Category: Under the Perfect Sun

Since the untimely demise of the Millionaires Tax and the birth of the subsequent “compromise measure” Governor Jerry Brown has come out of the gates lauding the new ballot initiative as the result of his superior political experience and judgment. He has also made it clear that his vision is not one of progressive taxes in the service of social justice. Indeed, Brown recently challenged Democrats in the legislature to “man up” and make steep cuts to social services to help pave the way for the tax measure’s passage. In sum, his notion seems to be that only by demonstrating more austerity budgeting can we convince voters to pass the new measure.

Note: Of course Brown was put in this box by the Republicans in the legislature (like our own would-be mayor Nathan Fletcher) who all signed the Grover Norquist pledge to never raise any revenue in any instance. That said, the Governor didn’t have to adopt his role with such relish. But that’s the austerity Democrats for you.

Nonetheless, the early polling results on the compromise measure seemed encouraging for Brown with the first USC/LA Times poll showing the measure at 64% approval in late March. Sadly, this has not held. As the San Francisco Chronicle noted last week:

A new poll confirms a fear we’ve raised before – Gov. Jerry Brown’s insistence on coupling the popular tax on millionaires with an unpopular increase in the sales tax could doom the revenue package this November – putting pressure on the governor and his allies to step up their political games and save the schools from disastrous cuts.

My column last week, “The Fletcher Flim Flam,” got a lot of attention and many comments, the most interesting one coming from Democratic Assemblyman Isadore Hall sent not by the politician himself but by a worried Fletcher campaign staffer who forwarded it to the OB Rag asking that it be posted in response to my blog. Here it is:

On the same day that Jim Miller published his piece against Nathan Fletcher, the right wing group Americans for Prosperity was doing a press conference to attack him as well.

You may have heard about this group, the front group for the Koch brothers. This is the same group that supported the chaos and dysfunction in Wisconsin–a model and vision that Carl Demaio has laid out as his vision for San Diego.

It’s unfortunate that Jim Miller doesn’t know Nathan Fletcher, but I do.

Nathan Fletcher is not a man of great political courage. He isn’t even a particularly independent thinker. But he is politically clever, and he knows that San Diego’s Democratic base has a long history of being bamboozled by wolves in sheep’s clothing from the days of Pete Wilson to the present.

Fletcher’s recent move to leave the Republican Party and become an Independent clearly banks on this tradition continuing. Indeed, if I were Fletcher’s campaign manager I would have advised him to do exactly the same thing. After losing the GOP endorsement to Carl DeMaio, Fletcher was sitting at 13% in the polls in third place with only a slight lead over the absolutely hopeless Bonnie Dumanis. And if you are a genuinely affable, good-looking, war veteran with big ambitions and the strong conviction that the world needs you now, that is not a good place to be sitting.

Last week in the New York Times Eric Alterman cheered the advances made by proponents of same sex marriage and other cultural and civil rights issues while bemoaning the sad state of affairs on the economic front. Specifically, he noted that:

“economic liberalism is on life-support, while cultural liberalism thrives. The obvious question is why. The simple answer is that cultural liberalism comes cheap. Supporting same-sex marriage or a woman’s right to choose does not cost the wealthy anything or restrict their ability to become wealthier.”

Alterman then goes on to give a brief history of how “the United States has undoubtedly become a fairer, more open and less oppressive society” thanks to the struggles of liberals in favor of civil rights for all. The problem, he notes, is that liberals’ faith in an ever-expanding economic pie was undercut when “the economy chose not to cooperate” from the time of the oil crisis in 1973 to the current economic downturn. Their penchant for “overpromising” and “underperforming” led to the alienation of many key constituencies and steadily eroded their base as working folks engaged in “a bitter, resentful scramble for the remaining scraps” of the pie that didn’t expand.

Opening week is upon us and the Padres ownership debacle has already done a lot to dampen the spirits of local baseball fans even before the first pitch has been thrown. With Jeff Moorad unlikely to ever take over the majority share of the team from John Moores, many fans rightly feel they have been bamboozled once again–left to sit in a park that their tax dollars built and pay through the nose for bad baseball and overpriced beer while the swooning friars stumble uncertainly around the bases toward yet another losing season. If you watch the Vegas line, the Padres are picked to finish last in the National League West with only 70 wins. Oh, the horror!

But, of course, that is the destiny of the Padres fan: losing. As I only half-jokingly tell my friends, I have taught my son to love baseball and love the Padres so he knows from a young age the first noble truth: life is suffering.

This just in: Carl DeMaio’s Comprehensive Pension Reform measure is a sad hoax. While it is likely that DeMaio’s deeply deceptive measure will pass overwhelmingly, that has more to do with the successful demonization of city workers and the nearly universally distorted local media lapdog chorus than it does with facts.

Last week, the city’s Independent Budget Analyst found that if DeMaio’s plan (which is also favored by Fletcher and Dumanis) passes, “Pension changes are projected to cost a net $13 million over 30 years ($56 million when adjusted for inflation).”

Last week news of a “compromise” between Jerry Brown and the coalition behind the Millionaires’ Tax was announced and was seen by some in the media as a victory for progressives. In the LA Times the Republicans greeted the news by saying that the Governor had surrendered to a “backwater union” (my statewide union, the California Federation of Teachers) by giving in and upping the taxes on the wealthy and lowering the sales tax in his initiative.

While the “compromise” does up the progressive elements of the tax and lower the regressive elements, it is still structurally the same as the Governor’s original initiative, hangs on to the regressive sales tax, and continues to be temporary without any of the guarantees of higher education funding beyond community colleges or any of the other specific requirements that the Millionaires’ Tax contained. Indeed, it’s likely that what this new measure will do is go to the general fund to offset costs rather than restore cuts and/or create new jobs.

Last week wasn’t so good for Jerry Brown. First the Public Policy Institute of California put out a poll that found that the Governor’s measure was favored by only a very slim majority of California voters at 52% approval. This number is 16% below where it was in a January PPIC poll and, if accurate, pretty much dooms it. What changed? In this survey, people were given the actual language that will be on the ballot (including the regressive sales tax), which appears to kill voter enthusiasm.

Making matters worse for Brown and company, another poll followed this one that eviscerates one of the governor’s main arguments. This poll confirms that a majority of Californians would prefer to have a choice of tax measures on the ballot.

In last week’s column, I noted that Arizona lawmakers, with help from a right-wing think tank, were pushing union busting legislation more severe than Wisconsin’s. Not surprisingly, as John Nichols reported in The Nation, Arizona Republicans got a little pep talk from Governor Scott Walker himself:

Two days after Ohio voters overwhelmingly rejected Governor John Kasich’s anti-labor agenda by a sixty-one to thirty-nine margin in a statewide referendum, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker jetted to Arizona to launch the next front in the national campaign to attack union rights. After meeting with former Vice President Dan Quayle, Walker was whisked over to the Phoenician Resort in Scottsdale, where he briefed a thousand Arizona conservatives on how they could attack “the big-government union bosses.”

“We need to make big, fundamental, permanent structural changes. It’s why we did what we did in Wisconsin,” declared Walker, who at the annual dinner of the right-wing Goldwater Institute said that compromising with unions was “bogus.” Comparing governors who have been attacking the collective-bargaining rights of public employees with the founders of the American experiment—“just like that group that gathered in Philadelphia”—

In response to last Wednesday’s kick-off press conference for the Millionaires Tax Initiative here in San Diego, Channels 6 and 10 were careful to give well over half of the time in their stories to local right-wing libertarian anti-tax nut Richard Rider.

Rider, the chairman of the San Diego Tax Fighters, opined that:

“If people think that rich people are greedy, why would they think that they wouldn’t move out of state if the taxes got too high? . . . It’s a very interesting conflict in their reasoning.”

Other than mischaracterizing a call for the top 1% to pay their fair share to help support education and vital public services as an ad hominem attack on the greedy rich and making the evidence-free claim that an extra 3% in taxes will force Hollywood stars and CEO’s to strap their hot-tubs on their Mercedes and head for Arizona, he was spot on.

For those who are wondering, there is zero evidence to support the claim that higher individual or corporate tax rates in the past hurts job creation or forced a mass migration of afflicted plutocrats. Indeed as Warren Buffet has pointed out, there was actually more job creation when taxes were higher on the rich than they are now.

The response to the small Occupy/anti-National Defense Authorization Act protest at the Democratic convention was indicative of where we are politically in many ways. Some delegates fearfully scurried away from the protesters, others angrily told them they were protesting the wrong party (although Obama did sign it), and others, still, stopped and expressed solidarity with Occupy.

As one activist who was there holding a Millionaires Tax banner outside the hall reported:

“It was like a Rorschach test. You could tell where folks were on the political spectrum by how they reacted. The thing that stood out to me was how the slickest suits in the crowd just walked by like we didn’t exist.”

Sitting at the Millionaires Tax table inside the hall at the Hilton (ironic no?), I overheard voices ridiculing Occupy, expressing dismay at being protested, or saying they were headed over to check out and/or join the action. As activists there to promote the Millionaires Tax initiative I/we were both inside and outside the event.

Commemoration on Wednesday at 6pm at 5th and E Streets – the Original Soapbox Site

This year, we commemorate the 100-year anniversary of a city ordinance that banned public speaking and assembly in the area around 5th and E Streets in downtown San Diego and the subsequent battle that followed. During the course of this struggle, many people were arrested, beaten and even killed for asserting their rights to simply stand on a soapbox and speak. Today, anyone who enjoys the right to assemble, protest, and speak in public in San Diego has the Free Speech League of the Progressive Era to thank for fighting to maintain basic rights for all San Diegans

The 100-year anniversary of the San Diego Free Speech Fight is a celebration of the legacy of local labor and civil rights activism and a reminder that if we are not vigilant in the protection of our rights, we can certainly lose them.