth reading in its entirety, telling stories of middle-aged, middle-class Californians who are not only out of work, but do not have the resources to make some necessary adjustments. Food stamps, welfare, and Medi-Cal are being cut precisely when the middle-class and others need it to avoid homelessness and starvation. We're cutting college classes and making it more expensive to even attend a community college and get some valuable retraining skills. Add in California's ongoing lack of public housing and public job creation and you have a recipe not just for long-term unemployment, but for a massive expansion of an already-persistent underclass.

The stories Goodman tells are not new to California. They are familiar to anyone with any experience in East Oakland, South Los Angeles, or other communities that had been cut off from public support and economic opportunity for decades now, owing largely to the skin color of their residents. We are now seeing those problems grow deeper by becoming broader.

To bring it back to the great unraveling, the attitude of California's right-wing politicians, who govern this state by virtue of the 2/3rds rule, is that this suffering is a good thing. Chuck DeVore believes the unemployed should just leave California. Meg Whitman has made a call for higher unemployment a key campaign pledge.

They have allied with the wealth extractors to reach out to some of those who still have some financial resources left - longtime homeowners, those still making good money - to recruit them to support the destruction of California. They argue against any and all tax increases because if they don't, then the public might get the idea that some tax increases are indeed good and worthwhile, then California might follow Oregon voters and raise taxes on the rich and large corporations.

But it will take more than aggressively and persistently pushing for new investment in public services. As Friedman and Goodman both indicate, we also need to reorient our thinking. Our work and our society need to emphasize creating and making things, instead of making money on finances (rising home values, investment income, etc).

California has reached the end of a 60-year long model that emphasized massive consumption of non-renewable resources that caused major environmental problems, the most significant of which is global warming. We have the expertise, the workers, and the financial resources to address those problems by democratizing the economy, empowering more people to create sustainable ways of life, and building public services to provide the foundation upon which it depends.

Progressives will have to lead the creation of that new model for California. Nobody else will, because nobody else wants to.

It's nice to consolidate our thoughts among the many evolving aspects of the Universe as its continuing endeavor of reoccurring challenge restructures our life style every day. It's nice to absorb these challenges of reflective dualism, and learning as we travel through the Universe in search of a better; or more affinite life style of harmony, and nature. Silence is golden, knowledge’s wisdom; learning’s infinite, education's the ability to make decisions and the ability to be able to make decisions is freedom. Infinite aspects of an infinite learning that's easily ignored by our modern world; or its ideals of creative development, and enlightenment. Ideals that need to be cultivated by a greater degree of learning; or its goals towards a brighter, and more educative future. Ideals that are to be challenged by the simple things in life that can't be denied, or ignored. Ideals that need to be seen as cultured or cultivated by our Universe that will hopefully guide us through to the next generation of challenges, and greater learning. Thus allowing for a greater degree of the fluidness, or learning that’s needed to rule ourselves with dignity, and the eternal grace of confidence!   Read More »

One of the great progressive achievements in American history (and no, that isn't hyperbole) is the nationwide adoption of universal public education. Here in California we went one better and created what for many decades was seen as the world's leading system of higher education - the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education.

Both were created out of the recognition that for California to have broadly shared economic prosperity, it was *essential* that we have a strong public education system that included *affordable* and *accessible* college education for those who desired it. California's fantastic economic success over the last 50 to 60 years was enabled in no small part by this commitment to education. And even after the state began entering a slow period of decline in 1978, with increasing inequality and slowly contracting public services, the educational system was still able to train a skilled and innovative workforce that helped sustain California until the present crisis hit.

Now all of that is about to be destroyed. California's colleges are facing cuts so vast that they will finally eliminate what remains of the *affordable* and *accessible* promise while turning the world-renowned system into "bachelor degree mills" that no longer contribute research knowledge to the state - knowledge that in the past spawned entire industries, including the high-tech industry.

At the same time the state legislature is poised to deliver major cuts to education spending - the only debate at this point seems to be "how" and not "if." Schools already sustained a $9 billion hit through an illegal interpretation of the Prop 98 rules, so now Arnold Schwarzenegger wants the legislature to suspend Prop 98 outright. Democrats, who have been engaged in a slow-motion cave yet again, appear likely to go along with some form of the insane cut.

Nobody has yet explained how this will do anything to promote economic recovery. Instead it is likely to leave California permanently behind the rest of the nation and much of the industrialized world for quite some time. Without being able to educate our children ind decent schools, it will be difficult to retain businesses here as they will struggle to find qualified workers, and will continually lose employees to other states that have not decided education is no longer important or valuable.

Unfortunately California in 2009 is a place where the word "future" is a verboten word, rivaled only by the phrase "economic recovery" in the level of disdain it is held in Sacramento. We are told that the need to cut trumps all else in our state - apparently it even trumps common sense.

Democrats have convinced themselves a budget deal is necessary to avert meltdown. But that meltdown is already here. Agreeing to destroy education in this state would merely be agreeing to ensure the radioactivity is channeled primarily at the young.

I don't know about you, but I can't find anything in the outcome of the May 19 election that justifies, say, ending welfare entirely, or denying AIDS patients life-saving medicines, or throwing a million kids off of health care, or closing the state park system, or eliminating affordable access to higher education. Can you?

In fact, even though polls show voters emphatically *reject* that kind of budgeting Arnold Schwarzenegger has gone ahead and proposed it anyway. In his best effort to play the role of a modern-day Herbert Hoover he has decided to interpret the election as a mandate to push through the radical attack on government he has always wanted to lead.

In recent hearings in the Legislature - which in themselves prove the value of an open budget process - the scope of the cuts has become clear, and even legislators who were just last week speaking of the need for cuts are starting to have second thoughts, as Anthony Wright reported:

Some members, like Senator Denise Ducheny, asked whether some of these cuts would not create more costs, as people end up in emergency rooms or elsewhere, even within the budget year. "What makes you think this doesn't create a cost shift?... Will people just die and we won't have to take care of them?" she asked.

Senator Mark Leno talked about how the AIDS Drug Assistance Program "literally keeps people alive," and asked for information about the increased cost of ermegency room visits as a result of the cut. Senator Alan Lowenthal asked if there was a "longitudinal" analysis, and asked for the "long-range implications" of these cuts.

Assemblywoman Noreen Evans was alarmed when she noted that dialysis would be cut for some patients, exclaiming that her father was going through such treatment, and was not optional. She also noted that some cuts, like the elimination of HIV Testing, would have public health impacts. Assemblyman Kevin DeLeon pointed out the cuts to community clinics, arguing that for many Californians, "this is the only safety-net they have."

As the Sac Bee reports, even some Republicans acknowledge that there is such a thing as a successful government program:

Assemblyman Danny Gilmore, R-Hanford, wrote an opinion piece this month for the Bakersfield Californian telling constituents how to apply to Healthy Families and touting it as a program that works "especially well."

Of course, the Zombie Death Cult still has its adherents, like Chuck DeVore:

But Assemblyman Chuck DeVore, R-Irvine, said the state must scale back because it cannot afford the benefits it provides. DeVore asserted that overregulation and high taxes have stifled businesses and led to layoffs, while California has compounded the problem with too much public aid.

"When you have an unemployment rate as high as it is in this state, it should be a signal to people to look for jobs in other states with more jobs and a lower cost of living," DeVore said. "We have had policies subsidizing poverty in this state for years, and we can't keep doing that."

And this guy wants to be in the US Senate! The irony is that even his own constituents disagree with him. Orange County residents don't want their parents to lose dialysis treatment. They don't want their kids to lose Cal Grants. They don't want to be barred from going to the nearby beach.

As we have been explaining for months now, these kinds of cuts are suicidal. They will make the budget picture worse by costing more money than the cuts would save. They will certainly make the economic crisis FAR worse by forcing consumers to pull back even further on spending in order to replace the lost state aid. Arnold Schwarzenegger is demanding a Depression.

Unfortunately the legislative leadership has woefully unprepared themselves to respond. Instead of spending the months leading up to the May 19 election talking about protecting Californians against horrific cuts, the Democratic leadership instead went along with Arnold's scare tactics and made a cuts-only budget sound inevitable - and then doubled down the day after the election.

It's time for legislators to "just say no" to these cuts. And not say it in order to accept lesser but similarly damaging cuts, but say "no" in order to walk through the wide open door that leads out of the Jarvis nightmare scenario. We have a golden opportunity to bury 30 years of anti-tax nonsense - Californians understand that taxes are necessary to prevent people from dying and to provide economic recovery. There is widespread support for raising taxes on the wealthy, closing the loopholes, and ending a failed prisons policy that costs us billions.

It's time for legislators to move beyond outrage and to start showing real leadership against this madness. If they want to restore their reputations with voters, the best way to do so is to show that the Legislature still understands common sense and can give the people what they want - a fair tax system that will stop these cuts in their entirety.

Resolutions for California Democrats

The Northern Solano Democratic Club has posted five resolutions on their web site that will be submitted for approval at the state convention next month.

They are:

A Resolution for Improving Higher Education Accreditation Practices
A Resolution for Relief from No Child Left Behind Expenditures
A Resolution Opposing the Open Primary in 2010
A Resolution for majority Rule Initiative Reducing the Threshold for Passing a State Budget
A Resolution on Contesting Elections

The full text of each is below the fold and can be adopted by local clubs by inserting your club name in the "Resolved" clauses at the appropriate place.   Read More »

Yesterday I wrote about the insanity of firing teachers as a "budget solution." Thousands of Californians seem to agree, judging by the growing outrage around our state over these cuts.

The Courage Campaign is asking our members to take action to ensure this never happens again. We need to create a progressive media narrative that calls for more investment in our schools, not less. Writing a letter to the editor of your local paper is still one of the most effective ways to accomplish this. We have an easy online tool that includes talking points, writing tips, and automatically sends your letter to whichever newspapers you want to include.

In addition, the California Teachers Association is holding a series of protest rallies around the state tomorrow on what they are calling Pink Friday.

A progressive movement is coming together around protecting our core services. Without education our state will never have an economic recovery - and we will lose an entire generation.

Below is the email we sent to our members today.   Read More »

My sister got her layoff notice yesterday. After teaching 5th grade for three years in an Orange County school district, and having achieved "permanent" status, she was told her services will no longer be needed as of the end of the school year. By all accounts her students' parents loved her, and as she told me last night, "I don't know what else I would do, teaching is all I've ever wanted to do." And that's true, ever since she taught our cousin what a fork was. Teaching is the family business, and now, she's been told her dreams are no longer possible because California has stopped caring about schools.

She is not alone in watching her hopes and dreams vanish. Over 20,000 of her fellow teachers have been pink slipped, with LA Unified alone firing 9,000 teachers. Uncounted numbers of support staff - the people who answer the phones, who drive the buses, who enable teachers to focus on their jobs, are getting laid off as well. Nobody in Sacramento or the offices of the Zombie Death Cult have been able to explain how this is going to help our state survive economic crisis.

The mass layoffs are an act so vile and insane that it almost defies description. Teachers should be the *last* people in society laid off, before almost everyone else but the technicians at the water treatment plant. To engage in a mass firing of teachers in the midst of a Depression is like a man stranded in the desert poking out his eyes with a stick because the sun is too bright. Sure, it might help temporarily, but eventually you're going to want to see where you're going, and wish you'd never acted so rashly back there on the dune.

Here at the Courage Campaign we have repeatedly explained why these layoffs are happening - a conservative veto (the 2/3rds rule) enables Republicans to starve government of revenue and then force crippling cuts while Democrats fail to craft a coherent response. Our knowledge of those underlying causes should not blind us to the insanity of these layoffs.

These pink slips also make a mockery of President Obama's education plans, which revolve around trying to attract new teachers to the profession:

And so today, I am calling on a new generation of Americans to step forward and serve our country in our classrooms. If you want to make a difference in the life of our nation; if you want to make the most of your talents and dedication; if you want to make your mark with a legacy that will endure - join the teaching profession. America needs you.

Such words ring hollow here in California, where those who already have stepped forward to make the most of their talents and to make a difference in the life of our nation have discovered that the legacy that will endure is a pink slip telling them "sorry, we don't really want you after all."

As Chris Bowers pointed out yesterday Obama's education plans have an overemphasis on dealing with "bad teachers":

I don't entirely understand why talk of making teachers work harder, making their profesion more competitive, and making their job secure is so common in America. We don't talk about making the lives of other people who work in public service, such as soldiers and first responders--or even health care workers--in such a foreboding way. If, as a nation, we actually want to solve our teacher shortage, part of that is going to mean dropping our constant national threats to make teachers lives more difficult. That is just a really, really bad way to recruit and retain teachers.

Obama's efforts to attract and retain the good teachers is simply impossible and unrealistic when those teachers who, like my sister and her 20,000 colleagues, have been given glowing reviews from administrators and parents alike and yet still find themselves turned away from the career they love.

His plans also suggest he is too wound up in what education writer Stanley Fish called the neoliberalization of education - the belief that education reform involves introducing market forces into schools, even though market forces prioritize money and denigrate other values such as good teaching, care for students, and building communities.

If Barack Obama wants to be serious about education reform, he needs to realize that you must first stop the bleeding before you can do anything else. The US Senate's decision to gut the state stabilization funds is behind the mass layoffs here in California. That act will neutralized the effect of the stimulus in California and cause lasting damage to a generation of young people whose education has been sacrificed to appease Republicans in Sacramento and the US Senate.

Before Obama focuses on how to fire bad teachers, he needs to first ensure that we retain the good ones. If teaching becomes seen as a profession where quality work brings no job security, then reforms are doomed from the outset.

Health education funding at risk!

The Chairman of the OC Board of Supervisors, right-wing conservative John Moorlach is going to attempt to cancel contracts that total over $300,000 with Planned Parenthood.

WE NEED YOUR PRESENCE AND PHONE CALLS AND EMAILS!

Next Tuesday (Mar 10th), John Moorlach, Orange County Supervisor District 2, will bring an agenda item to the Board of Supervisors meeting that could drastically inhibit our ability to serve the community. He plans to single out Planned Parenthood by withholding more than $290,000 in health education funding. Services provided through the Health Education Program empower teens and young adults throughout our community to make informed, healthy, and responsible decisions about their health, and ultimately to reduce the incidence of unintended pregnancies, STIs, and tobacco use in Orange County. Any attempt by the supervisors to change the contract represents a breach of contract and an abuse of power on their behalf. At a time when people are losing their jobs and their medical coverage, Supervisor Moorlach wants to take hundreds of thousands of dollars away from primary health care resources.

We need you to take action to protect family planning and health education services in your community.

Please call or e-mail your County Supervisor to let them know you support Planned Parenthood and the health education services we provide under the Tobacco Settlement Funds (TSR) and immunization contracts. (all contact info is provided in extended post)

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What will you do with your IOU from Aarold? I would pay all the hardworking teachers and educators in California what they deserve. Frankly this budget crisis is a bunch of malarkey. How can we afford to spend so much of our money on our state prison system while ignoring education? California is at a crossroads: if we choose to ignore education, we are truly doomed. All the uneducated will ultimately end up in the prison system anyway. But maybe that's the answer. After all, prisons create jobs, right? Maybe we should just cut to the chase and spend all our invaluable Arnold Bucks on the prisons, completely ignoring education, and then hire all of the state's educators to run our prisons. Would that work? Oh, I almost forgot about the students (the future of California and this Great Nation), but that's okay, because apparently so did Arnold.

The details of Arnold's budget plan are in and it is even more insane than we thought. His budget includes large cuts to public schools, which are bad enough in their own right. But the specific kinds of cuts are going to trigger a snowball effect that could destroy public schools in California - and I don't believe that's an exaggeration.

California schools could eliminate a week of instruction and increase class sizes next year under Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's new plan for solving the state's budget crisis.

Vowing to give schools maximum flexibility to cut costs, the proposal unveiled Wednesday also would allow districts to eliminate one of two science courses required for high school graduation.

Schwarzenegger's plan would provide no teacher salary increases, eliminate a program providing subsidies to overhaul low-performing schools, and suspend participation in a program encouraging teachers to obtain national certification.

In and of themselves these cuts are damaging and reckless. California students need MORE science instruction, not less, if they're going to be globally competitive. Cutting instruction isn't going to help students learn more, and will lead to corner-cutting by teachers and administrators alike.

Those damaging cuts become catastrophic, however, in the context of No Child Left Behind. Arnold's proposals are likely to cause numerous schools to fail to meet federal standards set by the law, especially when subsidies to low-performing schools are cut. Because NCLB mandates the closure of low-performing schools, Arnold's budget if enacted as-is would virtually ensure the closure of numerous schools in this state.

Arnold's budget also leaves schools facing their own cash crisis during the school year (and in prime testing season):

The governor has proposed to ease the pain, in part, by accounting transfers involving state transportation funds and by deferring $2.8 billion in school payments from April to July. Wells said the state, by deferring payments for three months, would place an "awful" new burden on school districts to secure short-term loans.

It will be extremely difficult to secure those kinds of loans, but Arnold continues to delude himself into thinking the private sector is interested in lending to state government or its affiliated agencies.

There are plenty of other ridiculous elements to Arnold's budget but the kinds of education cuts proposed are a good example of just how badly Arnold has screwed up our state. One has to wonder whether this is a shock-doctrine style plan to force mass privatization of public schools in California by starving them of revenue and forcing them to close when they inevitably are unable to meet NCLB standards.

Two years from now a new governor will be sworn in. I wonder if California can wait that long.

Today's New York Times examines the nationwide state budget deficit problem - the total deficit faced by the states is at least $66 billion (and is likely higher since the NY Times didn't include, for example, the $1 billion deficit in Washington State). California figures prominently in their story, of course, but the story makes it sound as if our deficit is solely the product of the economic crisis:

The plunging revenues -- the result of an unusual assemblage of personal, sales, capital gains and corporate taxes falling significantly -- have poked holes in budgets that are just weeks and months old and that came about only after difficult legislative sessions.

"The fiscal landscape," said H. D. Palmer, a spokesman for the California Department of Finance, "is fundamentally altered from where it was six weeks ago."

There's no doubt that the worsening economic picture is partly responsible for the budget deficit. But the NY Times article does not explain to its readers that reckless tax cuts have created a structural revenue shortfall - for decades the state hasn't taken in as much money as it needs to fund core services. Arnold's reckless VLF cut is responsible for nearly $6 billion of the deficit.

Still, given a deficit of this size, and the fact that numerous states are facing deficits, suggests that a federal response is a necessary part of the solution. Already cities such as San José are seeking part of the $700 billion federal bailout to help ease their cash crunch. Henry Paulson isn't interested - gotta keep the funds flowing to his Wall Street cronies - but a federal bailout of state and local governments needs to be a central part of President Obama's economic stimulus come January.

That bailout could be focused, for example, on filling gaps in health care, education, and transportation. The bailout funds could be made contingent on state-level solutions - here in California, for example, a smart and fair revenue proposal linked with a federal bailout could eliminate the deficit.

A revenue solution MUST be part of this - given the likelihood of state budget deficits for the next several years. The alternative is massive and crippling cuts to schools like that described in today's LA Times:

District officials -- already in the process of identifying $400 million in cuts for next year -- almost certainly will have to reopen this year's budget and find about $200 million to $400 million to meet an anticipated shortfall. The budget-cutting is becoming a painfully familiar routine: Officials had to eliminate 680 jobs just to balance the books last June.

"It was hard enough to do that, so doing it again, in the middle of the school year" could be chaotic, said Megan Reilly, the district's chief financial officer.

Those cuts would push LA even deeper into recession. Without a coordinated state and federal response, the economic picture is going to get MUCH worse.

Having barely escaped Arnold's demands for budget cuts this spring, education in California is in his crosshairs yet again. Arnold is announcing that California now faces a $10 billion deficit and as a result, held a closed-door meeting with education leaders warning them of cuts of $2 to $4 billion that could come as soon as next month.

The reaction was swift:

"There is just no way we would be able to cut that much," said Scott Plotkin, executive director of the California School Boards Assn., who was at the meeting. "For virtually every district I know of, this would be catastrophic."...

Los Angeles Unified School District Supt. David L. Brewer said that Schwarzenegger's proposal would cost the district as much as $440 million. He called cuts of that magnitude "impossible."

"They're going to have to go out and borrow money because we'd go bankrupt," Brewer said. "Fiscally, we can't do that without literally having to shut down schools."

By law, teachers cannot be fired unless they are told months in advance.

"You can't just hand out pink slips," Brewer said. Teachers "have protections, they have union agreements."

Plotkin was also quoted in the SF Chronicle saying he thought this was an effort by Arnold to scare the education community into backing a budget that wasn't cuts only. But I am not so sure this is the case. Arnold is talking as if education cuts are inevitable, and if he were truly interested in avoiding them, he would not have called a lame-duck legislature into session - he'd have waited until December 1 and allowed a new legislature with fewer Yacht Party members to take their seats and solve the mess.

Complicating matters is the fact that the budget deal that resulted from Don Perata's surrender in September is worse than we expected according to an analysis posted at the California Progress Report:

In a nutshell, the budget agreement includes new sweeping midyear cut authority for the executive branch, a restrictive new state spending cap that was billed as an expansion of the state's rainy day fund, and new corporate tax breaks that will cost the state more than $1 billion a year. The first two proposals require voter approval, presumably in a June 2009 special election, but the tax breaks are permanent unless reversed by the Legislature or at the ballot box.

All three proposals were carefully crafted by their proponents but were jammed through the Legislature at the last minute without receiving property scrutiny and review. Democratic leaders have vehemently opposed similar proposals in the past but surrendered on all three proposals in one fell swoop--a boon to fiscally conservative Republicans who have fought for a restrictive state spending cap and midyear cut authority for years.

The spending cap and midyear cut authority undermine the power of Democrats to protect education funding. Apparently these aren't yet in effect, but Democrats have already given up as much as they can. Beginning November 5th their job is to fight, fight, fight. They will likely have a voter mandate to do so.

They will also have common sense on their side. Cutting education spending - or any other government spending - during a severe recession is an act of madness that guarantees the recession will get deeper and last longer. Arnold needs to not only look at a new sales tax, but admit his error and restore the Vehicle License Fee, which would restore $6 billion to the budget immediately and make this immeasurably easier to solve.

Only if Democrats hold their ground will that happen. And for them to hold their ground, we must make them do so.

Yesterday, Al Gore emailed a special video message to members of the Courage Campaign discussing how vitally important it is that our budget priorities not abandon education. And he asked everyone to tell him what we think about the current threat to education funding here in California at Current.com. Already, 18 members of the State Assembly have recorded video responses and posted them at Current. But even more impressive is that there are already close to 200 (probably more by now) responses by people from all over.

For instance, CarolynGillis said:

We need to increase our investment in financial and economic literacy for all our K-12 students and their parents so they have a chance to use their earnings wisely and to choose skills that empower them to create a future for themselves and their families.

commenter lritz noted:

If we want to retain our competitive edge in this world, we need to refocus our priorities on education, and turn the system upside-down. Make people want to be teachers. Make kids want to go to school. Reward those that show potential with scholarships, and squash the myth that sports is the only way for underprivileged kids to escape their situation. Make college affordable and available to anyone who wants it. Stop grading kids on their ability to take tests. Dismiss the idea that we have to constantly boost self-esteem by not failing kids or holding them back a grade.

This is the sort of dialogue our education system needs if we're going to save it. But I certainly can't say it any better than Al Gore himself:   Read More »

Tomorrow, the San Diego Unified School board will vote on laying off more than 900 teachers in the face of budget cuts rippling down from the state's current fiscal crisis. That's an average of more than four teachers leaving every school in the district. While the future of our next generation becomes cloudier, Republicans in the legislature continue to defend tax free yachts. It tells you a lot about where their priorities lie. Driving home this point as the state wades through the budget process is vitally important, and that's why Courage Campaign and the California Nurses Association have come together, producing a new Yacht Party ad that needs your help to reach the air. Arianna Huffington emailed Courage Campaign supporters earlier today to explain the importance of this ad and this meme overall:   Read More »