News and Current Events

What’s at Stake in the Golden State? Corporate Cash vs. Progressive Populism

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christine-pelosi/whats-at-stake-in-the-gol_b_610505.html
Christine Pelosi: Campaign Boot Camp author: California DNC Member
Posted: June 13, 2010 02:24 PM

California voters face a clash between corporate cash vs. progressive populism. Nothing less than the biggest statehouse, the biggest Senate seat, and the future presidency of America is at stake here in the Golden State.

Can corporate cash always beat progressive populism? Absolutely not - but it will be spent at historic levels over the next five months. Corporate cash funded the nominations of Meg Whitman (R-eBay) for governor and Carly Fiorina (R-Hewlett Packard) for senator. http://vote.sos.ca.gov/returns/gov/59.htm

But, corporate cash lost to progressive populists who defeated Prop 16 (utility PG&E spent $45 million to LOSE a public power grab http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-california-prop16-20100610,0,6055763.story) and Prop 17 (Mercury Insurance spent over $15 million to LOSE a rate hike measure http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-0610-prop17-20100610,0,6749863.story)

One element from NO on 16 and 17 - the money is the message - for good and for ill. When a candidate or a company brandishes wealth during a recession, big spenders risk voter backlash.

Whitman vs. Brown for Governor

Republican and Independent women are excited about Meg Whitman—she beat men to rise to the top of eBay corporation and she beat a well-known conservative in Steve Poizner to win the nomination. She spent over $80 million—70 dollars per vote—and thus far has outspent Jerry Brown 200 to 1. Whitman did move to the far right on immigration which will hurt her with Latinos and moderates in the general. Jerry Brown is a party of one more like Arnold Schwarzenegger (who says he’s not endorsing) so don’t expect to pigeonhole him. He was a good mayor, a law and order leader with a military school in liberal Oakland—and has been an activist Attorney General.

Whitman wants to make Brown out to have been a big spender but older voters—the stars of midterm elections—remember the blue Plymouth instead of the Reagan town car, the mattress on the floor instead of the governor’s mansion, and his reputation as a cheapskate. Brown flubbed with his Goebbels gaffe—but some of Whitman’s people responded in kind attacking him as the real minister of propaganda—hopefully they will all stop the Nazi references! Really, people, I can think of 6 million reasons why this Nazi analogy has to stop. Meg Whitman will be on air nonstop talking at voters but they can’t see her debate till October 11th—the earliest date she OKed—when absentee ballots are already out for early voting. I expect that to change, as voters demand more interactivity and accountability.

Fiorina vs. Boxer for Senator

Carly Fiorina has her HP golden Parachute to fund a race against Barbara Boxer. She won the Palin primary against tea party favorite Chuck DeVore, who pushed her to the far right on immigration. Fiorina is anti gay marriage in a gay rights state, pro life in a pro choice state, and won’t fund abortions under any circumstances including rape and incest.

Fiorina began badly with her snarky Boxer hairstyle/Whitman on Hannity comments. She apologized to Whitman—not Boxer—and has now got to make up lost ground with voters who wonder why the head of a tech company can’t handle a hot mike, and with women voters who don’t want her mean girls cattiness to reflect upon us.

But it’s not about the hair or the Hannity—it’s about the jobs. Boxer will defend the Recovery Act aid to California, explain how jobs investments have helped make progress in people’s lives, and campaign hard in the Central Valley where swing voters thrive. Fiorina will have to explain why she was outsourcing jobs as CEO of HP before she was fired by the board.

Boxer has long championed our California coast. For a while, political reporters would tell me “so what? Environmental issues don’t win independent voters” but now that BP has spewed ecological, economic, and emotional disaster in the gulf coast, Boxer’s longtime stance against drilling off the California coast has the edge, especially along the Santa Barbara coastline where Tranquillion Ridge has been a target for drilling. We’ll see if Palin returns to California chanting “drill baby drill” with Fiorina anytime soon.

GOP vs. Obama for President

Long the ATM and brain trust of national politics, California is always host to national Democratic and Republican all-stars. This year, the stakes are enormous: we are looking at a battle for the direction of California and the 2012 Presidential race. President Obama has been out here twice for Barbara Boxer and could return if need be.

On the Republican side, Mitt Romney helped Meg Whitman and Sarah Palin helped Carly Fiorina. If Whitman or Fiorina should happen to win—and I concede neither—Romney or Palin would have a feather in their cap and a potential rival or slatemate for 2012, since victory in America’s largest state would instantly catapult Whitman or Fiorina into the GOP VP sweepstakes. But we are a long way from there… Jerry Brown and Barbara Boxer still lead in the polls.

What does all this mean for the November elections?

California is a blue state but we need a strong grass roots effort to win. Why? The June turnout was quite low according to our field poll http://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/jtf/JTF_June2010PrimaryJTF.pdf and will remain so unless voters have a compelling reason to come out. What Democrats need is to build on the No on Prop 16 and 17 victories and engage the voters.

Democrats must make the election a choice between which candidates help us achieve the California dream and open doors of opportunity and prosperity to all, and which will insist on corporatist policies that merely trickle down to Main Street. We need an interactive debate on jobs, healthcare, education, immigration, water, land use, and civil rights. Our standard bearers must be clear in their policies and their politics so that voters can cut through the multi-million dollar ad clutter.

I don’t think the answers will be on the air—I think they’ll be on the ground, when people go door to door and look eyeball to eyeball with voters to make the case for a better California. This will require a cultural change in Democratic politics—the admen (and yes they’re mostly men) will want their slick mailers and TV spots (and 15-18% consulting fees) to carry the day - so the progressive populists have to fight for every inch of ground intend to cover within the Democratic party and within the State of California.

Louisiana demands justice, not charity

http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/06/13/carville.louisiana.justice/index.html?hpt=C1
By James Carville, CNN Contributor
June 13, 2010 12:09 p.m. EDT

Editor’s note: CNN political contributor James Carville was chief strategist for Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign. Carville is a resident of New Orleans, Louisiana, where he teaches political science at Tulane University and serves as co-chairman of the 2013 Super Bowl Host Committee.

New Orleans, Louisiana (CNN)—Henry Ford once described history as “one damned thing after another.” And he didn’t even live in Louisiana.

Much has been made of my “outburst” toward the Obama administration on May 26, with George Stephanopoulos on “Good Morning America,” when I exclaimed, “Man, you got to get down here and take control of this! Put somebody in charge of this thing and get this moving. We’re about to die down here!”

But those emotions had been percolating below the surface like the crude that threatens our way of life today.

While it is important to note that both BP’s and the administration’s tepid responses to this catastrophe are unacceptable, it is also essential that the rest of the country understand that this feeling of neglect has festered amongst South Louisianians for generations. It’s just one damned thing after another, so the anger rising out of the Gulf is not new.

For too long, the federal government and industry alike have simultaneously abused and neglected, patronized and plundered, and now polluted the people of Louisiana. And our plight now is a national emergency.

We felt the effects of this neglect for the past five years, after rebuilding a city which was 80 percent flooded due to shoddy construction of flood control systems and levees by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. And we feel ourselves ever more vulnerable due to the nonstop degradation of our wetlands, which serve as our first line of defense against hurricanes and powerful storm surge.

For decades, massive engineering projects across the country have made us more vulnerable. We lose a chunk of land the size of a football field every 38 minutes. Since World War II, we’ve lost wetlands the size of the state of Delaware. I bet Joe Biden would be screaming on national television too if it was happening on his turf. Or if the Hamptons lost 16,000 acres a year, you bet there’d be a Million Hedge-Fund Managers March on Washington to demand action.

And the loss of coastal wetlands has everything to do with activities across the rest of the country, starting with the deprivation of natural sediment that the Mississippi River should carry to its mouth and dump at the Gulf of Mexico to nourish our barrier islands.

The Mississippi River system drains more than 30 states. Part of the sediment is lost by the damming of rivers in the system in the 1950s to provide electricity as well as flood protection for states like North Dakota and Missouri. According to historian John Barry, our sediment level is only 30 to 40 percent of the natural amount, which is why we are losing such valuable land so quickly.

Then the oil companies dredged canals in the marshlands in an attempt to grow an industry which now provides the country with more than 30 percent of its domestic oil and natural gas. Saltwater intrusion is killing the marsh. These marshlands provide jobs for tens of thousands of fisherman in an industry that provides over 30 percent of this country’s domestic seafood supply.

Canals were also dredged for shipping. Five of the nation’s top 15 ports are located in South Louisiana. So in essence, we are the gateway of commerce to much of the lower 48 states.

Add that to the fact that we have not seen a single penny of royalties for oil produced more than six miles off our coast. We assume all of the risk, produce seafood and oil and gas, with none of the reward. Royalties totaling $165 billion have gone to the federal treasury when they could go to help repair this pressing issue.

But there’s more.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, federal judge Stanwood Duval Jr. found that the Army Corps of Engineers had displayed “gross negligence ... insouciance, myopia, and shortsightedness.” He continued, “The Corps not only knew, but admitted by 1988, that the [Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet Project] threatened human life.” And yet, nothing was done about it until recently.

And then BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster hits, which is the deadliest combination imaginable of corporate greed and governmental malfeasance. We’ve been lied to by BP at every turn, from oil-flow estimates to the existence of plumes to health effects.

There’s also the blatant malpractice and corruption in the Minerals Management Service. Free meals, cushy seats at sporting events, and other gifts from the folks they were trying to regulate seemed to cloud the judgment of too many MMS officials to be bothered with protecting the interests of our residents and our way of life.

In case anyone misses the point here, let me state it bluntly: There is nothing natural about the great engineering failure of 2005 in Orleans and Saint Bernard Parishes. There is nothing natural about the environmental catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico today. Both were the result of shoddy engineering on the part of private industry, which was in both cases supposed to be regulated and overseen by the federal government.

Every penny that has been allocated to the hurricane recovery in Orleans and Saint Bernard is owed to us, and every penny in the future that will be allocated as a result of this current catastrophe is owed to us. We do not seek charity, but we do demand justice.

So we’ve had two monumental, mostly preventable man-made disasters in five years, which brings us to the moment where I said on television the thing that every person who lives south of the Interstate 10/Interstate 12 corridor agrees with.

We’ve been abused, neglected and exploited for too long.

And to be brutally honest, part of my frustration is a sense of personal shame that I have known this was going on for a long time, and I was ineffective in making Louisiana’s case in my years in Washington.

But let me say that it’s now time to draw a line in the alluvial mud. We want our fair share of oil revenues now so that we can protect ourselves. And we want to be treated like we matter.

And we’re not whiners. We produce oil and gas and produce seafood and allow goods to flow freely to the heartland. We assume the risks with little reward. Jobs and livelihoods are at stake.

In the end, whatever past transgressions by the country toward us or whatever our failures to articulate our plight have been, we should be reminded of the words of Admiral Lord Nelson just before the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805: “England expects that every man will do his duty.”

And in this, the most critical hour in our region’s long, tortured, and yet glorious history, let’s remind ourselves that Louisiana expects every person to do his or her duty.

This is a struggle for the preservation of our culture, way of life, and the land we love.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of James Carville.

Chevron Spills More Than 400 Barrels Of Oil In Utah

http://thinkprogress.org/2010/06/13/utah-oil/

Yesterday, Chevron discovered a leaking pipeline that was spewing 50 gallons of crude oil per minute into Red Butte Creek in Salt Lake City, UT. By the time crews capped the leak, more than 21,000 gallons — between 400-500 barrels — of oil had spilled out, “coating geese and ducks” and closing the city’s largest park. The Salt Lake City Tribune writes:

Chevron pledged to clean up the 6-mile mess, but the company could not quantify the damage. As of late Saturday, Chevron said the leak had been stopped. But company representatives could not say when it began, how much oil spilled into city waterways and why — despite pipeline monitors — it apparently took hours to learn of the accident. [...]

Gov. Gary Herbert (R) put out a statement calling the spill a “devastating situation.” This disaster comes just four days after the governor put out his energy plan, which called for more oil production in Utah:

For example, just recently a Utah company partnered with Utah State University’s Energy Dynamics Lab to announce new technology that will purify contaminated water and clear the air during on‐shore oil and gas recovery, such as the production in eastern and central Utah. Put in the context of the ongoing off‐shore Gulf Coast petroleum disaster, this has even greater significance. One might ask: “Why are we drilling in the middle of the ocean where there is extreme environmental risk when we could be meeting the demand for domestic production from on‐shore development in areas with minimal environmental risk such as Utah?”

Last month, both Herbert and Sen. Bob Bennett (R-UT) tried to block the Interior Department’s reforms for onshore oil and gas leasing. Herbert “said that if Interior doesn’t reconsider its drilling reforms, Utah might sue the federal government.”

By then [just before 8 a.m., when Chevron shut down the pipe], oil had reached Liberty Park’s pond, drenching Canada geese and Mallard ducks. At least 150 birds were rescued from the pond and taken to Hogle Zoo to be cleaned. Some were goslings and chicks as young as a week old. [...]

Depending on amounts, the spill could disrupt the food chain for the long term, killing bottom-dwelling invertebrates that feed fish, said Walt Baker, director of the state Division of Water Quality.

Why the United States Still Can’t Get BP to Do What’s Necessary

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-reich/why-the-united-states-sti_b_610469.html
Robert Reich
Former Secretary of Labor, Professor at Berkeley
Posted: June 13, 2010 01:07 PM

Here’s what Coast Guard Rear Adm. James A. Watson wrote to BP’s chief operating officer on Friday:

“Recognizing the complexity of this challenge, every effort must be expended to speed up the process.” BP’s plans don’t “go far enough to mobilize redundant resources” in the event of an equipment failure or another problem. “BP must identify in the next 48 hours additional leak containment capacity that could be operationalized and expedited to avoid the continued discharge of oil.”

Translated: You’re dragging your heels and aren’t even using all the equipment you have, damn it. You better, or I’ll ... I’ll ... .

BP spokesman Jon Pack said the company received Watson’s letter and would respond to it as soon as possible.

Translated: Too bad. Have a nice weekend.

The administration has not used legal authority to order BP to do a thing, because

As Californians Go To Polls, Activists Slam Corporate Hijacking Democracy

http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0606/californians-polls-activists-slam-corporate-hijacking-democracy/
By Agence France-Presse
Sunday, June 6th, 2010—10:01 pm

The free-spending role of corporations in California’s electoral system has come under fire as the state prepares to vote on two referendum which opponents have condemned as a “hijacking” of democracy.
Whether its a bid to legalize marijuana or ban same-sex marriage, single-issue referendum, known in California as ballot initiatives, are part of the fabric of the state’s political scene.

But two ballot measures being presented to voters at Tuesday’s June 8 primaries have raised questions about an electoral system which allows corporations to bankroll campaigns with millions of dollars.

The highest profile initiative—Proposition 16—is backed and financed by Pacific Gas and Electric, the private, for-profit electric company which supplies energy to nearly two thirds of northern California.
Proposition 16 would require any city or county in the state seeking to start its own municipal utility to get approval from two thirds of its voters.

Opponents of the initiative say that if approved it will give PG&E and other existing companies a virtual monopoly, locking out potential public sector rivals in perpetuity.

“I think it’s outrageous that a regulated company could decide to write its own business advantage into the state Constitution,” John Geesman, a former member of the California Energy Commission, told the Los Angeles Times.

So far PG&E has spent an estimated 46 million dollars on its campaign, blitzing local television, radio and newspapers with hard-hitting ads touting the measure as the “Taxpayers Right to Vote.”

Opponents however are hamstrung because the law forbids municipal power providers from spending any money on electioneering. The “No on 16” campaign is staffed exclusively by volunteers and has so far raised only 80,000 dollars.

“The initiative process originated with the idea that ordinary voters could bring forth issues of importance to them and it’s pretty much been hijacked by wealthy corporations,” said “No on 16” spokeswoman Mindy Spratt.

“We have far more public support, far more endorsements, far more volunteers. But the challenge is getting our message out against a 46 million dollar ad campaign that has blanketed the entire state.
“PG&E has obviously calculated ‘If you can buy a Governor’s Mansion, you might as well try and buy a part of the constitution.’”

The other ballot measure being decided Tuesday, Proposition 17, is being funded by Mercury Insurance, which has spent more than 15 million dollars on the campaign. Supporters say the measure is designed to allow drivers to keep loyalty discounts even if if they switch insurance companies.

Opponents say Proposition 17 will allow insurance companies to raise rates by imposing premium surcharges that are currently illegal. “When was the last time an insurance company spent millions to save you money?,” the “Stop Prop 17” campaign asks on its website.

Experts say that while corporations attempting to influence politics is nothing new, the sums of money being spent by backers of the two California measures in Tuesday’s election are unprecedented.

John Matsusaka, a leading authority on ballot initiatives who heads the Initiative And Referendum Institute at the University of Southern California, described the PG&E-financed campaign as “staggering.”
“Corporations have been involved in initiatives since the very beginning. It’s not new. But the amount of money being spent is,” Matsusaka told AFP.

“PG&E has spent something like 45 million dollars now. That’s staggering. Huge. That is a completely new thing."Matsusaka noted however that corporations were not alone in trying to buy influence at the ballot box, where public sector unions and wealthy individuals have often mounted similar campaigns in the past.

“What I do think is of concern though is the imbalance between the two sides,” Matsusaka said. “The direct democracy process was set up in the belief that the voters are competent to make choices.
“But in order for them to make choices they need to hear both sides of the argument. What’s troubling about this campaign is that only one side of the argument is being heard.”