Posts tagged Democrats
Brown Wants New Anti-Business Super-Agency
Jan 6th
Governor Brown’s proposed 2012-2013 budget – rushed out yesterday after a staffer inadvertently published it – includes what we’d expect from a liberal democrat governor … and more.
Sure, it’s got more spending (7 to 9 percent more, depending on who’s crunching) and class warfare (higher taxes on the “wealthy,” defined as $250,000 and up). But its real surprise is buried deep down: a new super-agency charged with making life even more miserable for California businesses … if such a thing can be fathomed.
The Daily Caller picked up my column on the budget and the new super-agency this a.m. It’s worth reading the whole thing – and I hope you do, because they count clicks! – but here’s the relevant material on the new super-agency:
Brown is calling for the creation of the Business and Consumer Services Agency, a new mega-agency that apparently will “service” businesses in the way male farm animals “service” female ones. The agency will combine habitually anti-business departments handling consumer affairs, “fair” employment and various business licensing and inspection functions, and into this fetid anti-business environment drop “the newly restructured Department of Business Oversight.”
Restructured from what? The department doesn’t currently exist, so it appears that Brown is creating an entirely new arm of government, surrounding it with anti-business zealots and charging it with increasing the amount of oversight of California businesses that are already suffering from too much oversight.
What lunacy is this? The five and a half companies a week that are leaving California are sending the clearest possible signal that California is death to business, but Brown still proposes to make things worse. Meanwhile, his budget barely tweaks public employee pensions and keeps the California High Speed Boondoggle Rail Commission alive and spending.
Oh … I’d better explain that picture of Brer Fox and Brer Rabbit. It’s about this, the column’s conclusion:
In reality, though, the governor’s proposed budget means virtually nothing. Even as Brown was announcing it, a judge ruled unconstitutional the health care cuts the governor had proposed in his budget last year. Then the Democratic Senate leader lined up against it, pledging to fight proposed cuts to social services. And of course, the state employee unions and their armies of lawyers and lobbyists are busy today planning their campaigns to force Brown into more spending and more taxes — which is sort of like forcing Brer Rabbit into the briar patch, where he’s right at home.
Crazifornia a Neal Boortz Reading Assignment
Mar 17th
Crazifornia got a great plug this morning as Neal Boortz included my Daily Caller column from yesterday among this “Reading Assignments” for the day:
Here’s the latest example of how Governor Moonbeam in California Brown is not going to deal responsibly with the state’s unfunded government employee pension liabilities. In other words: he isn’t going to stand up to the unions.
The piece, also linked in the post below, shows how the new contract for California’s prison guards shows Brown’s true colors, as the union suffered no losses in the latest contract, despite the state hemorrhaging money because of ridiculously lucrative public employee union wages and pensions. Thanks, Neal!
Daily Caller: Brown’s Hand Is Union Made
Mar 16th
As California Budget Battle Sequel XXXVIII (Or is it LXXIX? I get so confused.) heats up, I actually got so ballistic I wrote a Daily Caller op/ed just one day after the one you see in the post below. Note the headline – they’ve agreed to brand my pieces with the “Crazifornia” moniker. Very cool.
CRAZIFORNIA: JERRY BROWN SHOWS HIS HAND – AND ITS UNION-MADE
California’s 32,000 prison guards and parole officers — notorious for enjoying political clout wildly exceeding their meager numbers — tried to negotiate a new contract with former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger for four years but got nowhere. After just three months of negotiations with Jerry Brown, they got their contract, and hapless Californians got the clearest signal yet that Brown is not going to deal responsibly with the state’s unfunded public employee pension liabilities of as much as $500 billion.
The details of the new California Correctional Police Officers Association contract haven’t yet been made public and haven’t yet been analyzed by people who, unlike me, can tell a POFF from a PLP. (If you’re curious, POFF II contributions are suspended for two years under the new contract and one PLP will be granted every 12 months.) Still, it’s easy to read the net result.
In a letter yesterday to his board of directors, CCPOA executive director Chuck Alexander wrote, “The majority of the rights and protections that exist in our old MOU have been carried forward in this new MOU.”
Any objective California governor would realize the state can’t afford to do that. It’s not like this is a union that needs more coddling. It has grown at a rate of almost 1,000 members a year since its formation in 1980. It has a 70-person staff that includes 20 lawyers. Even that’s apparently not enough, since Brown’s new contract with the union includes even more new positions. You’d think California was a state that’s not in a fiscal crisis. [Continue reading]
Daily Caller: Unions Sinking Brown’s Budget
Mar 16th
The good folks at The Daily Caller ran this piece by me on March 14:
In California, Unions are Sinking Brown’s Budget Proposal
Talk about crappy timing for California’s Democrats: An oversized colon was sitting on the California capitol’s north lawn Monday, even as budget talks broke down and the powerful California State Employees Association and the California Teachers Association rallied on the capitol’s south lawn for higher taxes.
The colon was a publicity stunt by a Democrat assemblywoman from San Francisco, Fiona Ma, whose cause was fine even if her timing wasn’t. She put the 20-foot-long replica intestine on the capitol lawn to promote a resolution that declares March to be Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month, but it can’t help but be seen as a symbol for the constipation that’s blocking the state’s budget process, and the colon-full of bad news that’s hit California governor Jerry Brown.
The worst news for Brown broke early Monday morning when it became public that the “Gang of Five” Republican senators who were trying to find a middle ground with the governor have ended their budget talks. Both Connie Conway, the GOP Assembly leader, and a spokesman for Bill Emmerson, a Gang of Five senator, confirm that the talks are dead, but Brown’s camp insists they are continuing. [Continue reading]
Please do click through to read the rest. Not only is it brilliant and informative, but the folks at The Daily Caller want to know you’re interested in this stuff, so every hit helps.
Stop the Desecration of the 4th of July!
Feb 15th
There are sane people in the California Legislature. They’re just outnumbered. One of my favorite of the outnumbered and sane set is Diane Harkey (R, of course, 73rd), who has a keen nose for regulatory insanity. She’s just introduced AB 206, a bill that would exempt municipal fireworks shows from the heavy hand of the California Coastal Commission (and the California Environmental Quality Act, to boot).
This is a subject near and dear to Crazifornia’s heart – and the subject of much of my upcoming book’s chapter on the Coastal Commission – due to the plight of the good people of the North Coast town of Gualala (pictured), whose Fourth of July fireworks show was blasted out of existence by the Coastal Commission. Here are some posts you can check out for more on the story:
From Cheat-Seeking Missiles: Coastal Commission Attempting to Ban Fourth of July Fireworks
From The Daily Caller: The Queen of the Coastal Star Chamber
The bill is not yet posted on California’s LegInfo site, but it should be soon, and I’ll update this with a link when it does. A fact sheet on the bill summarizes the issue as:
Broad interpretation of environmental regulation law has defined fireworks as “development” which has expanded regulators authority to require permits or licenses in order to display fireworks. This interpretation has applied particularly to coastal communities. These regulations threaten the ability of local municipalities along the coast to provide this public service to both their communities and the state.
In order for Californian’s to celebrate the great independence of this country and continue with traditions that previous generations have enjoyed, it is necessary that the ability of public entities to put on such firework displays is protected.
These shows are a cultural event that are enjoyed by many Californians and also provide an economic benefit for the municipalities that display them.
Assemblywoman Harkey also sent me a sample support letter. Please help her in this important effort (which faces a bleak future in the Dem-dominated legislature) by getting folks in your neck of the woods to support it. Here’s the sample letter:
Dear Assemblywoman Harkey,
On behalf of the (INSERT NAME OF YOUR ORGANIZATION) I am writing to express support for Assembly Bill 206, which will provide an exemption for municipal firework shows from the California Environment Quality Act and California Coastal Act.
In 2008, the Gualala Festivals Committee received a cease-and-desist order from the California Coastal Commission for discharging fireworks without first receiving a coastal development permit. The Coastal Commission determined fireworks caused an increase in nest abandonment.
This action was confirmed by a court, setting a dangerous precedent in which “development” was deemed to encompass the discharging of fireworks as described in the California Coastal Act because the displays deposited spent materials into coastal waters.
Fireworks shows are an inexpensive way for families and the community to celebrate the independence of this country. Previous generations in California have enjoyed these shows without burden of a government agency standing in the way of a long celebrated tradition.
In addition, these shows provide an economic benefit for the municipalities that display them. As a coastal community this issue is especially significant to the citizens of (INSERT NAME OF YOUR CITY OR ORGANIZATION).
Environmental protection is important, but a line should be drawn to ensure the preservation of long held traditions that provide enjoyment, foster patriotism and stimulate our coastal economies.
(INSERT NAME OR ORGANIZATION) stands in support with AB 206 for the above mentioned reasons.
Sincerely,
A Clue to Brown’s Pension Strategy
Jan 29th
Shuffled in with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s last-minute appointments was one – a very good one – that almost slipped by largely unnoticed, until The Buzz blog at the Sacramento Bee outed it today:
Among other actions on his way out the door, then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger appointed Cameron Percy to the California State Teachers’ Retirement System board in December.
Percy, 26, has a graduate degree from Stanford. While he was a student, he helped write “Going For Broke: Reforming California’s Public Employee Pension Systems.”
That’s the report that Schwarzenegger and Co. used as a source for the oft-cited and highly disputed calculation that California’s Big Three pension systems faced a collective $500 billion in unfunded liabilities.
If there’s one thing California’s public employee unions hate, it’s the Stanford report – so they are decidedly unhappy with Percy’s appointment. When Percy et. al. released their study (which you can download here), CalPERS immediately fired off a page chock full of stats that lacked one critical piece of information: Its own calculation of the unfunded liability. I’ve spent over 30 years in the communications business where we have a word for that sort of thing: stupid.
The unions’ pension unfunded liability calculation, it turns out, is about one-tenth that of Stanford’s: a measly, insignificant $55 billion. Why worry? That’s only $1,500 out of the pockets of every man, woman and child in the state and, heck, it’s not going to get any bigger, right?
The difference between the two numbers is that Stanford used a 4.14 percent “risk-free” discount rate, the rate private companies must use when calculating their pension liabilities. California’s public employee pensions use between 7.5 percent and 8 percent – a performance they’re not achieving, and most experts agree they have no hope of achieving on a sustained basis, and certainly not now.
With public support for Brown’s special election tax increase proposal barely breaking 50 percent in the early polling, he knows passing the tax increases may force him to bite the union hand that fed his election campaign, and submit a companion pension reform proposal with real teeth. So far, Brown, who left Oakland with its own $310 million in unfunded pension liabilities, has only talked about minor tweaks – just enough to not tick off the unions, but hardly enough to show voters he’s really serious about fixing California. Look for support of the tax increase measures to drop dramatically if Brown doesn’t take the unfunded pension liability more seriously.
Percy’s nomination will give us a clear insight into Brown’s thoughts as he grapples with this dilemma. The appointment must be confirmed by the Dem-dominated Senate, but Percy may not even get that far, since Brown has the power to boot him and name his own appointee. How Brown,and the Senate act on the appointment will tell California voters and public employee union bosses what they can expect from Brown. It’s routine for incoming governors to replace the nominees of out-going governors, but there’s nothing at all routine about this case.
From RINO to Redux
Jan 2nd
(Please read this post at The Daily Caller, since they’re interested in how much traffic their authors generate. Thanks!)
Today, Arnold Schwarzenegger signs his last gubernatorial documents and spiffs up the governor’s office so he can get his security deposit back as the next tenant prepares to move in tomorrow.
The man who promised his charisma was sufficient to break down the boxes that hobble Sacramento leaves the place with all its boxes intact, and more than a few new boxes to boot – they’re just painted a greener shade of regulatory over-kill. As it turns out, the Schwarzenegger legacy isn’t governmental and budgetary reform; it’s AB 32 and SB 375, California’s hysterical global warming twins, and the passel of business-strangling regulations spawned in their wake. The incoming governor is apparently intent on protecting Schwarzenegger’s green legacy with the appointment of John Laird, co-author of AB 32, as Secretary of Natural Resources, ensuring that natural resources, not resourceful humans, will continue to be the focus of California state government. The leftist YubaNet.com declared the Laird appointment “sets off green fireworks,” adding:
On the first day of the New Year, Governor Brown showed that he is committed to a green agenda by appointing John Laird as the Secretary of Resources. … From waste reducer to wildlife protector Laird is sure to make 2011 a great year for the environment.
But California’s regulatory crusade to coddle the environment without care for the cost is not going to be the focus for Jerry Brown, as much as he might like it to be – it’s going to be the budget, debt and the ever-less-sustainable public employee pension funding gaps. If Jerry Brown is going to succeed on that score, he’s eventually going to have to take on the public employee unions he empowered in the 1970s when he signed the law giving them truly impressive collective bargaining rights.
It was the unions that terminated the Terminator. When Schwarzenegger put four mostly sensible reform initiatives on a special election ballot in 2005, he was handily disposed of by the unions, particularly the California Teachers Association, which mortgaged its headquarters to buy even more anti-Schwarzenegger ads. By most accounts, Brown is also plotting a special election strategy to fix the budgetary mess. First, he will get a budget through Sacramento (now, thanks to Proposition 25, requiring only the votes of the Legislature’s Democrats) that will include sweeping cuts in spending for popular state services, then he will call a special election and ask the voters to do what even the state’s all-powerful Democrats don’t have enough votes to accomplish: raise taxes and fees.
He should be able to count on union support for the higher taxes, but the voter’s mid-term rejection of Prop 21’s “park tax” and their approval of Prop 22’s and Prop 26’s restrictions on Sacramento’s non-tax revenue generation tricks indicates Brown’s going to have a tough time pulling off a special election win. Even if he does – and especially if he doesn’t – he’s still going to have to deal with pension reform if he has any hope of fixing the state’s fiscal mess. Meaningful reform seems just about impossible under Brown, as Orange County Register opinion columnist Mark Landsbaum wrote today:
Considering their clout, if public employee unions had a better candidate to run for governor, wouldn’t they have run him? Why didn’t they? Because Jerry Brown’s candidacy was their dream come true.
California’s future will be anything but golden unless Brown pulls off a “Nixon goes to China” with the state’s public employee unions and brokers sweeping and significant changes to public employee benefits. Tweaking at pension formulas isn’t going to be enough. Even the wholesale selling out of younger public employees by older pension-rich ones isn’t going to pull California out of the hole. No, dialing back California’s half-trillion-dollar unfunded pension liability before the state’s finances collapse entirely is going to take the kind of reform that will pose a threat to the future clout of the very public employee unions that swept Brown into office.
Can he do it? I don’t think so. His appointments thus far, while still few in number, indicate that the Jerry Brown we’re getting is the Jerry Brown we feared we’d get – Moonbeam Redux. He will use the Democrat’s complete control of Sacramento and the money and influence of his union benefactors to do everything he can to protect the status quo, because unlike where Sacramento was when he first came into office on the heels of Ronald Reagan, Sacramento today is exactly as he would like it to be – fat with government jobs and programs, committed to environmental over-regulation, and firmly in the hands of the unions he knows and loves.
Jerry Brown’s real challenge arises from the fact that the status quo will be impossible to protect unless the state’s businesses shake off the national recession and the state’s obsession with business-flogging and somehow begin to generate more jobs and more tax payments. Short of that unlikely salvation, it’s anyone’s guess how Brown will succeed in keeping his benefactors happy while dodging California’s looming fiscal black hole.
Utter Obliteration
Nov 24th
Twenty-two days after the midterm elections, Steve Cooley has just conceded to San Francisco left-wing DA Kamala Harris in the attorney general race, making the devastation of the California GOP complete. With the Secretary of State no longer reporting any “close races” on her website, we now know that Dems hold every state-wide position, and every Dem incumbent running for Congress or the Legislature was re-elected.
And, of course, Prop 25 made the GOP irrelevant in the budget process, since the Dems will be able to pass whatever monstrosity they wish upon California with a simple majority.
The GOP train has officially wrecked. Is anyone ready to stage the come-back that’s supposed to happen at this point?
A relevant bit on Harris from Wikipedia:
[C]ritics argue that San Francisco sends fewer people to jail per arrest than other counties throughout the state. The San Francisco DA’s incarceration rates are among the lowest in the entire state of California—fully 10 times lower than in San Diego County, for example. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, “roughly 4 of every 100 arrests result in prison terms in San Francisco, compared with 12.8 out of 100 in Alameda County, 14.4 of 100 in Sacramento County, 21 of 100 in San Mateo and Santa Clara counties, 26.6 of 100 in Fresno County, 38.7 of 100 in Los Angeles County and 41 of 100 in San Diego County.”
On the plus side, her inability or unwillingness to incarcerate dangerous felons may be just what California’s ruined prison system needs.
Did California Become Irrelevant Nov. 2?
Nov 21st
As commentators broke down the midterm election results on election night and the next day, you could almost hear them dismiss California as the land of fruits, nuts and irrelevance. It’s easy to see their point. The rest of the nation looked at the mess we’re in and did something about it; Californians looked at an even worse mess and voted to make it worse.
You know the talking points: We re-elected every single incompetent, egotistical, out-of-touch politician that contributed to the mess – as of this point in the ballot counting, not a single member of the California congressional and legislative delegations was sent packing. What a stunning endorsement of idiocy! But it didn’t end there. Californians passed Prop 25, giving the Democrats complete control of the state budget, as an award for their effectiveness at destroying the state’s economy. And they ensured that the California would stay mired in recession when they voted for draconian economic mandates by voting down Prop 23.
So, as voters in nearly every other state set new courses, it’s easy to count out California as a powerful national influence. But it’s wrong.
Ever since Republican Hiram Johnson became governor of California in 1910 and told voters he spoke for the insurgents, defining insurgency as “opposition to the looting of the people by the unholy alliance between big business and politics,” California has been the nurturer of America’s Progressive movement. The state’s modeling of Progressive legislation and policies and the sheer number of progressives churned out by its schools and universities has given the movement staying power – so much staying power, in fact, that it’s unlikely Barack Obama would be president today were it not for California’s Progressives, right up to Barbara Boxer, Nancy Pelosi, Henry Waxman and, once again, Jerry Brown.
Sure, politicians, think tanks and campaign managers will be studying election results everywhere else to see how to capitalize on, or crush, the Tea Party’s influence, but just as surely, Progressives, environmentalists, social justice advocates and union bosses will be studying what happened in California, so they can replicate it in their state next time around.
Besides, California’s influence on government goes much deeper than mere elections. We kid ourselves if we think our elected politicians control the show. They come and go, but the bureaucrats, regulators and legislative staff are forever, and they’re where the rubber of government really hits the road. Because California trains so many Progressives and pushes them into government, the state will continue to influence America, even if voters are trying to steer a different course.
This was evident when federal eco-bureaucrats followed Californian’s lead when they started setting the new federal vehicle fuel economy standards, just as it was evident in the eleven states that recently announced they would blindly follow California down the trail to eco-economic lunacy by adopting our Low-Carbon Fuel Standard. Like California, they will force industry to switch to low-carbon fuels that just aren’t there or just can’t perform – if there were a ready alternative for carbon-rich gasoline, Californians wouldn’t be burning 45 million gallons of it a day.
Don’t count out California. It may be sinking into economic ruin, but plenty of states and municipalities continue to jump aboard, eager to follow our lead, no matter where it leads them.
Crazifornia Exclusive! Jerry Brown, Oil Baron
Apr 16th
I’ve done a lot of interviews researching the Crazifornia Project; this one was by far the most interesting. There’s a lot more to this story, but this op/ed – indicative of the kind of things you’ll read in Crazifornia – appeared in the Washington Times on-line edition on April 16, 2009.
Pearce: Jerry Brown, Oil Baron
Little-known Foreign Oil Holdings Might Tint Decisions
By Laer Pearce
When Jerry Brown recently held his first fundraiser as an official candidate for governor, he chose as the venue the Sacramento apartment where he lived the last time he held that office, after famously declining to live in the governor’s mansion. Faced with multimillionaire Republican opponents, Mr. Brown wants to be seen as just a regular public employee, trying to hold his own against tycoons at the top of America’s wealth disparity. While politically expedient, the image of Jerry Brown as everyman is patently false.
Mr. Brown has a lot of money – how much exactly is not public – and unhappily for his environmentalist and global-warming-alarmist supporters, it’s oil money. Even more unhappily for his campaign managers, it’s money that may have led him to an attack against California’s largest employer and a rewriting of state regulations to feather the family nest.
Sacramento Bee political columnist Dan Walters spent months researching the source of the Brown family wealth 30 years ago and recently shared the story with me in his small office crowded with family pictures, catty-cornered from the Capitol.
In a nutshell: After Jerry’s father, Pat, left the governorship in 1967, he was introduced to the Indonesian generals who had just overthrown the country’s post-colonial dictator, Sukarno, and set up a military junta. The former governor was able to cobble together a consortium of banks that lent $12 billion to the junta – “a lot of money in the late ’60s,” Mr. Walters said. The banks were interested in the immense Royal Dutch Shell petroleum holdings in Indonesia, which Sukarno had nationalized and the junta controlled.
The grateful generals then set up two trading firms – one in Hong Kong and one in California – that handled the oil-exporting paperwork and were rewarded with a fee for each barrel, “a little taste, as they might say in the Mafia,” Mr. Walters said with a grin. Pat Brown was given 100 percent ownership of the California brokerage and half-ownership of the Hong Kong office. The deal was a very lucrative one because California’s early clean-air standards set a sulfur limit for the fuel burned in power plants – a limit only the clean, low-sulfur oil from Indonesia could meet.
Jerry Brown, alone among the Brown children, didn’t get a share of the business, but that changed after Alaskan oil came on the scene and threatened the monopoly Indonesian oil had in California’s power plants.
Chevron had just finished building a refinery in El Segundo that was designed to process Alaskan crude to compete against Indonesian oil for the California power-plant market. Before the facility could refine a barrel of North Slope crude, however, Jerry Brown’s Air Resources Board – headed up by his former campaign manager, Tom Quinn – passed a new air-quality standard for sulfur just barely too high for Chevron to meet with Alaskan oil. That cemented the Indonesian monopoly, and the Brown family, as the only oil provider to the California power industry.
Not surprisingly, when Jerry Brown left the governorship, Pat Brown finally gave him his own cut of the family oil business.
“To this day, Jerry’s very sensitive about it,” Mr. Walters told me. “He just hates the idea that people will bring it up because what it is, is the Brown family is in partnership with these corrupt, murderous dictators. It’s not something that a Jerry Brown wants to be associated with.”
The junta generals of Pat Brown’s day have given way to the more transparent, democratic government that rules in Indonesia today. The question here in California is: Will Jerry Brown also become more transparent and share with voters the details of this foreign influence on his personal finances?
Laer Pearce is a 30-year public-affairs professional currently involved in the Crazifornia Project, chronicling egregious policies responsible for tarnishing the Golden State.
