By JOHN HRABE

Back to the campaign drawing board for California Republicans.

The California Supreme Court recently upheld the maps drawn by the California Citizens Redistricting Commission.

The immediate fallout: State Sen. Sam Blakeslee, R-San Luis Obispo, told his hometown paper that he wouldn’t seek reelection, due to the unfavorable maps approved by the court. In another swing seat, Republicans have yet even to field a candidate. State Sen. Tony Strickland, R-Moorpark, announced that he wouldn’t seek reelection in order to run for a new seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.

If Republicans lose both state Senate seats, their Senate caucus will be reduced to fewer than 14 members, the all-important two-thirds threshold that gives Republicans the ability to block tax increases. At 13 Republican and 27 Democratic state senators, Democrats in the Senate could vote to impose infinite tax increases.

“It’s going to be seriously difficult for Republicans to stay above one-third in the Senate because of this,” California Republican Party Chairman Tom Del Beccaro complained to the Mercury News. “It puts the two-party system in the Senate in jeopardy.”

$2.1 Million Dollars for Useless Referendum

Republicans can now put a cost on their defeat: $2.1 million.

According to its fourth quarter campaign finance report, the Republican group Fairness & Accountability in Redistricting spent a whopping $2.1 million on its effort to put the new state Senate maps to a vote in November. The committee collected $1.7 million, or 80 percent, of its funding from the California Republican Party. That’s money that a cash-depleted party could have invested into voter registration programs for the three competitive state Senate districts.

“The CRP already spent a few million dollars on the referendum and varied lawsuit, all this while one of their best senate candidates, Jeff Miller, has no million-dollar voter registration program and can’t even afford a new URL,” observed the January 30th Redistricting Partners newsletter.

But it didn’t have to end this way for Golden State Republicans. Not if they’d followed the old maxim: An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Lesson One: Research redistricting commissioners and use legislative strikes wisely.

Propositions 11 and 20 gave legislative leaders of both parties the power to strike up to two names from the final applicant subpool of redistricting commissioners. Republican leaders could have spent a few thousand dollars on opposition research reports on the backgrounds of redistricting commissioners. Or they could have spent just a few hours cross-checking applicants against the state’s campaign finance database. Had anyone at the California Republican Party done a few hours of research, they’d have discovered several campaign contributions by two commissioners.

Back in July 2011, CalWatchDog.com first reported on two redistricting commissioners’ partisan histories and campaign contributions. Commissioner Jeanne Raya failed to disclose four contributions totaling $1,000 made on behalf of her business to a state political action committee.  State law requires commissioners to disclose any civic, political or charitable donations of $250 or more.

Commissioner Gabino Aguirre made three campaign donations to Democratic candidates for state office. In November 2008, Aguirre contributed $100 to Ferial Masry, the Democratic nominee for the 37th State Assembly District. A year later, he made a $200 contribution to Gloria Romero, a former Democratic state senator. Aguirre also has extensive ties to a redistricting special interest group, the Central Coast Alliance United for A Sustainable Economy (CAUSE). The progressive social justice organization submitted its own redistricting maps for the Central Coast. It’s no coincidence that Blakeslee and Strickland’s seats, which are now likely to flip to the Democrats, are both on the Central Coast.

With just a little bit of research, Republicans could have made an educated decision to strike Raya and Aguirre. But Republican legislative leaders didn’t want to spend the money. One high-level staffer described Republican legislative leaders’ approach to the redistricting process as “an inexcusable reluctance to spend the resources to research the background of the commissioners.” Another senior staff member for a Republican legislator put it simply, “The truth is we’re idiots.”

While neither staffer wanted to be identified by name, one Republican political consultant openly defied party leadership in an attempt to save the GOP from itself.

“When you start the process telling people not to be involved and then end the process complaining that others were too involved, you have created your own emergency,” wrote Matt Rexroad, a partner with Meridian Pacific, in his rant for Capitol Weekly. “The issue that really galls me is that Republicans can cry foul all they want, but legislative leadership made it very clear that they did not want any Republican consultants to engage on redistricting.”

Lesson Two: Focus on the flawed process, not self-interested outcomes.

If they had been consistent in their objections, Republicans could have convinced the public that the redistricting process was flawed.

Republicans were right: the redistricting process was corrupted by special interest groups. Background research could have helped expose Aguirre, but the full extent of his partisan activities couldn’t have been fully brought to light in time for the legislative strikes.  That’s because Aguirre’s last and most egregious contribution, a $100 check to Democratic Assemblyman Das Williams, posted to the Secretary of State’s website nine days after the Bureau of State Audits completed its background check.

Williams had a vested interest in redistricting. Yet the commission took no action to disclose this potential conflict of interest or sequester Aguirre from Williams’ region. They did the opposite. Aguirre was put in charge of overseeing the Central Coast mapmaking.  He promptly adopted the maps suggested by his friends at CAUSE.

Jerry Roberts and Phil Trounstine, who have been highly-critical of the Republicans’ redistricting referendum, questioned the cause of Willliams’ redistricting good fortune. “When you look at Williams’ new 37th Assembly district, which is about as safe for him as can be, along with the new 19th SD, the future of the hyper-ambitious young pol looks bright indeed, whether he sits still for two more, two-year terms in the Assembly, or jumps into a 2012 race that could bring two four-year terms in the senate. Coincidence? You be judge,” the CalBuzz team wrote back in August.

Republicans didn’t concentrate on this message, in part, because they liked the configuration of the State Assembly maps. They also ignored the Voting Rights Act violations with the congressional maps because those were favorable to high-ranking House Republicans. Instead, Republicans voluntarily swapped a message about the flawed process for a pity-party about losing one-third control of the State Senate.

Lesson Three: Don’t look a gift commissioner in the mouth.

Redistricting Commissioner Mike Ward, an Orange County chiropractor with no prior involvement in state politics, demonstrated a more coherent message than Republican political pros.

“The Citizens Redistricting Commission has certified maps that are fundamentally flawed as a result of a tainted political process,” Ward said at the commission’s August 15 press conference. “This commission simply traded the partisan, backroom gerrymandering by the Legislature, for partisan, backroom gerrymandering by average citizens.”

Then Ward did what you’re supposed to do when you object to a corrupted process: he voted against all of the proposed maps. He didn’t cherry-pick maps based on those that would help his political party. The Senate referendum quashed Ward’s message about the flawed process. If the process was corrupted, why only challenge one set of four maps? Republicans’ inconsistent message impressed upon the press, public and ultimately the State Supreme Court that the referendum was motivated by partisan interests.

Lesson Four: Courts are influenced by public opinion.

Republicans’ last error with its redistricting message came with the referendum lawsuit. Republicans turned the lawsuit into a legal argument about the rule of law, the right to referendum and the will of the voters.

“In the law, the word ‘stay’ has a clear meaning. To ‘stay’ an action means to stop that action. The most authoritative legal dictionary of American law defines ‘stay’ as, ‘To stop, arrest, forbear.’ To ‘stay’ an order or decree means to hold it in abeyance, or refrain from enforcing it.” Black’s Law Dictionary, at 1267 (5th ed. 1979).

Assemblyman Don Wagner wrote in the Flash Report, “Thus, because the petition is ‘likely to qualify,’ the Supreme Court was directed by the Constitution to ‘refrain from enforcing’ the Commission’s Senate maps. In short, the California Constitution, with a simple, four letter word of indisputable meaning, stays or stops the use of the Commission lines until the people have their say on those lines at the ballot box.”

Legally, Wagner may be right. But, who cares? Not even the Supreme Court cared about legal precedents or Black’s Law Dictionary when public opinion stood on the other side.

Said the court’s unanimous opinion, “The Commission-certified Senate districts also are a product of what generally appears to have been an open, transparent and nonpartisan redistricting process as called for by the current provisions of article XXI.” In other words, the Court was influenced by press accounts and public opinion when deciding what to do with the redistricting mess.

In their stories about the court decision, neither the Los Angeles Times nor Sacramento Bee included a word about the corrupted process. Mike Ward was left out completely.

By the end of the redistricting scandal, Republicans had so badly muddled their message that there was no longer any reference to a corrupted process.

(Related: 10 Ways to improve the Citizens Redistricting Commission.)

JAN. 8, 2012

By JOHN HRABE

California’s 2012 redistricting already is shaking up state and even federal politics. The candidates’ dogfight for the new 26th congressional district could determine whether Democrats or Republicans control the U.S. House of Representatives after the November election — or at least the degree of Republican control.

Rep. Elton Gallegly, R-Simi Valley, announced on Saturday that he’ll retire from Congress. He currently represents the old 24th Congressional District, which was drawn after the 2000 U.S. Census.

Gallegly would have had to run an uphill challenge against Rep. Buck McKeon in the new 25th District, based on the 2010 U.S. Census. McKeon has been in Congress since 1993 and is chairman of the powerful Armed Services Committee.

Gallegly’s other option was a tough general election fight in the 26^th Congressional district. The new Ventura County-based district, which includes Oxnard, Thousand Oaks, Moorpark and Camarillo, gives Democrats a slight voter-registration advantage.

However, the district has conservative tendencies and voted in favor of Proposition 8, California’s anti-gay marriage initiative. According to Redistricting Partners’ analysis of the district, it went handily to Obama in 2008 and slightly favored Whitman in 2010.

Gallegly’s retirement creates the opportunity for several county politicians to make their moves on the long-coveted seat. The Democratic side already features five announced candidates: Ventura County Supervisor Steve Bennett, Moorpark Councilman David Pollock, community activist Zeke Ruelas, businessman David Cruz Thayne and Oxnard Harbor District board member Jess Herrera.

On the Republican side, state Senator Tony Strickland, R-Santa Barbara, could be challenged by County Supervisor Linda Parks, a slow-growth environmental activist.

What to Watch for in CD 26

10. State Senator Tony Strickland Will Clear the Republican Field

Strickland will have the support of the Republican establishment, both in the county and on Capitol Hill. Ventura County’s field of top-tier Republican candidates has winnowed in the past five years. Bob Brooks, a popular Republican county sheriff and close Gallegly friend, passed on the chance to take over the seat in 2006, when Gallegly first flirted with retirement. Tom McClintock, another longtime county Republican stalwart, couldn’t wait for Gallegly’s retirement and moved to a Northern California congressional seat in 2008.

Other than Strickland, there’s only one Republican elected official in Ventura County with grassroots support, name ID and a strong fundraising prowess: County Supervisor Peter Foy. He told me Saturday night that he’s supporting Strickland. It’s perhaps Strickland’s most important local endorsement because it clears Strickland’s right flank.

Ventura County Supervisor Linda Parks, a registered Republican, won’t gain any traction with any of the county’s Republican establishment if she decides to enter the race. Ventura County Republican Chairman Mike Osborn, a close Strickland ally, led the county party’s independent expenditure campaign against Parks in 2010. Republican women proved to be the key voter demographic in that race. Expect the same in this match-up between Tony Strickland and Parks. If Parks is able to make the runoff, Republican women will be the most crucial voting bloc.

On Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., expect House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy, R-Bakersfield, to quickly lock down key endorsements and financial support for Strickland. The Strickland-McCarthy friendship dates back to McCarthy’s tenure as Assembly Republican leader.

Strickland served as an important member of McCarthy’s inner circle in Sacramento, and he’ll want to add Strickland as a loyal member of his team in Washington. (Fun fact: The pair overcame a one-time “young Republican” feud. McCarthy came up through the Bill Thomas machine; Strickland the more conservative crowd. The split was so bad it led to the creation of two separate young Republican organizations.)

9. Left-Wing Fight: Latino Democrat vs. Environmentalist Liberal

The CD 26 race could turn into a nasty fight between a Latino Democrat and a progressive environmentalist. Ruelas and Herrera will fight to be the consensus Latino candidate, while Bennett and Parks jockey to be the environmentalist candidate. (Yes, even though Parks is a registered Republican.) One quarter of the voting age population is Latino. Unless another Latino candidate enters the race, Herrera, a five-term commissioner on the Oxnard Harbor District, likely has the advantage over Ruelas.

The environmentalist battle might be avoided altogether. Bennett and Parks share the same base of anti-growth supporters. Both have served for decades as leaders in the SOAR movement (Save Open-Space and Agricultural Resource). SOAR opposes property rights in favor of protecting obscure wildlife.

In late December, the Ventura County Star reported that Bennett was having second thoughts about the race. If Bennett drops out, he’ll likely support Parks, despite her Republican registration. Bennett has endorsed Parks in the past and even contributed money to her supervisorial campaigns. Expect environmentalists to unite early in an “anyone but Strickland” coalition.

8. Regional Split: West County (Oxnard) vs. East County (Thousand Oaks)

Ventura County’s natural geographic divide is the Conejo Grade.  East County includes Thousand Oaks, Newbury Park and Moorpark. It’s wealthier, more Republican and increasingly moderate.

West County, which includes Port Hueneme, Oxnard and Ventura, is the major source of Democratic votes, due to its working class and primarily Latino population.

The first signs of a geographic split will be internally, between the environmentalists Bennett and Parks. Bennett represents West County; Parks East County. Parks should have the edge because she’ll have support from a broad base of community leaders in the East, while some of Bennett’s Democratic support will go to the Latino consensus candidate. Prior to her election to the county board, Parks served as a member of the Thousand Oaks City Council. Assuming the environmentalist crowd consolidates behind Parks, there’ll still be a geographic split with the Latino candidate from Oxnard.

Strickland has represented all of these areas in either the state Assembly or Senate, with most of his support coming from Camarillo, Moorpark and Thousand Oaks.

7. The Heretofore Unknown Wealthy Republican Who Wants to be Called “Congressman”

Strickland’s biggest competitor for traditional Republican votes could come from the heretofore unknown wealthy Republican who wants to be called “congressman.”

In 2006 and 2008, wealthy attorney and businessman Michael Tenenbaum ran to replace Gallegly. He seized on Gallegly’s “will-he-or-won’t-he” moment to fill that role.

Another wealthy Republican could follow the Tenenbaum model. Gallegly has held the seat for 24 years, so you can expect a few wealthy businessmen to think twice before passing on their chance at a congressional seat.

6. Big Labor Will Decide Who Makes the Runoff

Big Labor will play heavily in this race, but it’s unclear whom they’ll support. Both Parks and Bennett have strong, pro-union records on the Board of Supervisors. Herrera and Ruelas are former and current longshoremen.

Labor could stay out of the primary and keep its powder dry for a general election fight against Strickland. Or, it could decide to get behind the potentially stronger candidate, Parks.  There’s even the possibility that a few unions might consider supporting Strickland.

Whomever Big Labor gets behind will be the candidate to make the runoff.

5. Strickland’s  Pre-Primary GOP Endorsement Undermined by … Tony Strickland

Parks’s Republican registration, despite being in name only, complicates Strickland’s chances for a pre-primary endorsement from the California Republican Party. A party endorsement could provide crucial financial support. During last year’s internal party endorsement debate, party kingpins Jon Fleischman and Mike Schroeder proposed an easy pre-primary endorsement process that would favor conservative candidates. Their plan was defeated in favor of a complicated local convention system.

Under the current party rules, two-thirds of the county central committee members in Los Angeles and Ventura Counties must approve a pre-primary endorsement. Then, two-thirds of the California Republican Party Board of Directors must authorize the endorsement.

It’s a complicated but feasible hurdle for Strickland to overcome. Of course, Strickland has no one to blame but himself. He provided critical support for the more complicated plan. It was the brainchild of none other than McCarthy. The question will be if fringe, anti-Strickland Republicans can marshal enough votes to block an endorsement at the local level.

4. Outside Groups Will Play Heavily in the Race

Environmental groups, labor unions, Indian tribes and business interests will all play in this congressional race. Strickland, a former president of the California chapter of the influential Club for Growth, can expect major support from anti-tax, pro-growth advocates.

Parks is a quintessential RINO — Republican in Name Only. She’ll ignite the ire of anti-tax, anti-union activists throughout the country. Think Dede Scozzafava, the New York Republican politician just appointed to a post by liberal Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo; but Parks sports a record of quashing property rights to save squirrels. The Sierra Club and state public employee unions will play in the race in favor of the consensus liberal candidate.

3. The Most Expensive Congressional Race in California History

If you’re a Republican donor in California, chances are you’ve already received a fundraising pitch from Strickland. It’s been 24 hours since Gallegly announced his retirement. That’s enough time for Strickland to contact several hundred donors.

One of the best fundraisers in the state, I’d look for Strickland to post a massive fundraising number at the end of the first reporting period. (Yes, I just raised expectations.) The combination of Strickland’s fundraising and outside groups will make the 26^th congressional district one of the most expensive races in California history.

2. Linda Parks Will Re-Register as a Democrat

A potential game changer in this race is when Parks re-registers as a Democrat. In a debate, I’d ask Parks to name the last Republican presidential candidate she has supported. (Not that anyone can blame her for abandoning the anti-freedom Sen. John McCain.)

If Parks re-registered as a Democrat, she’d have the formal support of her Democratic friends and allies. Check Parks’s past endorsement record and you’ll find a “Who’s Who” of Democratic activists. It’d be so much easier for her to campaign as a Democrat instead of as a moderate Republican.

If Parks fails to make the runoff, look for her to endorse the Latino Democrat, regardless of her party registration.

1. The Race Will Remain Undecided for Days, Possibly Weeks

Get the lawyers ready for a heated ballot review process in November. It is easier to list the races that “Landslide Tony” has won easily than identify the races he’s barely squeaked out. Most of his victories have been decided weeks after Election Day.

The only race Strickland has won by a comfortable margin was his final re-election to the State Assembly in 2002. In 1998 and 2000, Strickland beat schoolteacher Roz McGrath by a hair. The 2008 state Senate race against former Assemblywoman Hannah Beth Jackson took weeks of ballot checking before a winner was declared.

And then there’ll be the rematch for District 26 in 2014.

Bonus Prediction: Epic Ground War Between Strickland and Parks

The best ground campaign activists in California Republican politics will reunite to run the ground campaign in this race. Strickland has trained a network of activists and should be expected to reinstitute his flop-house walk program. That’s where poor college students are convinced to spend day and night walking for the cause. Look for the best political operatives in conservative politics to forgo their lucrative state salaries and temporarily take LWOP — leave without pay — to support Strickland’s bid.

The Strickland machine will face its toughest test yet in Parks’s environmental operation. Every activist who has chained himself to a tree to save the spotted owl will mobilize to support Parks. She is a serious and credible candidate with high name ID. If she doesn’t re-register as a Democrat, this may be the first and only race to feature a Republican versus Republican general election match-up.

(Full disclosure: The author previously worked for Tony Strickland, a candidate for District 26.)

JAN. 4, 2012

It’s fun to gloat about our great weather when calling freezing relatives Back East on New Year’s Day. And some good things are keeping the sun shining this year.

Silicon Valley’s global technology dominance will continue in 2012. Despite the foolishness of the state, if you’re a young computer code jock from any corner of the world, Californy is still is the place you ought to be. Silicon gold. Transistor tea. Swimming pools. Entrepreneur stars. Billionaires.

It’s like Detroit was for a young engineer in the 1920s. Or Edwards Air Force Base for test pilots in the 1950s. Or Hollywood at any time for a starlet.

If that’s the place to be, then you don’t care about the government, the taxes, the regulations. Nowadays, you can run a computer business from a laptop at Starbucks while living out of your 1999 Corolla.

Indeed, the silicon boom well could bring in so much tax cash in 2012 that the calls for a tax increase will be a lot harder to make come November.

Time of Troubles

But California in 2012 also faces so many problems that many folks will break out the parkas and head for the Bad Weather States to find work.

For the good news, the record $13 billion tax increase departed Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law in 2009 expired in 2011. It’s not returning in 2012. Although voters might approve a new tax for 2013.

The Schwarzenegger tax certainly is part of the reason why unemployment in California rose from 10.1 percent in January 2009, the month before the tax increase, to 12.5 percent in December 2010 — a 2.4 percentage-point increase.

But in January 2011, the tax increases began to fall off. In that month, Schwarzenegger’s income tax increase expired. In July, the sales tax increase expired.

That’s much of the reason why, in 2011, things got better as the tax receded. The unemployment rate fell steadily throughout the year, from 12.4 percent in January 2011 to 11.3 percent in November 2011, the latest month available.

True, the national economy improved as well, partly because of the new payroll tax cut that was just extended. But California’s unemployment, although still second-highest in the nation after Nevada, improved faster.

This is shown in the following graph. It uses the “Jobs Gap” calculation I came up with two years ago. Notice the green line at the bottom.

Receding ‘Jobs Gap’

In January 2011, there was a 3.4 percentage-point “Jobs Gap,” as I call it, between California and the United States as a whole. U.S. unemployment was just 9 percent, but California’s was 12.4 percent — hence the Jobs Gap.

By November 2011, U.S. unemployment had dropped to 8.6 percent. But California’s had dropped to 11.3 percent. That produced a 2.7 percentage-point Jobs Gap for November.

That means our unemployment rate improved 0.7 percentage-point faster than did the overall U.S. economy.

Throughout the year, Republicans in the Legislature remained solid, for once, in resisting tax increases pushed on them. In this case, the tax increases were advanced by Gov. Jerry Brown, the Democratic Legislature and the powerful government-worker unions.

Brown campaigned all year, pulling out every rhetorical trick for increasing taxes, such as calling his major anti-tax opponents the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (picture above).

Clearly, Californians enjoyed having a little more change jingling in their pockets. They used the money not just to buy more Christmas goodies for their kids. They also used it to feed their families. And some used it to invest in new business and jobs creation.

For 2012, Californians know they will enjoy the whole year without a state tax increase. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that state tax increases hang over 2012 like the Sword of Damocles (pictured at right). And at the national level, no one knows who will be president in 12 months, or what his economic policies will be.

Short-Term Thinking

But as my colleague Steven Greenhut noted, if things continue to get a little better (but not a lot better), people likely will forget that state has some big structural problems.

One is an over-reliance on the income and capital gains taxes that flow like Niagra Falls during boom times, but dry up during bad times. This was analyzed in a 2005 report by the Legislative Analyst, “Revenue Volatility in California.”

The following chart from the report shows what happened:

Note how tax revenues from both stock options and capital gains soared during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, then crashed when the dot-com boom burned into the dot-com bust.

The chart stops before something similar happened during the real-estate bubble of the mid-2000s, which burst in 2007.

The volatility shows the folly of increasing taxes on “the rich.” During boom times, that seems to work. The Silicon Valley boys rake in the cash. The government skims off 10.3 percent of it — or 12.3 percent if Brown’s proposed new tax increase is enacted. The state then blows all the money.

Then the stock market crashes, as in the dot-com crash, and the revenues stop flowing in. But the spending remains at the high level from the boom. Then calls for more tax increases flow in.

This volatility often is used as a reason to attack Proposition 13, which limits increases in property taxes to 2 percent per year. Usually this comes in the form of pushing for a “split roll” on property taxes, with Prop. 13 applying only to home ownership, not business property.

The argument is that soaking business property is a lot more stable than relying on the ups and downs of the stock portfolios of Silicon Valley gearheads.

But once Prop. 13 is breached for business property, it soon would be breached for wealthy homeowners, then for everyone. Prop. 13 remains the bulwark of tax sanity in a state otherwise locked in an asylum basement.

Overspending

But the real problem is not that, in each boom, the state overspent. Governors, legislators and the powerful government-workers unions never learn. They always assume that the good times will continue rolling forever.

During the height of the dot-com boom, Gov. Gray Davis increased general-fund spending 15 percent in fiscal 1999-2000 and another 15 percent in 2000-01. And during the height of the real estate bubble, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger increased general-fund spending 15 percent for fiscal 2005-06 and another 10 percent for 2006-07.

If we have even a modest recovery in 2012, there’s every reason to believe that Gov. Jerry Brown will spend all of it, too, putting nothing away for a rainy day — or a bust. He blew his chance a year ago to put California’s fiscal house in order. He should have pushed for a state version of the flat-tax he proposed in his 1992 presidential bid, a restoration of the Gann Limit on spending he championed 30 years ago, or both.

Fortunately, a spending limit similar to Gann is being advanced and could be on the November ballot.

Brown wasted 2011 on his tax-increase obsession. And he is planning on doing the same in 2012. His State of the State address and budget proposal this month will be geared to push his tax increase.

Tax Increase 2012?

For political junkies, in addition to the presidential election, 2012 looks to be a battle royale on tax increases in California. Not just Brown, but several others are pushing new assaults on taxpayers.

Brown wants $7 billion for schools and public safety.

There’s the Think Long committee’s short-sighted proposal to boost taxes $10 billion, combined with some reform of the tax structure to address revenue volatility. Made up of billionaires, the committee might better spend its time reviving, and booking a gig on, “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.”

Molly Munger wants $10 billion for education and deficit reduction.

And the California Federation of Teachers is seeking a $6 billion tax on millionaires.

There will be others.

Maybe the millionaires and billionaires who favor tax increases should just cough up the cash voluntarily and spare the rest of us an election and higher taxes on the middle class.

More Cuts Needed

What often is overlooked is that more waste easily could be a wrung from the wasteful state budget. Start with cutting all the über-Politically Correct college and university courses that cost millions while advancing anti-intellectualism on campus, as Stan Brin described last week.

And the Cal State system is so top-heavy that it actually has more administrators than professors. Reports Michael Barone:

“Take the California State University system, the second tier in that state’s public higher education. Between 1975 and 2008, the number of full-time faculty members rose by 3 percent, to 12,019 positions. During those same years, the number of administrators rose 221 percent, to 12,183. That’s right: There are more administrators than teachers at Cal State now.”

Forced to slash budgets, Cal State, instead of cutting administrative bloat, increased student tuition 9 percent.

No wonder kids are graduating college with $100,000 or more in debt. It’s party time for administrators but indentured servitude for the student-serfs — who also must pay high taxes if they remain in the state. What a racket.

Next, pension reform is essential — and not just the tinkering around the edges proposed by Gov. Brown.

As the latest Stanford University study shows, the state’s pension liability has soared to $497.9 billion. Unless something is done to cut that amount, even taxing millionaires 100 percent won’t be enough to reduce budget deficits.

Schools for Scandal

And something needs to be done about the state’s failing schools, which score close to the bottom on standardized tests. For example, on the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress, California scored 46th among the states in fourth-grade reading, 49th for eight-grade reading, 46th on fourth-grade math and 48th on eight-grade math.

For the high-tech center of the universe, that’s just appalling. If the state had its act together, it would act like the owner of an 0-16 NFL team and fire the whole management. But teacher and administrator contracts don’t allow that.

Still, some reforms are advancing. Charter schools remain popular. And my friend Martha Montelongo has featured several reformers on her Gadfly Radio show, Tuesday nights at 8:00 pm on LaTalkRadio.com, in which I usually participate.

Martha recently featured Yolie Flores, a former reform member of the school board of the Los Angeles Unified School District. Flores now is CEO of Communities for Teaching Excellence, which promotes putting parents and kids ahead of unions and administrators, while emphasizing effective teaching.

All of the major tax-increase proposals are aimed at boosting school spending. But with the schools so broken, it’s like buying used Yugo and installing a new digital navigation system in it.

Moreover, despite claims to the contrary, California school spending has risen in recent years. A 2010 Pepperdine University study showed that school spending actually soared 21 percent from fiscal 2003-04 to 2008-09.

And the extra money went for administrators, not teachers. For example, in 2008-09, Oakland Unified spent a generous $12,946 per pupil. But just 35 percent of that went to classroom instruction, with 65 percent going to administration.

The schools have administered programs to get kids off junk food and slim down. But it’s the schools themselves that are gorged with fat administrative staffs.

As with colleges and universities, wasteful administration has devoured budgets. More taxes would only feed the beast.

Perhaps 2012 will be the year that reforms by Flores and others will be demanded by parents and forced on sclerotic school systems.

The Radiant Future

California is supposed to lead the world into a Radiant Future, to use a Leninist phrase. That certainly was the boosterism promoted by Gov. Schwarzenegger as he “terminated” the state’s problems by making them worse. Well, at least that poseur is gone. But under him, California’s middle class shrank to less than half the population, as the state nosedived toward Third World status.

The problem in 2012 is that the state government, like the U.S. government, is refusing to acknowledge that its past mistakes have caused today’s discontent. Past budget splurges should require whatever budget cuts are necessary to get out of the red and back to the black. Taxes should be streamlined along the lines of Art Laffer’s flat-tax idea.

Instead, the state is stuck in a “Back to the Future” nightmare in which a revanchist Gov. Brown tries to recreate the Atari Democrat technofuturism of his salad days as governor three decades ago.

But the reality of the here and now in 2012 is of most Californians struggling to keep a grip on middle-class hopes and dreams as the government keeps pounding them down into the ranks of the unemployed and the homeless.

By DAVE ROBERTS

Strange bedfellows — the Libertarian, Green, and Peace and Freedom parties — joined last week to file a lawsuit seeking to overturn Proposition 14, which has replaced political party-centered elections in California with open primaries and “top two” runoff general elections.

Prop. 14, which was labeled the “Top Two Candidates Open Primary Act,” was approved by 54 percent of the voters in June 2010. With just 40 signatures, anyone can now run for office in a primary election and receive the votes of anyone, regardless of party affiliation. If no one receives a majority vote, the top two vote-getters, regardless of party affiliation (or lack thereof), will contest in the general election.

Naturally, California’s six political parties have opposed this electoral castration — perhaps the first time they agreed on anything. Besides the three parties mentioned above, the challengers include the American Independent Party and the two major parties, the Republicans and Democrats.

Thus far in a few special elections, the top-two process has had negligible impact, but it will kick into high gear in the 2012 elections.

Two lawsuits challenging aspects of Prop. 14 were previously filed. The latest suit’s Nov. 21 filing in Alameda County Superior Court goes to the heart of top-two voting, seeking to kill it before it kills the state’s minor parties. The 18-page complaint makes a variety of arguments:

* Prop. 14 denies voters their fundamental right of choice and violates the 1st and 14th Amendments “by precluding small party candidates from the general election ballot.” In a 1964 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court declared, “The right to vote freely for the candidate of one’s choice is of the essence of a democratic society, and any restrictions on that right strike at the heart of representative government.”

* Election officials are required to grant access to the general election ballot to small political parties. Officials can require parties to show support, but they can’t require support from more than 5 percent of the electorate, according to case law. Prop. 14 allows candidates who receive as much as 33 percent of the votes in a primary to be denied participation in the general election (the top two candidates could each receive 33.5 percent).

* Prop. 14 prevents small political parties from effective political association by limiting their access to the general election ballot.

* By allowing candidates to designate a “preferred” political party on the ballot without that party’s approval, Prop. 14 undercuts parties’ trademarks, freedoms of speech and association and distorts their messages. The U.S. Supreme Court in 2000 ruled that a “corollary of the right to associate is the right not to associate. … In no area is the political association’s right to exclude more important than in the process of selecting its nominee.”

* Prop. 14 violates federal elections law by altering the way U.S. senators and representatives are elected. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled, “The Framers intended the Elections Clause to create procedural regulations, not to provide States with license to exclude classes of candidates from federal office.”

Voter Confusion

The suit also points out that the new system can create confusion for voters who “are not able to distinguish between candidates who are the official standard-bearers of a political party and those who may not actually represent a party’s interests.” That misperception may be reinforced by the fact that candidates declaring the same party preference are grouped together on the ballot.

A top-two electoral system was approved in Washington State in 2004. It was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. Justice Antonin Scalia, in a dissenting opinion, concluded that it “does not merely place the ballot off limits for party building; it makes the ballot an instrument by which party building is impeded, permitting unrebutted associations that the party does not itself approve. Not only is the party’s message distorted, but its goodwill is hijacked.”

The lawsuit against Prop. 14 states that “the potential for dilution of the party’s ‘brand’ or identity is even more pernicious” for minor parties, which already have limited membership. If their support diminishes, they face potential elimination from even being referenced on the ballot by candidates they support. The threshold for a party to place candidates on the ballot prior to Prop. 14 was 1 percent of the total registration, or receiving 2 percent of the vote in a statewide race during a gubernatorial election.

Because very few minor party candidates have won office, particularly in statewide or national elections, the main advantage of the pre-Prop. 14 system was that it provided a platform at candidate forums, in ballot pamphlets and media coverage for minor parties to get their message out during the general election, when most voters are tuned in.

‘Chilling Effect’ on Freedom

The lawsuit contends that “Prop. 14 operates to preclude voters from minor political parties from effective civic engagement at the most important stage of the electoral process.” The consequence is that small parties “have suffered a ‘chilling effect’ on their rights of political association.” Fewer minor party candidates have launched campaigns due to the belief that they “no longer have a realistic chance to appear on a general election ballot.” As a result, “the small parties themselves suffer a threat of diminution or even destruction.”

The suit asks the court to declare Prop. 14 unconstitutional under the 1st and 14th Amendments because it “severely burdens voter, candidate and party rights without fulfilling a compelling or even significant state interest.” And it seeks an injunction to prevent Prop. 14 from being enforced.

Tough Going

However, thus far it’s been tough going in the courts for those opposed to top-two elections.

In July 2010, Richard Winger, a Libertarian who has been fighting for increased ballot access for decades, and five others filed a suit against Senate Bill 6, which paved the way for Prop. 14. SB 6 was passed in the middle of the night on Feb. 19, 2009 at the behest of then-state Sen. Abel Maldonado, a Republican, who required it in exchange for supporting the tax increase embedded in the budget package worked out between the Democratic leadership in the legislature and the-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, also a Republican.

Maldonado now is using the Prop. 14 system in his bid for a seat in the U.S. Congress.

Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Pacoima, spoke against it, noting that a similar top-two proposition had failed four years earlier and that numerous groups from Common Cause to the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association to the teachers unions were opposed to it because it reduced voter choice in the general election.

Sen. Mark Wyland, R-Carlsbad, agreed, saying, “It’s important to give voters a fair chance to elect the candidate that they want. Strong visionary parties are absolutely essential to democracy. This undermines that. This is not the right way to empower voters, because it undermines the key element of democracy, which is the party system.”

Maldonado responded that democracy would benefit by being freed from the dysfunctional, partisan politics endemic to the party system. “When I was mayor and a city councilman in Santa Maria, I didn’t run as a Republican or a Democrat,” he said. “When we worked together, we didn’t get into closed session and say, ‘Let’s pave the other side of the town because that’s where the Republicans live or let’s put in a stop sign in this area because Democrats lived there.’ We worked hard together to do what’s right for that city. If the people have an opportunity to vote for this [Prop. 14], it’s groundbreaking, it’s historic and will move California in the right direction.”

Write-Ins Discarded

The anti-SB 6 lawsuit, Field v. Bowen, contested the requirement that write-in votes in runoff elections be discarded as well as the prevention of some candidates from listing their party affiliation or preference on the ballot. In December 2010, the California Supreme Court declined to block the implementation of Prop. 14. An appeal of the write-in provision was rejected in September, with the court ruling that it was based on an erroneous premise “that SB 6 allows votes that cannot be counted to be lawfully cast.”

Another lawsuit, Chamness v. Bowen, filed in February, was rejected by a federal trial court in August. Chamness wanted to be designated as a Coffee Party or independent candidate in the special election to replace Jane Harman in the 36th Congressional District. Because the Coffee Party is not a state-recognized party and the “independent” ballot designation is not allowed, he was labeled “no party preference.”

The judge ruled that the candidate’s speech was “burdened” by not being able to label himself as he chose on the ballot, but that “this burden is not severe.” In addition, the state has a legitimate interest in distinguishing between qualified and non-qualified political parties and in avoiding confusing or misleading party preference ballot designations. The decision has been appealed.

In an earlier setback for top-two opponents, the U.S. Supreme Court in March 2008 ruled against the Democratic and Republican parties, which were seeking to overturn Washington State’s top-two electoral process. The court said the parties did not prove that voters would automatically and perhaps mistakenly assume that the top two candidates represented their parties.

Undeterred, opponents are determined to battle to the end in the belief that if they don’t, it may be the end anyway.

One of the stranger bedfellows in American politics the past 40 years, Ralph Nader, in a rant in support of last week’s lawsuit filing, said, “Ballot access obstacles are not enough for the monetized minds of corporations. Better, they say, to abolish election day altogether for minor parties and independent candidates. What’s next for the corporate supremacists, who misled and lied to the people to get their vote for Prop 14? When will the people awake and repeal it?”

NOV. 11, 2011

By STEVEN GREENHUT

To say that the unions have undue influence in the California Legislature, as many critics allege, is to understate the problem. The unions – and the public sector ones in particular – don’t just control the Legislature. They are the Legislature. Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, previously worked as an attorney for a public sector union. Assembly Speaker John Perez, D-Los Angeles, is best known as the union organizer who led the Southern California grocery strikes of 2003-2004.

The Democratic Party, which controls every state constitutional office and holds strong majorities in both houses of the Legislature, functions as the cat’s paw for the unions. Gov. Jerry Brown was elected with the help of a record-setting $30 million in expenditures from the state’s unions, and despite disappointing them on a handful of matters including an encouraging new pension-reform proposal, has governed largely as their advocate in Sacramento.

So even as California sinks under the weight of an unfunded pension liability estimated by Stanford University to be as high as a half-trillion dollars, and even as various cities teeter on the brink of bankruptcy, there is little or no appetite for serious reform in the state Capitol. Pension reform has been a non-starter despite some modest criticism by legislative leaders of some of the more outrageous pension abuses. To illustrate how extreme the situation is, a 2010 proposal to strip pensions from government employees convicted of on-the-job felonies couldn’t even get a hearing. As Republican insiders told me, the unions exerted their political muscle by saying that such a measure was unfair to the families of the felons – and the legislation was pulled.

Instead of paring back union benefits and rooting out various abuses, ranging from those double-dipping DROP programs (Defined Retirement Option Plan) to “airtime” benefits that allow employees to buy additional retirement credits at a fraction of the cost to the taxpayer, the state Legislature continues to, at best, nibble around the edges of reform and even in some cases expand benefits, in the case of those cancer and heart-attack presumptions for public safety workers. Once, when asked what it is he ultimately wants for his members, a union president retorted, “more.” But despite lean times – in a state where unemployment averages above 12 percent, and where those numbers often exceed 20 percent in rural locales – the unions continue to implement more aspects of their benefit-expanding agenda.

GOVERNOR BROWN TILTS TOWARD UNIONS

Many observers had hoped that an aging Gov. Brown, back as the governor after a decades-long hiatus, would want to create a legacy rather than become too closely aligned with any interest groups. There was the much-discussed “Nixon goes to China” references to Brown, who could be the one person with the credibility to stand up to the unions that are a stumbling block to the state’s fiscal improvement. In a New York Times article before Brown’s victory over Republican billionaire Meg Whitman, Democratic consultant Chris Lehane echoed this common viewpoint, “He may be a career politician, but nothing about him has ever been conventional. If he is able to get through a lot of obstacles — and that is a big if — he could be the right person at this time, the sort of Nixon-goes-to-China way.”

Yet a year into his governorship, Brown has functioned in a “Nixon goes to San Clemente” way. He is less the unconventional politician and more a traditional pro-union politician. Brown is an interesting character, who offers varied rhetoric and prides himself on his Canoe Theory of Politics (paddle a little to the Left, then a little to the Right), but until very recently he failed to confront the unions.

As the Los Angeles Times reported after the close of the legislative session: “When the dust settled on Gov. Jerry Brown‘s first legislative session in nearly three decades, no group had won more than organized labor, which heralded its largest string of victories in nearly a decade. At the urging of the food workers’ union, Brown agreed to crack down on the use of automated checkout machines in grocery stores. At firefighters’ request, he approved new restrictions on local governments seeking to void union contracts. He guaranteed wages for workers in public libraries that are privatized — a bill sponsored by another labor group. … ‘Finally, after seven long years of [Gov. Arnold] Schwarzenegger, we’re moving in the right direction again,’ said Steve Smith, a spokesman for the California Labor Federation.”

Brown did, however, surprise most Sacramento observers when on Oct. 27 he introduced a 12-point pension-reform plan that goes much further than most Democrats and Republicans expected. The response from Sen. Bob Huff, R-Diamond Bar, the GOP caucus chairman, epitomizes this viewpoint: “The governor’s admission today that California is not on a sustainable path when it comes to unfunded pension liabilities is a refreshing step in the right direction. While I believe that all of the governor’s proposed reforms should be placed on the ballot for voter approval, I am ready to support his ideas to rein in costs by raising the mandatory retirement age for all new employees and the adoption of a hybrid risk-sharing plan. These proposals are similar to what Senate Republicans brought to the governor last year, and I believe the governor is on the right path.”

Specifically, the Brown plan – which still must get pushed through a Democratic-controlled Legislature – would raise the retirement age for non-public-safety new hires from 55 to 67, increase employee health-care contributions, ban “airtime” and other pension-spiking methods, and create a mandatory hybrid system for new retirees that apparently applies to public-safety categories also. Unfortunately, as my colleague John Seiler wrote in CalWatchdog, the details are left for a study and who knows what the study will conclude? Brown also calls for an initiative to change the nature of a retirement fund board in the wake of myriad scandals. The good news: the unions already are complaining.

Republicans called for a special session, but Brown rebuffed that idea.

San Diego Councilman Carl DeMaio, known for his statewide pension reform activism, said, “It takes some baby steps forward. But in the end, it’s completely inadequate for protecting taxpayers. It’s deja vu because it’s not reforming existing pensions.” And the pension liability doesn’t go away by reforming things only for new hires.

The Brown pension plan comes against a backdrop of his many pro-union bill signings. As I reported in the Orange County Register: “For instance, the governor signed a bill that makes it nearly impossible for municipalities to declare bankruptcy, forcing them instead to go through a mediation process that is dominated by union supporters who would oppose bankruptcy at all costs. Salaries and benefits are consuming such a large portion of city budgets that officials have no choice but to shut down parks and lay off workers. The unions won’t budge on benefits, so their goal is to make it impossible to abrogate those overly generous union contracts that are the source of the problem.”

Furthermore, the governor signed SB 202, which pushes citizen initiative measures to November general election ballots, thus undermining one of the key measures Californians have to tackle union power – the initiative process. The unions control the governor’s office and the Legislature, so reform can only come at the ballot box. Limiting initiatives to the general election makes it that much harder to qualify initiatives for the ballot and that much easier for big players, such as the unions, to dominate the process and squelch direct democracy.

Brown claims to be promoting democracy – at least that’s his explanation as he pushes Californians to approve new taxes and promotes a measure that would make it easier for localities to pass taxes. But the governor doesn’t like democracy when it comes to bans on those union-only Project Labor Agreements for public works projects. He signed a law that stops local governments from banning PLAs. At the bidding of the police unions, Brown vetoed a bill that was supported overwhelmingly by Democrats and Republicans in both houses of the Legislature.

It would have overturned a recent state Supreme Court ruling that allows police to search everything on an arrestee’s cell phone – a troubling development given the amount of information and number of databases available in a modern smart phone. By allowing police unlimited ability to search these phones, the court has given them unlimited ability to go on fishing expeditions of, say, a reporter’s databases if that reporter were arrested for any reason. The bill would have required a warrant, but Brown did what the unions asked him to do.

Brown signed a deal with the powerful prison-guards union that made it clear that he would not be standing up for taxpayers. As I wrote in City Journal: “The state’s old contract with CCPOA allowed retiring prison guards to collect a payout for up to 80 unused vacation days. In practice, that limit was often unenforced—but the new contract removes it altogether, letting guards bank an unlimited amount of vacation time. That will make it much easier to retire with six-figure payouts. Already, as a Sacramento Bee story has revealed, some state employees have walked away with as much as $800,000 in banked vacation time; the new CCPOA contract will make that more common. In fact, the San Francisco Chronicle reports that guards and their supervisors have 33 million vacation hours banked, which could cost taxpayers $1 billion or more. All this is in addition to prison guards’ ‘3 percent at 50’ retirement arrangement, which allows them to retire as young as 50 with up to 90 percent of their final year’s pay—and the guards commonly spike those generous pensions with various gimmicks, such as filing disability claims shortly before retirement.”

Brown also signed legislation to crack down on contraband cell phones that make their way to prison gangs. But the bill completely ignores the main source of those illegal phones – prison guards who take bribes and sneak them in. The California Correctional Peace Officers Association refuses to allow the guards to be searched unless they are paid for additional time.

Here we see that union power does more than impose financial costs on California taxpayers. It restricts accountability by public officials. It makes it nearly impossible to debate policy issues in terms of what’s best for the public. Such debates – ranging from pensions for felons to police searches of phones to keeping contraband out of prisons – don’t get much of a hearing when a dominant interest group flexes its muscle.

DEPTH OF THE PENSION PROBLEM

When Stanford University analyzed the state’s pension problem, it argued that the state’s main pension funds should use a discount rate of 4.1 percent in determining the size of the unfunded pension liability or debt. In the private sector, of course, most employees receive 401/k-style defined-contribution plans. The employer will, for instance, promise to match a certain percentage of the employee’s pay and place that in a retirement account. When the market goes up, the employee’s account grows and when it falls, obviously it too falls.

By contrast, most public sector employees receive defined-benefit plans. They are promised a defined level of benefit based on a formula regardless of how the stock market performs. Taxpayers are backing the promises made by politicians and must pay up if the pension fund investments don’t perform as promised. In California, these formulas can be rich. For instance, public safety officials receive the most generous formulas, including the common “3 percent at 50” formula. Police, deputy sheriffs, firefighters, prison guards and an expanding list of safety officials (such as lifeguards, who can earn more than $200,000 a year in Orange County) can retire at age 50 with benefits equaling 3 percent of their final year’s pay times the number of years worked. If an officer begins his police career at age 20, that means he can retire at age 50 with 90 percent of his final year’s pay – and that’s before the various pension-spiking gimmicks that can push those numbers even higher. In most California communities, firefighter pay and benefit packages average more than $170,000 a year, so these are expensive for taxpayers.

The agency that hires the employees and the employees contribute a portion of their salary into the pension funds, which then invest the money. In many instances, the agency – i.e., the taxpayer – pays the employer and the employee portion of the contribution. Especially with public safety, the employee often contributes nothing to his own retirement plan. Investment income is supposed to pay for the future pensions, so this becomes a guessing game.

The pension funds estimate the highest-possible rates of return on their investments because the higher the discount rate the less the predicted liability. The nation’s largest pension fund, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) estimates that its investments will earn 7.75 percent a year for the next 30 years, which strikes most observers as optimistic. The goal of CalPERS and the public employee unions are to minimize the size of the problem so that politicians do not tinker with the generous pensions they receive.

In an April 2010 study called “Going for Broke,” Stanford University suggested using the risk-free rate of 4.1 percent to determine the true unfunded pension liability for the state’s three major pension funds. According to the report, “Adjusting the discount rate used on liabilities to a risk-free rate, we estimate the combined funding shortfall of CalPERS, CalSTRS, and UCRS prior to the 2008/2009 recession at $425.2 billion (see Table 2). At the time of this writing, the funds have not released more recent financial reports, but due to the previously mentioned $109.7 billion loss the three funds collectively sustained, we estimate the current shortfall at more than half a trillion dollars.”

CalPERS was aghast at this study and its officials have been blasting it ever since, even though it was produced by a highly respected academic institution and its research was led by a well-known former Democratic state legislator who has taken particular interest in the pension crisis.

Ironically, as I reported recently in the Orange County Register, CalPERS’ own numbers actually make the case for an even lower discount rate than the one used in the Stanford study: “When the taxpayer is backing up the entire liability for the pensions received by members of the California Public Employees Retirement System, then CalPERS officials are exuberant about the stock market. They insist that a predicted rate of return of 7.75 percent is perfectly realistic. When their own funds are on the line, however, CalPERS can be extremely conservative as it embraces one of the lowest annual return rates imaginable: 3.8 percent.”

The latter number is what CalPERS uses when it pays localities that are interested in exiting the CalPERS plan. It’s the “rubber meets the road” number CalPERS uses when its own funds, rather than our funds, are on the line. It also is vindication that the Stanford study is on the mark and that the state’s unfunded liability is higher than expected. Former Orange County Treasurer Chriss Street pins that number at nearly $900 billion if the 3.8 percent figure is used.

But thanks to union power, reform has gone nowhere in the Capitol and even the discussions about reform – and local initiative-based reform measures – deal almost solely with new hires. But reforming pensions only for new hires doesn’t stave off economic problems. During one state Senate hearing about a Republican-backed pension reform measure last year that would have lowered pensions and increased contributions for new state employees, Democrats objected by arguing that it wouldn’t do anything anyway – it would be too many years down the road before savings would be realized. They weren’t arguing for a tougher measure that lowered pensions for current employees. Rather they wanted to do nothing. They said that this issue ought to be resolved at the negotiating table. Never mind that unions control both sides of that table, especially at the local governmental level.

The unions essentially elect their own bosses. In many local pension negotiations, the employees who supposedly represent that taxpayer are actually members of the union that sits at the other side of the negotiating table. They have every incentive to negotiate a deal that improves their benefits regardless of what it means for taxpayers. These negotiations are done in closed session, so the public rarely learns about the deals until it’s almost too late to organize to stop them. City council members and supervisors love to gain the union endorsements and to pose next to the squad cars and fire trucks. The average citizen hardly has a chance.

TACKLING REFORM AT THE BALLOT BOX

The pension issue won’t be fixed at the negotiating table. In California, which has liberal rules governing the initiative process, the only hope for reform is direct democracy. Last November, for instance, eight out of nine local pension-reform initiatives were approved by voters. The one losing measure was in liberal San Francisco, and this November’s election is dominated by pension reform even in that city.

In San Francisco, voters will choose between Proposition C, the “city family” measure backed by the establishment and the city’s public-sector unions, and Proposition D, a more hard-hitting measure championed by Public Defender Jeff Adachi, who also is a candidate for mayor.

The city establishment has rigged the game to ensure C’s passage. As I wrote for City Journal: “Prop. D is clearly the better of the two initiatives, which is why city officials are taking no chances that Adachi’s reforms will prevail over the establishment’s compromise half-measure. Mayor Lee pulled a sneaky behind-the-scenes stunt to ensure that Adachi’s measure would be less effective, even if it wins the most votes. Under a memorandum of understanding Lee negotiated with the police and firefighter unions in July, most of the city’s highest-paid workers would be exempt from the provisions of Prop. D that require higher pension-contribution rates. Despite an exposé by the San Francisco Examiner and ensuing controversy, the city’s board of supervisors unanimously approved the memorandum. Adachi rightly was appalled at the anti-democratic nature of a secret deal exempting particular classes of public workers from a ballot measure that the public hasn’t even had a chance to consider. He also was angered at the way the city’s controller, a Lee ally, skewed a supposedly independent analysis of the two measures to minimize the expected savings from Prop. D.”

The San Francisco Chronicle argued that “Neither would come close to covering the escalating general-fund obligation to meet promised pensions and health-care coverage for retired city workers.” But instead of siding with the more far-reaching measure, it backed Prop. C because that proposition has backing from the establishment and is less divisive. But given the degree to which pensions are consuming public budgets, officials in San Francisco and elsewhere are going to have to embrace measures that cut deeply into the problem.

Adachi, a progressive Democrat, has been making the progressive case for pension reform. In his view, unless San Franciscans cut back on millionaire’s pensions for public employees (a person would indeed need several million dollars saved to receive these six-figure cost-of-living adjusted deals), then the city will face a continued decline in the quality of life and in the quality of services there. David Crane, the liberal Democrat who was former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s chief pension adviser, said at a Senate hearing: “One cannot both be a progressive and be opposed to pension reform.  The math is irrefutable that the losers from excessive and unfunded pensions are precisely the programs progressive Democrats tend to applaud. Those programs are being driven out of existence by rising pension costs.”

Instead of embracing modest reform, Californians might soon need to listen to the reform-oriented official government watchdog called the Little Hoover commission, earlier this year “urged the Governor and the Legislature to establish the legal authority for the state and local governments to freeze pension benefits for current workers. The Commission recommends that, going forward, current workers accrue benefits under more sustainable pension plans. Payments to current retirees would not be affected.”

This was a groundbreaking suggestion. We’re not talking about stripping pensions from current retirees or changing the retirement formula going backward – even though unions have repeatedly succeeded in increasing pension benefits retroactively. Little Hoover simply is calling for the state to do what many private-sector companies have done: Make good on pension promises up until today, then implement a new, lower benefit tier starting tomorrow. Unless this is done, the current unfunded liability will not be addressed and pension and other retiree benefits will continue to consume an ever-larger portion of city budgets.

CUTTING PENSIONS OR CUTTING SERVICES

After Vallejo, Calif., went bankrupt – the result of excessive pensions and pay packages, including average compensation of more than $170,000 a year for firefighters and a $300,000 pay package for a police captain – the city had to shutter fire stations, parks and community centers and reduce the police force by a third. Citizens were warned to use the 9-1-1 system only in the most dire emergencies. So as governments pay too much to public employees, the services the public receives are greatly diminished. The Sacramento Bee once opined that city governments are becoming pension providers that offer services on the side.

The problem has been bipartisan. Although the state’s Democrats are most closely aligned with the unions, at the local level Republicans have been particularly eager to expand pay and benefits for police and firefighters.

Meanwhile, the state’s key pension reform activists have not been able to agree on a pension reform initiative, which leaves reform to the local level. A Paycheck Protection measure is going forward, however, which would limit the ability of unions to tap their members’ paychecks for political funds without them first opting in. The new measure includes restrictions on corporate donations also as a way to blunt some of the expected criticism from the Left.

And the SEIU has been dispatching action teams to places where signature-gatherers are collecting signatures for this measure in an effort to confront and even intimidate voters away from signing the petition. Unions still like to flex their muscle, whether at the Capitol or in front of grocery stores. Researchers at union-backed think tanks affiliated with the University of California have produced easily debunked studies that claim to show that public sector workers earn less than their private-sector counterparts. Clearly, they are fighting back as public opinion shifts in favor of pension reform.

Reformers are winning the debate but losing the policy battle thanks to the deep roots the union movement has sunk in California. It’s hard to overcome a union-backed governor, a union-owned Legislature and big union money that come into play during statewide initiative battles. But running out of money focuses the mind, which seems to explain Gov. Brown’s pension-reform proposal. As states and municipalities go broke, elected officials will have no choice but to reform overly generous pension deals for public employees and not just for new hires.

Steven Greenhut is director of the Pacific Research Institute’s Journalism Center in Sacramento. He is editor in chief of www.CalWatchdog.com, a columnist for the Orange County Register, a contributing editor to City Journal California and author of Plunder! How Public Employee Unions Are Raiding Treasuries, Controlling Our Lives And Bankrupting the Nation (2009 The Forum Press).

By WAYNE LUSVARDI

Can “flash mobs” strike Caliifornia as they have Milwaukee and other cities? Are the London riots a precursor to a repeat of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, perhaps this time in other cities as well?

In Pasadena, activists and the local newspapers have created hysteria about hate graffiti found on cars at a local public housing project and on mailboxes at a local post office in a minority neighborhood. According to the Pasadena Star-News:

“On Aug. 8, anti-Semitic images and slurs aimed at blacks were found in and around the Kings Village apartment complex.

“On Sunday, vandals used a black marker to leave a message targeting Latinos on curb planters.

“Police have no leads, and clues indicate that the two incidents were not done by the same group.

“ ‘We don’t believe (the incidents) to be related,’ police Lt. Tracey Ibarra said. “It wasn’t spray paint in the second incident, which is what was used in first incident.”

The graffiti are reprehensible.  Yet, no group, gang or anonymous individual has claimed responsibility for the graffiti. Nor are the police reporting the graffiti messages indicate the signature style or wording of a known gang.

Social Context

There is no indication that this graffiti is anything more than adolescent misbehavior.  But the social context probably tells us more about what this incident means.

While the hate graffiti are being investigated, we have to be careful. As sociologist James Davison Hunter writes in his book, “To Change the World: Irony, Tragedy and Possibility in the Late Modern World,” American society has a tendency toward a victimization culture partly incentivized by the welfare state and misguided religion. There is a sociological theory called Symbolic Interaction that says that groups often communicate with one another indirectly through symbols. Symbolic meaning derives from group social interaction.

This might explain why a community meeting on these hate crimes was being held at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena for widespread media coverage, rather than at a local church, park or other venue. The newspapers are curiously reporting the rally at the Rose Bowl focused on “unity” rather than concern about hate crimes.

In 2004, Claremont College psychology professor Kerri Dunn infamously claimed her car was vandalized and spray-painted with racist messages after she spoke at a forum on racism.  It was later found that it was a hoax perpetrated by the so-called victim. Dunn was later convicted of insurance fraud and filing a false police report and sentenced to one year in jail.

At stake in the Kerri Dunn case were racial, gender and ethnic quotas for professors at the Claremont Colleges. Dunn was trying to get special job protections for minority and women teachers by claiming that they were victims of racism.

Public Housing Problem

It’s possible that the recent Pasadena graffiti incidents might originate in the local neighborhood and not from outsiders.

But whatever is discovered about the hate crimes, an important discussion is needed about the sustainability of public housing in Pasadena. In the London riots, the “austerity” budget of new Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron has been blamed, although he denies it.

Those in the Democratic Party correctly perceive that what is forthcoming is the end or unraveling of the welfare state in the United States, not due to hate, but to a lack of money.  This is why there is so much psychological reversing of animosity and scapegoating on to those in the Tea Party who, welfare recipients perceive, want to take away welfare benefits.

Just this past weekend, Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Los Angeles, attacked the Tea Party. “This is a tough game,” she said. “You can’t be intimidated. You can’t be frightened. And as far as I’m concerned — the Tea Party can go straight to hell.”

But if the Tea Party were not there, the reality would not go away.  California is stuck running annual $20 billion budget deficits and the federal government is arguably broke when balloon payments on future social entitlement programs are factored into the balance sheet. Politically shaking down the middle class for their retirements and home equity to further the cause affordable housing has only brought about the rise of the Tea Party, which will likely continue to grow even across party lines.

Wealth Transfer

According to Zillow.com, those in the middle class, such as the Tea Party, had $9 trillion in equity in their homes wiped out in the Mortgage Crisis of 2008 after the ill-fated policy to provide affordable housing to nearly everyone. That is 12 times the cost of the Iraq War up to September 2010.  The unintended consequence of the Community Reinvestment Act, sub-prime loans and securitized housing bonds was the debasing of the value of the U.S. currency, triggering a bank panic.

The Mortgage Meltdown was the largest instantaneous wealth transfer from the middle class to the lower class in the history of the United States.  To put this in comparison, the entire War on Poverty cost $16.7 trillion from 1964 to 2008, adjusted for inflation.

If we’re going to prevent London-style riots and property crimes aimed at capitalist businesses and increasing social class polarization, we’re going to have to have brutally honest discussions about the viability of the welfare state.  Symbolic extortion will not lead to saving the welfare state when there no longer is any money.

The public should be skeptical of solutions to social problems proposed by either “the System” or “the Horde” of activists and government-cloned non-profit agencies.

Conversely, the claims of conservatives that “flash mobs” and riots are not the problem of too few subsidies but too many must also be questioned, even if there is some truth to it.

The questions should be: How much of a welfare state can we continue to afford? Can we make programs like public housing self-sustaining? Can the State of California continue to afford providing luxury public goods and services, such as redundant stem cell research, water bonds that mainly fund open-space acquisitions for wealthy elite communities and bonds that only make affordable housing into luxury housing while those in public housing are anxious about the continuation of benefits?

Conflicting groups apparently don’t want direct communication about tough issues and thus prefer symbolic interaction.  I will take symbolic interaction over violence or property crimes any day.  But let’s cut through the social and media fictions and redirect the public rage into something more productive. The outcome of our cities, states and civilization may depend on it.

By JOHN HRABE

A member of the California Citizens Redistricting Commission believes that the commission broke the law, failed to uphold an open and transparent decision-making process and used political motives in drawing California’s new state and federal legislative districts, according to an exclusive, in-depth interview with CalWatchDog.com.

“This commission simply traded the partisan, backroom gerrymandering by the Legislature for partisan, backroom gerrymandering by average citizens,” Commissioner Mike Ward said in an interview with CalWatchDog.com on Sunday night. “This commission became the Citizens Smoke-Filled Room, where average citizen commissioners engaged in dinner-table deals and partisan gerrymandering — the very problems that this commission was supposed to prevent.”

Ward, who was the lone member of the commission to oppose all of the commission’s proposed maps at its July 29 meeting, will outline his opposition in a detailed statement to be delivered at the commission’s press conference later today. An advance copy of the commissioner’s remarks was obtained exclusively by CalWatchDog.com and is reprinted below.

“Commission broke the law”

In the remarks, Ward stated bluntly, “This commission broke the law,” by failing to apply the Voting Rights Act to congressional districts in Los Angeles County. The Voting Rights Act, which is one of the commission’s mandated criteria for drawing district lines, requires that all possible “majority-minority” districts be drawn. In Los Angeles, African-Americans were split across three congressional districts instead of being drawn into one or two majority-minority districts.

Ward also attacked the commission for adopting the same partisan gerrymandering techniques of the state Legislature.

“Instead of fixing the redistricting process that politicians had so corrupted, we ended up doing the same thing as the politicians,” Ward said.

As evidence of Ward’s claim, he referred to the infamous “ribbon of shame district” that drew public outcry and was routinely cited by proponents as the need for creating an independent redistricting panel.

“Ten years ago, there was a ribbon of shame district, and we have another one. This time, the ribbon of shame district is a Los Angeles-based coastal congressional district held together by a tiny strip of land near LAX,” Ward explaind in his statement. “At the Senate level, there’s the Orange County hook, reaching out from Cal Poly Pomona and grabbing Cypress, Stanton and La Palma.”

To support his contention that the commission engaged in the improper drawing of district boundaries, Ward referred to two specific public hearings — on June 29 and July 8 — as examples where the commission adopted vague standards for local communities of interest.

“As Commissioner [Gabino] T. Aguirre has pointed out, something to the naked eye might look strange here, but these are — there is a community of interest — we’ve had two kinds of testimony about this area as a whole,” Commissioner Maria Blanco said at the June 29th hearing.

In a July 8th hearing, Commissioner Jeanne Raya described the mapmaking process as “an opportunity to be really artistic.”

“Political motives”

Ward believes the vague standards for community of interest resulted in the commission making “decisions based on political motives.” This inconsistent application, Ward believes, was most evident in the “joblessness” of the Silicon Valley and the Los Angeles ports.

“Around LAX and the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, jobs were a sufficient primary reason to bind communities into a district,” Ward said. “However, the commission split the Silicon Valley’s Golden Triangle, despite public testimony stating that 1 out of every 4 of the region’s private sector jobs are based in that area.”

The commission is expected to grant final approval later today to its final draft maps that were tentatively approved on July 29.

In recent weeks, CalWatchDog.com ran an exclusive series of articles exposing the political activities, campaign contributions and special interest connections of two redistricting commissioners, all of which were never disclosed to the commission or uncovered during State Auditor Elaine Howle’s background checks.

Commissioner Gabino T. Aguirre failed to disclose multiple political campaign contributions to Democratic candidates or his extensive connections to a special interest group, the Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy, which has submitted its own redistricting proposals to the commission.

CalWatchDog.com also first reported on four campaign contributions made within the past eighteen months by Commissioner Jeanne Raya’s business to a state political action committee. Campaign finance watchdogs have criticized the failure to disclose the business contributions valued at $1,000.

An advance copy of Commissioner Mike Ward’s prepared remarks can be viewed below.

And here is a YouTube I made of Ward’s comments on the Silicon Valley redistricting:
.

Independent “Citizen” Commissioner Concealed Partisan Political Activities, History of Latino Activism & Connections to Redistricting Interest Group

JULY 15, 2011

By JOHN HRABE

The California Citizens Redistricting Commission, the 14-member independent panel of average citizens, was created to end partisan gerrymandering and draw political boundaries in an open process,  without the influence of special interests.

An investigation by CalWatchDog.com reveals that at least one commissioner, Dr. Gabino T. Aguirre, has made multiple political campaign contributions to Democratic candidates — contributions that were previously undisclosed to the Commission; a long history of political activism in support of Latino causes; and an extensive web of connections to a special interest group that has submitted its own redistricting proposals to the commission.

A spokesman for the commission said  Aguirre would be unavailable for comment before this article was scheduled to publish.

This new evidence about  Aguirre raises serious questions about the fairness and objectivity of the Citizens Redistricting Commission, which has been charged with restoring fairness and integrity to the redistricting process. With the commission’s announcement this week that it will not release the second draft of its redistricting maps, the public deserves insight into what groups, causes and issues all commissioners are sympathetic to.

Moreover, the commissioner should be held to his own standard of openness. A former mayor and councilman from the City of Santa Paula, Aguirre has repeatedly vowed to uphold the commission’s charter to an open and public process.

“We have an open and transparent process where everything we say and everything we do is in front of the public,” Aguirre told the annual conference of League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), according to the Ventura County Star on May 21, 2011.

However, documents obtained by CalWatchDog.com, raise questions about whether Aguirre was less than forthcoming about the full nature of his past partisan activities.  Aguirre’s application to serve on the commission fails to list any political contributions to Democratic candidates or involvement with Democratic campaigns. His only reference to partisan activities is a list of past membership in the Peace and Freedom Party, the La Raza Unida Party, the Green Party and the Democratic Party.

Contributions to Democratic Campaigns

The commission’s legally mandated background report, prepared in compliance with Title 2, Section 60835 of the California Code of Regulations, begins to tell the different story about Aguirre’s significant political activism.

In the September 19, 2010, “Report on Information Collected Concerning Applicant,”  Steven Benito Russo, chief of investigations for the California Bureau of State Audits, acknowledged that Aguirre’s letters of recommendation came primarily from Democratic Party leaders, including Kathy Long, a Democratic supervisor for Ventura County, and Susan Broidy, a director of the California Democratic Party.

“Staff also discovered that Applicant had hosted fundraiser at his home in October 2008 for Ferial Masry, a Democratic candidate for Assembly, and in June 2010 endorsed Marie Panec, a Democratic candidate for Congress,” the investigator wrote. When pressed by staff about his partisan political activities, the report explained that Aguirre told them, “It’s not about the party — it’s about the person’s position.”

An independent review of state campaign finance documents revealed what state auditors missed: three campaign donations to Democratic candidates for state office. In November 2008, Aguirre contributed $100 to Ferial Masry, the Democratic nominee for the 37^th State Assembly District. A year later, he doubled his political giving with a $200 contribution to Gloria Romero, a former Democratic State Senator and candidate for state superintendent of public instruction.

It’s understandable why the state’s nonpartisan investigators missed Aguirre’s final political contribution: it posted on the California Secretary of State’s website nine days after the California Bureau of State Audits completed its background report. That final contribution was a $100 to Das Williams, now the Democratic Assemblyman for the 35^th district.

Williams, whose political career is directly impacted by the maps Aguirre must approve, previously interacted with his contributor dating back at least two years earlier, when Aguirre served as Santa Paula’s representative on the Ventura Council of Governments.

Geographic Rivals: Williams vs. Nava

This new evidence of Aguirre’s financial relationship with Williams provided new credibility to past allegations  that the commission’s first redistricting draft proposal was too favorable to Williams, an accusation made by some Democratic leaders. In April 2011, former State Assemblyman Pedro Nava, a longtime political rival of Williams, complained that the district lines that included Santa Barbara and Ventura Counties did not adequately represent local communities of interest.

Wasting no time, Williams impugned Nava’s “political motives.” The Daily Sound reported that Williams “said he has intentionally not waded into the (redistricting) discussion because the whole point of passing Proposition 11 was to get politicians out of the redistricting process.”

Approved by voters in November 2008, Proposition 11 promised “strict, non-partisan rules designed to ensure fair representation” and explicitly prohibited the redistricting commission from considering incumbents during the redistricting process.

“The place of residence of any incumbent or political candidate shall not be considered in the creation of a map. Districts shall not be drawn for the purpose of favoring or discriminating against an incumbent, political candidate, or political party,” Article XXI  of the California State Constitution now reads.

Just in case there was any ambiguity, voters overwhelmingly affirmed the same language two years later with the passage of Proposition 20, the companion measure that added congressional districts to the commission’s purview. Both propositions heralded, “Every aspect of this process will be open to scrutiny by the public and the press.”

Technically, the commission has complied with this mandate; each commissioner’s application is publicly available on its website, WeDrawTheLines.ca.gov. But political watchdogs are beginning to question whether the commission is adequately following the spirit of its open disclosure mandate, especially when state auditors failed to discover three campaign contributions that are publicly available via the California Secretary of State’s website.

“The original goal of the redistricting reform movement was to select members who did not have significant past partisan interests,” said Dan Schnur, former chairman of the Fair Political Practices Commission and director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California. “Legislative leaders were given veto power over commissioners for this very reason, which raises the question: Why didn’t they exercise their veto power?”

A senior staff member for a Republican legislator, who asked not to be identified for this story, offered a blunt explanation, “The truth is we’re idiots.” Another senior Republican legislative staffer described  Republican legislative leaders’ approach to the redistricting process as “an inexcusable reluctance to spend the resources to research the background of the commissioners.”

Had Republican legislative leaders expended the resources to research Aguirre’s background, partisan political contributions would have been the least of Republicans’ concerns.

History of Latino Political Activism: MEChA and La Raza

In a June 2011 profile in his hometown paper, the Ventura County Star, Gabino Tlamatini Aguirre was described as the “manifestation of the California Dream.” Born in Mexico to a farm-working family with 10 children, he immigrated to Texas as a child and “followed the crops from Texas, to Oregon, to California, to Arizona.” After serving in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War, Aguirre enrolled in college, where he was introduced to the Chicano-American political movement.

“He successfully transferred to U.C. Santa Barbara, where, motivated by the mobilization of his fellow Latinos during the Chicano Movement, he joined the La Raza Libre group and the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán or MEChA,” writes Gustavo Adolfo Cubias II, who interviewed Aguirre on April 7 for his senior thesis at Claremont McKenna College.

MEChA and La Raza have been favorite targets of the Republican Party. It has been called a “radical racist group.” In a piece for Human Events in April 2006, the late Rep. Charlie Norwood, a Republican from Georgia, called MEChA “one of the most anti-American groups in the country.” Norwood’s criticism of the Chicano student group was based on the disputed interpretation of the organization’s motto, “For La Raza todo. Fuera de La Raza nada” — “For The Race everything. Outside The Race, nothing.”

In her book, “Enriqueta Vasquez and the Chicano Movement: Writings from El Grito del Norte [the Shout from the North],” Chicana author Lorena Oropeza disputed this claim, and instead pointed to alternative evidence that suggested the motto was, “La union Hace la fuerza” — “Unity Creates Strength.”

MEChA’s motto may be disputed, but its fringe views are described in the “Philosophy” section of the organization’s website. The Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlánthe urges Chicanos to “reject assimilation,” references “brown pride,” and identifies “political involvement and education” as critical element for achieving their political objectives.

In 1969, Aguirre was likely to have encountered an organization even more radical than it is today. According to MEChA’s organizational history, the group’s defining principles are found  in a document known as “El Plan de Aztlán.” Of El Plan’s six stipulations, the first states “We are Chicanas and Chicanos of Aztlán reclaiming the land of our birth (Chicana/Chicano Nation).”

Even within the Latino political community, La Raza and MEChA are viewed as controversial.

“It is my experience that some of the more extreme positions sometimes expressed by groups like MECHA and La Raza aren’t necessarily representative of the majority of Latinos living in California,” said Tim Rosales, vice-president of the Wayne Johnson Agency, which was honored in 2009 with the League of United Latin American Citizens‘ (LULAC) Social Justice Award. “It is a mistake and overly simplistic for anyone to treat the Chicano community as a monolithic group. There’s a diversity of opinions, experiences and beliefs.”

“La Raza Cosmica”

Based on a 2005 speech in Santiago, Chile, Aguirre hasn’t changed his philosophy during the past four decades. On his “Supplemental Application for Citizens Redistricting Commission,” Aguirre listed a “presentation on NWFZ local activities at OPANAL Conference in Santiago, Chile” as an activity which he believed was “relevant to serving as a commissioner.”

The Agency for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in Latin America and the Caribbean (OPANAL) describes itself on its website as “an inter-governmental agency created by the Treaty of Tlatelolco,” which seeks the end of nuclear weapons. Via OPANAL’s website, CalWatchDog.com also obtained a copy of Aguirre’s 2005 remarks, delivered in Spanish.

“Culturally, our orientation is toward the South and we feel a connection with the force, as Octavio Paz has said, of the cosmic race,” the translation of Aguirre’s remarks reads. “Politically, our community is subjected to a type of internal colonialism that has pushed us to the margin of society just as other minority groups and poor people. At the margin of society, we are exploited like working hands in agricultural camps, in the factories, and also like soldiers to fight interventionist and imperialist wars.”

Aguirre’s reference to Octavio Paz and “la raza cosmica” puzzled Dr. Jaime E. Rodríguez, director of Latin American Studies at the University of California, Irvine and co-author of the book, “The Forging of  the Cosmic Race: A Reinterpretation of Colonial Mexico.”

“Octavio Paz did not discuss the concept of ‘La raza cosmica.’ It was the philosopher José Vasconcelos who coined the term. He perceived a time when Latin America would create a new people with the blending of four races –Europeans, Indians, Africans, and Asians,” explained Dr. Rodriguez in an email to CalWatchDog.com.

“Over-Correct for MALDEF”

Aguirre’s deep roots in Chicano-American activism could shed light on his sympathies during the redistricting process and affect the number of seats drawn for African-American and Asian-American candidates.  Aguirre told the Santa Paula Times on December 17, 2010 that he was “sensitive to the needs of farmworkers.” The California Bureau of State Audits background investigation into Aguirre also forewarned of potential bias in favor of the Latino community.

“At the top of the list was ‘Latino/Latina issues (health, education . . .)’ and the interests of no other racial or ethnic group appeared on the list,” wrote the state’s non-partisan chief of investigations.

The federal Voting Rights Act, which protects minority groups from being systematically discriminated against or underrepresented in the political process, serves as the primary regulation overseeing ethnic representation in the redistricting process. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act “prohibits not only election-related practices and procedures that are intended to be racially discriminatory, but also those that are shown to have a racially discriminatory impact.”

After its release of the first redistricting draft proposal, the California Redistricting Commission faced universal criticism from Latino organizations for drawing boundaries that reduced the number of Latino majority-minority districts. Census data show that California’s Latino population has risen to 37.6 percent of the state’s total population, which should mean an automatic increase in the number of Latino seats.

MALDEF responded to the maps’ gross under-representation of Latinos by releasing its own proposal. The MALDEF redistricting plan would have increased the number of combined Latino seats in the state Assembly and Senate and in the U.S. Congress from 26 to 37.

But some question MALDEF’s lines as being unfair to other minority groups.

“MALDEF did not draw a single Asian- or African-American district that met the same interpretation of the Voting Rights Act they used for Latino districts,” said Matt Rexroad, partner with Meridian Pacific, and a redistricting expert.

Rexroad warned that the effect of the commission’s error on the first proposal could lead to an over-correction on the final draft.

“The commission has always tried to make the last person that was at the podium happy.  MALDEF was the ethnic group with the most legitimate complaint. The commission will probably over-correct to make MALDEF happy,” he said.

Zero-Sum Nature of Redistricting

The redistricting process is a zero-sum game, meaning the voters added to one district must be subtracted from a neighboring district. Thus, this protection of California Latinos could come at the expense of African-American and Asian-American voters. On July 12, the Los Angeles Times reported that a group called “California Friends of the African American Caucus” had attacked the commission for diluting “the number of black districts, particularly in the Greater Los Angeles area.”

Critics of the commission claim that this week’s announcement that the commission will not release the second draft of maps leaves the public in the dark about the process.

“The commission will issue no final draft maps,” complained Tony Quinn, a former Republican staffer and expert on redistricting who first reported on some of Aguirre’s political donations. “They will take a final vote on the maps around July 29.  Then they apparently cannot change their maps prior to final approval and certification with the Secretary of State on August 15.  So the public will have no opportunity for public input before final certification.”

Relationship with Redistricting Special Interest Group

Aguirre’s most questionable relationship that poses a potential conflict of interest for the redistricting process is his extensive connection to a special interest group, the Central Coast Alliance United for A Sustained Economy (CAUSE).

CAUSE has organized workshops for its supporters to learn about the redistricting process, encouraged volunteers to testify before the commission and even proposed its own redistricting maps for the Central Coast. At the commission’s May hearing in Northridge, CAUSE was allotted 25 minutes to present its proposal to commissioners. CAUSE almost mobilized its activists to speak at the June 22 public hearing in Oxnard.

The mobilization effort appears to have paid off.

“The current ‘final’ maps for Ventura are very close to those proposed by CAUSE at the first public hearing in San Luis Obispo last winter,” Quinn explained.

As recently as July 14, Aguirre was listed as a member of CAUSE’s advisory board. However, CAUSE removed Aguirre’s name from its website sometime before this story was published. But it cannot eliminate one connection: a  2007 contribution from Aguirre to CAUSE. The Summer 2007 CAUSE newsletter lists “Dr. Gabino Aguirre” as the organization’s first Grassroots Supporter for having made a contribution of between $1-$499.

At the 2011 California LULAC State Convention, Commissioner Aguirre spoke on the same panel discussion as Maricela Morales, Co-Executive Director for the Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy.

Aguirre’s support for the political activists behind CAUSE even precedes the creation of the organization.

Marcos Vargas, the executive director for CAUSE, previously worked from 1986-1995 as the executive director of a Ventura County Latino community advocacy organization, El Concilio del Condado de Ventura.

Among the qualifications listed by Aguirre on his application for the redistricting commission: “founding member of El Concilio del Condado de Ventura.” As recently as December 2010, Aguirre’s continued to be actively involved with el Concilio.

At the special meeting of the Ventura County Board of Supervisors held on December 7, 2010 at the Santa Paula City Hall, Aguirre was honored because he “still makes time to be involved in community activities, such as being a founding board member of El Concilio del Condado de Ventura.”

According to the Santa Paula Times, such high praise was offered by none other than Democratic Supervisor Kathy Long, the same elected official who wrote to the commission on April 16 in support of Aguirre’s redistricting application.

These questions about Aguirre’s background seemingly contradict his low-key style and under-the-radar approach.

“He has a very quiet presence,” Commissioner Jeanne Raya of San Gabriel told the Ventura County Star. “He’s really able to explain things, and he really understands what forms a community.”

Aguirre’s failure to fully disclose his long history of political activism may have been due to his quiet presence. But it certainly raises new questions about whether the California Citizens Redistricting Commission is actually composed of average citizens.

Part 2 of this Series on Aguirre’s conflicts of interest is here: “Did Gabino Aguirre Flout Code of Conduct?“

By K. LLOYD BILLINGSLEY

When cities outsource services to save money, they often take heat from workers. It’s different in Berkeley, where a revolutionary plan to “insource” services to the city drew the wrath of recycling reactionaries.

Berkeley’s progressive pretensions cannot prevent economic woes and the city recently found itself with a deficit of more than $4 million in its solid waste department alone. Unlike the federal government, the city cannot print money to stimulate the local economy. The city duly sent a Request for Proposal (RFP) for solid waste consultants to help eliminate the deficit.

The respondents included Sloan Vazquez LLC of Irvine, a company experienced in solid waste management and recycling, and which had recently completed a similar project for the city of Santa Monica. Kim Braun, solid waste manager for Santa Monica, called the Sloan Vazquez recommendations “productive” and “very helpful.” She told CalWatchdog that collection route changes had resulted in savings for the city of more than $450,000 on overtime costs and $334,000 on alley cleanup. Santa Monica laid off no workers as a result of the report and is “still implementing” other recommendations, Braun said.

After an interview process, Berkeley selected Sloan Vazquez to conduct the review.  The company set out to examine everything in the purview of Berkeley’s solid waste management system. If not a model of fiscal rectitude, it did showcase the city’s commitment to diversity.

The city itself handles residential and commercial garbage collection and manages its own transfer station for the waste. The city also manages some franchised haulers serving the commercial sector and contracts with the non-profit Community Conservation Center (CCC) to process the residential and commercial recyclables. The non-profit Ecology Center (EC), collects recyclables from residential areas, but that is not all they do.

The Ecology Center runs a Climate Change Action program, with services “to both prevent and prepare for rapid climate change.” The center also offers climate change workshops and with its carbon calculator “you can quantify your ‘carbon footprint,’ quantify the change in your carbon footprint when you shift your habits, and connect with others in Berkeley who are doing the same.”

The Ecology Center describes itself as “a community-based non-profit that depends on the generous support of our members and donors.” The “many ways” to support the Ecology Center include donations of money, donations of stock, and “sell your house using Green Planet Real Estate.” The non-profit also enjoys a steady revenue stream from Berkeley, and occupies a special place in the city’s municipal waste system.

Richard Nixon was president and Ronald Reagan governor of California when the Ecology Center began collecting recyclables for Berkeley in 1973. In all that time, nearly 40 years, the city has never put out that service to bid. Waste management services are deemed “public health and safety” concerns, so cities are not required to bid them out. Yet most municipalities do bid out or renegotiate such service contracts every seven to 10 years, in an effort to keep costs down.

Berkeley’s recycling costs remain high. Sloan Vazquez found that Berkeley residents paid 50 percent to 60 percent more than neighboring Bay Area communities. At the time of the RFP, Berkeley was paying the Ecology Center an annual $3.2 million to collect residential recyclables, which EC picks up with six trucks, all painted white. The EC mission states:

The Ecology Center facilitates urban lifestyles consistent with the goals of ecological sustainability, social equity and economic development. We seek to make these goals accessible by providing people with the information they need, the alternatives they seek, and the infrastructure necessary to make sustainable practices possible on a large scale. We aim to make the visionary mainstream. (emphasis added)

When Sloan Vazquez sought the information it needed for its report, however, EC was not forthcoming, unlike all the other groups, including the city of Berkeley itself and the CCC, also a non-profit. The non-profit that offers to quantify one’s carbon footprint was not willing to quantify their own recycling business in any detail.

Sloan Vazquez proceeded with their review, based on the Ecology Center’s $3.2 million – by other accounts $3.7 million – annual charges to Berkeley, and compared those to the city’s known operating costs. Based on this comparison, they recommended that the city “internalize,” that is, take over, the recycling collection service performed since 1973 by the Ecology Center in what can only be described as a sweetheart deal of incredible endurance.

Joe Sloan of Sloan Vazquez calculated that such insourcing to the city would reduce costs by about $1.5 million, even though he found that a single solid waste worker costs Berkeley an average of $113,000 a year in salary, benefits, and other costs. The Ecology Center didn’t like the plan, but Berkeley City Council member Gordon Wozniak called the Sloan Vazquez report “a success” because it had motivated proposals for cutting costs. City Council member Laurie Capitelli was also supportive of the Sloan Vazquez report. According to news reports, so were some union people, who had come up with a similar plan.

Some Berkeley city workers are members of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), and in City Council meeting they praised the Sloan Vazquez report. Ricky Jackson, an SEIU shop steward, said the union’s own report had “some of the same ideas.”

Andrea Lewis, an SEIU member and city worker, told the council that the Ecology Center has a $3.7 million contract, and “that’s not peanuts.” The contract, she said, “has got to go to bid! . . . Why is this contract so different?”

Likewise, Berkeley City Council member Susan Wengraf wondered “why this 3.7 million dollar contract is not bid competitively?” She wanted answers, but none emerged in the meeting. A labor rift offers one explanation. Berkeley is a strong union town, but to paraphrase George Orwell, some unions are more equal than others.

The GuideStar profile of the Ecology Center, based on their 2007 and 2008 IRS 990 forms, shows 21-100 full-time employees and 11-20 part-time employees. The Ecology Center is a union shop and its workers are represented by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), known as the “Wobblies,” a paleo-left group that peaked in the 1920s, even before the Stalin Era. The most famous current IWW member is Noam Chomsky, the American leftist icon touted by Hugo Chavez and Osama bin Laden alike.

“Solidarity Forever,” is a famous Wobbly song, but in March, when Joe Sloan presented his report to Berkeley’s Zero Waste Commission, an IWW mouthpiece accused him of being responsible for “all that is wrong in America today,” and for pitting labor groups against each other.

Ecology Center boss Martin Bourque charged that “the end of nonprofit recycling in Berkeley” would lay off more than 35 union employees. That struck a chord with Berkeley City Council member Linda Maio. She said that the city’s job is to balance the budget and that “our goal isn’t to have anyone laid off from their job.”

EC boss Martin Bourque earned a masters in Latin American Studies and Environmental Policy from UC Berkeley. He has served as executive director the Ecology Center since 2000. Before that he worked for the Institute for Food and Development Policy, also known as Food First. The group is “committed to dismantling racism in the food system” and believes in “people’s right to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems—at home and abroad.”

Bourque talked trash about Sloan Vazquez to anybody who would listen, and proved himself an adept community organizer. He tapped politically correct local PhDs to criticize the Sloan Vazquez report, which some critics said was “incomplete.” That was true in several ways.

The report had not included a detailed breakdown of how the Ecology Center spends the nearly $4 million it gets from Berkeley every year.  The report did not include a salary schedule for Ecology Center employees, its board, and executive director Martin Bourque. In an email, CalWatchdog asked Bourque if his Ecology Center makes available that financial and salary information. Mr. Bourque’s belated email response did not answer those questions. Costs and salaries are of considerable interest in this case, but Sloan Vazquez didn’t need that data to perform the job Berkeley wanted.

“We simply looked at what they [the Ecology Center] charge the city to perform the service versus what it would cost the city to do it themselves,” says Joe Sloan. “It was very straightforward.” Sloan says that the Ecology Center “wants to change the terms of the debate, obfuscate, and bluster.” He stands by the report and says that none of Bourque’s local experts “could withstand the scrutiny of an open, public debate on the service issues and costs.”

The controversy would be understandable if Sloan Vazquez had recommended that the city of Berkeley take services they were currently performing and outsource them to some non-union for-profit multinational company headquartered in New Jersey, with possible oil company connections. But that was not what happened.

Rather, the very consultants Berkeley selected, from many candidates, offered the city a way to save money by insourcing recycling services. Despite support for the Sloan Vazquez report from the SEIU and various City Council members, Berkeley has not insourced the recycling service as the report recommends. A more likely outcome is a rate hike, from rates already substantially higher than those in nearby Bay Area communities.

In the end, Sloan’s long experience in recycling and waste management had not adequately prepared him for the conflicts inherent in the system, specifically Berkeley’s longstanding protection racket. In Berkeley’s scale of values, cutting costs takes a back seat to maintaining the recycling status quo, the sweetheart deal with a politically correct, environmentally orthodox non-profit. Observers could be also be forgiven for thinking that Berkeley would rather jack up the rates than do anything less than worshipful of the IWW, Noam Chomsky’s union.

“Power to the people!” used to be the rallying cry in Berkeley. Now it’s “more dollars from the people.”

By DAVE ROBERTS

The November elections were disastrous for California Republicans. They lost all nine statewide races, lost ground in the state Assembly and failed to gain a seat in Congress, despite California having 12 percent of the House seats and a nationwide tide that saw the GOP gain a net 63 seats. But it may have been slightly less disastrous had the electoral rules now in effect been in place last year, according to David Harmer, who narrowly lost to Democratic Congressman Jerry McNerney in the 11th Congressional District.

“Had Proposition 14 been in effect last year, [American Independent Party candidate David] Christensen could not have appeared on the general-election ballot, and I likely would have won,” Harmer told supporters via e-mail last week. “Unfortunately, Prop. 14 didn’t take effect until this year. But for future elections, the Prop. 14 system, operating in districts drawn by the new independent commission instead of incumbent officeholders, will give voters a clean, up-or-down choice between status-quo incumbents and challengers like me.”

Two-term incumbent McNerney beat Harmer by 48-to-47 percent — a mere 2,638 votes out of more than 240,000 votes cast. Christensen took the other 5 percent. Had Christensen been eliminated from the general election, it’s likely that most of his 12,439 votes would have gone to Harmer. The American Independent Party platform of God, Constitutional fundamentalism, anti-liberalism, pro-family, pro-life, anti-gay marriage, pro-Second Amendment and securing the borders is pretty much in lockstep with Harmer’s views.

Amazingly, Christensen was able to capture so many votes despite not running a campaign.

“Christensen was never a serious candidate,” Harmer told his supporters. “He raised no money, assembled no organization, gave no interviews, and showed up for no forums or debates, save one in his hometown — where he responded to predictable questions by confessing his perplexity. He hadn’t the remotest prospect of winning, or even influencing public opinion. The only effect of his candidacy was to facilitate the re-election of an incumbent whose views were diametrically opposed to his own.

“California voters approved Proposition 14 last June precisely to prevent candidates like Christensen from muddying the general-election waters. Under Prop. 14, all candidates from all parties appear on the same primary ballot, and only the top two vote-getters (regardless of party) proceed to the runoff. It’s an eminently sensible system. Naturally, all the state’s political parties opposed it.”

The maxim of politics making strange bedfellows was indeed in effect with Prop. 14′s opponents. When is the last time the Democratic Party, Republican Party, Green Party, Peace & Freedom Party, American Independent Party and the Libertarian Party agreed on anything? Ralph Nader joined Jon Fleischman (of the Flash Report) and Meg Whitman in opposing it. Republican Congressman Jeff Denham locked arms with public employee unions to fund the anti-Prop. 14 campaign. Supporting Prop. 14 were then-Gov. Schwarzenegger, the California Chamber of Commerce and most of the state’s newspaper editorials.

In two special elections held in February, the winner gained a majority of votes, avoiding a need for a general election runoff. Republican Sharon Runner won 65 percent of the vote in a two-person race against a Democrat to gain the 17th Senate District seat vacated by her husband George when he won election to the State Board of Equalization in November. In the 28th Senate District, Democrat Ted Lieu won 56 percent of the vote, beating out a Democrat, four Republicans and two candidates who declined to state a party affiliation.

Tuesday’s 4th Assembly Race

The next test of the new electoral system took place Tuesday when one Democrat vied against seven Republicans to represent the 4th Assembly District. In the new post-Prop. 14 world there was the possibility that two Republicans would face off in the May 3 general election in a district with 45 percent Republican registration, 31 percent Democrat and 19 percent declining to state. But the top two Republicans split most of the GOP votes, and the Democrat, retired fire chief Dennis Campanale, finished first with 32 percent. He will face Beth Gaines, wife of Ted Gaines, who vacated the seat when he won a special election to represent the 1st Senatorial District.

One of the main arguments both for and against Prop. 14 is that it will lead to a watering down of ideological differences between the parties. Fleischman argued in an anti-Prop. 14 video posted on YouTube last year that we’re likely to get a lot more Abel Maldonados in the state legislature. I asked Fleischman to comment on Harmer’s contention that Prop. 14 would have sent him to Congress last November.

“Obviously, he lost a close election, and that’s frustrating,” said Fleischman. “Prop. 14 is a bad idea. There’s an American tradition that if you run for office and are the nominee for a political party you should be on the ballot. Most importantly, the people wrote Prop. 14 to reduce the role of political parties and elect more people to office who are in the mushy middle. If a political party has a majority, they should be able to set the agenda. David Harmer, as a conservative Republican, would have been extremely disadvantaged in the first election under an open primary system. Prop. 14 is intended to keep people like David Harmer out of office.”

Ironically, Markham Robinson, the California American Independent Party executive committee chairman, agrees with Harmer and welcomes the new electoral rules.

“Number one, numerically he’s indeed correct,” Robinson told me. “He probably wouldn’t have been facing Mr. Christensen because of the greater barriers that Prop. 14 would have imposed. It’s placed a greater barrier in the way of small-scale candidates. Which isn’t much loss given that none of these small candidates are serious. You have to be able to be persuasive enough or popular enough to have a realistic chance of being elected. Some people lament the lack of access of the really small fry. What this will do for the AIP is greatly decrease the number of its candidates, but also make the candidates that do emerge much more realistic ones. The electoral system is vastly changed.”

Robinson’s other takeaway from the 11th Congressional District race is the remarkable showing by Christensen, indicating a dissatisfaction with the major party choices.

“Five percent is a very high percentage for somebody with no name recognition,” he said. “It’s because people didn’t like the Republicans and Democrats. With the Democrats it’s a quick death and the Republicans it’s a slow death. Voters said, ‘I don’t choose death and would rather take a long shot — neither of the two is minimally acceptable.’ This is a very radical and extreme conclusion. Now at least in the primary, even though the barrier is high, we have a chance if we have quality candidates. The two parties will face greater competition if third parties can field people with modest resources and get name recognition – instead of Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dumber.”

California Republican Party Chairman Ron Nehring and Vice Chairman Tom Del Becarro did not respond to requests to comment for this article.