John Garamendi appeared on Angie Coiro's Live From The Left Coast with Professor George Lakoff and our own David Atkins to talk about the California Democracy Act, Lakoff's one-line initiative which would change all legislative actions on budget and revenue to a majority vote. Listen at around 13:00 for Garamendi's remarks endorsing Lakoff's approach.
Garamendi: Well, if you put a proposition or a Constitutional amendment on the ballot, and it says, gives the legislature a majority vote to raise taxes and a budget, or one or the other, it's likely to be turned down. You know, that's, the polling indicates that, there are issues that have come up before, there was one I think two years ago that was on the ballot, it was turned down (it was 2004 -ed.). That was 55% for budgeting. The fundamental problem is, we're not framing the issue, we're not putting the proper issue to the people, and I think that was the common error from just a moment ago. If you make it about the budget, if you make it about taxes, I think you're sure to lose. If you make it about the very nature of democracy, all the way back to the Greek, the Greek civilization and the start of democracy, it was a majority. It was a majority situation, and here we are in this day and age in America where we really have thrown majority out, and we, in California at least, we are faced with minority rule, and some would say the tyranny of the minority. Which is exactly what's happened in the last two or three decades now, when it's come time for tight budgets and tight situations, urgency bills, as well as budget or tax bills. So I think we need to have a new discussion about what is the nature of our democracy.
While not an explicit endorsement, this mirrors Lakoff's theory on how to properly put together this kind of initiative. The majority rule theory is fairly rooted in the American imagination, and that's really the only way to explain this to people. There isn't enough of a sense that we have minority rule right now, and that this tyranny of the minority is largely the cause of the state's dysfunction over the last several decades. This is more than anything an education project, and Garamendi appears to understand it.
We're a democracy, we elected these people, let them do their jobs, and if we don't like what they do, we'll throw them out the next election.
Majority rule is an accountability measure. People currently have everyone and no one to blame for the problems of the state. Democrats can blame the rules, Republicans can blame the Democrats. Majority rule would make things much clearer for the public.
This is an important turning point, to have someone like Garamendi openly siding with the concept of the Lakoff initiative in what is fast becoming a grassroots/establishment split. The folks at CA Majority Rule are still raising money for a poll to prove their concept as one that can work with voters. I suggest you give it strong consideration.
(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.
It's been a long time, nearly 50 years, since Governor Pat Brown's vision for California brought us what was so frequently dubbed the "California Dream." We had infrastructure that rivaled if not exceeded any in the world. We had a strong social safety net that enabled Californians to pursue careers in the burgeoning middle class. And we had the "Master Plan for Higher Education" that promised highly subsidized education for those Californians that met a basic set of requirments, and shut nobody out.
At the heart of the Master Plan, were the community colleges. The community colleges allowed students who underperformed at high schools to get back on track for a higher degree. They were to be plentiful, high-quality, and cheap. The state was going to kick in 35-40% of the operating revenue, with a bunch of additional funding coming from the county level. You may think that strange given the way the state works today, but back then, pre-Prop 13, counties actually had their own sources of revenue. They could rely on the property taxes and other local taxes to provide opportunities to fund programs like the community colleges.
The community colleges were then to feed in to the newly upgraded UC and CSU systems. At the time, UC was already on of the world's leading research systems. CSU would soon grow to take a very important "middle" place for students. It was originally intended for only bachelor's and master's degrees, with the doctarates being issued at the UC campuses. The various CSU campuses would focus on teacher certification and other public service functions, with the UC doing the bulk of the top-flight research. (Photo Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
And all of this was going to be free for Californians. It was an investment in the future, and it paid off, big-time. The quality graduates that came out of this public education system helped to grow the California economy at a pace far outstripping the rest of the nation. Some like to call the 20th Century the American Century, well, if that was true, the last half of the 20th Century was the California Century.
But like all good centuries, they come to an end. And with the election of Ronald Reagan, and later Deukmejian and Wilson, and to an extent, even Brown's son Jerry, the Master Plan has been gradually chipped away. As we stand right now, of the approximately $18 Billion UC budget, around $3 Billion now comes from the state.
All this is made even more evident today as a Mass Walkout is occuring on all of the UC campuses from San Diego all the way up to Davis, students, faculty, and staff are walking out on classes to picket the university and its administration. And the administration is facing some tough questions of its own, particularly relating to admistrative bloat.
The latest blow to the system is the loss of about $110 million that the community colleges had been expecting from the stimulus bill. Unfortunately, the draw down requirements were not met by our 2009 budget, so those federal dollars go unspent as the community colleges cut classes and limit enrollment, a bitter irony when compared to their original goal of being the "open door" for California students.
But when you look at what used to be the grand scheme for California higher education, you can see the problem is far greater than any administrative bloat or lack of stimu-bux can really address. While trying not to look like an apologist, instead of pointing the finger at Yudof and crew, we should be looking to Arnold and his Republican predecessors and cohorts.
We have destroyed what was once the envy of the world, and are hard at work turning it in to nothing better than a mid-level private education system. At least when you head to the Farm down in Palo Alto, you know you are going to get high fees and tuition. With the UC's students are left in limbo, thinking they were going to get an affordable education. I'll leave you with the words of one of my professors at Berkeley, George Lakoff:
Lakoff, UC Distinguished Professor of Linguistics and author of several popular and scholarly books on the language of politics, said in a letter to UCB's Townsend Center that "the privatization issue goes well beyond public education. It is about whether we have a democracy that works for the common good, or a plutocracy that privileges the wealthy and powerful. Privatizing the world's greatest public university is a giant step away from democracy."(Berkeley Daily Planet 9/17/09
David Dayen mentioned this earlier today, but it is worth reproducing here.
Hooray! The outrageous propositions 1 A-E have been crushed by voters who just can't take any more.
California voters have rejected the nonfunctional minority-rule government that has bankrupted the state, along with the governor who led the state into bankruptcy.
The voters want a functional democracy, and that means majority rule. No more blackmail by a 1/3 plus 1 Republican minority.
In short, the voters have given the Democrats a new freedom - if they will only take it.
As I read my Monday morning (Oct. 1, 2007) San Jose Mercury News a headline jumped out at me: "Cigarette tax would hurt poor".
How often do we hear that taxes "hurt" or "punish" one group or another? How often do we hear that taxes are a "burden on the economy" or "cost jobs?" How many politicians talk about providing "tax relief?"
