The campaign to re-elect Assemblymember Betsy Butler to the California State Assembly today announced the support of Congresswoman Judy Chu and former Congresswoman Diane Watson.
Betsy currently is a board member of Equality California and previously served as President of the National Women's Political Caucus (LA Westside Chapter), and as the Director of Development for Consumer Attorneys of California. Assemblymember Butler also has served as an appointed member of the California Film Commission, where she worked to keep the film industry as a driver of the state's economy.
After the passage of the National Defense Authorization Act, with its codification of imprisonment without charge or trial, I could no longer register voters for the Democratic Party - even with the hope of involving new registrants in the California Democratic Party's popular Progressive Caucus. If I could not ask someone to join the Democratic Party, I could not in good conscience stay in the party, even as an insurgent writing resolutions and platform planks to end our wars for oil.
Unfortunately, too many corporate Democrats, beholden to big-money donors or to a jobs sector dependent on militarism, vote for perpetual war and the surveillance state, replete with secret wiretaps, black hole prisons, and targeted assassinations. Far too many who are fearful or bought by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee vote for legislation that relegates Palestinians to second-class citizenship and threatens to take our country to the brink of an unthinkable war on Iran.
President Obama, despite his eloquence and initial popularity, has continued, and in some cases, expanded Republican Party policies under George Bush by escalating drone attacks on Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia; hiring deregulators from predatory banks to craft economic policy; repeatedly putting Social Security cuts on the table; lifting a 20-year moratorium on new nuclear power plants; signing NDAA legislation that eviscerates due process; increasing U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) raids and arrests of undocumented workers.
As the US empire crashes on the shores of rapacious greed, as power shifts from the federal to the local level, the Green Party can play a crucial role in creating and promoting local economies, worker or consumer-owned cooperatives, model municipal policy and participatory democracy. The time is ripe for municipal federalism with its emphasis on cities sharing expertise, policies, and strategies for community building in a sustainable world.
I want to be part of that movement to create a post-empire future that rejects perpetual war, addictive consumerism and vulture capitalism to embrace a life-affirming vision of sustainability with measurable goals for energy, water and food independence.
As more people struggle financially and the cost of energy and optional travel increases, Americans will stay closer to home to invest and recreate more intensely in their communities and neighborhoods. Our challenge in the age of withering empire is to set a new economic course that helps us invest our resources in ourselves, rather than multinational companies that extract our wealth and labor for the 1%.
While running Greens for federal office may help to register new Greens, to attract young people to the Party, the Greens' resources - economic and grassroots - are best used at the local level where the Party has experienced the most success in the United States.
In 2011, 8 out of 12 California Green Party members running for local office got elected.
In Richmond, California, the working class city's Green Mayor Gayle McLaughlin, representing more than 100,000 residents, took on Chevron, resulting in a 115-million dollar pollution settlement, enacted a waiver on residential solar power fee installation; and spearheaded one of the nation's toughest anti-foreclosure ordinances that exacts a $1,000 a day fine on banks who fail to maintain foreclosed property. McLaughlin was one of several Green Mayors to publicly oppose the dirty tar sands project, signing on to a letter to President Obama urging him to reject, as he recently announced, the XL pipeline that would carry the dirtiest crude from Canada across the United States to the Gulf of Mexico.
In the city of Fairfax in Marin County, Green Mayor Pam Hartwell-Herrero and a majority Green city council has banned intrusive Smart Meters, and authored successful ballot initiatives to ban plastic bags and the cultivation of genetically modified organisms. Fairfax is the third California city to have a Green majority on its town council, joining Sebastopol in Sonoma County from 2000 to 2008 and Arcata in Humboldt County, which had the world's first Green majority on any legislative body between 1996 and 1998 and then again from 2000 to 2002.
While water board races are not often high-profile races, water board seats may be the front line defense against corporate privatization of our increasingly-scarce water supply. Kaitlin Sopoci-Belknap, President of the Humboldt Bay Municipal Water District, understands this. The youngest Green elected to local office, Soppoci-Belknap is working to stop the sale of the county's watershed to keep water in the public domain.
In Los Angeles, LA Community College District (LACCD) trustee Nancy Pearlman, elected first as a Green before becoming a Democrat (something that happens too often to avoid Democratic Party rival candidates), advocated for tough sustainability standards which resulted in the LACCD becoming the first community college district in the nation to adopt a LEED environmental building certification standards. Under Pearlman's Green leadership, all nine LA community colleges developed green jobs training programs.
Nationally, Greens are leading the "Move to Amend" effort calling for a constitutional amendment to abolish "Corporate Personhood," or as former Green Presidential candidate David Cobb describes, "the legal doctrine that allows corporations to overturn democratically enacted laws seeking to protect citizens from corporate harm and abuse." Cobb is now the National Projects Director for Democracy Unlimited, a coalition of Greens, Progressive Democrats, libertarians, and Declined-to-States organizing forums and rallies to challenge unlimited independent political expenditures by corporations.
Greens are also spearheading efforts to pass city ordinances embracing a Sustainability Bill of Rights, which would set measurable goals for energy independence, local food production, and clean air, land, and water. While Pittsburgh became the first city in the nation to pass a law protecting the rights of nature against corporate exploitation, Santa Monica could be next in line, thanks to the work of a coalition called Santa Monica Neighbors Unite! led by urban gardener Cris Gutierrez and Green Party urban forest advocate Linda Piera-Avila. Greens in the city of Santa Monica, which previously elected one of the first Green mayors - Michael Feinstein, a co-founder of the Green Party in the U.S. - are in the forefront of this effort to pass a Sustainability Bill of Rights ordinance that would recognize "the fundament rights of natural communities and ecosystems to exist, thrive, and evolve" - and set a goal of 100% local water use by 2020.
Throughout the US, Greens and allies are at the fulcrum of the occupy movement, defending homeowners facing foreclosure, practicing participatory democracy in the street, and successfully altering the national discourse from deficits and taxes to wealth inequality and privilege. In Oakland, Green Samsarah Morgan helped start the Children's Village at Occupy Oakland, where children can play and protest peacefully. Former LA County Council Co-Chair of the Green Party Rachel Brunkhe mobilizes marches on Bank of America in San Pedro, home to the largest port in the country; former Green assembly candidate Peter Thottam organizes thousands at Occupy the Rose Parade, where Wells Fargo, one of the most notorious banks for robo-siging illegal foreclosures, was one of the parade's chief sponsors; Al Shantz, Green Vice President of Napa Valley College's Student Senate, launches Occupy rallies downtown and on the Napa Valley College campus; Harrison Wills, a Green President of the Santa Monica College Associated Student Body tells an Occupy crowd at his campus, "There's socialism for corporations and capitalism for the rest of us."
Rather than running candidates for every state and federal office, Greens can invest their energy in campaigning for local non-partisan offices, in electing Greens to neighborhood councils and city councils; union leadership positions, pension and credit union boards, associated student bodies - and to movement-building and media messaging that injects and accentuates a Green anti-consumerist pro-sustainability vision into the economic discourse.
Power to the cities!
Though our emphasis should be local, our scope global as we solidify relationships with Green Party members across the world. Let us hold the Greens from Europe to Africa close to our hearts as we reject nationalism - its attendant racism, xenophobia, and scapegoating - and embrace global citizenry and planetary-caretaking.
Let us look to the German Green Party, the first to enjoy national prominence and the catalyst behind Germany's decision to phase out nuclear power by 2022. Encouraged by the German Greens, we must challenge billions in U.S. federal subsidies for new nuclear power plants and demand plant closures from California to New York. With a void in leadership in the U.S. anti-nuclear movement, the Green Party can play a key role in re-invoking the moratorium lifted under the Obama administration.
Elsewhere in Europe, Greens have launched a Green New Deal (GND) aimed at "reducing inequalities within and between societies, and reconciling our lifestyles - the way we live, produce and consume - with the physical limits of our planet" through progressive taxation, tax incentives for green initiatives, and new economic indicators beyond the Gross Domestic Product. For example, in Vienna, Austria, a GND initiative built "bike city" - a housing project that includes bike rental and maintenance, a compressed air station, 300 bicycle parking spaces, and extra large elevators for bike transport.
Let us build a new American landscape of bike cities, urban gardens, municipal credit unions, barter economies, and city-owned utilities with Greens organizing a new power-sharing worker-member-owner paradigm a la the Mondragon Cooperatives Cooperation in northern Spain. Based in Basque region, the Mondragon is a federation of worker cooperatives employing 84,000 people in four critical sectors: finance; industry; retail; knowledge.
Electorally, I envision a fusion approach - whereby Greens support progressive Democrats, just as Los Angeles Green Party members recommended my candidacy when I challenged war profiteer Jane Harman for Congress, and just as Green Party activists in northern California support PDA's Norman Solmon to fill retiring Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey's seat. Endorsing progressive Democrats - a la Congress Members Kucinich, Lee, Grijalva - on the national level - and Assemblyman Bill Monning and Senator Fran Pavley on the California state legislative level - makes sense until the Green Party is ready and able to successfully elect statewide and federal candidates of its own, either because the Party has exponentially multiplied its current voter registration, estimated at 300,000 in the nation; 110,000 in California, or because enough cities like Oakland, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Portland have instituted instant run-off or ranked-choice voting to increase the likelihood that voters will not simply cast their ballots for pre-ordained winners or lessers-of-evil but instead choose a candidate who truly represents their vision of peace, social justice, and environmental sustainability.
Ranked choice voting must be a strategic priority for the Green Party in the U.S., with Greens in every leadership position - be it a partisan office or a non-partisan environmental organization - introducing ranked-choice voting into their respective organization. Strategically, Greens might organize a coalition of third parties - Greens, Peace and Freedom, Libertarians, and the well-funded centrist Americans Elect - to institute proportional representation through state ballot initiatives for ranked choice voting. Such initiatives would appeal to voters who want to save budget-starved states, counties or cities millions of dollars wasted on run-off elections.
In the meantime, until widespread adoption of ranked choice voting, the Green Party might leverage its power by becoming a fusion party, regardless of state laws like the one in California that prohibit candidates from becoming the nominee of more than one party. On the grassroots level, endorsing Democratic Party candidates active in Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) would address the "spoiler" charge and position Greens as a swing voting constituency, much as a swing state can decide a Presidential election. Let the Greens be wooed; let every candidate running for city, state, or federal office feel compelled to address the priorities of the Green Party, and let our party learn the lessons of the Swedes and Norwegians who successfully challenged the 1% by building strong coalition governments and coalition movements behind those coalition governments.
While it's true that California Democratic Party delegates can be stripped of their delegate status for endorsing Greens in elections, there is nothing stopping non-delegates active in PDA from participating in a blue-green coalition that endorses and works to elect local Greens. In fact, that should be the call to action, watering the Green seeds for the next generation.
In LA County, where there are 23,000 registered Greens, and over 900,000 Declined to States, the Party will participate in an aggressive voter registration campaign before the November 2012 election when a Green Party Presidential candidate, perhaps pioneering environmental health advocate Dr. Jill Stein, will likely enjoy ballot status in at least 17 states, including the largest state, California, with its 55 electoral votes, and swing states Ohio, Florida and Colorado. Other Green Party ballot access states or districts include Arkansas, Arizona, DC, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Maryland, Maine, Michigan, Mississippi, New York, South Carolina, Texas and West Virginia. Though Green Party strengths lies in bottom-up organizing, running a Presidential candidate can provide a strategic stage for the left to critique and challenge the status quo, while attracting "millennials" or younger voters to a party platform that refuses all corporate contributions, supports single-payer health care, advocates zero-waste, calls for a tax on the rich, and opposes not only pre-emptive wars for empire, but weapons sales to other countries.
With strategic planning and a shift in focus, those newly registered Greens can rock the world of monopoly capitalism with a sturdy footing in city soil and municipal radicalism.
I will proudly stand with them.
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Marcy Winograd, a former congressional peace candidate, mobilized 41% of the Democratic Party primary vote in her challenge to war profiteer Jane Harman. Presently, Winograd serves as as a board member of the Ocean Park Association in Santa Monica and is a member of Santa Monica Greens.Winograd, a public school English and history teacher, helped organize OccupyLAUSD to protest education cuts in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
Email Marcy at Winogradteach@gmail.com
Follow Marcy on twitter: marcywinograd
Friend Marcy on fb: Marcy Winograd II
Grassroots activists in Assembly District 50 received a hard lesson in "Incumbent-Protection 101" this weekend. Despite losing every Democratic Club endorsement in the district, candidate (and current 53rd AD Assembly member) Betsy Butler managed to get 57% of the vote at yesterday's California Democratic Party "pre-endorsement" caucus, beating her opponent, Torie Osborn, who had won the support of every local club who voted to endorse, often by overwhelming margins.
Every year, CDP delegates meet a few weeks before their yearly state convention to "pre-endorse" (aka recommend) Democratic candidates they believe are worthy of their party's institutional support.
Candidates who received between 50% and 70% of the votes at their local weekend meeting are now eligible for, but not guaranteed of, the state Democratic party's seal of approval at the February convention. And if no one received at least 50% of the votes, Dems won't offer any endorsement in that legislative or congressional primary.
(And don't even ask me the rules for how Democrats in these local party meetings gained eligibility to vote. Instructions from IKEA make more sense.)
Again, these meetings and subsequent endorsements are notable because of the brave new world of party primaries, ushered in by 2010's Proposition 14 top-two system. It's a world unsettled, too, by new district maps that have left more open seats than at any time in recent history.
As such, a number of Democratic candidates are scrambling for an advantage. And the gold standard is thought (by many) to be the official "Democratic Party candidate" come June.
Theoretically at least, the delegates voting in these caucuses are supposed to be from the home district of the candidate they're voting to endorse. And actually, the delegates themselves are. However, the politicians who "own" these delegates don't have to be.
Only about a third of CDP delegates are elected by popular vote. The other two-thirds are appointed by politicians or elected by Central Committees. And in contested races like the one for the 50th Assembly District, delegates can be traded amongst politicians like playing cards.
That's exactly what happened yesterday in the AD50 pre-endorsement caucus.
Of the 64 votes Butler received, 5 of those came from delegates she herself appointed. Forty-two delegates were assigned by Assembly Speaker John Perez, who pulled them from assembly members in districts as far away as San Francisco and Riverside.
Torie Osborn, on the other hand, not being an elected official, could not assign herself delegates. The numerous Democratic club endorsements she secured weren't particularly helpful either, since party rules severely limited the number of delegates they're allotted. Some endorsing clubs weren't eligible to send delegates at all.
Dorothy Reik, President of the Progressive Democrats of the Santa Monica Mountains - one of the clubs endorsing Osborn - attended the pre-endorsement caucus.
"John Heaner, the chair of the 13th District who was running the meeting, tried to claim that other electeds had a stong interest in our district and had sent the delegates on their own." said Reik,"That is ridiculous. Those delegates were not even in the room for the most part. What should have been an example of local democracy in action turned into a farce."
Butler failed to get the 70% needed for unanimous consent at the CDP convention, so she'll have to wait until February for another endorsement vote at the convention to seal the deal. It's entirely possible grassroots activists won't let this go without a fight, and could organize to block Butler's endorsement.
But such moves are rare, success rarer still. The grassroots are woefully underrepresented at the State Convention, the delegation an almost perfect microcosm of Sacramento itself - insular, inclined to protect the status quo and resistant to overcoming institutional inertia.
But in the age of "occupy", grassroots activists seem less willing than ever to put up with the status quo. As one young Osborn supporter put it, "Folks in Sacramento should take note that AD50 supports Torie Osborn without a doubt,and will fight to make her voice heard"
Fasten your seat belts, kids, this could be a bumpy ride.
Being a delegate is important to the Democratic Party of California for many reasons. It's not just about picking who is going to be the Candidate for your party, in local and Statewide elections. It's not just about going to the State Convention.
It's about helping chart the direction of the party and representing the people in your district. And I have very strong opinions about where the party is going and what it needs to do.
Having been a 2008 Obama National Delegate and attended recent California State Conventions first as an observer in San Jose and then as an alternate, in Sacramento, I can tell you that there is nothing quite like being in a convention center or, in my case, a National Democratic Convention at Mile High Stadium in Denver with "50 Thousand" or so like minded folks. You CAN be the change, you really can make a difference, on your street, zip code, town, city, State and National levels. Plus make many new friends in the process. The following notice showed up in my inbox and I am passing along. Good Luck! California Democratic Party needs as many Progressive Voices as can possibly be elected. TAG, as Thom Hartmann would say, YOU ARE IT.
In 2010 California Democrats bucked a national trend and won eight of nine statewide offices, with the race for Attorney General still being counted.
A huge part of our success was because California Democrats from up and down the state volunteered their time, made phone calls, donated money, knocked on doors, and participated in our biggest Get out the Vote effort ever.
If you were part of our team and you want to stay involved, a great way to do that is by running to be a delegate to our 2011 and 2012 state conventions
The California Democratic Party will hold elections in each of California's 80 Assembly Districts on January 8 & 9, 2011. At these meetings, registered Democrats will elect 12 delegates from each Assembly District to be members of the California Democratic Party State Central Committee.
Now is your opportunity to help direct the future of Democrats in California! Delegates approve the platform of the Party, elect Party officers and endorse candidates for congress, state legislature, and executive office.
Since members of the CDP's Budget Rescue Team started picking up their phones to ask Republican legislators where they stand on the Democrats' sensible budget proposals last month, we've started getting some interesting responses.
Volunteer dbunn contacted Senator Jeff Denham (R-Merced-Modesto-Salinas)'s office, where a staffer reportedly said, "Sen. Denham is opposed to the Dem budget proposals" -- and went on to defend this anti-democratic "superminority" rule!
This kind of statement shows what we've been saying all along: that Republicans would rather hold the state hostage than work with Democrats to govern effectively, We have to continue to put the pressure on budget extremists like Jeff Denham and get all of his colleagues on the record to make sure they know people are watching them if they try to hold the state hostage again.
See our easy instructions, and our progress, below and get started today!
Will you call a Republican legislator today and urge them to tell us where they stand on the Democratic budget proposals? You can call any Republican in any district -- see below for a grid of our progress and instructions for how to make your call. When you have their statement, report it by leaving a message in the comments to this thread or emailing cdpeditor@cadem.org
There's a lot working against us getting a fair budget deal, like the rule that lets a "superminority" of 1/3 plus one legislators veto any budget the majority approves. But there are some very concrete ways these calls help:
1. Maybe California can end up with a better budget. By getting Republicans on the record early, Democrats can be proactive in building our budget strategy and get Democrats and progressives the negotiating leverage we need.
With Democratic budget proposals that add revenue to avoid cuts to poverty protections, and a Schwarzenegger cuts-only budget that would put an additional 430,000 people out of work, the more progress we can make here the better.
2. We can definitely build a strong case against Republicans. The past few years, Republicans have held our state hostage to their extreme anti-revenue ideology by holding up the budget. But right now, many Californians just think "the legislature" is to blame for our annual budget problems: They don't realize the central role Republicans play
That's not an accurate picture, and these statements will help us make the case that the budget is late again because Republicans are holding us hostage, not "because both sides couldn't agree."
3. We can definitely change things this fall. If we can educate the public on the reason our budget problems get worse every year (Republicans) and the conditions that enable it (a minority can veto the majority's budget), we can take a Republican seat or two and pass Proposition 25 -- the majority vote budget initiative.
See our easy instructions, and our progress, below and get started today!
In the month of June, with the Constitutional Deadline to pass a budget, the CDP did one move on the budget. And it was pathetic. There was no Theory of Change, no path for what they were doing to result in passing a budget quicker, or passing a more just budget. It was quite honestly one of the most pathetic online moves I have ever seen by a state party -- anywhere in the country.
And then they got defensive. They started censoring comments at Calitics, giving a '0' rating to disappear any criticism. They censored, again and again and again and again.
I'm trying to figure out how the California Democratic Party could have failed so completely, I think it might have gone something like this:
Delegates, Floor Fight? You Bet!
Winograd vs. Harman: Choose Our Street over Wall Street
Delegates, I need your support to block the endorsement of Blue Dog Jane Harman on the floor of the California Democratic Party convention this weekend. Harman is a formidable opponent, particularly with her campaign consultant Harvey Englander, the man who engineered the passage of Howard Jarvis' Prop 13.
You will hear Harman's appointees argue that we should not usurp the local caucus's power to endorse. Delegates are aware that incumbents enjoy institutional support and as such, many are unwilling to expend political capital or perceived accessibility to incumbents even though those incumbents may vote against core Democratic values. Our Party's bylaws however, provide for exactly this type of challenge because when a candidate is endorsed, that endorsement reflects the will of the entire statewide Party, not just local delegates. Moreover, when a corporate Democrat, funded by military contractors and personally invested in those same contractors, takes us to war without exercising her oversight responsibility, all of us pay the price.
You may hear that we must respect what Party activists in the 36th congressional district want. Please know that I am proud to be endorsed by the majority of grassroots Democratic clubs in my district, including the San Pedro Democratic Club; Torrance Democratic Club; Progressive Democratic Club (Harbor); Gardena Valley Democratic Club; Progressive Democrats of America-36th District.
Candidates for the San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee (DCCC) have reported fundraising numbers for the period ending March 17th - and the need for reform is evident. Unlike other local races in the City (where contributions are capped at $500), there are no limits for giving to a DCCC candidate. Scott Wiener, Debra Walker and Rafael Mandelman are running simultaneous races for DCCC in June and Supervisor in November - and all three have exploited this obvious loophole. Other candidates have raised huge sums - with the Firefighters Union giving $10,000 to each of its members running. Nowhere else in California must candidates for DCCC raise this money - for a job that pays nothing, and whose only power is making Democratic Party endorsements. Most counties elect their DCCC by Supervisor district (rather than Assembly District), which may be a good start. But what's really needed are campaign contribution limits - and it's unclear which entity could do that. With the upcoming State Party Convention in Los Angeles this weekend, now is an ideal time to be talking about such reform.
Interesting piece up on Huff Po now: Power Struggle: Inside The Battle For The Soul Of The Democratic Party
Excerpt:
Since 1995, members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus have collectively given $6.3 million directly to members of the Blue Dog and New Democrat coalitions, according to an analysis by the Huffington Post of data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. That's not an overwhelming sum when the average winning campaign nowadays costs more than $1 million, but it represents one-sixth of all giving from one faction within the party to another. It doesn't include the millions that progressives have given to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee -- rank-and-file members are supposed to cough up $150,000 every two years (though many miss that mark), committee chairmen $250,000 and up. The DCCC turns around and funnels that money to conservative Democrats in close races. Add to that the millions spent by organized labor and outside groups such as MoveOn.org, and it's clear that progressive donors have become major financial benefactors of the conservative Democrats who battled to undermine their agenda. "That tension exists a lot," George Miller says about the party's demand that progressives fund their intramural rivals. "That tension exists a lot. And it's real."
With over 650 people turning out, Mark DeSaulnier (*State Senator-Concord-Dem) set a new record for mass support at a Crab Fest in Contra Costa County. The list of attendees included the County's top political people including both Congressmen: Miller and Garamendi, Tom Torlakason (Assembly-Dem only 48 hours from a heart stint operation), 3 of the Board of Supervisors, The County Election Clerk, more than a dozen City Council folks from 5 different cities and county, district and state Democratic Party officials as well as union and business leaders throughout the area.
The crowd gave DeSaulnier a standing ovation when he declared that what happened in Massachusetts will not happen here and further that 'we will never, never, never give up on America.'
(There's an Act Blue page soliciting funds to take a poll on the Lakoff Initiative)
You may have seen me live-tweeting the events last night at SEIU Local 721 in LA, where Professor George Lakoff and the folks behind CA Majority Rule met with around 200 activists, union members, elected officials, legislative candidates, representatives from Speaker Bass' office, and more, to talk about the just-released proposed November 2010 initiative on majority rule. If you read through both the live tweets and Dante Atkins' notes on the meeting, I think you get a picture of a potential split inside the California Democratic Party, one that could have major implications for all elections next year.
It should be noted that CDP Vice-Chair Eric Bauman was there to offer support. He gave a typical stump speech and said very plainly that "the reason you're here tonight is the solution" to the problems that grip the state, problems he laid out very carefully and completely. He was honest in saying that any Democrat who opposes this kind of measure will be told that "vertebra are available for installation... I think the chiropractor's lobby can help us with that." He made clear that we don't have a spending problem, "we have a common sense problem," and he pushed everyone in the room to work toward a real solution.
But Professor Lakoff's speech seemed to capture the dynamic between the grassroots and the establishment much better. Lakoff opened by talking about the origins of the initiative that he filed yesterday:
I got into this last spring when Lonnie Hancock invited me to speak to a group of State Senators. And I said, what's the problem, you're the majority! And they said they don't have any power. And they explained the whole 2/3rds rule, and how the leadership has to work with them because we want to lose as little as possible.
And I asked, why aren't you in every assembly district explaining this problem? It's about schools, healthcare, everything, and there's no answer. I went back and said that there's something really wrong. Its name is democracy [...] Which is more Democratic? Majority rule, or minority rule? You knew the answer from the 3rd grade on. Even Republicans know the answer but they don't like to. We know there will be a blowback if we try to change things, but the hardest blowback is coming from our side. The reason that Loni Hancock invited me was that there was a poll done by a progressive organization, and it asked the wrong question.
This is my business. Studying language and the framing behind language. If someone presented you with the poll question: would you rather have more taxes and higher services, or fewer taxes and less services. Obviously, it went with the latter. And the legislature concluded that they shouldn't put anything about taxes on the 2010 ballot. Why do they think that? Because they think that polls are objective, and that language just floats out there. They're wrong. Language is not neutral. There's a truth here that that language hides. It's the truth that we don't have Democracy in this state. We have minority rule.
In response, because nobody else would do so, Lakoff's initiative reads: "All Legislative actions on revenue and budget must be determined by majority vote." It's tweetable and it's fairly simple to understand. It's framed as a democratic action to return the state to democratic rule. And it appeals very much to those interested in preserving democracy.
Which is the consensus opinion inside the Democratic Party. We know this because, back in July, the state party passed a resolution calling for majority rule for budget and revenue. And it didn't pass with contentious debate - it passed unanimously. One of the very few people to speak out against it was the Party Chair, John Burton. But the rank and file supported it utterly.
It was something of a reversal for Burton, who when he was trying to get the votes of those rank and file supported a majority vote position. Now he's seen some polls and decided to take half a bite out of the apple. Lakoff described his exceedingly short meeting with Burton last night.
Burton wouldn't talk to me for more than a minute. He just said that he saw the polls, and it said 55% on budget and nothing on taxes. How many of you were at the state convention? You voted on a resolution about this. How did that resolution come before you? The resolutions committee. And that was the point. We got the resolutions committee to do it and got a standing ovation. The rank and file Democrats know it's the right thing to do and they have to tell their leaders. So how do you change this? You have to have a poll, but you have to have pressure. The major donors have to call Burton and say, if you want any money from me, you get behind this. And he has to hear that from donor after donor and organization after organization. We have to win in our own party first. I think John Burton is a good person, same with Bass and Steinberg. It's the good people that we have to win over first.
Later, a woman from AFSCME asserted that Willie Pelote was willing to give $1 million dollars to a majority vote campaign until Burton called him and told him to forget it.
You can argue about what the most effective approach is to deal with California's budget dysfunction. We've been doing that all week. You could say that leaders must prepare the ground by tying things Californians want to revenue, and tell the story of Republicans thwarting the popular will. You can say that we need to throw out the Constitution and move straight to a convention. But what becomes incredibly clear is that there is a groundswell of support inside the party for a simple move to restore democracy to the state, and if the establishment in Sacramento rejects that, in particular John Burton, the subsequent outrage will have a major impact on grassroots support for all Democratic candidates next year. There's just no question about this. The grassroots already feels disrespected and abused by the leadership. They got Hillary Crosby into a statewide officer position based on just this kind of frustration. They feel that one of the richest economies in the world is run like a third-world country, and they know that they will never change that when procedural rules force Democrats into a defensive crouch, where they see their role as losing as little as possible. This split will grow and branch out into statewide officer races, legislative races, etc. The grassroots workhorses won't be very inclined to work so hard for a Party that disrespects them and fails to act in their stated interests. Not to mention the fact that everyone knows that, while we wait another Friedman Unit until the electorate figures out the problem on their own, people will suffer from budget cuts, people will go bankrupt, and people will die.
The CA Majority Rule team has a multi-pronged strategy. One, they are raising money for this poll, to try and prove that a properly framed set of questions will elicit the desired results. Two, they will put Speaker's Bureaus together in every district in California with people who can talk about majority rule and restoring democracy, complete with real-world examples of the fruit of the state's dysfunction. Three, they will seek to pass endorsements of the one-line majority rule initiative in every Democratic club and county committee in California. There's an executive board meeting coming up in November where this will probably come to a crescendo, too.
The real story of the Lakoff initiative is a story about rank and file Democrats wanting their leaders to follow their will. You can argue about tactics or strategy or approach, but that's what it boils down to. And the party leadership had better take heed.
The deadline for filing an initiative that would make the November 2010 ballot is Friday (Just a quick update to that: Friday is a suggested deadline to maximize time for signature gathering) . The initial measures to repeal the 2/3 ballot initiatives filed by Maurice Read failed at the end of July. There is currently an initiative to lower the threshold from 2/3 to 3/5 in circulation, but it does not have any backing.
And that's it. There is no pending initiative regarding any two-thirds rule, with the institutional support needed to get on the ballot, and the deadline is Friday.
A split between Democratic activists and the political pros who run the party may be growing over how to approach the issue that has bedeviled the party for years: the two-thirds vote required to pass taxes and budgets in the Legislature.
Most Democrats in the upper echelons of the party apparatus are convinced it's a fool's errand to try to persuade voters to hand the majority party unchecked power to raise taxes. Instead, they're gearing up for a campaign next year to lower the threshold - from two-thirds of both legislative bodies to a simple majority - on budget votes only, a path they believe voters can embrace.
But some grass roots liberals say they're frustrated with the caution of party leaders and believe, if sold right, voters would hand over both taxing and budgeting powers to the majority party.
"This is a doable thing, but it requires getting Democrats together and deciding to really do it," said George Lakoff, a UC Berkeley linguistics professor who has become a de facto leader of the cause and is preparing to submit by next week a ballot measure for the November 2010 election that would drop the two-thirds requirement on both taxes and budgets. "Either they want to give the state a future or they can let Republicans continue pushing it into disaster." [...]
But party leaders see him as quixotic, and dismiss his position as misplaced and uninformed.
"People are not ready to pass it," said John Burton, the Democratic party chairman and a former Senate leader. "He's got a theory. Good luck to him."
Mind you, that another guy had a theory before he entered the CDP Chairmanship: John Burton. At the time he committed himself to repealing the 2/3 majority for the budget and taxes, and listed it as a top priority. But I don't even know that the Burton fallback position is being considered; as of now, they have a little over 48 hours to file a 2/3 repeal on the budget. And of course, this would immediately put half of what a budget is - revenues - off-limits, while taking responsibility for bad budgets that cannot be fixed.
What I have heard now is that, with statewide offices being decided in 2010, party leaders don't want to put revenue on the ballot and increase GOP turnout against it, threatening their statewide officer candidates.
This is nothing more than a Friedman Unit strategy. We cannot put such a proposal on the ballot in 2010 because it might hurt candidates, so we move it to the next election. Which has candidates in it as well, so we have to just hold off past 2012. But our Governor's up for re-election/trying to defeat the Republican in 2014, so we have to hold off then, too. As a result, nothing proceeds.
And it's worse than that. We hear constantly that the public is not ready for a conversation about changing the rule, but in the meantime nothing is being done to prepare the ground for that shift in public opinion. It's not that we have to give the war a few more months to succeed, as in the Friedman Unit; it's that we have to give NOTHING more time for voters to, I guess, come up with their own ideas about state government.
The inescapable conclusion you must come to is that everyone in the system actually likes the system as it is. For Democrats, they personally prosper by getting elected and re-elected, and they can always blame the 2/3 rule for whatever failures occur. It's accountability-free government complete with a scapegoat, and it rocks their world.
We can talk about how Democratic leaders tend to view the electorate as static and unchangeable, rather than the starting point from where opinion can be shaped. We can talk about how small-bore goals or a major crisis can provide the spark for the change the state so desperately needs. But this isn't a failure of imagination. It's a general contentment with the status quo.
Which is why change will have to be imposed upon the system from the outside. The most intriguing initiatives to date are the one pushed by Lenny Goldberg to repeal the $2 billion dollar a year corporate tax breaks, and the proposal for a Constitutional convention (though that has also not gone into circulation by the Bay Area Council, but only through an independent effort from Paul Currier). This obviously cannot be left to anyone in Sacramento - they will always find a convenient excuse for delay.
When I was at the aforementioned CDP training in Ventura over the weekend, the attendees were asked by a show of hands how they found out about the training: friends, emails, their local club, County Committees, etc. Lastly was...the CDP website. And the only hand that went up was mine. Instant political geek cred right there.
So when I checked the CDP website recently again and saw this item, it made me a little curious. It's innocuous enough: establishing a set of guidelines on the part of the Rules Committee for the Legislative Action and Equal Opportunity committee (henceforth (LAEO).
I asked sources (an honest blogger doesn't reveal sources, so don't ask) what this may be about, since it isn't something that happens all that often regarding these committees--and I got more than I bargained for.
The average reader on this site would know that many of our editors haven't exactly seen eye-to-eye with CDP leadership in recent years on...well...just about anything. Political strategy, resource allocation, technology, volunteer mobilization--you name it, we've complained about it.
But it seems like things are changing, and nobody could be happier than I.
I happened to be at the CDP Learn to Win training this past Sunday in Ventura (another new program I'm happy the CDP is doing--more on this in a future post) when I received an email from one of my favorite bloggers who influences a lot of my thinking on political issues and strategy--Mark Kleiman at Same Facts. The email detailed the occurrence that I detailed Sunday evening, where Rep. Walley Herger in CD-2 praised as a "great American" a nutcase who described himself as a proud right-wing terrorist.
I showed the email and the details to Shawnda at the CDP, who was in attendance at the training (hooray for Blackberry). For the record, it's really too bad that there's no good video of this incident. This is why it's imperative that no matter what district you're in, it's always good to have a video camera trained on your local Republican--you never know when you're going to catch your own Macaca moment.
And no more than a couple of days later, the CDP has an action plan ready to go soliciting small-dollar contributions to fund an advertisement:
Members of Congress around the country have been holding town hall events in their districts this August, and some of them have gotten pretty heated. But nothing like this.
The Mt. Shasta News reports that at a recent town hall in Redding, Republican Rep. Wally Herger went out of his way to praise a man who stood up and identified himself as "a proud right-wing terrorist," calling him "a great American."
Yes, you heard me right: Rep. Herger, a Republican Congressman from California, publicly praised a self-described right-wing terrorist. That's outrageous.
The email gets better, because it lays it out on the line--directly listing all the incidents of right-wing terrorism that have occurred since Obama's election, associating Wally Herger with these incidents, and calling for him to issue a public apology.
Me? I'm all about keeping this incident in the news. And I'm glad the CDP is asking for citizen action about this outrage, along with the small-dollar contributions.
The special election to replace Ellen Tauscher in CA-10 is taking an ugly turn. The CDP has announced that its endorsement caucus will take place on August 1, and I'm already having flashbacks to Migden-Leno and the 2008 CDP convention.
You see, even though major flaws in the endorsement process were exposed over a year ago, nothing has changed; nor is there, at least to date, any apparent desire on the part of the CDP to address a situation where powerful outsiders are invited to skew the outcome of endorsements in local races.
As the Governor has tried to hijack the budget crisis to serve his own ends of punishing union workers and shredding the social services net, over the last couple days we've seen Democrats fighting back. For example, Dean Florez surgically took apart the Governor's idiotic smear attempt on legislators for doing their job of legislation. Considering that the Governor has never invited all 120 lawmakers into his smoking tent for a pow-wow, I think there's room for multitasking here. But understanding that would involve basic knowledge about how government works, as Florez said:
Assembly bill 606 creates a commission to serve the marketing interests of the blueberry industry. Another bill defines "honey" to mean the natural food product resulting from the harvest of nectar by honey bees, and a third bill adopts regulations establishing definitions and standards for 100-percent pomegranate juice.
"Look, we're pro-condiment, we're pro-fruit, but the focus needs to be on the budget crisis," McLear said.
Senate Majority Leader Dean Florez (D-Fresno) called Governor Schwarzenegger's criticism "childish" and said he is fed up.
"The governor's turned from an action hero into just another politician," Senator Florez said. "He should really, really take a course on fundamental government on how the legislature works."
"The fact that he doesn't understand these things worries me," he added.
Asm. Nancy Skinner held a press event with small business owners, again using the imagery of Arnold Antionette smoking a stogie in his Jacuzzi to contrast with the state's struggles:
Skinner called a news conference at the corner of Solano Avenue and The Alameda in Berkeley, outside the vacant storefront formerly occupied by A Child's Place. Near her podium was a poster of Arnold Schwarzenegger with a cigar in his mouth, with the headline "While the state drowns in IOUs ARNOLD DOESN'T CARE" and featuring a quotation from this past Sunday's New York Times Magazine article on the governor's method of coping with the stress of the budget crisis: "I will sit down in my Jacuzzi tonight. I'm going to lay back with a stogie."
Skinner said that's pretty cheeky talk for a governor who nixed bills that would've helped solve the state's cash crisis, avoided the need for the IOUs now going out and kept the deficit from growing by another several billion dollars. And it's particularly distasteful, she said, to small businesses that are struggling through this recession even as Schwarzenegger proudly talks about vetoing a plan to collect sales tax from large online retailers doing business through California-based affiliates.
You can debate AB 178, the plan to collect sales tax on affiliate sales (I don't sell enough in affiliate sales to have much skin in the game, but there are decent arguments on both sides), but aligning with small business to attack a supposedly business-friendly Governor has good optics.
For the wonks, the Assembly produced an analysis of the Governor's so-called "reform" agenda, showing that most of it would be completely irrelevant to the current budget year, and all of it uses math that magically eliminates implementation costs but assumes outrageously oversized savings years down the road. These are cuts to social services pretending to be reform. I guess it's a step up from completely eliminating programs like CalWorks, but it's fundamentally dishonest.
"I've never liked when people pick on the poor because they haven't got the ability to fight back," said John Burton, the state Democratic Party chairman and former Senate leader known as a fierce advocate for the poor. "It's a Republican syndrome. It isn't tough for Republicans to beat up on poor people. When finances are terrible, they go after the poor and blame the poor. Republicans constantly use that and don't worry about all the benefits government gives to businesses." [...]
Welfare advocates countered that nearly two-thirds of recipients are working or participating in training, and that half are making some kind of income. They also said that the governor's own May revised budget proposal estimated an annual savings of $100 million with that reform.
"He's reinforcing negative stereotypes and scapegoating people for the failure of his own administration," said Frank Mecca, executive director of the County Welfare Directors Association of California. "It's a reflection of a bully mentality, to go after the problems of struggling families when he doesn't get his way. The last thing those families need is to have a powerful figure accuse them of fraud, of not trying."
Furthermore, the CA Democratic Party has collected budget horror stories to highlight the human cost of the crisis. Here's one picked at random:
I am on Social Security Disability and with the amounts allowed to get SSI having been cut, it has also cut my income. Also, my medical coverage is being hit as well as so many of the social programs all of us depend on. Fortunately, I am not homeless yet, but it is a good possibility. I just do not understand how you could make all Californians suffer, especially those of us who are very low income, in favor of giving a huge tax break to oil and tobacco. This is not just or right and I believe that the solution is to sign the compromise bill, and tax the big corporations that are not now paying their fair share! - Christine, Victorville
The structural barriers in the state are so high that I'm not sure any of this can work. One thing is certain, however - this aggressive strategy creates energy in the grassroots, inspires changes to the system and can leverage public opinion far better than desperately seeking some compromise behind closed doors.
Dan Walters is touting a UC Riverside poll on budget issues that interviewed 276 respondents, 63% male, with a 42-38-11 split among Democrats, Republicans and independents. He does this with a straight face.
It barely matters what such a flawed poll shows, but I'll mention it anyway. According to 276 people, 57% support the 2/3 requirement for passing a budget, 24% preferred a simple majority, 6% in between, 4% other (?), and 6% don't know. Given the bad methodology, these numbers mean nothing.
But I'll tell you who has historically taken numbers like these as the gospel's truth and used them to mute themselves about any reform efforts for thirty years. That would be the leaders of the California Democratic Party. And they latch on to any poll numbers showing a view like this as a blunt instrument to kick hippies, not a starting point for the political advocacy and opinion leadership that can and should be done to change perspectives.
Here's the problem, in a nutshell. In 1978 California passed Prop. 13, and Democrats have run for cover ever since. They should have put up a fight immediately. But instead, Democrats cowered in fear of losing power, despite the demographic shifts in the state since the mid-1990s, so they lay low and never advocate for the necessary reforms, and buy completely into the myth that the 70's-era tax revolt remains alive and well, and they take public opinion polls like this as static and unchangeable through anything resembling leadership. Obviously Republicans are insane in this state, but they can barely manage 1/3 of the legislature (and if we had a half-decent campaign apparatus among California Democrats they'd lose that too) and shouldn't be feared in any respect. Yet our Democratic leadership exists in a post-1978 fog, a kind of "Sacramento Syndrome," where they've come to love their captors on the right, and have bought into their claims.
Meanwhile, the David Binder memo, with ten times the poll respondents and a clear majority favoring a broad swath of tax increases over spending cuts to deal with the deficit, goes unmentioned by virtually everyone in this state. And in that desert, voters go vainly on a futile search for leadership. They find nothing but shell-shocked politicians.
...As if on cue, view for yourself the craptastic "Post-Budget Reform Push" press release Assembly Speaker Bass just dropped. You'll be thrilled to know that your state government will be more "user-friendly" when leaving AIDS patients and the poor to die on the streets. You can almost smell the fear coming off this press release (on the flip):
Last week, John Burton (the new Chair of the California Democratic Party) sent an update to members of the CDP's Executive Board about what the organization has been doing since he took the helm in late April.
Please see the message below in its entirety (edited slightly to make it easier to read).
Congratulations on your election to the California Democratic Party Executive Board! Our first meeting will take place in Burlingame on the weekend of July 17th through the 19th. I am looking forward to seeing you there.
And I also wanted to thank you for making the April 09 CDP Convention such a positive and high-energy event. Our team has hit the ground running. (See the update below)
During this transition time, we are looking for the best ways to address the needs activists expressed to us during the campaign, and putting the programs in place to answer the call.
During my campaign, I promised I would focus on the basics: getting Democrats elected - from local races all the way up the ticket: Push to move red areas to blue, in all 58 counties; Increase Democratic voter registration; give activists the tools and assistance they need to be successful; support our young Democrats; and re-energize the state party.
I wanted to share a couple of thoughts with Calitics readers about my experience running for chair of the California Democratic Party.
First, I really did mean it in my speech on Saturday when I said most of the good ideas were on the floor of the convention. Of the 12 points I presented in that speech, a couple were mine. A few came from things I heard at central committee meetings or regional events I attended across the state during the campaign. In some cases, they were things political friends of mine suggested, or even stuff I read on blogs and listservs. One friend of mine at the convention called it crowdsourscing, another fellow said it was the essence of democracy, and a third observed that that's what representatives are supposed to do--listen to their constituents. Of course they're all right. But the point is, all you have to do is show up and listen. We have a lot of bright, experienced people in the Democratic Party in California. They have a lot to teach us.
The other thing people kept telling me is that I was so brave to do this. Anybody who knows me can tell you I'm not an inherently brave person. Foolhardy on occasion perhaps. But I was so nervous on Saturday that my son had to type the changes to my speech because my hands were shaking. What motivated me was the belief that what I was doing was important, and that's not much different than most of the people who do extraordinary things in our party every day.
