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.

Yacht Party Hijackers

George Skelton finds a nut:

The two-thirds rule is not used merely to protect taxpayers from politicians trying to reach deeper into their pockets. It's used by special interests -- mainly big business -- to game the system; a tool handy for legislative leverage, or extortion. If you don't give us what we want, we'll withhold the votes needed for the two-thirds.

It's about buying and selling. Last Friday, at the all-night windup of this year's regular legislative session, Democrats weren't in a buying mood.

This is what happened, according to Democrats, and Republicans aren't exactly denying it: The Senate GOP blocked more than 20 bills requiring a two-thirds vote because Democrats wouldn't cave on three unrelated demands.

This has been true for years if not decades. The 2/3 rule does not protect tax increases, it's a tool for the Yacht Party to hijack the process. In this case, the GOP wanted to create a forced market for Intuit, makers of TurboTax; to increase the corporate tax breaks from the Februrary budget deal, in particular to help Chevron; and to make Roy Ashburn a lead author on a Democratic bill. See if you can find the word "tax increase" in there. But because the Democrats didn't much feel like giving out even more corporate welfare or fattening the pockets of Intuit, the Yacht Party revolted. And they knocked down 20 bills, including one that would keep domestic violence shelters open throughout the state (which is nothing more than homicide prevention) by shifting available funds, and another to allow the Treasurer more leeway to renegotiate with banks and save the state $850 million dollars.

These and the other bills, again, did not involve tax increases. They were taken up under urgency requirements (so the policy takes effect immediately) or other factors, like changes to the budget, which necessitate a 2/3 vote. And the Yacht Party routinely takes advantage of this, mainly out of spite and an attempt to leverage their votes to reward their corporate backers.

Ashburn candidly defends blocking the legislation: "This was an opportunity for Republicans to have some leverage." Concerning the merits of measures buried in the fallout: "The subject matter of bills at that point was secondary to what the [GOP] caucus had decided to do with them."

This is a pretty startling admission. But not one anybody wasn't aware of before now.

Skelton has deciphered the problem pretty clearly, and Democrats are well-positioned to highlight it and show the disaster of governance ushered in by the onerous 2/3 rules.

Will they?

Annals Of The Insurance Industry

Just a few tidbits about the industry that Republicans and many conservative Democrats say we must keep in business at all costs:

• A member of a non-profit in Virginia was arrested at the headquarters of Anthem for trying to question them about a rate increase. This is the same Anthem who sent a letter to their customers telling them to contact members of Congress and tell them to oppose a public option. When the same customers try to contact Anthem, they are met with arrest.

• Crystal Lee Sutton, the union organizer who inspired the movie "Norma Rae," died from cancer this week, after a protracted battle with the disease - and her health insurer.

As Daily Kos blogger hissyspit points out, last year Sutton gave an interview to the press where she described a struggle with her health insurer over treatment. The Times-News in Burlington, North Carolina, wrote in 2008:

[Sutton] went two months without possible life-saving medications because her insurance wouldn’t cover it, another example of abusing the working poor, she said.

“How in the world can it take so long to find out (whether they would cover the medicine or not) when it could be a matter of life or death,” she said. “It is almost like, in a way, committing murder.”

She eventually received the medication, but the cancer is taking a toll on her strong will and solid frame.

• In eight states and the District of Columbia, insurance companies define domestic violence as a pre-existing condition. The theory goes that a victim of abuse is more likely to be abused again, and would require medical treatment for those beatings.

Words cannot describe the sheer inhumanity of this claim. It serves as yet further proof that our insurance system is broken, destroyed by the profit-mongering of the very companies whose sole purpose should be to provide Americans with access to care when they need it most. In 1994, an informal survey conducted by the Subcommittee on Crime and Criminal Justice of the United States Senate Judiciary Committee revealed that 8 of the 16 largest insurers in the country used domestic violence as a factor when deciding whether to extend coverage and how much to charge if coverage was extended.

• The same insurance interests who deny coverage to victims of domestic violence, who deny claims for cancer patients, who arrest those who dare to question them, have spent $585 million dollars in the past 2 1/2 years, and $700,000 a day, lobbying Congress to ensure that any reform bill protects their profits. They have scored with at least one committee, Max Baucus' Senate Finance Committee, which produced a bill that CIGNA whistleblower Wendell Potter calls an absolute gift to the insurance industry.

Potter argued that the lax employer requirements would shift the cost and risk of coverage onto the individual and maintained that the bill’s “network of cooperatives” would be unable to compete in today’s concentrated health insurance markets. “The co-ops won’t stand a chance,” he concluded.

Reform must also do more to regulate insurers, who have agreed to accept applicants with pre-existing conditions but are insisting on benefit and rate flexibility. Potter argued that the benefit package standards in the Exchange and the high deductible option for younger beneficiaries would allow insurers to design almost anything that they can sell in the health market place and push the country towards consumer driven health care.

Under the Baucus legislation, private insurers could also charge older individuals up to five times more for coverage. “You’re just using age as a proxy for health status,” Uwe Reinhardt, an economics professor at Princeton University told the New York Times. Reinhardt estimates that “Senator Baucus’s age-rating plan would allow insurers to cover roughly 70 percent of the additional risk they’d take on by being required to accept all comers, regardless of health.”

Some, like Nancy Pelosi, have vowed not to pass the "Insurance Industry Profit Protection And Enhancement Act," as she called it. But they are under tremendous pressure from powerful interests to enact just such a giveaway. Reform groups like Health Care for America Now understand that attacking this industry, and devaluing their influence, is a means to getting a bill that truly helps all Americans obtain quality and affordable health care.

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.

The Lack Of Investment, Protecting The Rich And Connected

It's hard to choose the most cruel or the most thoughtless among Arnold Schwarzenegger's line-item cuts added to the budget revision. But you could make a case for the slashing of all state funding for domestic violence centers, for a savings of about $16 million dollars. LAist profiles one center, in the Santa Clarita Valley, that will probably now have to close:

The Domestic Violence Center in the Santa Clarita Valley is the only agency that provides domestic violence services in the 200-square mile valley. As a result of Schwarzenegger's cut, which is immediate, they've lost 45%, or $207,222.00, of their annual funding, which they say will force them to close their doors later this year unless the community supports them with donations. In 2008, they served over 1,000 victims of domestic violence.

“As the Center’s Executive Director, I think about every client who has come through our doors and their horrific stories of abuse - I cannot help but cry when I think about what the loss of our services will mean to victims," said Executive Director Nicole Shellcroft in a statement. "Those who walk through our doors have suffered through broken bones, beatings, strangulation, food deprivation, arson, torture, genital mutilation and unspeakable sexual violence. They have been thrown down flights of stairs, have been victim to violent physical attacks during pregnancy and have even faced the prospect of murder. Victims seek our services to escape incredible violence aimed at them and their children."

Here's another profile, from Oroville in Butte County.

This is what we are talking about when we say that people will die from the decisions made by Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Legislature. The $16 million in cuts represent a pittance of the budget and far less than the $2 billion dollar annual tax cut for the largest corporations in America instituted back in February. But, we are told, those businesses would flee the state if they were forced to contribute a fair share of taxes for the commons that they use, so instead, women and their children will have practically nowhere to turn to save themselves from spousal abuse.

It turns out that some businesses are dismayed enough to consider leaving California - not because of the lack of tax breaks, because of all of the budget cuts and the impact on the workforce.

Wilbur D.Curtis invented the globular glass coffeepot, that staple of coffee counters everywhere, in 1940. Since then his son and grandsons have turned Wilbur Curtis Co. into a manufacturing concern that earns revenue approaching $100 million by turning out commercial coffee brewing equipment from a sprawling factory in Montebello.

But their long history in California doesn't exempt the Curtis family from the costs and hassles that give this state its reputation as one of the hardest places in the country to do business [...]

Yet it's plain that the state government has failed in precisely those areas where it can make a difference. Laws' main concern isn't strictly how much money the state spends -- it's that the bucks don't go where they count.

His two biggest issues are education and infrastructure. "We pay a fortune here to educate people on basic things like writing and math skills that they should have learned in high school," he says. The company, whose workforce is mostly Latino, also provides training in English as a second language -- including for some employees who came through the public schools [...]

Then there's that lifeblood of any firm whose products can't be shipped through cyberspace -- transport.

Traffic congestion in the L.A. basin has become a round-the-clock hassle. Laws says one of his biggest customers, a coffee company with a national reach, opened a local facility here to be near its own big customers, only to find that navigating the overstressed road system drove its costs to twice its expectations.

And these complaints about infrastructure and education exist before budget revisions that would decimate the future of higher education for a generation of students, and only harm the ability to create the infrastructure necessary for densely populated areas in the 21st century.

We're picking away at safety net programs and increasing the danger and suffering for a whole class of citizens, while protecting the largest corporations and the wealthiest campaign contributors. And the actual lifeblood of job creation, the small business community, would rather see investment than the current hijacking of state government by those who want to dismantle it.

Related: Marc Cooper's cover story on California at The Nation.