UC students’ protests over tuition hikes are seriously misguided. Where have they been for the last year as California’s budget was decimated?

November 22, 2009

University of California students should be better informed. Where have they been for the last year or two as California’s economy went into the tank and the Governor and state Legislature refused to raise any taxes to balance the budget? What, exactly, do they expect UC President Yudof and the Board of Regents to do? Print money?

Students should be protesting the fact that Californians refuse any tax increases — alcohol taxes, commercial real estate taxes, and corporate income taxes to name a few — that could close the yawning budget deficit and save the world’s greatest university system from this historic decline. A quarter a drink alcohol tax alone could raise $3.5 billion a year.

Students should be protesting against the people of California — including their parents and themselves — who always seem to want something for nothing. Either we raise taxes to balance the budget or we dismantle the greatest system of higher education ever created — UC, CSU and California community colleges together — along with all our other social services.

The Legislative Analyst says that California will run $20 billion deficits through 2015, at which time there will be little left of our great state. Why don’t UC students aim their protests at the people and politicians who refuse to raise taxes and save California?


How NOT to do prison reform

September 18, 2009

How many could avoid prison with drug treatment?

How many could avoid prison with drug treatment?

For decades, people in California have talked about prison reform. Even while we were locking up record numbers of young Californians with laws such as Three-Strikes-and-You’re-Out, Democrats and Republicans (well, not the troglodytes) alike have been talking about how we need to divert nonviolent offenders to rehabilitation programs instead of simply jailing them. And California did have some innovative programs to do just that. Only, they were pilot programs. They never became institutionalized. And they were never really supported by the all-powerful prison guards’ union, because they didn’t create enough prison jobs.

It’s long been known that most criminal offenders are substance abusers; most of them are untreated addicts, hence the high recidivism rate. They get out of prison with no treatment, go score their drug of choice – whether its alcohol, crack or crystal – then get loaded and commit new crimes. It ain’t rocket science to prevent this. Oodles of research and pilot projects show that providing treatment and aftercare to addicted offenders reduces recidivism and criminal justice costs. The famous CALDATA study from the early 1990s found that every $1 spent on drug and alcohol treatment saved $7 in taxpayer money, mostly because of reduced crime.

Meanwhile, California’s Little Hoover Commission continually over the years urged more drug courts, treatment, rehabilitation, education and training for both youth and adult prison inmates to reduce overcrowding and huge taxpayer costs.

But, we didn’t do it, not in any meaningful way. A meaningful way would have been to divert incarceration dollars to treatment and rehabilitation programs and push most inmates and parolees into treatment and long-term aftercare for their addiction. But the prison guards’ union wouldn’t allow that, and neither would conservative politicians — or most liberal politicians who either didn’t want to be seen as soft on crime or who just didn’t think it was very important. The state’s prison budget has increased fivefold since 1994. But we didn’t see fit to use that money to transform our corrections system so that it would stymie recidivism.

Now, it’s too late. The federal government is forcing the State of California to release 45,000 inmates – the size of a small city – because of overcrowding and inadequate health care in prisons. The State Legislature recently passed bills called prison reform, but they were really just ways to cut a billion dollars from the prison budget with some window dressing to try to fool people into thinking that lawmakers were doing something positive.

The state says that it will be sending these released prisoners to local programs. But they’re being cut by the state revenue raid of

California prison population outta control

California prison population outta control

local government and cuts to state-funded treatment and rehabilitation, like the deletion of  Proposition 36 funding. So those local programs, such as probation, jails and rehabilitation, actually have less capacity then they did six months ago, yet the state is sending more offenders to local jurisdictions. All these problems will only get worse as California’s budget problems grow next year.

The moral to this story is…well, there is no moral. People give lip service to prison reform, but I’ve never seen it really done, not in California or anywhere else in the United States. We could be diverting huge numbers of offenders from our prisons. But the truth is — we don’t really want to.


Third-world California

May 30, 2009

Proposition 13, and the whole Proposition 13 mentality, is finally comingCalifornia motto home to roost in California. The arrogant and foolish California idea that we could have whatever we wanted without taxing ourselves to pay for it is the same kind of heedless thinking that brought America the banking and mortgage crisis.  Californians actually believe that they are overtaxed, that state government is hoarding cash or wasting it through fraud, abuse and avariciousness. But the populist idea that if we just cut waste out of government, everything would be fine is finally being proven false.

Coping with a $20 billion to $40 billion budget deficit without raising taxes means that we will lose our state parks. We will lose the safety net for the poor and disabled. People — including children — will die because they can’t afford health care and the state won’t have the money to provide it. Hospital emergency rooms will be so overcrowded that they’ll shut down. Our schools will see widespread teacher layoffs and staff layoffs.  Local governments will find their property taxes siphoned off from the state, resulting in cuts to police, fire, libraries, local parks and rec. Higher ed will be deeply cut; California’s world-leading university systems will be degraded. And on and on.

Why? Because Californians would not raise their own taxes. For the cost of a few dollars, we will turn the Golden State into a third-world country, destroy our parks and schools,  and turn the poor and disabled — including the children — out into the streets. Nice work, people of California.


Taxing marijuana to balance California’s budget? Just another stoned daydream…

March 26, 2009

stoned-aginThe romance with weed is never-ending for California marijuana devotees. Now, they claim their beloved drug can save the state by solving its unrelenting budget nightmare.

State legislation is afoot to legalize and tax marijuana to backfill the state budget. But, like the grandiose daydreams of a stoner, the reality of this plan would be far different from its vision. I won’t go all “Reefer Madness” on you or claim that hemp T-shirts are a slippery slope to damnation. The problem with marijuana legalization is simpler and worse.

California cannot afford more stoned people, especially stoned young people. We need a lot fewer stoned people.

Prevention experts understand the problem with legalization: The greater the access to an intoxicant, the more abuse there will be of that intoxicant. Alcohol isn’t the most dangerous drug in the world because it’s worse than heroin or cocaine. It’s the most dangerous drug because it’s so easily accessible. You can get large quantities of it anywhere, and cheaply, too. Underage drinking is a big problem because kids can get alcohol so easily.

Legal marijuana would mean more access to marijuana. The number of marijuana users would spike, including teens. Problems related to marijuana use would spike. Marijuana lobbyists argue that if a dangerous drug such as alcohol is legal, then marijuana should be, too. I’ve never understood that. With all the problems we have with alcohol, why would we want to legalize another intoxicant?

Right now, there are 127 million alcohol users and 14 million marijuana users in this country – because one is legal and the other isn’t. But, most alcohol users don’t get intoxicated. About one-fifth of alcohol users binge drink or regularly drink heavily.

The serious problems from alcohol occur when people get intoxicated. With marijuana, you get intoxicated every time you use it. That’s the whole point. Marijuana intoxication and alcohol intoxication may be different, but both are bad for society.

Marijuana intoxication means cognitive impairment, grandiosity, short-term memory loss, difficulty in carrying out complex mental processes and impaired judgment. It severely hurts your ability to perform at school and work. It saps initiative and drive. It increases confusion. In other words, it makes you stupid.

ob-morning1An increase in stoners among California’s young people and work force would be very bad for the state. Right now, we’re in a recession in which people without college degrees are losing jobs twice as fast as people with college degrees. Our future economy will be based on innovation, education and highly skilled labor.

But we’re already not producing enough college graduates for our future work-force needs. With many more stoned teens and young people, the problems of an unskilled, uneducated and unmotivated work force will get worse. Stoned people can’t learn or work very well. Marijuana is the loser drug: That’s the big problem with it.

What about the idea that California can balance its budget by legalizing marijuana and taxing the heck out of it? You haven’t been paying attention to special-interest politics if you believe that.

Moneyed special interests run policy in this state. Look what happened when California criminal justice policies made prison guards one of the most powerful lobbies in the state. The union quickly began dictating policy in its own interest.

The alcohol industry is so powerful in California that beer taxes haven’t increased in nearly 20 years; the last time they were raised was by a minuscule amount and the industry almost killed that. A wealthy marijuana industry will soon co-opt policy-makers and dictate how much tax we charge, where we sell the product and who gets to buy it. Why would a marijuana industry be different from any other special interest?

Personally, I don’t think the marijuana lobby believes its own arguments. When I talk to legalization proponents, it usually boils down to their angry demand that people should be left alone to get stoned if they want to. That libertarian sentiment shows a complete disregard for the public good. If legalizers can’t understand that, elected policy-makers certainly should.

The disingenuousness of the marijuana lobby becomes clear on the subject of medical marijuana. For marijuana lobbyists to push both recreational marijuana and medicinal marijuana at the same time is duplicitous. It’s nakedly obvious where their real desires lie.

Recreational drug use and medical drug use have nothing in common. If pharmaceutical lobbyists pushed recreational and medical use of the same drug, they’d get hauled before Congress and slammed by state attorneys. But the marijuana lobby sees nothing wrong with its tactics.

How about a little more candor from marijuana romantics? Like the panhandler standing on a street corner with a sign that says, “Why lie? I just want a beer.”

Reprinted from San Diego Union-Tribune


Could California finally end its budget madness?

February 23, 2009

Have we had enough insanity yet? I don’t think most people in California 19budget480realize it, but the Golden State just dodged a self-created economic depression by finally passing a budget. The world’s 7th (or whatever) largest economy almost committed suicide when a legion of state employees faced layoffs, which would have led to skyrocketing home foreclosures, vital services grinding to a halt, etc.

Even with the new budget, education will be slashed, which will severely harm our state’s future economy. Anyway, the tyranny of minority rule by extremists that brought California this craziness can be stopped with three public policy changes now in the works. The good news is that any one of these policies may be profoundly beneficial. The bad news is that they each depend on ballot initiatives, which means, even if they pass, they may be subject to the law of unintended consequences.

Policy 1: A movement is afoot to get rid of the ridiculous two-thirds vote requirement to pass a budget, something California shares only with those notably progressive states of Arkansas and Rhode Island. This mandate not only allows minority rule, but it has given a platform to ideologues to hold up the state budget so they can fulfill senseless campaign pledges. In this case, Republican extremists who had foolishly pledged “no new taxes” during the worst recession in 70 years were allowed to almost turn a recession into a depression because of two-thirds vote. The California Budget Responsibility Act would amend the State Constitution from a two-thirds mandate to 55 percent (which still doesn’t make sense to me because democracy is 50 percent plus one, right? But, oh well…) This policy change attacks the budget stalemate problem head-on.

Policy 2: State Sen. Abel Maldonado, one of the few moderate Republicans in Sacramento, forced the state Legislature, in exchange for his yes-vote on the budget, to place on the ballot a constitutional amendment mandating open primaries. Under our current primary system, with our gerrymandered districts, extremists have an easy time of it because they can always get the faithful Kool-Aid drinkers out to vote in the primaries. Open primaries will allow the two top vote-getters to make it to the general election, no matter what their party. Candidates will have to appeal a much more diverse electorate, and that means moving toward the center. The result – fewer zealots in general elections. (Both the Republican Democratic parties oppose open primaries, which means they are a good idea.)

Policy 3: Last fall, California voters barely passed Proposition 11, the Voters First Act, which takes redistricting away from the state Legislature and gives it to a commission made up of five Democrats, five Republicans and four of neither party. The commissioners cannot have run for office – or have a close relative who has run for office – in the last ten years, and neither can they be lobbyists or campaign donors of more than $2,000. The multi-partisan commission will get its first chance next year. Under the current districts, state Legislative districts are gerrymandered so that incumbents win 99 percent of the time. Both Democrats and Republicans liked the gerrymandered system; even though it guaranteed a Republican minority, they supported it because it also guaranteed individuals their seats. The result of Proposition 11 should be more competitive races which means that candidates will have to campaign toward the center. The result – fewer zealots.

These measures could very well end budget stalemates, which have harmed the state’s economy and nearly destroyed our educational system.

California ranks 49th in the share of population age 25 and older that is at least a high school graduate. From 1977 and 1983, California ranked 1st among the 15 largest states on this measure.

– California Faculty Association Report, 2009

Then again, it’s hard to imagine California without a budget stalemate. The impulse for self-sabotage may just be too great.


Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jerry Brown try to shoot the messenger of California’s prison disaster

February 2, 2009

California Gov. Schwarzenegger and Attorney General Jerry Brown are california_prisons_1_4001
firing blanks at the messenger heralding the disaster that California prisons have become. Both the governor and attorney general asked U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson to remove J. Clark Kelso, who was appointed receiver of prison healthcare three years ago by Henderson, and return inmate medical care to state control. Schwarzenegger and Brown complain that Kelso is going to spend $8 billion to build a gold-plated health system. However, their ploy to remove Kelso probably won’t work.

Let’s set aside whether Kelso’s $8 billion plan is a good one or not and instead look at how we got into this mess and whether we’re anywhere near getting out of it. The last question is easy to answer. Judge Henderson appointed Kelso because prison healthcare in California was terrible. There’s no evidence to show that it’s improved, nor that it will any time soon, considering the state’s multibillion-dollar deficit. Why would Henderson suddenly remove the receiver when nothing has changed?

How did we get into this mess? That’s easy, too. The politicians and people of California created it by foolishly thinking that they could punish crime away — without giving any consideration to the ultimate cost and impossibility of such a plan.

With rehabilitation almost nonexistent – the public and politicians never wanted to pay for that – recidivism remains at more than 66 percent. Two out of every three people released from California prisons go back – the highest rate in the nation.  Politicians and the public thought they could scrimp on health care, drug treatment, rehabilitation, education – anything that might benefit the lives of inmates once they were released because, well, they’re inmates and they deserve only the worst. Only 7 percent of inmates receive alcohol treatment, although 42 percent have a high need for it. And only 2.5 percent of inmates who have a serious need for drug treatment actually get it. And even for those who get treatment in prison, aftercare programs when they’re on parole are wholly inadequate.

The fact is that inmates are wards of the state and the people of the state are responsible for their welfare – all 172,000 of them. The people of California have volunteered to take care of as many inmates as possible, and now they’re complaining about the cost. Maybe Californians should have thought of that before they embarked on their prison-building binge while incarcerating as many people as possible. Since 1977, about 1,000 laws have been passed increasing penalties for all sorts of crimes. California politicians run for office by touting how they got tough on crime by increasing prison sentences. And the public eats it up.

Crime rates are lower in California than they were when we started our prison building and people punishing obsession. But they are lower
everywhere, including in states that didn’t try to throw everybody behind bars. Nobody’s exactly sure why crime goes up and down.

But one thing is sure: Californians chose an impossibly expensive way to fight crime. And now, we don’t want to pay for the program we chose and we don’t have the political will to create real change. The result will be continued billions of dollars in costs for prisons (more than we pay for higher education), continued high recidivism rates and large-scale inmate releases as the system we chose collapses.

That collapse is upon us. A panel of three judges is considering whether to cap the population and release up to 52,000 inmates – with almost no rehabilitative or re-entry programs in place for them.

This whole thing is dumb public policy, folks. A child could devise a better plan.

Recommended read on prison reform on the California Progress Report.


Sunrise Powerlink and Peripheral Canal: It’s up to us how we manage our critical infrastructure

December 19, 2008

sunrise-powerlink-image1In California, the names of two important public projects – one now approved, the other still in our dreams – have taken on boogie-man status in the public mind. The one just approved is the Sunrise Powerlink in San Diego County. The other still in our dreams is the Peripheral Canal around the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. The Sunrise Powerlink has been called a $2 billion boondoggle, a blight on the environment and an open faucet to dirty coal-fired energy plants in Mexico. In reality, it’s just a big power line, like many others that drape our state and country.

The Peripheral Canal – which has never been built – also has been called a giant boondoggle, a blight on the environment and an open faucet to drain water from Northern California to Southern California. In reality, it’s just a big canal, like many others that cross our state and country.

What’s important is how we use the canal and the power line.

The Delta is in a very bad state for both environmental protection and  fresh water conveyance. The current situation, in almost everybody’s view, is untenable. Drawing water through the water using fragile dikes and manmade islands is not working. To some, the answer is to stop exporting fresh water altogether and use conservation and desalination plants to take the place of Delta water. (Note that the Peripheral Canal is no longer a north-south problem; the Bay Area and regional farmers have become dependent on Delta water over the years.) But near unanimity among urban and business water users holds that cutting off Delta water experts would be a disaster for the state.

Ending all exports might be the most environmentally sound decision, if you don’t include humans in the environment. The second most environmentally sound decision, one that does include human needs, is the Peripheral Canal.

qqxsgperiphcanal-sf2

Similarly, opponents of the Sunrise Powerlink say that conservation and distributed renewable energy are the best solution. But I can’t find any report (link me up if you can) that shows that distributed renewable energy and conservation alone will end our need for major power sources, those 500 to 1,000 megawatt power plants.  Distributed renewable power with energy storage for permanent load shifting will increasingly become more important. But it won’t replace the need for big power plants. Not yet, anyway. But who says those big plants can’t be green? With the Sunrise Powerlink, Imperial Valley can build giant renewable energy stations, just like the 800 megawatts of solar photovoltaic in two stations coming online by 2013 in San Luis Obispo County.

The canal and the power line are merely conduits for resources – water and electricity — that  human civilization needs to survive. Whether we use these conduits in an environmentally sound way is up to us — through our State Legislature, regulatory agencies and the ballot box.

If we drain away all the fresh water from our rivers or rely only on dirty coal-fired power plants for electrons, we’re doomed. But, if we don’t build vital infrastructure for water and electricity just because we’re afraid we might misuse it, we’re also doomed.


Disaster looms, but Californians keep fighting about water

July 11, 2008

It’s long past the time for Californians to stop fighting about how the state should solve its water crisis. New reservoirs vs. conservation. Environment vs. cities. Industry vs. agriculture. North vs. South. Add to these battles a prolonged drought plus climate change plus antiquated water conveyance and storage plus court cases — and we’re creating a certain crisis. We need both new reservoirs AND conservation, we need to protect the environment AND capture more water, we need more water for North AND South…and a lot more.

So, instead of arguing over the deck chairs on the Titanic, Californians need to unify behind the Dianne/Arnold $9.3 billion water bond initiative and then move on to what needs to be done next to improve water supply and protect the environment, cities and ag.

It’s sad that so many Californians seem oblivious to the enormity of water supply issues in their own semi-arid state. I often hear simplistic statements about water from intelligent people. They usually begin, “Why don’t we just…?” I recently heard, “why we don’t just spend a couple billion on desalination?” Yes, desal may be part of the solution. But desal can’t possibly provide the amount of water our state needs. Also, desalinated water created on the coast cannot economically be used inland. Plus, desal uses a lot of energy. We don’t know enough about desal yet. The fact is, there’s no one solution; the only solution is a broad array of solutions.

Are there some flaws in the Arnold/Dianne water bond formula? Sure. In any piece of omnibus legislation or big bond initiative, you have to throw some coins to get people’s support. For example, what is money for the Salton Sea doing in there? Answer: molifying enviros and Imperial Valley ag. Will this big bond harm the environment? Yes, raising dams does. We can push for more underground storage, though expanded surface storage will be necessary. But the bond initiative also will benefit the environment through waterway habitat restoration, watershed restoration in fire areas, invasive species removal, coastal water quality improvement, etc. Overall, this is a good bond initiative for the environment — and  for cities and ag.

We’re facing a disaster here. The main conduit for water in California, the Bay-Delta, is held together by fragile earthen levees. One good earthquake and we’d all be drinking seawater. Meanwhile, global warming is inexorably diminishing the snow pack that feeds the Sacramento, San Joaquin and Colorado Rivers, where we get nearly all our water. We’ve got to capture more runoff as snow melts come earlier and more precipitation comes in rain.

And yet, Californians still can’t help themselves but to fight over water. We still have people saying “no dams!” Or, “we can’t afford a $9.3 billion water bond!” Can’t afford it? We can’t afford to not do it. Our water system is under threat, and we must begin fixing it now. Upgrading California’s complex water system will take a long time, and we’re already behind.

This isn’t only important for California. Remember that the Golden State is one of the biggest economies in the world, and that our farms are the breadbasket of the nation. If severe water shortages hurt the biggest state economy in the United States, everybody gets hurt.


No good choices: Wildland fire policy in the West

July 4, 2008
Big Sur fire 2008 - Associated Press

Big Sur fire 2008 - Associated Press

One big problem with wildland fire policy in the United States is that decisions are ultimately made on the Eastern Seaboard, specifically, in Washington D.C., where people really have no idea what a western forest looks like or the immensity of a wind-driven western wildland fire. When people in the East think “forest,” they think trees. But in the West, a forest is often shoulder-high brush — miles and miles and miles of brush, with some trees interspersed, often in remote, steeply sloping places that are impossible to navigate. The current fire destroying our beloved Big Sur is a perfect example. Yes, there are trees there fueling the flames. But the nitro is the brush and the winds.

The fire policy debate among experts is aptly characterized as Minnich vs. Keeley, a very good explanation of which can be found in this San Diego Union-Tribune story by Scott LaFee. Basically, Richard Minnich of University of California Riverside says that fire suppression has created a sea of gasoline in California and the West, and only through controlled burns can we drain the gasoline. His research compares fires north and south of the US-Mexico border, and shows that there are massive fires north of the border, where we suppress fires, and smaller fires south of the border, where they don’t.

Conflagurations north, little fires south

From San Diego Union-Tribune

Jon Keeley of the US Geological Survey’s Western Ecological Research Center says controlled burns won’t work — and will cause more harm than good. He says that  the real culprit is Santa Ana winds, not the fire fuel.

Minnich and Keeley both agree that the expansion of housing out of cities and into wildfire areas is the main cause of destruction, and that is obviously true.

Fuel vs. wind? I dunno, probably both. But I do know that we have created this problem ourselves by building homes in fire areas. And climate change will make Western fire problems worse. They question is, how much public money will we spend trying vainly to save rural homes from wildland fires before we change development patterns? How many firefighters will die?


Everybody talks about rehabilitation, but…

June 29, 2008

Don’t look now, but California is about to be forced to release some 27,000 prison inmates by 2012, with very little chance that many will have received any meaningful rehabilitation. Despite that the California Department of Corrections has been renamed the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, it’s still just a name on a door. The problems at the community level are even worse.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) June 28, 2008 — A proposed settlement seeting to reduce California’s prison population collapsed yesertday, setting the state for a trial that could result in the court-ordered release of thousands of inmates…

Local officials said that the proposed settlement would have put too great a burden on county jails and rehabilitation programs, which they sare are underfunded.

The California public has supported rehabilitation for years. One survey in 2004 found that by an 8 to 1 margin, Californians favored using state funds to rehabilitate prisoners both during  and after incarceration. And yet, a report by the California Policy Research Center shows that while 42 percent of state inmates have a “high need” for alcohol treatment and 56 percent have a “high need” for drug treatment, only 7 percent get alcohol treatment and 9 percent get drug treatment — of any type, even just 12-step meetings — while in prison. The national average is more than twice that high. Not surprisingly, only 21% of California parolees successfully complete parole— half of the national average— and two out of three inmates returning to prison are parolees.

California has known about these problems for decades and done nothing. In fact, rehabilitation programs declined throughout the 1990s. Today, 20 percent of California inmates don’t take part in any prison program at all.

Pretty soon, there will be mass releases,  and communities — not the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation — will get hurt. Even if you don’t believe that addicts should be incarcerated, almost everybody thinks that they should receive treatment. If they don’t, if we release thousands of untreated alcoholics and drug addicts into our communities… well, let’s just say it probably won’t have a beneficial impact on public health and safety.

SAD FACTS ABOUT CALIFORNIA PRISONS