Now what do you do?

After decades of gradual fee increases, the latest 'deal' struck by the UC regents to raise fees an unprecedented 32% has finally crossed the line. A world class education-essential for the success of yourself, your state, and your nation-is slipping away from California's social contract.

Since realizing the inevitable last fall, you've walked-out, sat-in, and spoken-up. The outrage-real outrage-on UC, CSU, and Community College campuses is palpable. In fact, your reaction has received global media coverage. Of your massive protests last September, the UK Guardian first wrote of the "shock" it sent throughout the capitol, and then it described the students and faculty as "meaning business."

So the die has been cast. The state of California has crossed the rubicon. Sacramento wants your education back.

What do you do?

You've blamed the UC Regents and the CSU Board of Trustees-suspicious of how readily they accepted the cuts and questioning of their compensation, you want answers. You've blamed the governor-for heaping the fallout of California's colossal dysfunction onto the shoulders of its children, and for seeming aloof from the plight of California's students. You've blamed the state legislature-for doing its best to undermine your education, and for allowing nearly every other function of the state to grind to a halt on its watch.

But something about these enemies doesn't stick.

The regents and the trustees are only reacting to what's coming down on them from the State Capitol, and their compensation alone doesn't come close to closing the hole.

The Governor too is hamstrung. Even in good economic times, he and the legislature only control about 20% of the budget. The rest is 'locked-in' by the spending priorities and restrictions by the political movements of yesterday.

The legislature is a tempting target...but wait. Fees have increased during periods of Republican control and Democratic control; when liberals were in charge of the legislature and when conservatives were in charge; in good economic times and bad. You have every reason to believe that you will continue to receive less education for more money no matter who wins what election where or when.

No, the fee hikes, the layoffs, and the furloughs (like the IOU's, the prisons, and the water) are bigger than Arnold Schwarzenegger, and they are certainly bigger than either the regents or the board of trustees. For this reason, you and your fellow students have been visibly frustrated trying to find the right target for your wrath, the most effective avenue for your collective action.

Should you look to Sacramento? Today, at this very moment, the Capitol exists in a state of controlled-anarchy. Every lobbying firm and every interest group scavenges whatever it can from the public body; the feast has no strategy, no master plan, and no guiding principle. The beast has shown itself capable of devouring water systems, prison systems, roads, bridges, and the social safety net, and now its hungry for the greatest university system in the history of our species. The monster cannot be tamed or captured, and its gluttony is ravaging us all.

Then it hits. The problem is Sacramento. Your enemy is Sacramento.

What do you do? When who controls the legislature or the governor's mansion has largely ceased to matter, and when the system and all its parts has become so fundamentally committed to destroying everything you love-from your parks to your health to your education-where do you turn? Do you tinker around the edges? No. You get a new system.

Last month, a coalition of advocacy groups called Repair California, finalized and submitted two ballot measures to do just that, by calling California's first constitutional convention in 130 years. If the measures succeed at the ballot we would be enabled to scrap the old system and build a new one, one that learns from other states and reflects the California of tomorrow. No other reform proposal offers such an opportunity, not even close.

I don't know about you, but I refuse to accept the status quo and what it's doing to us. It's time for us to seize our future. California needs you. This movement needs you. Visit www.RepairCalifornia.org.

Repair California has offered a limited Constitutional Convention as the best opportunity for the people of California to step forward and reclaim their state government.  While the movement has the support of 70 percent of voters, as well as thousands of volunteers and many public leaders, some naturally express skepticism.

Constitutional conventions have been common throughout U.S. history, but California has not had one in 130 years.  This extraordinary lapse of time without a serious citizen-review of government could understandably breed fear.  Indeed, such trepidation accompanied the lead up to many of the 232 successful state Constitutional Conventions.  For instance, in the 1963 black & white documentary of Michigan's Constitutional Convention, held in that year, the narrator aptly summarized this unease:

"There had been fears the convention would be too conservative; fears that it would be too liberal; fears that it would be racked by politics...Pro-labor or pro-farmer or pro-business. Favoring the present, trapped in the past, lost in the future..."

Yet Americans are optimists with a propensity to overcome their fears and to emerge from trial and ordeal stronger than before - just as they did in 1963 Michigan, and just as they have done during each of the 232 state constitutional conventions in U.S. history.
Furthermore, a sober analysis of some of the most recent constitutional conventions demonstrates that these fears consistently fail to materialize.  When reviewing recent state constitutional conventions it becomes clear that when given the chance, the American people see this venue as something beyond regular politics, and they seem naturally inclined to check partisanship at the door for the sake of carrying out the people's business.     

Constitutional conventioneers have proven particularly willing and capable of making the type of important compromises and decisions that commonly elude regular legislatures.  The 1978 Hawaii Convention established term limits for state office holders, and required the legislature to produce an annual balanced budget.  Delegates to the 1970 Illinois Convention actually took power from the state capitol and delivered it to local governments, closer to the watchful eyes of the voters.  Michigan's 1963 convention resolved the thorniest of issues:  reapportionment for legislative districts.  

The ability of delegates to agree on common-sense reforms is often explained vis-a-vis the fundamentally different incentives driving convention delegates vs. regular politicians.  Among these are party politics, delegate demographics, and the unique nature of the constitutional convention venue itself.

First, constitutional convention delegates aren't driven by re-election.  As such, delegates aren't burdened by the incentive to appease a particular party's activist base, raise money or secure endorsements.  For similar reasons, delegates have no electoral incentive to cower from important decisions.

Second, Constitutional Convention delegates are often "outsiders."  The Repair California delegate selection model brings in an equal number of experts and everyday Californians as voting delegates, but prohibits individuals who serve in a state-level elected office, their staff, lobbyists, employees or businesses that rely on state government.  This mimics the approach of several states, including Montana.  According to the official history of Montana's 1971 Constitutional Convention:

"The delegates brought none of the acrimony and bitterness to the Convention that sometimes develops between seasoned politicians with preconceived positions on major state issues.  Thus, the delegates were able to approach the principle issues before the Convention in an objective manner, and they also avoided a good deal of the pressures to which legislators are subjected.  The probable unforeseen result...was a constitutional body relatively free from influence and dedicated to basic changes in Montana's constitutional framework."

Finally, conjuring images of powdered wigs and founding fathers and mothers, Constitutional Conventions occupy a special place in the American psyche; a place Americans have historically proven unwilling to spoil with partisan bickering and electoral posturing.
After describing the fears which had preceded Michigan's march towards its 1963 Convention, the documentary went on to explain how Michiganders eventually reconciled their fears.

"The convention...was not an assemblage of angels.  It was a convention of men and women.  Taking the best it could agree on for our time and for our people...This was the process.  Sometimes calm, sometimes not so calm.  Either way, it was the people's way.  It was the way of a free democracy." 

WHEN motley crew political organizations from all over the state and political spectrum bring traveling town hall meetings to San Francisco, the civic minded would be well-advised to attend. Repair California is one of these crews, and last Tuesday they brought their push for a limited Constitutional Convention to The City by the Bay.

Composed of such seemingly disparate groups as The Bay Area Council, a business led-public policy organization, the Full-Circle-Fund and the Courage Campaign, an education advocacy group and progressive grassroots organization respectively, Repair California makes for an odd bird. Nevertheless, despite the very real differences between the interests these groups represent, two powerful forces have conspired to forge their unity: the complete collapse of California's government and the strategic conviction that the situation in California has become so perilous they are willing to bet their time, energy, and yes, money, on the proposition that a representative sample of average Californians can do better.

At the risk of digression the following must be said. Tuesday night's California Constitutional Convention Town Hall filled the 500 seat PG&E auditorium to capacity and yet was about as anarchic as a Norman Rockwell painting (Complete video of the event here and here). This impression would have gone completely unnoticed if not for the rather caustic health care town halls currently underway across the country. The speakers addressed the enormity of the task before them with an eloquence matched only by the dignity of the evening's participants, young and old, liberal and conservative, as they lined up to ask what were almost without exception well-thought-out insightful questions. This sentiment was echoed by Peter Schrag, former editor of the Sacramento Bee and longtime chronicler of California's woes, who wrote on the California Progress Report, "What was most striking about the Repair California group and the people who've come to their meetings is that they seem both so ordinary and yet so thoughtful." One couldn't escape feeling it. This is the way town halls are supposed to go.

First at the podium was the Full Circle Fund's Jeff Camp and his terribly depressing presentation on California's public education over the past three decades. The cliff notes history of California's public schools goes something like this. Until the 1960's schools were funded almost exclusively through property tax revenues. "This worked great..." deadpanned Camp, "for wealthy communities". The US Supreme Court eventually found this system violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, and school funding was modified to be more equitable. Years later, proposition 13 completely reversed this system by amending the state constitution so that all property tax dollars would go first to Sacramento (and put through the legislative sausage making process) and then distributed back to the locals from whose pockets the money originally came. It should come as no surprise that, over time, fewer and fewer dollars were coming back. The challenge for Convention delegates would be to ensure that more powers of the purse are devolved back to local governments without leaving schools in poor neighborhoods to completely fend for themselves.

Jim Wunderman, President and CEO of the Bay Area Council, immediately began by recognizing that the same type of dire presentation on California's schools could be done for the state's responsibilities across the board: water, prisons, transportation, etc. After speaking at nearly all of these events, Wunderman spends little time describing the scope of the failure, apparently confident that Californians don't need a weatherman to tell them its raining. Wunderman instead focuses his message not on why California should be reformed, but why a Constitutional Convention would be the best way to do it.

There are three ways to reform California's government: through the legislature, through the ballot initiative, and through a Constitutional Convention. The first method, the "insider" strategy, has been completely disregarded by nearly everyone; the capitol is far too polarized to agree on any sort of meaningful reform, and politicians have precious few incentives to come to compromises.

The second option, the ballot, is deeply flawed for at least one big reason. California's government is so broken, its problems so numerous, it would take "Proposition A-Z" to fix. Such a campaign would be prohibitively expensive, and interest groups which benefit from the status-quo could easily pick them off one-by-one. That leaves the Convention...

As of this moment Californians do not have the right to call for a Constitutional Convention. Only the legislature, through a 2/3 vote, can propose one. When you think about it, it's a rather glaring deficiency for a system that supposes the people are the government. Repair California has therefore developed a "offer-voters-power-and-challenge-them-to-seize-it" strategy to push for two ballot initiatives: one to amend the constitution to give people the power to call a convention, and another to actually call the thing.

Stephen Hill, director of the Political Reform Program at the New America Foundation, described the proposed idea of choosing delegates via a representative sample of Californians selected at random from a master list built from jury pools, the DMV, and voter registrations. "One thing I'd like to say about these citizen bodies is that they're actually being used across the United States". Hill referred specifically to the enormous New Orleans citizen-delegation which was convened to break through a political stalemate over the city's post-Katrina rebuilding plans. The delegation was comprised of 4,000 people spread over 21 cities and linked by every facet of modern networking technology. "When you read about what occurred, it is truly impressive because they were able to find common ground". Hill explained the surprising successes of this citizen-delegate model to the fact that delegates do not bring self-interest tainted by the partisanship and incumbency. "What you find is that when average people come together they check their partisanship at the door."

Progressive activists, good-government watch-dogs, and business leaders...the breadth of Repair California's coalition, already large, promises to become a colossus. And it better be, because the task is equally enormous. While California continues to loose its edge, you can bet that someone in Sacramento is winning big, and this entity is not going to go quietly into the night. As Schrag put it "The chore isn't just to restructure the state's dysfunctional system of government, but, as [Repair California] knows, to re-create citizenship in a state that now has much too little of it." Such language tends to make Sacramento shudder. All the more reason to keep repeating it.

My commentary on race relations post "Gates-Gate" is legitimized by having once been arrested, at gunpoint, under almost the exact same circumstances as those surrounding the famous professor. More on that later.

First, in the wake of the Cambridge hullabaloo involving Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Cambridge police department, and President Barack Obama, the nation's baby boomer press has dived headlong (again) into the debate they most love to hate: race.

Make no mistake about it, they love this debate. Remember when all discussion of Obama's nascent presidential candidacy was, embarrassingly, always prefaced with his racial pedigree? ("I heard his mother was white..."). Or how the month long controversy our African American Attorney General, Eric Holder, sparked when he pointedly called out Americans for too often being "cowards" about race?

Or what about the complete lack of controversy surrounding the Republican Vice Presidential Nominee's then-soon-to-be-son-in-law Levi Johnson's myspace page, which read "I'm a fuckin' redneck who likes to hang out with the boys...shoot some shit. Ya fuck with me I'll kick ass"? Very few people cared to describe just how thoroughly the press would loose their collective shit if Barack Obama's girls were of age and in a relationship with an African American teenager who described himself with even half the aggression of the Alaskan hockey stud.

But make no mistake about it, they also hate this debate. How else could you describe the infantile standards of our race discussions, even, or especially, among the elite? We all got a taste of this during the Sotomayor confirmation hearings from GOP Senator Jeff Sessions. As CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin argued on air "What's worth noting about what Jeff Sessions -- the line of questioning, was that being a white man, that's normal. Everybody else has biases and prejudices ... but the white man, they don't have any ethnicity, they don't have any gender, they're just like the normal folks, and I thought that was a little jarring."

Indeed, that is jarring, but Sotomayor herself reinforced the exact same sentiment in her now famous "wise Latina" speech. The issue with the speech can be broken into three parts. First, Sotomayor proclaimed her superior intellectual mettle. Second, she credited this superiority to her race. Third, she did not explain this association vis-a-vis all races, genders, or generations, but with enormous specificity to white men. Thus the stupidity of the Senator from Alabama extends all the way to a Berkeley graduation ceremony. Holder had it wrong. We're not a nation of cowards, we're a nation of idiots.

Or perhaps we're a nation of stark generational divides. From the perspective of a Millennial, this much seems pretty cut-and-dry: Generally speaking, our grandparents were born into an overtly racist society and, like all generations before them, they more-or-less accepted it. Our parents, the baby boomers, we're raised into this overtly racist society. However, unlike our grandparents, they saw it as unjust and they actively supported political movements to fix it, in numbers that their parents did not. However, having been raised in the racist society, the depth of this commitment among white baby boomers varied greatly, and some were just as passionate about continuing segregation as others were about passing the Civil Rights Act. The civil rights struggle that ensued brought all these emotions to the fore, sometimes violently so, scarring all those who took part with memories for a lifetime.

Which brings us to today, where the children of these baby boomers were essentially raised to believe that racism was wrong, even in the cases of parents who were unable to completely shake elements from their racist past. This generation's perspective on race did not have to be transformed by social movement; we could all recognize equality as a no-brainer even as we acknowledged that, as a nation, were not there yet.

This generation's liberalized attitude towards race was further promoted by a consortium of economic and technological factors beyond the control of themselves or their parents. First, arts and entertainment was democratized and internationalized. This generation's hit music is now as likely to come from a British Sri Lankan as it is a homegrown guitar hero, and the Best Picture award as likely to go to an Indian film as it is to Spielberg. Second, immigration has ensured that social circles in this generation would be almost impossible without some level of diversity. And third, this generation was raised with technology that allowed cultural intercourse in ways previously unimaginable.

While Senator Sessions (62), Sonia Sotomayor (55), Henry Louis Gates (58), Sergeant James Crowley (42), and the rest of the mainstream media continue to reference the time-capsule that is their shared experience of the 1960's and 1970's in regards to contemporary race discussions, I find myself utterly bewildered.  

I haven't read the arrest report, nor do I intend to. I haven't interviewed Gates, or Sergeant Crowley, nor do I intend to (nor do I pretend I could if I wanted to, I don't have that many followers). So, while I can't offer much insight on the specifics of Gates-Gate, I can tell you about an incident that occurred when I was a scrawny 16 year old. One that bears striking similarities to the case of Henry Louis Gates Jr., except, of course, that I am blaring white.

It's early July, 2000, on a weekend. I am 16 years old. My best friend and I are returning from a successful day the beach (by successful I mean what any 16 year old boy means: tasty waves and new phone numbers). We had planned to meet up with some girls from the beach to go see a movie later that night. On our way to the theater, I made a fateful decision to stop by my mom's house to reply to nature's call. She, however, was not home and I, unfortunately, had forgotten my set of keys.

So I did what you do in these situations: I broke in.

I popped out the screen from the living room window, slid the glass open, hopped in, then unlocked the door to let my buddy in. I used the bathroom, washed my hands, and made a phone call. As we leave, we gently closed the window, replaced the screen, and locked the door behind us. All told, the maneuver took 8 minutes, tops.

We scurried across the hall and turned to descend the staircase back towards the parking lot, eager to meet the girls at the theater on time (my memory has fogged a bit, but I'm pretty sure we were describing our ultimate hopes for the evening in rather lurid detail, and at a rather high decibel). Halfway down the stairwell we were confronted: three squad cars and no fewer than six officers, guns drawn, standing between us and my best friend's forest green Camero (its true), like Frodo between Gollum and the tortuous ecstasy of the Ring.

"Freeze! Get your hands up!"

A moment of panic ensued, as both my buddy and I were under the sudden belief that the day's lovely progression had gone far enough, and that fate was determined to stonewall our hormones even if it meant dropping us into the middle of a gun fight between San Luis Obispo's finest and whatever manner of criminal must have been at our rear to warrant the current situation. With hands in the air, I glanced behind me to find the armed man. Nothing.

"I'm talking to YOU motherfucker! On the ground!"

Within moments we were hand-cuffed and face-down on a grimy parking lot at my mom's shitty apartment complex, boots at our backs, guns at our heads.

"Is anyone else in the building?!"

"No officer. This is a some sort of mistake. That's my m--"

"I repeat: Is there anyone else in the building?!"

"No. It's my mom's house. I was just using the bathroom".

"Because if we go in there and find someone else..."

Of course, nobody was in the house. They came back down, chatted some stuff over the transmitter, asked us a few questions, and then let us go. But not before my buddy, like Professor Gates, asked for an apology. First, we got a scowl. Then, like Gates, an abrupt "no".

Benjamin Franklin was said to have quipped that doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result was the definition of insanity. Dr. Franklin, welcome to Sacramento. Where despite the shame, humiliation, and human suffering caused by California's horrific budget catastrophe, proponents of doing the same thing have unleashed a campaign of fear against convening a Constitutional Convention, and in doing so have rushed to the defense of the status quo.

In a June 18 Op-Ed appearing in the Capitol Weekly, a union official representing the State Building & Construction Trades Council essentially called on Californians to fear their neighbors.  

"Think about the person you know - a relative, friend, neighbor, colleague - whom you disagree with the most. That person may well be in a jury pool and could be selected. Is that the person you want spending the next several months...deciding how California should be run?"

This is not an argument against a Constitutional Convention, its an attack on the entire pantheon of American values, from trial by jury to universal suffrage.

And yet, this is only slightly more hysterical than the rationale given by a coalition of 6 taxpayer groups opposing a Constitutional Convention because of "fears that the process can and will be hijacked" by special interests, oblivious to the fact that special interests rule the entire roost right now.  

While it is clear that those on the far-left and far-right fear a Constitutional Convention, and believe you should fear one too, their rationale is not so clear. For example, are they afraid that citizen guided reforms will make California's schools the worst in the nation? They already are. Do they fear pan-generational neglect of our water infrastructure? That has already happened. Are they afraid that millions of poor children will suddenly go without healthcare? We're already there. That our beloved state parks will close? That our prisons overflow? Done and done.

Just last week a colleague of mine gave a teary-eyed account of the real cost of the ruined California government. Driving with his two small children, they passed a elementary school weighted down with chains and shackles. The marquis read:

"Sorry, no summer school. Budget cuts. Have a great summer."

As we approach the moment of truth, we expect the fear mongering will only increase. This is unfortunate because history teaches us that when you give citizens the responsibility to reform their government, the American people rarely disappoint.  

When Illinois voters called for a Convention in 1968, delegates drafted a short document that established basic rights, established the "Home Rule" principle that gave cities and counties more control over their own resources, and created what is all-around considered to be a model constitution.

Likewise, Michigan held a Constitutional Convention in 1963 that brought it into the modern era. Hawaii alone has convened two Con Cons since 1960. All told, there have been 232 State Con Cons in US history. In each of these and other states, Constitutional Conventions are regularly debated on the merits of the moment and by the facts on the ground, not by fear, mistrust, and misinformation.

During the 1963 Michigan Con Con Wayne State teamed up with Michigan State University to produce what has since become a classic black and white documentary about American democracy. At the closing moments of "Michigan Can Lead the Way", the narrator summarizes the experiment:

"Perfection is never an outcome of human enterprise. There had been fears the convention would be too conservative; fears that it would be too liberal; fears that it would be racked by politics...Pro-labor or pro-farmer or pro-business...Favoring the present, trapped in the past, lost in the future. The convention had been all of these, it was not an assemblage of angels. It was a convention of men and women. Taking the best it could agree on for our time and for our people...This was the process. Sometimes calm, sometimes not so calm. Either way, it was the people's way. It was the way of a free democracy."

For California, doing nothing and expecting different results is the worst option of all. And defending the status quo is not only scary, it's insane.

It won't be Philadelphia, 1788. But after the Golden State's current fiscal oblivion, a constitutional convention could prove to be much more than simply the least-bad-solution.   

"WHEREAS Mr. Dickinson foresees apocalypse" uttered an irascible and rotund Paul Giamatti, "I see hope". Giamatti's character then launched into one of the most powerful scenes of the award-winning HBO mini-series John Adams, convincing the congress at Philadelphia that Independence from Great Britain was not simply just, but fully within the realm of the possible. Abuse under the crown had matured Independence into something much more powerful than a right; it had become a duty.

Thankfully, California's current predicament is not quite so perilous. (Understatement noted). However, like the patriots of Philadelphia, we too have reached a watershed moment in the Golden State, one we cannot afford to ignore. The government of the Great State of California is a failure. The only "moderate" position left is to pull-the-plug, pronounce it dead, and rewrite it from scratch.  

BY ALMOST ANY RUBRIC, California is well-positioned to take advantage of the 21st century. We are the most energy efficient state in the union and the most diverse in both economics and ethnic makeup. We are a cultural icon, international destination, and oceanside paradise. We are home to world-class universities, cutting edge corporations, and the most "green" conscious people in the country; for leadership on global warming, the world looks to the US, and the US looks to California. However, far from a lubricant to prosperity, the organ of the state has become its chief barrier. 

The exact culprits, however, are no mystery, nor are they even that complex; indeed, they can be counted with one hand. First, California's budgetary procedure; Second, its political organization; Third, its relationship with local governments; and Fourth, its ballot initiative process. Four fundamental issues, simple as salt. 

BUDGET REFROM

Perhaps no failure is as severe or as consequential as California's bizarre and extraordinarily useless budget process. For a state that is as large as a medium-sized european nation (and unlike one in that it cannot print its own money), budget disorder can be catastrophic. Luckily again, the reason is not hidden: it takes a 2/3 vote of a deeply polarized legislature of novices (more on that later) to pass a budget.

The 2/3 budget rule is destructive. Historically, democracy's have reserved supermajority votes only for matters of extraordinary importance and/or rarity, such as the amendment process for the US Constitution. The idea is to slow the people down before passions drive them to alter the fundamental workings of society. In contrast, could there be any other state function less extraordinary, less radical, and more routine than setting a budget? The budget process is treated like an amendment process, and the annual budget-battle significantly undermines the efforts of the state's public and private institutions from making the sort of long-term strategic thinking needed to remain competitive in a globalized economy. It comes as no surprise then, that a budget has not been passed on-time in 22 years.

Critics will argue that the 2/3 hurdle is required to keep state-spending in check. This is wrong for two reasons. First, and most obvious, the 2/3 hurdle was patently useless in preventing our current crisis. Second, even the "reddest", most fiscally conservative states in the union don't have a 2/3 requirement. In fact, California is one of only three states to employ one. If it's too strict for Texas, why in the world would we want it in California? The 2/3 rule is a useless means to restrain spending at-best, a threat to the state's solvency at-worst. 

Sensible budgetary reforms include replacing the 2/3 threshold with a 55% one, and by making the budget biennial instead of annual. The untold story of California's mismanagement is that, because of the state's size, budget battles consume most of the legislature's time. Making two-year budgets would help free lawmakers to focus on other issues, like how to make the state more attractive to businesses and how to solve the state's acute housing shortage.   

 

POLITICAL REFORM

California's political structure produces ideologically extreme politicians who bear little resemblance to the populace at-large. Voters partially addressed this problem by passing redistricting reform on the 2008 ballot. Redistricting, however, will likely fall short of its promises because it doesn't address the core problem, which is that the districts are extreme because primary voters are extreme. Since so many (about 25%) Californians are neither Democrats or Republicans, the two major parties are controlled by fringe activists which keep their crop of candidates ideologically "pure", which in-turn keeps these moderate, decline-to-state voters out. Politicians pander and answer to the most extreme of the extreme. Surprise, surprise: the legislature is consumed with gridlock and a quarter of voters are effectively disenfranchised.   

Division is one thing, but pettiness and partisan obsession quite another. An open primary system could fix this. It works by including all candidates from all parties on a single primary ballot. Voters would then vote for their favorite candidate, and the top two vote-getters would face off in a general election. This would force nominees from ideologically distinct regions to compete for moderate voters in ways they currently do not have to. An open primary would also promote competitive elections, even in truly "safe" zones, by allowing two members of the same party to face-off in the general election. In places like San Francisco, where GOP candidates haven't a chance, this would help keep incumbents attentive to their constituents and engage more people in the process.

Again, it must be stressed this is not an extreme solution, nor is it a partisan power-grab. Seventeen states, from Hawaii to Mississippi, have some form of open primary. Judging from our current debacle, we would be wise to consider alternatives.  

Finally, it must be stated plainly: the term-limit experiment has been a disaster. We have a state the size of a nation, governed by perpetual novices. And yet, no term-limits have ever been imposed on lobbyists, nor could they. The people's representatives are hamstrung by the state's draconian term-limits, and the main beneficiaries are the interest groups headquartered across the street from the capitol, in whose laps legislation now falls and whose presence is eternal. 

Term-limit reform strikes at an even deeper key. When punishing one's democracy, there comes a moment of truth when the punisher must decide whether or not he/she is still indeed a democrat at all. Despite the occasional frustrations, Churchill's observation that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others, still rings true. Democracy is a messy process with irreducible levels of corruption which are to be expected. But after three decades of abuse, it's time to reinvest our efforts in improving our democracy instead of lashing it.

 

STATE-LOCAL FISCAL REFORM

When it comes to alternative energy, the biggest hurdle is a logistical one: How do you transport energy from where it is created to where it is consumed? The farther energy travels, the less of it there is when it arrives to its final destination. A similar problem afflicts state-local relations in California. 

Locally cultivated revenues, like property and sales taxes, are transmitted first to Sacramento where they are subjected to bureaucratic and political extraction, and then sent back to localities to fund programs. If this sounds fishy, then you understand it perfectly. To make matters more complicated, because the state budget is always late, government entities like schools and police and fire stations have developed the tortuous ritual of annual lay-offs when the money runs out, followed by annual re-hirings when the budget finally passes. Hardly a liberal or conservative issue, this fiscal masochism screams for common sense.      

BALLOT INITIATIVE REFORM

California's ballot initiative was instituted during the progressive reforms of the early 20th century as a means for the people to bypass a legislature dominated by railroad interests. That the birth of the ballot initiative is so closely tied to "big rail-road" is pleasantly instructive: today, the former is properly used to the same extent the latter still even exists.       

Because entrenched interests have adapted since its passage, the ballot initiative has been corrupted and co-opted by the sort of interest groups it was meant to circumvent. Too-few signatures are required to prevent any well-funded group from appealing complex issues to ill-informed voters, while the state has grown so much since its passage in 1911 that it's still far-too-many signatures to be of any use to the average citizen. In addition, because the ballot initiative is so broad, voters can, and do, engage in citizen-budget-voodoo whereby they demand services while simultaneously refusing to pay for them. As a result, state government is a contradicting patchwork of rules, regulations, and priorities, which require an equally complex system of smoke and mirrors to maintain.      

The ballot initiative is a cornerstone of direct democracy and should be preserved. But it must be reformed. Increase the signature threshold and require every measure which calls for spending to specifically cite where the revenue will come from. Make them answer: what will we tax, or, what will we cut? Good Government 101.

THE CALL for a new constitution is one that transcends ideological lines. The right of the people to change or abolish their government has no partisan monopoly, and a constitutional convention can be held in a way to prevent it from digressing into a partisan quagmire. Since the legislature is unlikely to call for a convention themselves, it's up to the people to rally. 

The push for a California Constitutional Convention is neither drill nor pipe-dream. In fact, the momentum is on our side. Not only does it enjoy support from Governor Schwarzeneggar, but also from the Bay Area Council, the League of Women Voters, and Common Cause. It has been endorsed by the San Jose Mercury News, the San Francisco Chronicle, as well as by numerous other op-Ed pieces in the LA Times and the Fresno Bee. The consistent failures of the state government have begun to threaten California's citizens, businesses, and global standing. Luckily, in America we are the government, and per tradition, we have more than the right, we have a duty, to abolish or alter that government when it fails. 

For more information visit repaircalifornia.org

TOWARDS THE END of the summer of 2006, shortly after my college graduation, I was approached by one of my former classmates, still enrolled, and was asked to submit an alumni article for SFSU's political newsletter, Politics by the Hour. "The US vs. John Lennon" was just released in theaters, and I chose to write an essay on "Why Lennon Still Matters". With the famed corner of Haight-Ashbury just down the street from where I was typing, the failures of baby-boomer liberalism loomed directly overhead.

It was not a happy scene. Today, San Francisco's Haight district is awash in boring. It's tired, it smells, and it's burdened with tie-dyed tokens of its past--inescapable reminders that its glory days are long gone.

Back in the summer of 2006, this sounded alot like liberalism in-general. Bush won in 2004, the GOP controlled congress, and now conservatives controlled the supreme court. The College Republicans, radically misguided as they were, were nevertheless master propagandists with a seemingly endless supply of creative ideas on how to get press. They were often featured on Fox News segments, made it into the papers, and prepared for debates. The College Democrats, on the other hand, was a club of no-members, no-ideas, and no-shows.
 
I lamented the Left's lack of creativity, their passivity, and the way their political correctness restricted rather than unleashed their thinking. I asked how-it-came-to-be that creationist yokels could out-flank and out-think urban, educated progressives at every turn? Even on a San Francisco college campus, the right was dynamic, energized, and organzied, while the Left was visibly rotting under the weight of the Haight's decades-old stockpiles of petuli oil.

What a difference two years make.

It has been said the right is fond of clinging to "guns and religion". Let it be added that they also are clinging to the radio. All the new-media titans, Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart, Rachel Maddow etc., have all found main-stream success Left-of-center. While Bill O'Reilly increasingly sounds like someone from another era, and Sean Hannity like someone from another planet, MSNBC has caught up in the ratings, Obama's numbers are way up, and the GOP numbers aren't just down, but way down and declining, and have been doing so for over two years now.

One can see specific parallels between the decline of the left after the 1970's and the decline of the right after George W. Bush. For instance, like the Democratic party of the late 70's, the GOP of today has no unifiying theory for its existence. The GOP's once-mighty formula of personal morality and free-market principle, cannabalized by Ted Haggard's meth-addled gay escapades and George W. Bush's spoiled-rich-kid economics, is little more than a simple collection of interest groups. The whole is the sum of its parts. And while a new-left has risen, the right is visibly rotting under the wieght of Rush Limbaugh's decades-old stockpiles of junk-food and oxycontin.

The GOP will most likely rebound oneday to fight again. But American political parties have failed in the past, and we may look back on these years as the days when we watched the death of the party. Listen closely...one can already hear "Rush Limbaugh Republican" replacing "San Francisco Liberal" as the rhetorical weapon of choice.

"I not only think we will tamper with Mother Nature, I think Mother wants us to."

--Willard Gaylin

IT IS THE DESTINY of the human race to overcome human nature. Thus spoke Nietzsche's Zarathustra some hundred twenty years ago. But the idea that our species can and should be improved is much older still, and after a half century lull, the debate has returned to the fore. In an opinion piece appearing in Scotland's Sunday Herald, scientist and atheist Richard Dawkins writes why "Eugenics May Not Be Bad". Withholding his explicit support for the controversial theory, his thesis is simply that a debate on eugenics is long overdue.

"Eugenics" as the logo for the 1921 Second International Eugenics Conference billed it, "is the Self-Direction of Human Evolution". Advances in science notwithstanding, the basic idea is perhaps as old as civilization itself; ancient Prussian, Fan, and other aboriginal societies are said to have engaged in primitive eugenics and Spartans used to dump "unfit" male newborns on the steppes of Mount Taygetus. However, such archaic attempts at selective breeding were doomed to fail without two modern developments: the centralized state and the science of genetics.

Eugenics was given new life after the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species seemed to validate the tenets of selective breeding. Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Darwin's, became an early exponent with a paper titled "Hereditary Genius", in which he argued that human "talent" and "genius" were hereditary, and without social policies to prevent interbreeding of the classes, society would suffer from what he termed "a regression towards the mean".

It comes as no surprise that men such as Galton, born into the upper class of a 19th century England defined by its primitive class system, tended to equate themselves, their bloodlines, and their habits with "talent" and "genius" (note the explicitly un-Americanness of the enterprise; eugenics leaves little room for the sanguine phrase "created equal").

It also comes as no surprise that Richard Dawkins would be interested in rekindling the debate. Dawkins, himself a Briton, is a brilliant man who strongly believes in the promise of science and reason, and who is famously contemptuous towards religious thought (he would probably object even to the pairing of the words). At times, however, Dawkins comes dangerously close to mimicking the intellectual hubris of his Oxford predecessors, including Galton. For instance, Dawkins believes atheists should abandon the moniker and refer to themselves as "brights", a label Christopher Hitchens dismissed as "conceited" and "cringe-inducing").

What may come as a surprise was that a chief opponent of eugenics--also known as social Darwinism--was Charles Darwin himself.

Darwin rejected eugenics on political grounds as a deeply illiberal concept requiring of the state an unacceptable assumption of power. Darwin also rejected eugenics on scientific grounds. Darwin expressed a lack-of-confidence in the ability of science to conclude which traits were worthy of promotion, which were not, and to predict what kind of social damage would be wrought by the sudden absence of millennia old behavior. Sedentary talents--philosophy, art, music--are impossible to quantify in terms of social value, and are not necessarily genetic: Sean Lennon is no John Lennon, and before you blame the screeching genetic influence of one Yoko Ono, it must be said the Julian Lennon (from a previous marriage) is also no Beatle.

Most importantly, Charles Darwin also rejected social Darwinism and eugenics on moral grounds. It was true, he said, that advances in medicine and economic prosperity ensured the survival and reproduction of the weakest, laziest, most unintelligent among us, and he even conceded that this was probably "injurious to the race of man". Nevertheless, within that same race, natural selection has also included the instinct for sympathy and compassion which we cannot reject without the "deterioration [of] the noblest part of our nature...To neglect the weak and helpless" he said, could only come with an "overwhelming evil".

Darwin would marvel at the scientific advances which have occurred since his 1882 passing. And yet, despite the lessons of Gregor Mendel's peas, regardless of the discovery of the double helix, even in the face of the stunning progress at the Human Genome Project, the ethical question remains exactly the same: if we had the power to modify our species in significant ways, should we do it?

No matter the question, honest and open debate is always the right course of action. However, Richard Dawkins is wrong to think the quiet regarding eugenics is due to fear, intimidation, or inquisitiveness. In actuality, there is no debate simply because we've already had it, and in that debate, Charles Darwin, Richard Dawkins' hero, came out categorically against.

Darwin's work is a marvel of scholasticism, genius, and hard work. It upended established thought and for that alone deserves our continued recognition. This February 12th, 2009, we celebrated what would have been Charles Darwin's 200th birthday. What better way to carry on the tradition of the storied scholar than to scrutinize the opinion's of today's established thought, starting with those who claim his mantle? Judging from Dawkins' latest post, he's asking for it. We should oblige.

SINCLAIR LEWIS famously penned "When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross." This enduring--if unexamined--quip is positively misleading for the simple reason that when anything comes to America it comes "wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross". It begs the question, what of an atheist president? Could atheism, paradoxically, come prepared as such?

President Obama is a devout Christian, and while his more provincial (and less educated) critics claim he is a Muslim, he has almost entirely escaped the accusation of being an atheist. This is surprising for two reasons: his explicitly atheistic biography and the naked opportunism behind his membership at Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ.

According to a quote which appeared in a Tim Jones article in the Chicago Tribune, Maxine Box, Barack Obama's mother's best friend from high school, said of Ann Dunham that she had not only "touted herself as an atheist" but had demonstrated intellectual wherewithal: "it was something she'd read about and could argue". His father, although born a Muslim, became an atheist by the time of Obama's birth and remained one for the rest of his life. Pause and consider, momentarily, the long-established correlation between a parent's spiritual beliefs and that of their children. That having faith requires a degree of doubt is longer-established still and, even though the revelation that such doubt haunted even Mother Theresa has done much to legitimize the looming question mark, Obama's written account of his own skepticism is particularly honest-sounding. He even confessed in The Audacity of Hope that his road to conversion was marked by his conclusion that you could still doubt the facts of the Bible and be a Christian. Many on the conservative right would beg to differ.

His skepticism is such that doubt can even be cast on the sincerity of his conversion experience, which occurred shortly after his arrival in Chicago after graduating college. The timing of this is suspicious for two reasons. First, Obama's refusal of well-paying corporate jobs in favor of the humble sustenance of a community organizer evidences the motive of political ambition. Second, by his own account, his early twenty's were consumed with the search for racial, not spiritual, identity. In fact, if we are to assume that the frequency of themes stressed by Obama in Audacity is reflective of their relative importance, then his conversion had less to do with ecclesiastical faith than with power and identity. If this is so, then it is yet another testament to the man's intelligence; the connections made at Trinity United led to his work as a civil rights lawyer and eventually as a State Senator and beyond.

Again, in The Audacity of Hope, Obama accurately described a phenomenon that had largely not yet occurred (and thus more like predicted): the tendency of people to project on to him precisely that which they want to see. For a politician, this gift is truly the golden egg, and judging from the amount of money raised by Atheists for Obama (nearly $400,000) and endorsements by prominent atheists like Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, the non-religious community has proved that, despite Obama's public religiosity, it is no exception. It begs the question: what are these atheists seeing that the rest of the country is not?

They couldn't have foreseen Obama's inaugural speech, where he specifically mentioned non-believers as being part of the American fabric. (A first for a presidential speech. Remember, George H.W. Bush's opinion that atheists should be treated as second-class citizens).

Upon reflection, what is so remarkable about Obama's political success is that the chief attack is not that he is an atheist, but that he is a Muslim--a completely baseless accusation and one that seems beside the point given that Americans, when polled, say they are even less likely to vote for an atheist for president than for a Muslim. Thus, Obama has enchanted even the freethinkers: despite his preachy-speak, despite mailers with his face shown prominently next to crosses, despite nearly all evidence to the contrary, non-believers still see what they want to see: a fellow doubter doing what he's got to do to win. Someday, we may even learn that atheism indeed came to America: wrapped in the flag, and carrying a cross.

INDEPENDENT VOTERS from across the nation are struggling to synthesize the parade of stupid which bull-horned its way through Washington at last week's Conservative Political Action Conference. After three scorched-earth days of the movement's preeminent philistines taking turns scaring the bejesus out of one another, two headlines emerged from the rubble: Rush Limbaugh Proclaims Himself GOP Leader; and Mitt Romney Wins Straw Poll.

Yes, the contradiction is that apparent. Put the comedy within those two headlines--which were apparently the most newsworthy occurrences at CPAC 2009--aside, and take a moment to appreciate the tragedy.

Mr. Limbaugh's speech has already received adequate coverage so we need not play into the aged and drug-addled talk-radio host's hands by dissecting it yet again. This is especially so when straw-poll results are as juiced with fodder as this one. With the results from CPAC's 2012 presidential straw-poll in-hand, this much becomes clear: both on-radio and on-the-ballot, the Republican Party has distilled into a potent broth of insane. As is the case with any reduction, the sauce is louder, the spice harder to ignore, and the volume much, much reduced.

Ranking number four on the list was Alaska Governor and 2008 Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Governor Palin didn't know Africa was a continent, couldn't name a Supreme Court case she disagreed with besides Roe v. Wade, and thought it was the Vice President's job to "run the senate". She didn't know what the Bush Doctrine was, couldn't name a newspaper or journal that she read to stay informed, and, apparently, speaks English as a second language. Verdict: Schizophrenic megalomaniac.

Coming in third was Texas Congressman Ron Paul. Dr. Paul, as he is affectionately known as to his legions of die-hard fans, became "famous" for his stand-alone routine during the 2008 Republican presidential debates. He was one of only 6 (out of 223) Republican congressmen to vote against the Iraq War Resolution, and railed hard against the patriot act, wars of aggression, and the war on drugs. However, Dr. Paul is also a libertarian extremist. How extreme? He thinks Abraham Lincoln launched (as opposed to responded-to) civil war as a fiendish conspiracy to expand the power of the federal government, and, apparently he believes the federal government should be shrunk to pre-civil war levels. Verdict: well-meaning, conspiracy-peddling, crack-pot.

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal ranked second in the vote. In most ways, Jindal is as rank-and-file GOP as it comes: pro-gun, anti-labor, anti-choice. But he is also bizarrely craven, even for a politician. From the governor's mansion in the state most recently associated with natural disasters, he lambasted federal spending on volcano monitoring in a populated Oregon region as waste! His response to President Obama's address to congress last week was awkward, poorly scripted, and painful to watch--even for republicans. Nevertheless, as the son of Indian immigrants, he's good for the party's image. A lot of polish and he could threaten mainstream appeal. Verdict: Callous nutcase in not-very-convincing sheep's clothing.

And finally, Mitt Romney: CPAC's first pick for president, 2012. During the primary battle with Hillary Clinton, one of the most attractive qualities displayed by candidate Barack Obama was that one got the sense he wouldn't have minded much if he lost. Such is the exact reason why Mitt Romney is such an unattractive politician: he will apparently say anything to become President. Romney's aunt died in the 1960's from complications following an illegal abortion; when Romney's mother ran for the US Senate from Michigan she took the position that abortion law must be "liberalized". When Romney ran for the US Senate in liberal Massachusetts in 1994, he specifically cited his family experience as evidence that he could be trusted to support keeping abortion "safe and legal". Then Mitt decided to run for president. First, he snubbed the legacy of his own mother and became a draconian pro-lifer, essentially overnight. He then demonstrated just how committed he was to doing whatever he was told by offering to "double the size of guantanamo" even though nobody, not even on the far right, was calling for it. Finally, Romney's pitiful campaign reached its crescendo when he uttered perhaps the most illiberal, undemocratic, un-American statement of any campaign since Millard Fillmore campaigned on the 1856 Know-Nothing platform to expel Irish immigrants: that freedom is impossible without religious faith. If Romney's hard-on for the presidency were any bigger it would blot out the sun. Verdict: Spineless and cynical opportunist.

For all the talk about unity, what is often missed is the constructive role of constructive criticism. Divisions should be clear, they should be legitimate, and they should be serious. Instead we have this crop that--with the exception of sky-high Dr. Paul--is so anti-intellectual that they are even ignorant of the lineage and history and philosophy of their own party. It's fun to kick around now and again, but please, somebody help them.