On November 19th, 52 UC Davis students were arrested after peacefully protesting the new 32% fee increases established by the UC Regents. As a second year undergraduate, I was hopeful that students were beginning to see the bigger picture: California is broken.
Students, so far, have been forcing most of the blame on the UC Regents. While it is true that the 20 Regents who voted for the increase certainly deserve a heaving portion of the blame for borrowing tens of millions (from a non-CA bank, NY Merrill Trust) while forcing students into a cycle of debt in order to protect UC's eerily superb bond rating, the only way for students to move towards enacting change is to recognize that UC's woes are symptomatic of the larger disease that has infected the entire state.
The UC student, to widen the umbrella for a movement that might have the capability of rallying support for reform, should understand that he or she risks turning people off by angling attacks towards the Regents and the Regents only. It is important to recognize that while it is a travesty that UC is becoming an unaffordable option for many California families, it is nearsighted to think that UC fees are anything more than a slice of the pie that is California's broken political system. The state workers that have been furloughed, the elderly Californians that are losing their access to Medicare, the thousands of previously middle-class Californians that have had their homes foreclosed, and the over 12% of California that is unemployed might tell students that UC is not the only government program that is underfunded, mismanaged, and increasingly unavailable to the people who need it.
(Posted by Steve Smith, California Labor Federation)
The campaign to repeal the egregious corporate tax giveaways that were part of the last budget deal is gathering steam. Thanks to Brian and David for their coverage of this issue - it seems to being having some resonance with folks who are fed up with sweetheart deals for corporations at the expense of the rest of us.
The governor said "the only solution for our healthcare crisis" is a complete overhaul of the state's healthcare system along the lines of his $14.9-billion plan that the Legislature rejected last January as too expensive.
"We supported wholesale health reform, but this is a population that has nowhere else to go, and he's leaving them high and dry," said Elizabeth Landsberg, legislative advocate for the Western Center on Law & Poverty, a Los Angeles nonprofit. (LA Times 10/28)
Disgusting.
• A fascinating legal case is going to trial in San Francisco. A group of Nigerian villagers are suing Chevron over a protest on one an oil rig in the Niger Delta. The plaintiffs accuse Chevron of drastic human rights violations. Oh, and Chevron is now the #3 oil company in the world.
Some of these items may have been covered here, some not, but I didn't get to post a lot throughout the week, so here's some fresh meat (apologies to CMR) for those interested in Golden State politics:
This is about the eighth time I've seen a report simliar to this one that undisclosed donors are financing a Schwarzenegger trade mission.
Fifty-two business delegates will join Schwarzenegger on the trip, according to a list the Governor's Office released Friday. A third of those going represent interests that have donated to Schwarzenegger's campaigns.
The governor's trip will be financed by the California State Protocol Foundation, a tax-exempt organization not required to disclose its donors. California Chamber of Commerce leaders, including President Allan Zaremberg, serve as the group's officers.
The foundation is not required by law to disclose its contributors and has not done so. In 2005, the last year for which IRS forms were available, the group received nearly $2 million in revenue. It reported $1 million in travel expenditures that year after Schwarzenegger led a weeklong trade mission in China.
The excuse put forth by the Governor's spokespeople is always the same: this SAVES taxpayer money because they don't have to finance these trade missions! Really? What about all the corporate welfare checks that get cut as a result of this access? What about all the watered-down regulations that cost taxpayers, not only with money but with public health and quality of life? What about the state contracts that could go to lower bidders who don't have the same relationships (read: bribery poke) with the Governor?
That was Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez today at an event in downtown Los Angeles, in front of a Chevron station (that was selling gas for a low low $3.49, I think the advance man could've found stations 30-40 cents higher without too much trouble), as he announced with Assemblymen Mike Davis, Mike Feuer and Mike Eng a series of bills to combat rising gas prices and the artificial depression of refinery supply. The bills will seek to oversee refinery maintenance, expand regulatory authority, and deal with the "hot fuel" issue. The Speaker said that "During the electricity crisis a few years ago, California adopted similar measures to keep energy companies from using these convenient (refinery) shutdowns to amp up their profits, and today we're going to make sure oil companies can't use Enron-like tactics on California consumers."
This is an object lesson in why now was the exact wrong time for the CDP to accept $50,000 from the prime progenitor of those Enron-style tactics. And it actually came up in the press conference. A full report on the flip, with audio to come.
(update: Frank Russo reports that the Speaker of the Assembly will introduce various bills tomorrow regarding refinery capacity and gas prices. I believe that this is an attempt to allay the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights' concerns; they have distributed petitions for a special session of the Legislature, after all. I give tentative support to the Speaker's efforts, and hope that it won't befall the same fate as Joe Dunn's bill last year, which never made it out of the Assembly. This is the beginning of the fight, not the end. The rest of my article, which deals with the CDP and really not the Speaker, holds.)
I appreciate all the comments in my somewhat provocative diary on Chevron's $50,000 donation to the CDP and why I think there's a better way to do business. I'm no hallowed saint when it comes to politics, and I understand that right now it takes lots of cash. But my main point is that money received from this particular company at this particular time with these particular underlying scenarios, whether taken in good faith or bad, will not do as much to reach new voters as it will alienate old ones. People have every right to assume that a politician or a party who receives a large donation from a corporate entity will be expecting something in return, as the instances of such exchanges being consummated are too numerous to count. And $50,000 buys 1 ad in LA during election season, maybe not all of it, but it drives hundreds of activists crazy, and every decline-to-state voter that hears about it just shakes their head and continues to believe the perception that "they're all the same" in politics. I know personally, from the reaction this has gotten, that people are upset. It doesn't mean they'll stop working for the party, but maybe they'll stuff one less envelope. Maybe they'll make one less phone call. And maybe they just won't feel as invested in a big-donor top-down party as they would in a small-donor bottom-up one.
I am fairly surprised that more has not been made in the blogosphere of the unwelcome news that Chevron is doing everything it can to buy off the California Democratic Party and some of its top legislators. Outside of this small item in The Oil Drum, pretty much nobody has said a word about the fact that the CDP accepted a $50,000 check from a company that is attempting to artificially depress capacity and manipulate the energy market in a way that is shockingly similar to how Enron made themselves a fortune during the 2000-2001 energy crisis. You can read the details here.
As a delegate to this party, I feel personally tainted by this donation. I feel like there is a concerted effort to buy my silence. It will not work, and I want to outline why I am respectfully asking this party, of which I am a member and to which I pay dues, to return the money.
Jamie Court and Judy Dugan of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights pen an extremely troubling piece today about Big Oil, particularly Chevron, outright buying our government and its leaders. This is not limited to Republicans, but certainly the Governor is the biggest recipient of this largesse.
Take Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who once claimed that he was so rich he did not need anyone else's money - and who isn't running for another office. Yet as gasoline prices were breaking last year's record of $3.38 a gallon, Schwarzenegger collected a $100,000 check May 1 from Chevron, the West's largest refiner. The company certainly had the cash on hand. Just three days earlier, it reported a $4.7-billion first-quarter profit, up 18% over the same period last year.
The contribution brought Schwarzenegger's take from Chevron to $665,000 (making it his 15th largest donor) since 2003, and his total political tribute from the energy industry is now $4 million. According to a recent Schwarzenegger fundraising solicitation, Chevron's $100,000 buys the company special briefings with the governor, something that beleaguered motorists aren't getting.
In all, oil companies delivered $90 MILLION dollars to political campaigns and parties in 2006, and while a lot of that went to block the corporate tax-for-alternative energy Prop. 87, plenty was spread around to political leaders and parties. And that seed money ensures that there is no investigation into practices like this (over):
Remember my facetious post excusing Californians for blaming Chevron for gas prices...well, I think I just meant for gas prices. Because, while they might have some role in the manipulation of gas prices, it's certainly not solely under their purview. But, the fact that they destroy the environment of developing nations and then run away from it? Well, that is their fault.
Vanity Fair ran an article entitled "Jungle Law" concerning a lawyer who was suing Chevron for damage that Texaco (now part of Chevron) wreaked upon their environment:
In a forsaken little town in the Ecuadorean Amazon, an overgrown oil camp called Lago Agrio, the giant Chevron Corporation has been maneuvered into a makeshift courtroom and is being sued to answer for conditions in 1,700 square miles of rain forest said by environmentalists to be one of the world's most contaminated industrial sites. The pollution consists of huge quantities of crude oil and associated wastes, mixed in with the toxic compounds used for drilling operations-a noxious soup that for decades was dumped into leaky pits, or directly into the Amazonian watershed.(Vanity Fair 5/07)
Follow me over the flip for a little Arnold connection...
And I don't disagree. I just heard a new Cheveron Ad, and they were super-psyched about finding some new oil field that will allow us to continue to pollute for generations to come. Yay!! Well, Field Research has just released one of their awesome Field polls, this time on how gas prices are affecting ordinary Californians. Apparently, 70% of Californians see gas prices as a "serious" situation (either very serious or somewhat serious), with the amount of people saying "Very serious" up to 35% from 32% in August 2005.
And I'm not going to quibble with that. Adjustment to a new price condition is ahrd. DUde, I saw $4 regular gas for the first time yesterday. $4.09.9 to be exact. Yowsers! (I won't go to that station, it's an outlier b.c of it's convenience to the highway. But, folks, yeah, you are going to have to adjust to these new conditions.
If you look at this cool graph (right) from the Department of Energy, you'll see that, oh, um, yeah we are the green line on the bottom $4 cheaper than European prices. Don't you think they are hurt by these energy prices too? Well, instead of just blaming Chevron (and ya, i'm cool with that as well), what else can we do to make our economy more competitive in a market that is just going to have expensive gas prices? How about adding more rail services and other public transportation? Increasing the CAFE standards? Taxing gas hogs?
Look, gas ain't going to get a whole lot cheaper, so how about spending a little more effort to address conservation and replacement technologies? And sure, keep blaming Chevron...they can handle it.
California Chamber of Commerce President Allan Zaremberg isn't the only Sacramento powerhouse seeking to protect power by opposing reform.
The Chevron Corporation -- formerly known as Standard Oil of California -- wrote a $250,000 check to a special interest group opposing Proposition 89, the California Clean Money and Fair Elections Act.
(Edited for space and appearence. - promoted by SFBrianCL)
Right now, we have a great chance to take a huge step toward cleaner air and cheaper energy for California. Proposition 87, on the ballot for November 7th, will:
Reduce gasoline and diesel usage by 25% over the next 10 years;
Create thousands of new clean energy jobs and grow our economy;
Reduce air pollution that causes asthma attacks, lung disease and cancer;
Make oil companies pay their fair share for oil drilling in California, just like they already pay in every other oil-producing state -- even Texas;
Make it illegal for oil companies to raise gas prices to pass the cost along to consumers.
Proposition 87 is a great initiative, and we urge you to support it. Sign the Yes on 87 campaign's petition now, at:
