Moby Doing More To Stop Murder In California Than Arnold Schwarzenegger

Musical artist Moby has decided to donate 100% of the proceeds of three upcoming concerts in California, totaling anywhere from $75,000 to $100,000, to help out domestic violence shelters who saw their state funding cut by Governor Schwarzenegger back in July.

Six shelters that temporarily house victims and their families have closed since Schwarzenegger used his line-item veto to eliminate their funding in July. Advocates say dozens more of the 94 agencies that received a total of $20.4 million in state money last year have scaled back services and cuts hours and staff.

"In the grand scheme of things, it's not a lot of money," Moby said about the cuts during a phone interview from Chicago. "But it's going to directly harm the women who benefit from these programs."

Moby, whose real name is Richard Melville Hall, said he hopes to generate $75,000 to $100,000 from dates in San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco from Oct. 12 through 15 to give to the California Partnership to End Domestic Violence.

"My mother was in a long relationship with a guy who was very, very abusive and at one point I had to stop him from stabbing her to death," Moby said.

The money will go to the California Partnership to End Domestic Violence.

Domestic violence shelters are nothing more than homicide prevention units. Schwarzenegger's cuts - made by blue pencil after the Legislature passed a budget agreement - caused a huge threat to public safety that could cost more in court and law enforcement money in the long run. Republicans like him probably think that, as long as charitable donations have stepped into the breach, the state can be absolved for their efforts to threaten women's lives. But the $100,000, while extremely generous, is just a small fraction of the money that was cut.

Maybe some other celebrity could hold events with the proceeds going to domestic violence shelters. Maybe someone who had a long movie career and has a legion of adoring fans. Or maybe we can fund government properly and we wouldn't have to hold fundraisers to save women from being beaten or killed.

Will The Spotlight Ever Fall On Jerry Brown's Ideas, Not His Image?

With the Rasmussen poll numbers filtering through the traditional media, the idea of Jerry Brown being the favorite at this moment to return to the Governor's mansion is taking hold outside of California. Talking Points Memo has a piece marveling at how strange it is to see the "colorful" Brown back in this position, recalling the time-worn stories about Linda Ronstadt and "Governor Moonbeam," although they do acknowledge that "this all contributed to a somewhat inaccurate caricature of him as a left-winger." Indeed, the TPM profile notes that Brown was a fiscal conservative in office and ran on the flat tax in 1992. Clearly, the author was informed by Joe Mathews' cover story in this month's American Prospect, which delves further into Brown's un-campaign for Governor and the puzzling question of what in the heck he's planning to do once he gets there:

But a little talk about the big picture is in order. Outside Brown's news conferences, California is coming undone. This summer, unemployment reached 11.9 percent. Tens of billions of dollars have been cut from the budget in the past year. Thousands of teachers have been laid off. State offices are now closed three Fridays a month. University tuition has been hiked. Thousands of elderly and disabled people are losing their state-provided health insurance.

The crisis is so profound that it may present an opportunity for California to fix its badly broken government. Coalitions on the left and in the center (the right is sitting on the sidelines, enjoying the Armageddon) are drafting plans to change the way the state is governed. They hope to get several measures on the 2010 ballot that would reshape the state budget, call a state constitutional convention, and perhaps unwind much of Proposition 13, the 1978 initiative that severely limited the government's ability to raise taxes -- a major contributing factor to the budget hole California finds itself in today.

If any candidate should be talking about this, it's Jerry Brown. After all, Prop. 13 passed during his governorship. But Brown has yet to engage the would-be reformers. In the rare moments when he's asked how the state might be fixed, he talks vaguely of the need to forge compromise and invokes older, better times in California, when he and his father, former Gov. Pat Brown, were in power. "We can talk about 'restoring the dream,'" he told a union conference in Palo Alto during an explicitly political appearance this summer. "Well, I was around when the dream was here."

This is a dodge -- not only of the present questions about what he might do as governor but also of lasting concerns about Brown's own role in diminishing the California dream. Pat Brown was a great builder of the highways and waterways and schools that made the state prosperous, but his son Jerry announced "an era of limits." Since that declaration 33 years ago, the state's population has grown from 22 million to more than 38 million. The state government has not kept up. If Brown has specific ideas on what to do about all of this, he is keeping them to himself.

Brown clearly has a blueprint for winning the election - say as little as humanly possible about the problems that grip the state, and hope that tangerine dreams of the halcyon 70s push him to victory. You cannot blame him - it's a winning formula. With a pathetically thin state political media, it's fairly difficult to run on any issues to begin with, at least ones beyond the bumper-sticker variety. Arnold Schwarzenegger got elected by saying pretty much nothing that wouldn't fit as a movie slogan, and a celebrity-obsessed media let him get away with it. So I don't begrudge Brown the lack of specifics. That's the way the game has been played in recent years.

Indeed, I don't worry about what we don't know about Brown, but what we do know.

Progressives, both then and now, argue that Brown's brand of anti-government liberalism fueled the Prop. 13 fire. If government isn't all that important, what does it matter if you cut taxes? Brown had frozen highway construction, criticized funding for adult education and food stamps, and slashed social services. "I am going to starve the schools financially until I get some educational reforms," he said in one encounter with reporters.

What reforms, governor?

"I don't know yet." [...]

Brown, in the midst of running for re-election, called himself a "born-again tax cutter" and immediately reinvented himself as Prop. 13's champion. (He maintains now that he had to support 13 after its victory because of his oath to defend the state constitution.) Brown went so far as to befriend the legislation's co-sponsor, the anti-tax crusader Howard Jarvis. "It seemed like he went over to Jarvis' house frequently," says Joel Fox, who would later serve as an aide to Jarvis. "Mrs. Jarvis would tell stories about serving lunch to the governor with Howard in his pajamas. Howard voted for him for re-election because Jerry convinced him he would implement Prop. 13 in the right spirit."

As it happens, the only thing worse than Prop. 13 itself was its implementation. Brown and the legislature bailed out cities and counties that lost revenues under the law -- and thus established the dysfunctional system of budgeting that plagues California to this day. Tax and spending decisions once made by city councils and school boards were centralized in Sacramento. The state Capitol became a giant piggy bank, with interests on the right and left using lobbying muscle -- and the initiative process -- to carve out special protections for their funds, leaving less for broad public investments. At the rare moments when Democrats tried to make such investments, Prop. 13's two-thirds requirement for taxes allowed Republicans, even when they were in the minority, to block them.

Indeed, the Jerry Brown of recent public comments shows no sign of understanding the present state of the state. He has supported the current Governor in various accounting tricks and tough-on-crime stances that have blown a hole in the deficit. He has stated an unwillingness to take a leadership position on any even remotely controversial issue. He hasn't strayed from that "born-again tax-cutter" mantra. As our own Robert Cruickshank says in this very good article:

"The problem with Brown is that I'm not convinced he's moved past 1978," says Robert Cruickshank, who works for the progressive 700,000-member network Courage Campaign and is a frequent contributor to the blog Calitics. "The lesson he drew from that is that he has to adapt to a more conservative reality. ... I'm concerned that it's not going to be the kind of governorship where you see significant changes in the way California operates."

If this is the Jerry Brown we can expect to "lead" in 2010, I know that progressives will have far better outlets for their advocacy, be it the Lakoff Initiative or the Constitutional convention. As I've said many times, you could elect Noam Chomsky governor and he would still be constrained by the same structural factors that resist true democracy and responsible governance. And Jerry Brown is most certainly no Noam Chomsky.

Bass On Activism And The Legislature

This Los Angeles magazine interview with Karen Bass is really illuminating about her life and her early activism, which she says started in middle school during the civil rights movement. Bass, a student organizer, antiwar activist and advocate for the poor in South LA, has a deep connection to the grassroots world outside Sacramento. And yet she is boxed in by circumstance and the minority rule in California to do things that directly conflict with her personal interests. This is a fascinating passage:

Why did you start the Community Coalition for Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment in South L.A.?
In the ’80s, crack cocaine took off as an epidemic, and I became obsessed by it. It was the first time that a drug impacted across class lines in the African American community, and it was also the first time in history a drug trend impacted both genders equally. It was really beginning to reshape the landscape in the inner city. I wanted to find a way to address the drug problem that did not involve massive incarceration—that could get at the root causes—and at the same time I wanted to build an organization that would help create, recruit, and train a next generation of activists. We’ve been around for 19 years.

Does the coalition show up at your office to protest what you’re doing in the legislature?
Absolutely. They’re organizing a protest right now. They are nice enough to call me up and tell me when they’re going to be protesting.

Would you be out there with them if the job didn’t preclude it?
No question. One thing that’s a little funny, if you don’t mind me going off the record—OK, I’ll say it on the record. I would have been protesting, but even when I was making these decisions, I was still in contact with the groups that protest to tell them to continue, because I understand better than ever how important those protests are. So it is quite interesting to be in a position like this.

There's a very good reason why Bass' current position feels unnatural, beyond just the inside v. outside dynamic. It's because she thought she was going from a position of weakness, as an outside activist, to a position of strength, as a legislative leader. However, the truth was the opposite. At least as an activist she was free to advocate and maybe make substantive gains. As a leader in this legislature, she cannot. By rule. Because the minority holds sway.

Anyway, I found it to be a very interesting article.

The Friedman Unit Strategy For Perpetual Minority Rule

The deadline for filing an initiative that would make the November 2010 ballot is Friday. 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.

As has been mentioned in a Contra Costa Times article, the political leadership in the CDP appears to be moving away from it.

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.

Kent Conrad Killing Health Reform?

When I first read this story about Kent Conrad increasing the budget window for health care reform to 20 years, I thought it would actually help the cause. Most experts predict that the savings would come in the later years, and so those could be built into the reform from the start, producing a favorable budget score. Then I thought about how the CBO was unlikely to measure savings 20 years down the road, and typically in those cases they punt and score them as zero. Which means that the outlook would appear far worse in a 20 year window than in a 10 year one. And the President has vowed deficit neutrality in the bill. So this would mean that, if the President and the Congress adhered to CBO numbers, some substantial increase in revenue or cut to the overall cost of the bill in the short term. Ezra Klein has more.

In other words, he thinks the CBO is underestimating the savings that reform will deliver, but he wants to see those savings underestimated over a longer period of time, which will make the total gap between the revenues the CBO predicts and the savings it misses appear larger. It's a bit like the restaurant review from "Annie Hall": The food was terrible, and such small portions!

The end result is likely to be a new hurdle for health-care reform: a CBO report that makes the bill's total cost sound higher, as it's measured over 20 years, and its savings seem smaller, as they're underestimated over 20 years. The Huffington Post caught up with Conrad and asked him whether this would kill the reform effort. "No," he replied, "but it makes it more challenging." The question is why Conrad wants to make health-care reform more challenging.

This is the same Kent Conrad who voted for the Medicare Modernization Act in 2003, which added $600 billion dollars to the deficit and was financed with nothing but debt.

There are three possibilities for this. One is that the 20-year projections will look bad, but not as bad in Max Baucus' bill, and Conrad is just putting his thumb on the scale for it. Two is that Conrad wants to embarrass the Congressional Budget Office in 20 years, which doesn't make sense because the CBO Director was a close colleague in the Gang of Six meetings, and also Kent Conrad isn't likely to be alive in 20 years. Three is that Conrad is just a bastard who senses health care reform slipping away from his grasp and wants to drive a stake through it.

I don't know what I vote for yet. I do know that it's time to end the tyranny of Congressional Budget Office numbers. For certain things they do a good job. For long-term projections they are admittedly conservative and uncertain, and when they don't have a clear answer, they assume zero, which distorts potential savings. The Institute of Medicine thinks the CBO is misreading the numbers and wants their numbers to take precedence.

The U.S. can cut health-care spending by $250 billion a year within a decade, a congressionally chartered panel will say this month in a bid to show costs can be contained even if all Americans are insured.

A report from the Institute of Medicine, which advises the federal government on health care, will counter “stingy” estimates from the Congressional Budget Office, said Arnold Milstein, planning chairman of the institute’s working group on health costs. The panel’s annual figure is five times the amount the budget office says the U.S. will save under a bill in the House of Representatives, according to the budget office’s July 17 letter to House Ways and Means Committee chairman Charles Rangel.

The preliminary findings from the institute, part of the National Academies in Washington, will be issued amid a growing debate over the health-care overhaul proposals that President Barack Obama is urging Congress to pass. The report will help bolster the argument that covering the nation’s 46 million uninsured won’t bust the budget, advocates of the bill say.

“The institute will make it very clear that we are right,” said Senator Benjamin Cardin, a Maryland Democrat who backs health legislation because he says it will save money. “It gives us the lift we need and the encouragement to say, ‘We’re right to do this.’”

The CBO numbers set the benchmark in Washington. But there is no balanced budget amendment, so their numbers don't carry major import. They're just what media and politicians use to identify the costs and savings in bill. It's not etched in stone, and as the Institute of Medicine shows, it can frequently be wrong.

Maybe this is part of Kent Conrad's devious plan. But more likely, he's one of these fiscal scolds who only come out under a Democratic President to thwart a progressive agenda.

Parsky Commission To Introduce Their Shock Doctrine Document

We heard last week about outlines of the Parsky Commission report that would radically shift the tax burden in California. We even heard that offshore drilling may have been snuck into the draft at the last minute. Last week, the commission held a public meeting which featured more details, including the intimation that 3% of the population would see half of the tax break under the Parsky plan. They made the public wait for seven hours and then gave one individual a minute to make a comment. Yesterday, the final public meeting was held, and right before it, Jean Ross offered some facts and figures showing how the commission's recommendation would amount to the Latvia-ization of the state of California, with a massive transfer of wealth to the upper classes at the expense of working families.

The biggest winners would be the state’s millionaires, who would receive personal income tax breaks averaging $109,000 per year. The biggest losers would be middle-income families who would receive a tiny, if any, reduction in their personal income taxes and who would pay substantially more for goods and services due to the new “value-added” tax the Commission proposes to replace revenues lost due to the tax cuts for the wealthy and repeal of the corporate income tax.

The magnitude of the shift proposed by the Commission is nothing short of stunning. The changes to the personal income tax structure alone would reduce income taxes paid by the poorest 62 percent of California taxpayers by $4 per year, on average, while providing six-figure breaks to the millionaires. The bottom 81 percent of the income distribution – the vast majority of all Californians – would receive 10 percent of the personal income tax cut, while the top 0.2 percent would receive 27 percent of the benefits.

And that’s the “good news.” The Commission would repeal the corporate income tax and the state’s portion of the sales tax and replace it with a new tax on business net receipts – a tax that has never been tried anywhere in the US – that the Commission’s own consultant notes would raise prices of goods and services, while exerting downward pressure on wages and benefits [...]

Some might be willing to support these changes if they ended California’s persistent budget crises. But again, the Commission’s own estimates predict that revenues raised by the new tax system would grow more slowly over time than those raised by the state’s current tax system. Thus, the Commission’s recommendations would lead to larger, not smaller, budget shortfalls in the future.

At the committee hearing yesterday, commissioners requested an analysis of the impact of the recommendation for taxpayers, and it came out precisely as Ross stated - "The 10 million taxpayers making less than $50,000 would pay $100 million more in taxes while the 7 million taxpayers who make more than $50,000 would get $6.8 billion in tax cuts."

This will not be a consensus document, most of the liberals on the panel won't sign it. And even the news reports today acknowledge that the changes would "largely benefit the wealthy." Clearly the Governor will put his weight behind it, but that's meant nothing in Sacramento for several years. The question is whether the Democratic Legislature would dare to massively reward the rich so nakedly by accepting these recommendations. Because the business community is actually against it, worried about the effect of the net receipts tax, I'd still guess no, but people should be letting their Representatives know that they will not get away with a transparent shift in wealth from the middle class to the super-rich.

Palace Sentries Dispatched To Guard The Drawbridge

The establishment in Sacramento has manned the barricades, battened down the hatches and gone on the offensive to prove their own worth. They sent their best man in the media, George Skelton, out to prove that no, despite your lying eyes, the California Legislature had a real banner year. After all, they managed to bring suffering to the lives of hundreds of thousands of state residents with consensus and bipartisan elan!

The current Legislature, regardless of Duvall and despite ideological polarization, has had a better year than it's getting credit for.

Its main accomplishment was keeping the state afloat amid a flood of red ink, created primarily by the toughest economic times since the Great Depression. OK, so it did use some bailing wire and chewing gum! The bills got paid, even if briefly with IOUs.

With great difficulty and pain -- at least for Democrats -- the Legislature and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger slashed programs by roughly $30 billion. They also struck a major blow against "auto-pilot" spending by permanently eliminating all automatic annual cost-of-living adjustments, except for K-12 schools. And they summoned enough courage to temporarily increase taxes by $12.5 billion.

In the end, they found a way to restore health insurance for 660,000 low-income kids.

The tax increases hit the more vulnerable elements of society disproportionately, of course. They actually found that way to restore children's health insurance by lowering industry taxes and increasing the co-pay and deductible burden on the low-income families themselves, while reducing the covered care. And anyone who adds cutting $30 billion in programs and eliminating COLA as an accomplishment is a bit of a social deviant. But there are probably no lengths to which Skelton will go to defend the palace walls from the rabble who think, based on the evidence, that the system is horribly broken.

Steve Maviglio wisely steers clear of the more horrific achievements of this year's Legislature, and offers a slightly more defensible outlook of the '09 Legislative session. Still, there's a lot unsaid:

Looking back, getting the measures on the May ballot was a significant early success that required 2/3 votes. And toward the end of the session, in addition to the renewable energy bill, Speaker Bass pushed through measures on childrens health and domestic violence that won broad bipartisan support. (The Speaker also got a standing ovation, and she appears to have strengthened her support in Caucus. Compare that to the ouster of the two Republican leaders).

Okay, so the grand water deal didn't get done. Big deal. Nothing like that has been done for a generation. Perhaps Senate President pro Tem Steinberg set the bar too high when he said he'd get it done. In any case, all parties agree that they got close and can pick up the pieces and get it finished in short order.

So for all those crying for major reforms, put it all into perspective. Sure, improvements could be made, and things could have been better, but this is not reason for drastic action. Far from it.

Of course, the renewable bill is veto bait, as are many of the other major bills pending the Governor's signature. And the domestic violence bill didn't pass the Senate, so, um, that doesn't count. The prison bill offered decent parole reforms but stopped well short of a real solution. Everyone keeps saying the water bill will happen but the two sides remain far apart, and the fact that they'll have to go into overtime to reconcile it kind of proves the point, no?

But Maviglio tips his hand with the line "this is not reason for drastic action." Of course he would say that. He's profited well from the status quo. Anything that messes with it could hurt him professionally, and what's more, could stop the endless blaming of outside factors to account for stunning failure.

There is no shame in stating that this was a failed legislative session. Just about everyone in California would agree with you, particularly the ones who are suffering the most from the destruction of social insurance caused by the most heartless cuts. Simply put, the Great Recession dominated legislative activity, and the conservative veto from various 2/3 requirements restricts the Legislature from fulfilling the expressed will of the people through their votes (NOTE: This does not only come into play with the budget; late last Friday Republicans blocked over 20 bills that required 2/3 votes for one reason or another, probably because they knew they could get away with it). That's not something to explain away, it's actually something to fight, every single day until the problem is rectified.

Skelton and Maviglio may want to tell themselves all is well, but the public knows better, and they're going to demand major structural change. Those who think that the Legislature can still be a force for good in the state can get aboard and provide the best ideas to break the supermajority gridlock and get the state moving again. Or they can defend their narrow interests. Their defense will fail, and it would be a shame not to see them on the right side of history.

More End-Of-Session Notes

A few end-of-the-session tidbits for you:

• CapAlert reports that Karen Bass will try again to get some of the more spineless members of her caucus to support a prison reform bill better than the scaled-back effort it already passed. Bass talked about adding the "alternative custody" provisions into the bill, which would get it to the proper level of cuts, but not the sentencing commission, which still looks dead, sadly.

• One bill we know to be dead is SB88, which would have forced localities to get permission from the state before going into bankruptcy. This was a union-backed bill to protect their local contracts, but city governments balked. Sen. Mark DeSaulnier says he'll try to broker a compromise for next year. Those bankruptcies are probably right down the pike, so he'd better hurry.

• The bill that the Governor arrogantly vetoed earlier in the week, in a hissy fit because he wasn't getting his way on water or prisons, was a bill to initiate a Vietnam Veteran's memorial day. It was authored by Republican Assemblyman Paul Cook, and he's whipping support to undergo the first legislative veto override in Sacramento in about 30 years, which is truly a sad legacy. Only in California could securing an override on an uncontroversial bill be something that could end a political career, as Cook acknowledged today. An override would be at least a sign of life in the Legislature.

• A lot of rumbling about the water bill, which is being written completely in secrecy, and without the input of politicians who represent the Sacramento Delta. Bass hinted at a bond issue to finance whatever comes out of conference, which would cost $600 million $800 million in debt service annually without any consequent gains in revenue to pay for it.

Could be another long night...

Remember These Moments

True to the reality of a weak political media and an inattentive public, the chatter over the results of the July budget revision, despite major cuts to the social safety net, has completely subsided. No taxes got increased and nobody "important" got hurt, so it was just time to move on. Politicians just move on to the business of raising corporate money, special interests can move on to the business of writing laws that help their bottom line, and everybody in Sacramento can praise everybody else for "sacrificing" to get things done.

Only, for the people living under the consequences of these budgets, created through a choice not to properly pay for needed services, the budget battle is not forgotten. And it doesn't consist of a group of numbers in a column. It's entirely real and it hits them every single day. Here's just one example.

Six domestic violence shelters in California have been forced to close while dozens more are scaling back services after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger eliminated all state funding for the program that supports them.

Shelters in the Central Valley town of Madera, the Sierra foothill town of Grass Valley and in Ventura County in Southern California have closed. Others in the San Francisco Bay area, Los Angeles and Bakersfield are on the verge of closing.

Many centers are laying off staff and closing satellite offices that serve remote areas of the state as they cope with the budget cuts. A national domestic violence group describes California's as the deepest cuts to such programs nationwide, even as other states have reduced funding.

In Madera County, officials have turned away six domestic violence victims and eight children since the county's only shelter closed Aug. 7, said Tina Figueroa, the shelter's director. The Martha Diaz Shelter served about 100 victims a year, many of them low-income and with no place else to turn, she said.

So 100 victims of domestic violence in smallish Madera County now have truly nowhere to turn, and will either suffer under the boot of their abusive partners or, in many cases, be killed by them. The director of domestic violence policy in the LA City Attorney's office pretty clearly calls these programs "homicide prevention." It also saves money relative to what you spend prosecuting the eventual homicides. I've seen "tough on crime" conservatives over the years invoke the name of victims and stir up public support for laws in their name. They go curiously silent when hundreds of domestic violence victims are put at risk of death because they want to save rich people and corporations from having to pay for their fair share of the commons.

These closures are the direct result of line-item cuts by the Governor. So the blood is on his hands. Leland Yee has a bill that attempts to cover the domestic violence shelter budget with cash from a crime victims fund, but under 2/3 rules, it's not likely to pass this week.

Kudos to the AP for doing a story on this; but there need to be many more. There's a human face on the budget cuts that has completely been lost and forgotten. Those suffering are right to suspect that nobody in Sacramento cares about them.

Legislature Home Stretch Update

There's lots of significant news in the Legislature's last week regarding various bills, and it's extremely difficult to keep up with it all, probably by design. I should point out that, while the legislative calendar has an end date, there's no actual reason for some of the forced bottlenecks that result in hundreds of bills being passed at the last minute. It creates a shroud of secrecy in which special interests rule, and saps the public trust. A Democratic leadership actually interested in positioning government as somewhat decent would remove these forced bottlenecks from the internal legislative rules and allow bills to be approved on a rolling basis. That said, this is the system we have now, and here's a bunch of news about various bills:

• A new bill would exempt non-General Fund workers from furloughs. This would reverse one of the dumbest provisions in the budget bill, the practice of forcing furloughs on workers not paid by state government, saving almost no money and depriving people of needed services. Of course, the Governor will probably veto this one, because he hates admitting how wrong he is.

• Democrats on that vaunted water committee have decided against floating a bond to pay for any restoration or overhaul of the Delta. This means Republicans won't vote for it, and very little will come of this very important committee thrown together at the last minute. Some conference committee reports are here, but a deal looks remote, as it would need votes from some of the empty chairs in the Yacht Party.

• One bill that has cleared both chambers would set up "Education Finance Districts", "in which three or more contiguous school districts can band together to try to increase local taxes." This is a small step to make it easier for districts to pass parcel taxes to fund schools, but at this point every little bit helps. The 2/3 rule for approving such taxes would remain.

• With all the talk of health care reform, it's notable that an anti-rescission bill has once again passed the legislature. The bill would also simplify insurance forms. Last session, Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed it. There's something you don't hear much about from the Democratic leadership - Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed a bill that would have banned insurance companies from dropping patients after they get sick. He sided with the forces of insurer-assisted suicide. This is your modern Yacht Party on this issue:

"Any of those who have read the various exposés in the Los Angeles Times and others . . . is aware that health insurers have admitted and acknowledged they engaged in a form of post-claims underwriting," said Sen. Mark Wyland (R-Escondido). "It is unethical and, considering what some of these people have endured, it really borders on the immoral."

However, Wyland said he would not vote for the bill because the Department of Insurance has proposed new rules to solve the problem, and he wants to see how they work.

Hey, give 'em a chance to see if the immorality stops! If not, we can think it over.

• The Legislature may extend a homebuyer's tax credit passed in a previous budget agreement that was nothing but a bailout for developers. It only credited new construction, and was structured only to benefit high-income households who could afford new construction. By the way, sales of new units have fell since this was enacted, so it's not even meeting its intended purpose. But it's a giveaway to a special interest, so off the money may go, even though we cannot afford it at this time.

• A bill to ban bisphenol A (BPA) from children's products was delayed after the Assembly couldn't muster 41 votes. The debate in the Assembly last night was pretty fierce.

• Cities and counties reacted angrily to a proposed bill to slow local government bankruptcies until vetted by the California Debt and Investment Advisory Commission. On the merits this looks to be a bill that would install more control on locals from Sacramento, although there are arguments on both sides. But mainly it's about the fate of union contracts in local bankruptcies, I don't think either side would deny that.

• A roundup of other bills passed yesterday can be found here.

Parsky Commission Looking To Spring A Surprise On California?

When business groups began to object to various provisions in the Parsky Commission effort to upend the tax structure in California, including anything that even smelled like an increase (even though the plan had to be revenue-neutral to clear the Legislature), I figured the effort was dead and buried. It appeared that the entire effort was a complete waste of time, and the effort to Latvia-ize the state by shifting the tax burden from the upper class to the lower class had been sniffed out and extinguished. However, the recent secrecy on the part of the commission, after a pledge of transparency, has many wondering if the shock doctrine is alive and well.

The plan is that, just about 24 hours from now — or 11 a.m. Thursday, to be precise — a state commission will consider and potentially adopt a proposal for an entirely new tax system for the state of California.

It would be a radical undertaking, slashing some taxes, eliminating others and establishing a new tax about which no one in California is familiar. No one can say with anything approaching certainty how much it would cost businesses and consumers or how much revenue it would generate to finance state services.

Yet, despite the significance of the task, despite all the unanswered questions and despite the imminence of a decision, as of this writing — midafternoon Tuesday — the details of the proposed new tax plan have not been made available for public review.

A spokeswoman told me a little after 3 p.m. there was still hope that the detailed proposal would be posted on the commission’s Web site before the day was out.

The Legislature has made no indication that they would take up whatever plan the Parsky Commission votes out, even after the Governor orders a special session to deal with it. And with both sides of the aisle condemning aspects of the plan, liberals for the tax burden shift, and conservatives for the unknown tax increases that may be part of any deal, I wouldn't call the prospects likely for a Parsky Commission plan to become law. But the secrecy is certainly troubling, as well as the revival of provisions voted down by the people on multiple occasions.

But members of the tax commission are reviving the rainy-day fund idea once again. Most notably, the idea has had some of its strongest support from Democratic-appointed commissioners.

Former Assemblyman Fred Keeley said recently that while many commissioners believe the state can reduce its budget volatility through changes in the tax system, he believes the tax system isn't so much the problem.

"My belief is that volatility of the general fund, to the degree it's a problem, is due to the governor and Legislature with regard to spending," Keeley said. "That can be solved by way of an appropriately designed rainy-day fund or lockbox."

Another Democratic appointee, University of Connecticut law professor Richard D. Pomp, reminded the commission this month that he has long believed the reduction of volatility was a spending issue.

"From the outset, I have argued, and continue to believe, that volatility, which is a feature of every state's tax system, is a spending problem and not a tax problem," Pomp wrote. (That comes awfully close to the oft-used GOP line that California's budget problems are "a spending problem, not a revenue problem.")

I think these Democrats are trying to argue that volatility in the tax structure is a good thing, which it is. But the leap from that to a spending cap doesn't follow. There's a difference between spending wisely in good years and a third-party mechanism that limits the ability to restore chronic budget cuts from bad years, which is what a cap would inevitably do. (A rainy-day fund without a cap would be different, but may end up serving the same purpose.)

I stick with my prediction that the commission is doomed, but it still bears watching.

...Kevin Yamamura has more.

The $3 Million Dollar-A-Day Delay

Despite the assumed end to the prison crisis, there's still no bill to clarify the $1.2 billion dollars in savings assumed from cuts in the July budget. The Assembly passed a bill that fell $200 million dollars short and had almost no prison reform in it (some parole reform, but no prison reform), and the Senate has yet to take that bill up. After word yesterday that the Senate would do so, Darrell Steinberg backed away from it, seeking to give more time to the Assembly to add more reform and more cuts into the bill. Because the bill only requires a majority vote, it takes effect 90 days after passage. Which means that every day with no bill costs the state $3.3 million dollars. This is the consequence of so-called fiscal conservatives in the Yacht Party, as well as their higher-office-seeking bretheren in the Assembly Democratic caucus, wanting to look tough on crime. As the State Worker notes, this delay is taking a daily hit on the savings gained from furloughs:

Here's one way that furloughed state workers could look at this: The CDCR budget impasse is whittling away at savings from furloughs. If you take that $3.3 million and multiply it by the 70 days from July 1 through today, you realize the state has burned through $231 million.

A single furlough day cuts about $61 million from the state's payroll, although not all of that savings is in the general fund. (The rounded math: $2.2 billion divided by 36 furlough days in the fiscal year.) If you narrow it down to just salaries that the administration defines as being in the general fund, one furlough day equals about $35 million. (Double check our rounded numbers: $1.3 billion divided by the 36 furlough days.)

In other words, this budget-stalemate-in-miniature has squandered the equivalent of about four furlough days for everyone or nearly seven furlough days if you look only at general fund employees.

Other states have used smart on crime policies to reduce spending without any loss in public safety. They are taking new looks at non-violent offenders, relaxing draconian sentencing policies, targeting parole resources to those who need supervision and concurrently lowering recidivism rates through rehabilitation. Right now, California has the exact wrong set of policies on prisons.

In fact, California is nationally known "for having the most dysfunctional sentencing and parole system" in the country, according to Stanford University professor Joan Petersilia, a criminologist who has spent years working with state officials trying to implement reforms.

"We're too harsh and too lenient. Simultaneously," Petersilia said.

Our mix of tough laws and fixed terms doesn't give prison officials the flexibility to push low-risk offenders toward rehabilitation and keep dangerous criminals behind bars.

But reform efforts haven't gained public traction because we're too busy trying to keep people behind bars -- with Jessica's Law, Megan's Law, the three-strikes law -- to take a hard look at whether locking up more people actually makes us safer.

"The public doesn't understand how illogical the whole system has become," Petersilia said. "We think that somehow we've created something that is able to call out the most dangerous people, send them to prison and keep them in for a very long time.

"And the public is willing to pay whatever it takes to get that type of crime policy."

I disagree with the last sentence. The public is willing to be frightened into initiatives that do nothing for public safety and just spend money needlessly, because they've seen no leadership on the other side for an alternative conception of how to protect the public sensibly and best manage our cirminal justice system. Nobody has argued in public for a more intelligent system for so long, that the public willingness to believe in its possibility has atrophied. We can keep the lock-em-up policies or we can look to a better future. Either way, we're blowing $3 million a day while some Assembly Democrats go on a desperate search for their spines.

Healthy Families Increases The Cost Of Coverage To Keep Children On The Rolls

Given the major hits that the Healthy Families program took in the last budget revision, it's sort of good news that the program is trying to find ways to keep almost half a million kids from being dropped from the insurance rolls. How did they manage to do that?

California legislators have apparently reached a bipartisan solution to prevent more than half a million children from being cut from the Healthy Families public health insurance program.

The Senate Appropriations Committee voted Thursday to send the proposal to the full Senate. All but two Republicans on the committee – one was absent – voted with Democrats to move it to the floor. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger also supports the measure, said spokeswoman Rachel Cameron.

The state board that manages the programs had planned to begin sending disenrollment notices next week to the first wave of children set to lose coverage but decided Thursday to delay the move for a month.

The bill, which surfaced this week, would raise money for Healthy Families by having participating families share more of the costs of coverage and extending a gross premiums tax on companies that manage Medi-Cal insurance plans.

What's this now? A tax? On corporations? Well, the tax already exists. It was due to end October 1, but this measure would extend the tax, and also LOWER it, from 5% down to 2%. The California Association of Health Plans (the state insurance lobby) supports the bill, and if my business' taxation were going down while I got credit for saving children's health care (a far higher sum of money to keep Healthy Families alive comes from the First Five Commission, not this lowered tax). Also, dental insurers got an exemption from this tax because Dave Cox wanted it. So anyone who thinks this vote, requiring 2/3 in both houses, will be smooth sailing, industry opposition or not, is dreaming.

As stated in the article, the bill would increase premiums and co-pays for participating families, who opt into the Healthy Families program because they cannot currently afford coverage. The Managed Risk Medical Insurance Board (MRMIB) set out cost-saving measures that would force higher costs on low-income Californians.

MRMIB also adopted four emergency regulations to trim program spending, three of which increase families’ out-of-pocket costs for Healthy Families services. Beginning November 1, families will pay higher copays for non-preventive health, dental, and vision services; prescription drugs; and emergency room visits that do not result in hospitalization. For example, families will pay $15 for using the emergency room, up from the current $5. A fourth emergency regulation requires families to enroll in the lowest-cost dental plans for their first two years on the program, at which point families could shift to a higher-cost plan. These four changes will generate net savings of $12 million in 2009-10, according to MRMIB estimates. MRMIB did not take action on a staff proposal to increase families’ premiums for savings of $5.5 million in 2009-10, because the increases are included in a bill currently moving through the Legislature (AB 1422, Bass).

I'm pleased action is being taken so that low-income kids in this state can have health insurance coverage; in the long run, we save money by allowing them consistent and preventive care instead of paying for it collectively through ER visits. But poor families may not be able to use the coverage they get through Healthy Families if the premiums go too high. And really, we're talking about $100 million dollars to cover kids when the state shoveled $1.5 billion annually to the largest corporations in America, none of whom are thinking of abandoning 38 million potential customers in the nation's largest state. It comes down to priorities.

P.S. The Legislature took action on some other health-related bills this week. Some decent bills may get to the Governor's desk, but others were killed. Cynthia Craft of Health Access has a roundup.

America's Worst Legislature

Trying to appease the cowards running for higher office in the Assembly rank and file, Karen Bass has dropped the sentencing commission out of the prison reform package.

The sentencing commission was among the most controversial provisions of the Senate prison plan. But on Monday, Senate leader Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, said “a real sentencing commission, with teeth, is my top priority” for corrections legislation.

Steinberg spokeswoman Alicia Dlugosh said Monday that the Senate leader would like to see any legislation passed by the Assembly “realize the same dollar figure in savings as the Senate bill.”

The bill passed last week by the Senate, AB 14 XXX would save the state an estimated $600 million, according to an analysis of the bill. But the Assembly seemed poised to make key changes that would reduce those savings by about $220 million.

Among the other changes expected to be made by the Assembly would be the elimination of a provision that would change some crimes which can be either felonies or misdemeanors --known as “wobblers” – exclusively to misdemeanors. The Assembly bill expected to come up for a vote this week would leave the state’s wobbler law unchanged.

Assembly Democrats also balked at a provision in the Senate bill that would allow some sick and elderly inmates to finish their sentences under house arrest.

Bass said she hoped to pass the sentencing commission as stand-alone legislation later in the year. First of all, the year ends on September 11, and second, adding the commission to a must-pass reform package was the whole point. If lawmakers objected to it as part of a package, they're not going to turn around and support it in isolation.

Punting on this issue will ensure that federal judges will be mandating reductions of the prison population 10 years down the road. The only reform worth doing in the package now clarifies parole policy, devoting resources to those who need to be monitored instead of the blanket supervision that has turned our parole system into a revolving door. But that will not be enough to turn around the prison crisis for the long-term, without finally doing something about our ever expanding sentencing law.

This also shows the complete dysfunction of the leadership. Darrell Steinberg may not go along with the limited version, and I don't blame him. His chamber has now stuck their neck out three times on tough votes - Tranquillon Ridge drilling, HUTA raids and now this - that the Assembly has quashed. I wasn't unhappy about the first two, but if I was in the Senate, I'd be pissed about all these controversial votes I was needlessly taking. You'd think Karen Bass would have a sense of her caucus and know that she couldn't pass whatever she and Steinberg and the Governor hammered out in private. Because she's on her way out the door in 2010 she has no leverage over the caucus, because everyone's termed out and running for something else they have no fealty to the Assembly, and because they all live perpetually in fear they won't take a vote they know would help future generations deal with a crisis.

As I've said, a broken process will almost always produce a broken result. But individual lawmakers need to be called out. Particularly the three Assemblymembers running for Attorney General who think they're showing off their toughness. When all of them lose, they'll probably attribute it to other factors. They should be reminded of this day.

And... That's Over

The California Chamber of Commerce and 33 other business groups have basically stuck a knife in the Parsky Commission with a coalition letter opposing most of the tax reforms proposed. I'm sure they'd still love to see a flat income tax and the elimination of corporate taxes, but since they have basically refused all revenue-raisers in this document, that won't happen.

The coalition doesn't like removing Proposition 13's property tax limits from business property and a proposed new "carbon tax," both of which have been promoted by the tax commission's liberal bloc. But it also is warning about the potentially negative effects of a "net business receipts tax," similar to a European-style value-added tax, that commission chairman Gerald Parsky champions [...]

"The California business community has consistently stated that the solution to California's revenue problems will only come from robust economic growth and job creation," said today's letter to Parsky. "We believe the proposed split roll property tax and the energy tax would be extremely detrimental to California's economy. As for the business net receipts tax, we believe it is risky and inappropriate to move forward with dramatic changes to the tax structure without first fully vetting their impact on California jobs and the economy."

The only way for the Parsky Commission to get an up-or-down vote for its recommendations is by making the package revenue-neutral. The CalChamber document opposes all of the tax hikes while saying nothing about the reductions. California Democrats can be squishy, but not squishy enough to eliminate corporate taxes in exchange for nothing. Sen. Steinberg never agreed to bring the commission recommendations to a vote in the first place. And without an offset, they will never see the light of day.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Chamber of Commerce. Even in the unlikely even that the legislature ignores this letter and passes some plan including split-roll or a carbon tax or a business net receipts tax, there's no way the Governor signs it. The Parsky Commission is dead.

And I'm not really shedding a tear for it. Forcing a revenue-neutral standard on how to fix the tax structure inevitably was going to shift the tax burden from the rich, who have the clout to shield themselves from the predations of lawmakers, to the middle and lower classes, who don't. The very structure was flawed, and the reforms sought of a lesser order than being able to properly fund government according to the wishes of the majority.

So we can move on to the next challenge. Calbuzz has a good scene-setter on that, referring to something that Jean Ross mentioned in our Netroots Nation panel last week. California Forward's reform package may include, as a condition of repealing the 2/3 rule for passing a budget (and only the budget), a raising of the threshold to 2/3 for mitigation fees on businesses, which may extend to fees on alcohol, oil production and "anything else that carries a nexus to a public problem." In other words, while the budget would require a majority vote, revenue (which is 1/2 of a budget) would be subject to an even higher standard than it is now, and the legislature would be constrained in their ability to respond to the impact of corporate actions that harm the public good. Actually it could go even further than that:

But Chairman Bob (Hertzberg) insists it would be a mistake to focus only on Sinclair as the key to business support for CF reforms. The only way some of the conservatives and business people on CF would “even consider” allowing 50% to pass the budget is if there’s a whole panoply of budget reforms – pay-as-you-go provisions, controls on one-time expenditures, two-year budgeting, performance reviews, sunset provisions AND limits on what can pass with 50% as a “fee,” he said.

But will liberals – on CF and in the Legislature – agree to circumscribe their current authority to impost fees with a majority vote? Will they agree that there has to be a “clear nexus” between charges allocated to a polluter or manufacturer of polluty stuff?

As Jean Ross puts it, ever so succinctly, "California Forward?" I concur.

So while we appear to have sidestepped the Parsky Commission (for now), California Backward's set of "reforms" still lurk in the distance.

No Vote Yet On Prison Reform

Jim Sanders reports that the Assembly will not hold a vote on a prison reform package today, as legislative leaders and law enforcement groups huddle to reach a compromise. Yes, law enforcement groups, which should read lobbyists. They hold a veto over processes like this.

I'm amazed by how any lawmaker could possibly view a vote like this on prison reform as a choice. Federal judges have affirmatively ruled that California must cut its prison population by 44,000 inmates, and submit a plan to do so by next month. The judges charged with oversight on the prison system have spoken unanimously on this subject and given the state years to work out the issue. If lawmakers vote this down, the population will get reduced ANYWAY, and in all likelihood in a far more randomized and less considered fashion. You would think that the legislature would want a bit more say in the matter, especially since any bad outcome arising from early release will be blamed on them anyway, since that's just the default reaction of most people in this state.

Furthermore, the legislature has already earmarked $1.2 billion in cuts to the prison budget. That was affirmed by a majority in both chambers - I believe, a 2/3 majority - and signed into law by the Governor. This vote is not optional. It's required as a function of last month's budget vote. Bills with compromises that cut less money or lead to the reduction of less of the population are really useless, because eventually, that money will need to be cut and those prisoners released. Assembly Democrats afraid of special interests are living in a fantasy world.

And we really are talking about fear.

In the Assembly, nearly 40% of Democrats (19) are running for another office. Most are fearful of being branded by campaign opponents as "soft on crime" if they vote for, say, early release from prison of even decrepit old blind men.

That's why a plan by Democratic leaders and the governor to reduce the prison population by 27,300 inmates this year and save $525 million passed the Senate 21 to 19 last week, but stalled in the skittish Assembly. No Republican supported the bill, but none was needed because it required only a majority vote to pass.

An amended, watered-down measure may be debated on the Assembly floor today. It will retain the feature Schwarzenegger deems most important: an overhaul of the parole system by focusing on the riskiest parolees and paying little attention to the rest, resulting in fewer ex-cons being returned to prison for minor violations.

All this can be worked out and space freed up in the barracks and gyms. Better to do it now than after the predictable prison blowup.

As for what is subject to change in that amended plan, here's a good rundown. Most of it is nibbling around the edges - adding back a couple crimes as felonies, lowering the dollar threshold for grand theft, changing the months' worth of sentencing credits for rehabilitation and vocational training from 6 to 4 - but these are the big ones:

Eliminate a proposal that would allow the release of up to 6,300 "lower-risk" inmates -- under house arrest with electronic monitoring -- who are medically infirm, aged, or serving the final 12 months of their sentence.

Alter the structure of a proposed sentencing commission that would have broad powers to rewrite sentencing guidelines.

The Assembly version would raise the commission's voting members from 13 to 14. It also would grant law enforcement more clout both by adding a representative from rank-and-file and by requiring that any actions of the commission by approved by two law enforcement members. A requirement that an ex-felon receive a nonvoting seat would be eliminated.

It's truly amazing the law enforcement, under this plan, would literally hold a veto over statutory considerations like sentencing. I believe that plenty of members of the law enforcement community actually understand that they can be smarter on crime, keep people safe and save the state money. But that's just a hijack over the process.

The bottom line is this - we spend more than any state except Michigan on prisons in terms of a percentage of the overall budget, and federal judges have ordered a reduction in inmates. Regardless of special interests or anything else, something's gotta give.

Living 21 Years In The Past

The SacBee reports that Tough On Crime types are trotting out the same symbols that Lee Atwater used in 1988 to sink a Democratic Presidential candidate.

Willie Horton's shadow haunts the Capitol as lawmakers wrestle with how to cut $1.2 billion from state prisons without endangering public safety.

More than two decades after Republican presidential candidate George H.W. Bush used televised ads of murderer Horton to paint presidential opponent Michael Dukakis as soft on crime, state GOP lawmakers are slapping Democrats with a similar charge over proposed prison cuts.

The politically explosive issue, coupled with opposition from some law enforcement groups, is making many Democrats jittery – especially those with aspirations for higher office.

I'm hearing that a lot of this nonsense is being pushed by astroturf front groups for the prison guard's union. And considering that Horton was the kind of violent offender who would be exempted from any changes in the law under the plan on offer, it's simply baseless. But this may be more about getting prison guard money and law enforcement support in future elections. But it has the effect of legitimizing the kind of nonsense that has destroyed our prison system, given us the highest recidivism rate in the nation, put the prison health care system in the hands of a federal receiver due to Constitutional violations, and drawn a demand from federal judges to reduce the population by 44,000.

And it's working, of course.

Bass proposes to eliminate a provision in the Senate-passed plan that has attracted the most intense opposition.

Known as "alternative custody," the controversial proposal would allow the release of up to 6,300 low-level, nonviolent inmates who are elderly, medically infirm, or have less than a year remaining on their sentences.

Inmates released under the plan would be subject to electronic monitoring under "house arrest," which could include placement in a residence, local program, hospital or treatment center.

Because blind people with one leg are dangers to society, and we should spend more money warehousing them than we do on the average higher education student. Makes perfect sense. Not to mention the fact that the judges will probably release these same offenders anyway, as part of the federal mandate.

The real fear is that the Assembly will water down the sentencing commission so that lawmakers will have to affirmatively pass their recommendations into law instead of having to pass legislation to prevent those recommendations from being enacted. Assembly Majority Leader Alberto Torrico, running for Attorney General, basically says in the piece that he wants such a change. It's a subtle but important difference; essentially the recommendations will be easier to kill under the weakened standard. And so we continue the endless Tough On Crime march that has put us into a ditch.

Meanwhile, as John Myers notes, intransigence on sensible prison reform will simply increase the eventual budget deficit:

Then there's the never-ending state budget blues. The original prison plan, when added to February's budget cuts and gubernatorial plans to reduce prison spending, was a $1.2 billion part of the deficit solution written into law; the original bill, alone, was estimated to save as much as $600 million. But that was with those alternatives to prison cell custody and fewer crimes resulting in felony one-way tickets to the joint. The 'Plan B' version, say staffers, may come up as much as $200 million short (and that's assuming all of the original savings estimated were valid).

In some years, a $200 million gap in the California state budget may not be the end of the world. But this is no ordinary year; cuts a fraction of that size are forcing all kinds of shutdowns of state services. And if this plan becomes the new way to go on prisons, it's going to leave a lot of budget watchers -- and Californians -- wondering what happens next.

Democrats are wrong if they think they can finesse the right into taking the charge that they are "coddling murderers" off the table. Just look at eMeg, claiming that a sentencing commission would reverse three strikes, about as factual a charge as Sarah Palin's "death panels." They'll always be smeared, so they might as well do the right thing for once.

The Charge Of The Hack Brigade

If the Capitol Weekly is going to have a right-wing corporate shill on their editorial pages, the least they could do is get a good one. Because I don't know where anyone, even John Kabateck of the National Federation of Independent Business, gets the cajones, after the legislature just passed a cuts-only budget completely on the backs of poor people, to fret about the plight of possible taxes for the business community.

"Get the monkey off your back and relocate to Las Vegas", barks a new ad trying to lure hard-working small businesses away from California. If legislators don't listen, small businesses that have already been hit hard by the effects of a fragile economy and the billions in taxes that were passed earlier this year will go under.

Um, right, this "rich people and businesses are leaving California" Galt-ism is not true and has never been true. But do go on.

The Legislature is back and up to its old tricks. The budget that was passed in February and revised in July will need to be "fixed" again this fall. If history is our guide, we all know that it will be an uphill battle and an unpleasant environment for small businesses. There are currently $2 billion in tax hikes being proposed, including taxes on everything from gas, internet purchases and vehicle license fees.

Oh noes! Oil companies might have to pay for the natural resources they take out of California's ground for the first time in a century of drilling! Get the smelling salts! The vehicle license fee might return to still-well-below-the-average-percentage relative to every state in the nation! This is terrible!

You'll notice that Kabateck fails to mention the $2.5 billion annually in corporate tax cuts passed in the previous two budget agreements, which miraculously exceed the tax hikes - beaten back by the Yacht Party and the Governor in July - about which he is fretting so. These massive corporate tax cuts do nothing to keep the largest corporations in America doing business in California - they would hardly abandon a market of 38 million people. It's nothing more than a kickback for services rendered. And if that's a transaction of prostitution, then John Kabateck is the guy who cleans up the courtesan's antechamber afterward, eager to grab a buck for himself for the privilege of working for whores.

It's amazing how little the California office of the National Federation of Independent Business speaks for independent business. He could have written a nice little article about how corporate behemoths are screwing small businesses when it comes to state purchasing, which currently favors out-of-state multinationals. Instead, he offers the party line that the structural revenue gap is fine and leaving citizens out on the street to die is a small price to pay for protecting oil and cigarette companies. Kabateck doesn't seem to understand that this mentality is destroying the California economy, and with it all of those small businesses he claims to represent.

Hacktackular job, CapWeekly! With any luck, you'll get Jon Coupal or Joel Fox to offer a rebuttal.

A California Economy In Free Fall

Whether it's the continued foreclosure crisis, the impact of state budget cuts or the cumulative effect of depressed consumer spending, it's now extremely clear that the state's employment picture shows no sign of bottoming out, reaching an all-time high in the post-war period.

California's unemployment rate took an unexpected leap in July, reaching a post-Word War II high of 11.9%. The increase contrasts with the national rate, which declined slightly over the same period, and reflects ongoing weakness in the state's battered construction and financial services industries.

The state lost a net 35,800 jobs last month, more than any other state, the U.S. Labor Department said today. It has lost 760,200 jobs over the last year.

Every category of nonfarm jobs in the state except education and health services experienced year-over-year losses. The construction sector was the hardest hit, shedding 18.6% of its jobs. Manufacturing jobs fell 8.7% from the same time last year.

Job loss did slow relative to the previous two months. But I don't think anybody believes that 11.9% is a floor. Los Angeles, where the jobless rate jumped 0.7% in just a month, is one of the worst big cities to find a job in America. The city has 15,000 homeless veterans. And areas of the Central Valley and the Inland Empire are in far worse shape. It's basically a depression in those parts.

And we are just starting to add a round of painful state budget cuts to increase the economic shortfall. Whether it's closing parks that provide economic benefits, or dropping or cutting aid to 100,000 IHSS recipients, or wiping out the entire domestic violence budget, the cuts will not only force the poor and infirm to slip through the cracks and cause mass suffering and even death, but the economic impact will be profound. Caregivers will lose their jobs. Relatives will shift their schedules to care for their families. Productivity will reduce. It's just a plain fact that lowering public spending during a deep recession will negatively impact the economy. Consumers aren't spending, companies aren't trading and businesses aren't investing. Government is the spender of last resort. And that spending has been slashed.

I honestly don't know where the bottom is.

A Budget Made Of Straw

Among the sketchiest of budget solutions passed last month was the plan to sell the State Compensation Insurance Fund for $1 billion dollars. This would be a perfect plan, if anybody actually wanted to buy it. But they don't, and so later this year, there will be this $1 billion dollar hole in the budget, and oh-so-sincere Yacht Party types will assume that it's just the cause of overspending, or something.

"This isn't going to happen any time in the next three to four years because there would be one court case, if not many," said Frank Neuhauser, a University of California, Berkeley, researcher and expert on workers' compensation. "There's no money coming from this in the short term that would resolve a budget problem. I think it's no better than smoke and mirrors."

The list of problems with the proposed sale is long.

The authorizing bill requires that State Fund's board of directors agree that assets identified by the state are appropriate to sell. Whether that gives the board veto power is already under dispute, a key point since the board opposes any sale.

The board's right, by the way, since the only way you could sell off any of the assets of the worker's compensation insurer of last resort is by selling off low-risk policies to private interests, essentially saddling the SCIF with the worst policies and driving premiums up. This from the Governor who supposedly "slashed" worker's comp.

Meanwhile, there's this inconvenient set of facts:

A major question is whether the state even owns State Fund assets. Policyholders likely would argue that the assets belong to them, not the state.

When Colorado lawmakers this year attempted to take $500 million from its workers' compensation fund, Colorado's attorney general concluded the money was not the state's to take and would incur extensive litigation. A Utah judge in 2005 ruled that Utah likewise had no ownership in its workers' compensation fund "other than as a policyholder."

"I don't see where that money is the state's to take," said Neuhauser, the UC Berkeley workers' compensation expert. "When the reserves are more than necessary, they are given back as dividends. I've always thought of that as the employers' money and never understood how it's possible the state could sell it."

We see here, once again, the practice of breaking the law to balance the budget. Because the Yacht Party refuses to properly fund government, and because the current rules allow them a minority veto, the only avenues left are raiding special funds and illegal or unworkable gimmicks. It's a budget built of straw.

(By the way, John Chiang, attributing the problem to "irresponsible spending" doesn't really help matters)