California Governor Jerry Brown deserves our heartfelt appreciation for his hard work for the Yes on Proposition 30 campaign these past few months. The percentage of Proposition 30′s victory mirrored the percentage of the vote Brown won in 2010 when he defeated in the governor’s race the former Hewlett Packard CEO Meg Whitman. Working...
Last November, Californians did not elect Republican Meg “Money Bags” Whitman to be their governor. We elected a Democratic governor and Democratic majorities in the State Assembly and the Senate. Yet five members of the Republican minority once again are in the driver’s seat and they’re determined to run the state right over the...
R. Jeffrey Lustig has compiled (and contributed) to an amazing set of useful essays that examine the many maladies plaguing California’s politics and public institutions and provide food for thought that points to possible remedies. Remaking California: Reclaiming the Public Good, is the most important book on contemporary California politics to be published in...
Before the music swells, the long dissolve, and the credits roll, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and his merry band of right-wing Republicans who control a third of the state legislature are intent on making one final power play to squeeze the last drops of blood from California’s public institutions. Schwarzenegger’s hackneyed “State of the State”...
Bad things happen when those in power lack seriousness. Not long ago we had a Republican president who told Iraqi insurgents: “Bring ‘em on!” Now we have a Republican governor in California who sees the state’s current budget catastrophe as nothing but a big joke. Why else would Arnold Schwarzenegger post a tasteless Twitter...
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, amidst the worst economic depression in seventy years, demands that the state legislature dismantle what he calls the state’s “luxury model” social programs. To justify his budget cutting zeal he has repeatedly sounded the alarm that we’re in the midst of an economic catastrophe. But nothing will shake his religious...
As the California budget crisis continues to be a showdown between a recalcitrant Executive and a weak-kneed Legislature, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, discussing the merciless state budget cuts he has proposed, insisted to Mark Leibovich of the New York Times Magazine (July 5, 2009): “I see the faces behind those dollars. I see the children...
Civic-Minded Plutocrats
It’s truly touching how much interest in America’s great democratic experiment that our esteemed men and women of industry, finance, and commerce have shown in the 2010 midterm elections. Elementary school teachers across the land might lead civics lessons by pointing to these salt-of-the-Earth hedge-fund managers, oil tycoons, derivatives traders, and outsourcing zealots who...
Read more »