Meg’s campaign boasts of her management prowess. But compare this.

Here’s how Meg ran eBay: She didn’t go out and hire retired GM, Ford or GE managers. Instead, she hired young hotshots hungry to create the Internet future.

And here’s how she’s run her gubernatorial campaign: She’s hired old Arnold, Pete Wilson, McCain and Bush hacks. Wilson last won in 1994 by being against immigration, an issue Meg has flipped Left on. That year, the Internet hardly existed.

Arnold won only because of the 2003 recall fluke; then, in 2006, he campaigned against tax-increasing Angelides on a no-new-taxes pledge — a lie, because he broke the pledge in 2009. Bush actually lost the national popular vote in 2000; then barely won in 2004 against the pathetic Kerry. And in 2008, McCain lost California by 3 million votes.

These people she hired for tens of millions of simoleons aren’t winners, they’re burnouts. That’s why, this far into the campaign, she’s still losing in the polls against an opponent who has spent hardly any money.

She should have hired some pimply, 17-year-old hackers who would have learned the political language as fast as they pick up HTML or C++.

A CalWatchdog Retrospective: 20 years after the California Task Force to Promote Self-esteem and Personal and Social Responsibility.

By K. LLOYD BILLINGSLEY

California state documents do not generally fly off the shelves but 20 years ago the Golden State had a hot seller. Toward a State of Esteem was the final report of the California Task Force to Promote Self-esteem and Personal and Social Responsibility. This body, which shut down in 1990, is largely forgotten but not entirely gone.

The prime mover was then-assemblyman John Vasconcellos, a San Jose Democrat who became known as the “Johnny Appleseed of self-esteem.” Vasconcellos authored AB3659, which established the self-esteem task force in 1986, when George Deukmejian was governor of California and Ronald Reagan president of the United States.

According to this legislation, self-esteem was the key to problems such as violence, crime, alcohol and drug abuse, welfare dependency, teenage pregnancy, academic failure, recidivism, child and spousal abuse, and the failure of responsible citizenship. Making California “a state of esteem” would solve all that, and more.

In a November 28, 1990 letter to incoming legislators, Vasconcellos described self-esteem, as a “social vaccine” against dysfunction. It also “provides us a vision for developing our human capital to make America competitive again,” and is the “key to community, especially to realizing our promise as a multicultural democracy.” The benefits would be virtually limitless.

“Self esteem is the best budget balancer, by far,” wrote Vasconcellos, “serving both to increase productivity and taxes, and to reduce human needs for public support and services.” The letter was co-signed by assemblyman Pat Nolan, a Glendale Republican.

An attachment to the letter, “Self-Esteem: a Profound Revolution,” touted, “a revolution of faith: faith in ourselves and in our own innate capacities.”

It was also “a revolution of hope,”  “a revolution of love,” a “truly grass roots revolution” and “the ultimate truly populist revolution.” Further, “the personal revolution, wherein each of us chooses to envision ourselves as innately good-natured, grows to experience ourselves and each other that way, owns and exercises our power and takes charge of our lives and our politics, our society and our future!”

For some observers the task force was the latest exhibit of California’s taste for utopian hucksterism. Gary Trudeau lampooned the task force mercilessly in his Doonesbury comic strip. That did not prevent more than 40 of California’s 58 counties from forming their own self-esteem task forces. Washington and Maryland aimed for self-esteem legislation of their own. The 25-member task force, meanwhile, was not all of one mind.

No generally accepted definition for self-esteem emerged, and task-force member David Shannahoff-Khalsa of Del Mar, a yoga teacher and researcher in neuroscience, denied that self-esteem could simply be given to anyone. He told the Los Angeles Times that the final report was “propaganda” and its recommendations “simplistic and misleading. They could have been written by a group of sixth-graders.”

Shannahoff-Khalsa also criticized the contributions by University of California professors. “Self-esteem was never shown to play a causative role in the six social problems the task force studied,” he told the Times. “The report is a massive effort to mislead people. There’s no basis for what is written in it.”

That did not stop Toward a State of Esteem from becoming California’s best-selling state document of all time, at 60,000 copies. It did not have a sequel documenting how self-esteem solved the various problems as promoters claimed it would. Twenty years later, observers are hard pressed to find any evidence that the self-esteem task force solved any problem.

In 1990-91 the state faced a budget shortfall of $3.6 billion. Twenty years later the budget deficit has ballooned to $19 billion. So self-esteem did not prove “the best budget balancer, by far,” as John Vasconcellos claimed. But his vaunted “revolution” did have negative fallout, most apparent in education, where it became the dominant theory.

As John Leo of U.S. News and World Report noted, the self-esteem evangelist was “on a collision course with the growing movement to revive the schools academically.” Further, “to keep children feeling good about themselves, you must avoid all criticism and almost any challenge that could conceivably end in failure.”

California’s government-run K-12 system thus advanced students to the next grade, even though they had not mastered the material, lest they not feel good about themselves. Such “social promotion” was outlawed in 1998, but more than half the incoming freshmen at some Cal State campuses still need remedial math and English. (See Vicki Murray, The High Price of Failure in California: How Inadequate Education Costs Schools, Students, and Society, PRI, 2008) So the self-esteem legacy endures, even though the California Task Force to Promote Self-esteem and Personal and Social Responsibility is forgotten and its “Johnny Appleseed” has moved on.

John Vasconcellos was termed out of the Assembly in 1996 then ran for the state Senate, from which he was termed out in 2004, after 38 years in the Legislature. Calwatchdog requested his appraisal of the self-esteem movement but a staffer at the Vasconcellos Project said he was in France and unable to respond. “A Message from John Vasconcellos” on the project’s Web site does address the subject in a fashion.

“I find myself longing to leave a lasting legacy that will preserve and sustain for future generations my radically new vision of government called the Politics of Trust,” Vasconcellos explains.

“What will best constitute this living legacy,” he writes, “is the generation of a new movement in American politics, grounded in the belief that human beings are innately inclined toward becoming life-affirming, constructive, responsible and trustworthy. I believe that from this faithful view of our essential human nature, a whole new series of policies, programs, and political processes can emerge that truly serve to inspire and benefit the growth and healing potential of each and every citizen in our community. . .”

“With your help I’ve successfully raised the banners of healthy self-esteem, of diversity, inclusion and collaboration, and of the importance of searching out the deepest roots of our problems,” the statement adds, concluding:

“I appeal to you for your full and active partnership in my final and most ambitious undertaking of my political career. Let us work together to broadcast our faithful vision of humanity and to revolutionize our system of governance to reflect who we are becoming as a people. Let us start with ourselves, so that we may ultimately empower every institution, from our families to the United Nations, to nurture and support our capacities to become empathic neighbors and authentic leaders.”

What goes around comes around, also true, in a way, of  Pat Nolan, the Republican assemblyman who co-signed Vasconcellos 1990 letter to legislators.

First elected in 1978, he became a rising star and the Assembly Republican leader. Then he accepted a campaign contribution that was part of the FBI’s “Shrimpscam” sting operation. Nolan plead guilty to one count of racketeering and in the mid-1990s spent more than two years in federal prison. He now works with Justice Fellowship, a division of Prison Fellowship, founded by Charles Colson of Watergate fame.

Visitor Contacts are Not a Crime

By Don Amador

July 27, 2010

As a native Californian and land-use professional, I was disappointed today by your editorial entitled: It’s the Wild West in our state parks.

Rather then developing an opinion based on a dispassionate review of the facts, the Bee appears to have relied on the hype surrounding the State Parks Initiative and its proposal to create a $1/2 billion dollar per year slush fund by levying an $18/yr. tax per vehicle owned.

The editorial wrongly lumps ranger contacts with visitors who are reporting a bee sting, or a raccoon stealing a sack lunch, with real crimes such as DUIs, drug trafficking, vehicle theft, and vandalism of public property.

The State Vehicular Recreation Areas, water-based State Recreation Areas, and State beaches have the highest visitor usage in the State Park system. Of course there are going to be higher crime rates with parks with the highest visitation. But it is wrong to mischaracterize a visitor contact as a crime.

Crisis mongering is unattractive and seldom offers real solutions. I have always supported law enforcement and proper management of our public lands. However, popular self-funded user-pay/user-benefit programs such as OHV and Boating and Waterways should not be sacrificed on the alter of political correctness to support an Initiative that directs tens of millions of dollars to non-park-related environmental groups and state agencies such as the Ocean Protection Council.

Support for the State Parks Initiative should be left up to the individual taxpayer and public land user without cheerleading from a biased media.

Don Amador was a commissioner on the California State Parks Off-Highway Motor Vehicle Recreation Commission (1994-2000) and is currently a land-use consultant. He writes on environmental issues from his office in Oakley, California. He may be contacted by email at: damador@cwo.com

Words escape us.

Help CalWatchdog caption this photo of our colleagues, taken in the CalWatchdog newsroom today.

Add your caption ideas in the comments section, and win a gift package from CalWatchdog.

Lance Izumi and Steve Greenhut - your caption here!

- Katy Grimes

Officials told the Bee that tobacco use is declining which is no doubt true. Part of that reason can probably be tied to punitive taxation and Nanny State regulations, but a bigger part of this is declining social acceptance. That’s my theory any way. But another possibility also is that people are simply buying their cigarettes from lower-tax states through the Internet — the Board of Equalization didn’t supply data on out-of-state sales. Even if it did, it’s not uncommon for Internet purveyors to under-report sales. No data was supplied, either, for black market (and Mexican) purchases which reportedly have boomed as taxes go up.

No doubt, California’s brain trusts will call for higher taxes to back fill the revenue losses. Looks like I’ll have to shift my cigar purchases to the Internet.

JULY 29, 2010

By ANTHONY PIGNATARO

All contractors hired by the California High-Speed Rail Authority to prepare environmental reports on the project are contractually prohibited from discussing their agreements with the media, a CalWatchdog examination of the authority’s current contracts shows.

The gag order clause appears in 10 of the 18 contracts: Parson Brinckerhoff Quade & Douglas (program management), URS (Fresno-Palmdale and Los Angeles-Palmdale corridors), STV (Los Angeles-Orange County corridor), HNTB (Los Angeles-San Diego and San Francisco-San Jose corridors), AECOM (Sacramento-Fresno and Central Valley-San Francisco corridors), Parsons (San Jose-Merced corridor) and T.Y. Lin (program manager oversight). These contracts represent roughly $777 million of the total $798 million currently spent by the authority on outside contractors. The estimated final cost for  bullet train system that will run 800 miles across the state ranges from $45 billion to more than $80 billion.

The clause is the same in each contract: “The Consultant shall not comment publicly to the press or any other media regarding this Agreement or the Authority’s actions on the same, except to the Authority’s staff, Consultant’s own personnel involved in the performance of this agreement, at public hearings, or in response to questions from a Legislative committee.”

Another clause in the contracts add, “The Consultant shall not issue any news release or public relations item of any nature whatsoever regarding work performed or to be performed under this Agreement without prior review of the contents thereof by the Authority and receipt of the Authority’s written permission.”

Though Terry Francke of Californians Aware, a free speech advocacy group, said he didn’t usually examine government contracts, he said the clause did surprise him. “My guess is that it traces to the sensitivity of those proposing the project to the environmental concerns of the public,” he said. “The process of ‘massaging’ drafts could be undermined if a reporter calls a consultant. Maybe all this has to be kept under wraps until those paying for the product are happy with it. But that’s just speculation.”

According to High-Speed Rail Authority officials, the clause is basically there to save money.

“The Authority wants keen oversight of the scopes for each contract,” said HSR press secretary Rachel Wall in an e-mail. “[I]t is counterproductive to the project to allow consultants to bill the Authority for time spent talking to the media when there are positions within the Authority for that very task.”

This reasoning raises a number of troubling questions. Most notably,  why it only pertains to consultants doing either project management work or environmental impact report preparation.

“The clause began being included in contracts when the Authority hired a new contracts manager nearly a year and a half ago,” Wall e-mailed. “At that time that manager began including/updating the standard contract language (aka ‘boilerplate’) in the Authority’s service contracts.”

Then there’s the issue of the authority’s “lax contract management” that was the subject of a recent (and scathing) California State Auditor report. The April 2010 report found numerous instances where authority personnel weren’t monitoring contractor spending:

• The Authority paid invoices from regional contractors without gaining assurance that the invoices reflected work performed;
• Authority staff did not keep a record of their own review of the regional contractors’ and Program Manager’s invoices;
• In several instances, the Authority paid for items or work not included in contracts or work plans.

Any reporter following up on such charges would have to call the various contractors for some sort of comment. And the contractors would, at a minimum, want to say something, even if only to clear their name – an action seemingly banned by the gag order clause. Yet in response to the auditor’s report, the high-speed rail authority cloaked itself in, ironically, the necessity of “transparency.”

“The Authority is committed to transparency and believes strongly that additional spotlight on our operations will ultimately make for a better high-speed train project for the state,” authority Chairman Curt Pringle wrote in an April 19, 2010 letter to Auditor Elaine Howle.

Spurred on by Pringle’s eloquent wording, CalWatchdog contacted all the contractors bound by the gag order clause. Surprisingly, it was not a completely fruitless endeavor.

For the most part, the contractor’s work on the bullet trains has been very low-key. Few of the companies have more than cursory information about their high-speed rail work on their Web sites, and none of the contractors sent out press releases announcing their initial winning of the contracts (the companies usually released all sorts of statements to the media after winning their various contracts).

Officials from Parson Brinckerhoff, URS, STV and AECOM did not respond to general requests for comment about the work they were doing for the High Speed Rail Authority. Public relations people at HNTB and T.Y. Lin responded, but only to say that we should direct all inquiries to the authority itself.

Parsons was a different story. Within minutes of our e-mailed inquiry we received a phone call and a follow-up e-mail making sure we had received the phone call. Mo Hayes, Parsons’ market development manager for California readily answered all of our very general, very innocuous questions about her company’s work on the bullet train project, though she did get somewhat vague when the conversation turned to the gag order clause.

“That is pretty common,” she said. “They don’t want us to tell you the terms and conditions and prices unless they clear them.”

Hayes explained that creating an environmental impact report has more to do with following the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) process than it does the actual project. “Things happen sequentially,” she said, meaning that the gag order prohibited her company from releasing information about the project development before it had a chance to get proper CEQA approval.

Then a dark thought came over us. “This conversation isn’t going to get you in trouble?” we suddenly asked.

“I don’t know,” Hayes said, laughing. “Maybe…”

Photo courtesy California High-Speed Rail Authority.

By KATY GRIMES

Faced with a $19.1 billion state deficit and no acceptable budget in the works, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger reinstated furloughs for state workers on Wednesday. In an executive order declaring a fiscal emergency, the governor called for state employees to take three unpaid days off a month, beginning Aug. 1.

The order came after the governor said last week that he will not sign a budget before he leaves office next January unless he gets the reforms he wants. “And if I don’t get all of the things that we need in order to be fiscally responsible and to make the changes, the tax reforms, the budget reforms and the pension reforms, I will not sign a budget and it could actually drag out until the next governor gets into office,” said the governor.

Schwarzenegger spokesman Aaron McLear, on Wednesday said that the governor has stated this same position repeatedly, throughout the budget talks.

When asked what no budget might mean to the state, Sen. Denise Moreno Ducheny, D-San Diego, replied, “Very bad. It means we can’t borrow.”

Ducheny, chairwoman of the Senate Budget and Fiscal Review Committee, told CalWatchdog that the governor’s latest statement about the budget is the “most irresponsible thing he’s ever said,” and “shows his attitude toward the state.”

When asked how long the budget stalemate could go on, Ducheny said that she remembered one year in the 1990’s when the budget had not been signed as late as October.

But, as a “concession to Republicans,” Ducheny said, “We’ve been exploring tax reform, to get talks going again.”

“Democrats have been at a place to close the budget, but the governor’s unwillingness shows his lack of concern for the state,” said Ducheny. “Democrats do not have tax increases in the budget,” Ducheny stated. “We are only extending the taxes people already pay, and stopping the upcoming corporate tax breaks.” “A one-year delay is not going to hurt anyone,” she added.

McLear said he “disagreed” with the tax language Ducheny used and said, “No one including the governor wants to make cuts. The Democrats’ attempt to eliminate tax incentives for employers are nothing more than tax increases.”

“We’ve done our end of the budget” McLear said. “We got our budget done on time.”

“But Democrats just want the governor to sign a budget with tax increases,” said McLear. “The people said no to tax increases by a 3 to 1 margin on the ballot in May 2009. Democrats will be taking money from small businesses, not just big corporations, who then can’t hire people. Raising taxes instead of encouraging business to hire people is what the governor said he will not let happen.”

“Democrats have tried to explore alternatives and are hoping Republicans could support tax reforms,” said Ducheny. “The budget the Senate laid out in May is the right one.”

If a budget is not approved, Ducheny said that interest will continue to accrue on the debt owed to the state’s unpaid vendors and on the money that the state borrows.

But no one seems willing to discuss insolvency. When asked what would happen to the state if a budget is not approved until another governor is sworn in, no one would address the ultimate “what if scenario.”

The Department of Finance spokesman H.D. Palmer is the one person in the administration who can answer that question, but is out on vacation right now, and his press office referred all calls to the governor’s spokesman. When asked the question, McLear said, “I would have to check with the Department of Finance for that answer.”

But the costs to the state continue to grow, even if it is debated between the parties about how the debt is calculated. In his weekly radio address last weekend, Assembly Minority Leader Martin Garrick said, “If you take our $19.1 billion dollar deficit and divide it by 365 days, you’ll find that the state spends $52.3 million dollars more than it receives in tax revenues for every day the budget is late. The math is quite simple, and highlights a serious overspending problem in state government. But legislative Democrats reject this notion.”

Ducheny disagreed with Garrick’s calculations and said the $52.3 million is a “fake number.” “Republicans count anticipated savings, and then use what would be saved in the total amount that the state is losing,” Ducheny said. Calling it an “erosion of savings,” Ducheny added that “there are consequences with being late.”

However, Ducheny said the biggest problem with no budget, are the massive costs being shifted to counties: “The $4 billion cost shift of CalWorks to already strapped counties are cuts to real people. …  “And now with the minimum wage and furloughs today, the governor shows that he governs by press releases and not with programs.”