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Balancing Act

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 20:33:00 GMT

Photograph courtesy howtosurvive.blogspot.com

There are no simple or short-term solutions to balancing the City of Los Angeles’s budget. The budget crisis does not result from large pools of unnecessary spending, large numbers of overpaid employees, or waste. One can find some examples of unnecessary expenditure, overly high compensation, and misallocation of resources, and eliminating these would be wise—but won’t resolve the fiscal crisis. Compared to most large private enterprises, the City of L.A. is a model of leanness and efficiency.

No, the real roots of the budget crunch lie elsewhere—and they result from national- and state-level processes more than local ones. The first and most important cause is the ongoing economic slump, which continues to hammer Southern California harder than the rest of the country because the housing bubble popped more explosively here. A second driver is growing economic inequality, which leaves much of our population in need of extra government assistance for schooling, transport, primary health care, and public safety—all services that local government is deeply involved in providing. A third reason for the shortfall is politically imposed limits on local taxation, chiefly Proposition 13.

With regard to the first cause, L.A.’s ability to revitalize the economy is sharply limited. The best thing the City can do is spend more than it takes in, providing some degree of economic stimulus. While some observers have decried the budget’s “accounting tricks”, in a stagnant economy accounting tricks that allow extra spending can be a very good thing. If U.S. states and municipalities scrupulously seek to balance their budgets instead, we risk a repeat of the double-dip depression that hit in the 1930s as cuts in state and local spending canceled out the effects of expanded federal outlays.

Spending should particularly be directed to investments that can help overcome the crisis’s second source: widening inequality. In the short to middle run, the City must single-mindedly use its land-use powers and transportation expenditures to create jobs, as the LA Economic Roundtable and others have argued. For maximum impact, it’s critical to create good jobs, not just any jobs, and to build access for historically excluded populations: Metro’s recent Project Labor Agreement is a good example of this approach. In the longer run, strengthening K-12 education is an essential road to reducing inequality and developing a skilled workforce that will attract employers. It’s a road that will take ten years or more to have a measurable effect.

On the third front, expanding revenues, there is some low-hanging fruit, such as improving collections of existing taxes and fees (as recommended by the 2010 Commission on Revenue Efficiency). There are also possibilities to enlarge in-lieu-of-tax payments by major tax-exempt properties, to further expand user fees (preferably targeted at those with greater ability to pay), and to increase public employee contributions to pension funds (again, especially among higher earners). But it’s hard to think of a way to significantly expand revenues without relaxing Proposition 13. Provisions to expand property tax collections could build in “circuit-breakers” to protect the most vulnerable property owners, such as lower income homeowners, laid-off workers, and elders on a fixed income.

Expanding the property tax is greatly preferable to the other main local tax alternative, the sales tax. The sales tax, unlike the property tax, hits hardest at those least able to pay. By the same token, the sales tax mainly takes money out of the hands of people who would otherwise spend it themselves (canceling out the stimulus effect of government spending), whereas the property tax gets into circulation money that the wealthy would otherwise save. Best of all would be higher state or federal taxes on the richest, with increased aid to localities.

I expect that some people reading this set of recommendations will see me either as a misguided job-killer or an impractical dreamer. But the reality is that the U.S. in its economic heyday (think 1940s-1960s) and Europe’s most successful economies (think Germany) followed polices a lot like the ones I’m describing. Deep-rooted problems call for far-reaching solutions, even if at the moment our reach may exceed our grasp.

Where We Were

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 23:38:00 GMT

In the spring of 1992, I had recently graduated from UCLA and just begun working full-time at the L.A. Weekly as an associate editor. I reveled in the energy of the Weekly, the buzz of deadlines, the exposure to different perspectives and inspired writers. On the late afternoon of April 29, 1992, the staff gathered in the conference room and watched the “not guilty” verdicts being read for all four officers accused of beating motorist Rodney King. We were deployed across town to cover reactions. I was sent with two colleagues who were both former interns like myself—Dave Gardetta and Amy Waldman—to the First AME church on Adams Boulevard. As it turns out, half of the journalists in L.A. were headed there, too. The church had become the place to go for the “official African American opinion,” and its minister, Cecil Murray, was the trusted voice to deliver it. It felt like an electric current was running through the city as we drove that late afternoon, the air was that charged. Young guys were walking down the middle of the streets, bottles were being lobbed into the sky and shattering on the asphalt. The closer we got to the church, the more impossible it was to reach it. Barricades were going up, there was nowhere to park the car, and we had no choice but to turn around and head back up Western.

It wasn’t until several hours later, when I called my parents to check in from a pay phone, that I realized how far things had gone. “Where the hell are you?” my dad screamed into the receiver. “El Cholo,” I reported sheepishly from the little booth off the restaurant’s entrance. At first my dad was relieved that I was in a familiar, safe place. Then he quietly said, “People are getting pulled out of their cars. You need to get home now.” When we had walked into the restaurant, it was crowded; somehow through our nervousness we hadn’t noticed it had emptied. The riots had yet to reach there (when I returned to the street 72 hours later, the area had been hit hard), and we walked onto an eerily quiet avenue. I hadn’t moved from my parents’ house yet, and back home I spent the evening splayed out on their living room floor with my sister, listening together to a Radio Shack police scanner (one of many odd hobbies in our house) as it spit out a crackling litany of destruction that moved north all night. For some reason I was most unnerved by the report of stolen police uniforms.

That weekend Amy and I headed south again to volunteer in the relief effort. We were assigned to pack donated food at a car dealership on Crenshaw, then loaded it into my pickup to deliver it to those neighborhoods that no longer had a corner market. There were still fires across the horizon. With the National Guard stationed at intersections I’d been passing through since I was born, I felt like I’d crossed the border into a different country.

What I learned over the next week that we spent at the Weekly, putting together a special issue devoted to the riots, influences my editing to this day. We gathered essays, photographs, statistics, definitions. I knew that readers would keep the issue, and that at least some of it would remain imprinted in their minds long after the wreckage was swept away and the newsprint had faded.
Mary Melton
Editor-in-Chief

I was in Montreal visiting my future wife, who was in school there. I remember watching everything on TV in a student annex. A guy from Chicago was in the room, exchanging jokes with a Quebecois kid about L.A., as if the whole thing were just more SoCal silliness. I went home a few days after the riots ended. To be honest, I was glad that I wasn’t in L.A. amid the mayhem, but it didn’t feel right not being there at such a pivotal moment. As the plane descended over L.A. and huge tracts of charred landscape became visible, the scale of the events hit home. The wreckage itself seemed to cover an area larger than the entire city I’d just flown in from.
Matthew Segal
Executive Editor

I was a metro reporter at the L.A. Times in 1992, and my assignment was to go to the First AME church after the verdicts, to a gathering of the community that began in the evening. My photographer and I headed out early and ended up a few blocks away from Florence and Normandie. I was talking to people, getting man-and-woman-on-the-street reaction, when I saw my photographer running toward me, his cameras swinging around his neck. “Run!” he said, and we hurried to his car. Someone had tried to take one of his cameras. Only later did we find out what had happened at the intersection so close by. We headed to FAME. There was no parking anywhere near the church, so the photographer dropped me off and went searching. Hours later, after I’d listened to the Reverend Cecil Murray address the community, I called in to the city desk for the final time before deadline. That’s when my editor informed me that my photographer had been mugged while trying to find parking. He was fine, but he had left hours before. As palm trees burned all around me, I found myself outside a crowded church—safe, given the number of people there, but still without a ride back to the office.
Amy Wallace
Editor-at-Large

L.A. was still under its own peculiar form of martial law Sunday, the last night of the riots. No one was to be caught after dark on the streets. But I had a wedding to attend in Santa Monica. The drive west from downtown on the 10 was a dream: Mine was the only car on the dark highway. Surprisingly, the wedding was a happy one—most attendees were local. At one point the groom was lifted into the air by four bridesmaids, who then danced him across the floor—like swans—to the thin hands of the waiting bride. Maybe Swan Lake was playing at that moment; I don’t recall. I also don’t recall the names of the two men who worked as DJs that night, but I do remember they were Latino, and I know that later that evening they would find themselves pulled over and arrested for driving a van filled with audio equipment. An arrest like that was as normal as a wedding held under curfew that lousy weekend, and maybe we were all cursed. The marriage did not last.
Dave Gardetta
Writer-at-Large

It was so wrenching and violent on TV, and I felt like I needed to do something, but at 20 I hadn’t yet figured out what that was. I joined a friend at Philippe’s to talk about it and to feel like we were part of a community. I remember watching the National Guard and their military convoy heading south on Alameda and regret that I did nothing to help those in need.
Chris Nichols
Associate Editor

I was a high school student in suburban Northern California. The riots seemed strange and distant, not quite real. From far away it seemed like they weren’t that big a deal, like they had only gripped a very small part of the city. I paid more attention to the verdict and was far more appalled by it than I was by the riots.
Elina Shatkin
Senior Editor

I was working at LA Style magazine, we were in the El Capitan Theatre building on Hollywood Boulevard, across the street from the Chinese Theatre. There was definitely activity and fires down Hollywood Boulevard close to Vine, so we were upset and nervous. Most people went home. Some of us in editorial and production lingered, because we were on deadline, but I got home early that afternoon. I lived in West Hollywood on a hill and had a view of all the helicopters from our balcony. We were certainly glued to the TV that night and felt safer at home than at work. It felt otherworldly, and I remember wondering, What was I thinking when I moved here?
Julia St. Pierre
Production Director

I was at home, watching TV and the images of looting in Koreatown and South L.A. Korean store owners were on the roofs of their businesses with shotguns, protecting themselves and their property. I was stunned. I remember quickly getting into the car with my dad and driving with him downtown to check on his business. We were afraid rioters would smash the front glass window and get inside. As we drove over the bridge across from Belmont High, heading east, I looked to my right and saw fires burning in the distance. It was South L.A. burning. What a horrifying sight. My father’s business was unharmed, and the window was boarded up as a precaution. I can still picture the National Guard tanks stationed at 5th and Grand, at the corner of the Biltmore Hotel, on alert. It was surreal.
Leilah Bernstein
Associate Editor

I was working at a Futuretronics store downtown—basically a knockoff of the Sharper Image—when I saw the verdicts being read on TV. Despite the first night’s rioting, I went to work the following morning. As I was looking out onto the deserted streets, it dawned on me that looters might be interested in all the neat gadgets on display. The manager locked the door, turned off the neon sign, and began to frantically cover the floor-to-ceiling windows with gift wrapping paper. We hunkered down inside, hoping that a young mob walking down 7th Street wouldn’t notice the shop. They didn’t.
Eric Mercado
Research Editor

Where Were You?

How did you experience the riots of 1992? Tell us in the comment section below.

Remembering the L.A. Riots

Compiled by Shayna Rose Arnold — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 22:10:00 GMT

Charlie Beck
Chief, Los Angeles Police Department

The L.A. riots were a very dark period in the history of our department and our city. The images of buildings burning, stores being looted, and innocent civilians being attacked by fellow Angelenos remain a vivid memory.

I saw an organization that was paralyzed by the events that were unfolding during those six days in April 1992. At the time there had been an intense amount of scrutiny on the LAPD’s use of force policies, and many of those policies were in transition. As a result, there was a lot of uncertainty among officers, which resulted in us not reacting as quickly as we should have in containing the violence. Had we done a better job of policing at the flashpoint of the riots, I believe that the violence would not have spread to other parts of the city.

I witnessed an organization that I am extremely proud of—one where my father served, my sister served, and where my children now serve—not dealing with the civil unrest, and it was very humbling to me. I learned some very valuable lessons that will never be repeated by me or by the department.

Having served this great city for more than 30 years, I have come to love it as my own. While the events of 20 years ago damaged our city, our relationships, and our reputation as an organization, my faith in the resilience of all involved never wavered.

As a result of what we learned from the 1992 L.A. riots, the department emerged stronger and much more capable of protecting the citizens of Los Angeles and maintaining public safety. Through training and education, our department is much more sensitive to the many cultures that live and work in our great city. Our ability to change with the times and educate ourselves has improved the way we police our city.

Our relationship with the community that we serve is more of a collaborative partnership than it was 20 years ago. As a result of our growth we are much better prepared to deal with situations like civil unrest and major unusual occurrences through specific training, which was not available back then.

Perhaps most importantly, our relationship with the community is much better and stronger than it was in 1992. Efforts to engage with the communities we serve and foster a relationship of trust and collaboration have taken us to unprecedented heights. Crime rates in the city are at levels we have not experienced in decades, and the public’s trust in their police department is at an all-time high.

In the 20 years since the L.A. riots we have grown tremendously. But in order to continue our upward momentum, we must always remember our successes and failures from the past.

Colleen Williams
Anchor, NBC4 News

I was at NBC4 working. The riots broke out as we teamed up in the newsroom to cover the Rodney King beating verdicts. The controversial verdicts were broadcast live, and within hours, as word spread, the riots began. At about 6:45 p.m., I remember vividly the beating of Reginald Denny at the corner of Florence and Normandie. As we watched it unfold on the air, we were all stunned and couldn’t envision what was about to happen. We immediately went on the air to report what was going on and continued live coverage, nonstop for days, as we watched in disbelief with everyone else. The intersection of Florence and Normandie became synonymous with what was about to happen across the city.

That intersection remains a constant reminder of the riots because it is where a man was nearly beaten to death; the country watched it live on television. Even 20 years later, those images are still vivid in my mind, and I don’t think that will ever change for me or any other Angeleno.

A terrible thing happened at the intersection of Florence and Normandie that day, but we can’t forget the Good Samaritans from the neighborhood who stepped up to help others in need. Those community members rescued Reginald Denny and saved his life. We can’t deny the tragic events that occurred during the riots, but we have to remember all the heroes who put their lives at risk. These are the individuals who bravely stepped into a dangerous situation to do the right thing, while others stood by almost paralyzed. There’s no explanation for the existence of these Good Samaritans, but fortunately for Los Angeles, they will always be with us.

Eric Garcetti
Los Angeles City Councilmember

I watched my city burning on TV from New York City where I was finishing my senior year at Columbia. As a fourth-generation Angeleno, I always knew I’d move back to L.A. after college, and as I watched, I wondered what kind of city it would be when I got home. Would it be racially divided? Would it be physically destroyed? How would people feel about our city and our police department? Twenty years later the Los Angeles of today is a testament to our city’s resilience and our people’s deep commitment to their neighborhoods and each other.

Roberto Barragan
President, Valley Economic Development Center

I was in San Francisco at that time, where there were riots. I was actually almost arrested when police called an illegal assembly and started rounding people up. They cordoned off one end of the street and then came up behind the protesters on the other side of the street, and at the time I was in the middle. Luckily I was next to a building where I had a client, so I went into his building and got away.

Soon thereafter I was recruited to potentially be a senior executive at Rebuild LA, the corporate city response to the civil unrest, in financial management. I was very interested in the position but didn’t get it. About eight months later I was approached by folks at Wells Fargo and Bank of America because they had put together their own program called the L.A. Community Reinvestment Committee (LACRC), which was establishing a community finance resource center. I became its new executive director. CFRC was the banks’ response to the civil unrest. It was an attempt to bring the banks together and establish one location where people could get business lending, business assistance, home assistance, and financial education. As competitive as the banks were, this was one place they came together to benefit the community.

I had wanted to come down to Los Angeles immediately. I grew up in Southern California, and it was extremely heart wrenching to see people who were at the limit of tolerance. We saw people running out of stores with diapers. People concentrate on the people who went into stores and stole TVs. But you saw many more people go into stores and walk away with consumer goods, because in ’92 we were in the middle of a recession, there were major defense cutbacks in California, there were aerospace cutbacks, unemployment had gone up, and home prices were stagnant. We were caught in one of those business cycles. And you also had a city with a police force that wasn’t known for being community oriented. People got sick of it. They got sick of the economics. They got sick of the police presence. They got sick of not having services in their neighborhood. When there was a spark, people just retaliated. It was sad to see business owners who had served the community watching their stores burn down. After the riots, some never came back.

Part of what I did when I was in South L.A. was to lend money to businesses that couldn’t get money otherwise. Each one of the lending situations was unique, each was hard to do, and each required a level of care and assistance that wasn’t being made available to anyone else. Now I believe if you design the program right, you can lend anywhere to any business. To consider a place like South-Central as unsuitable for business is unconscionable. The civil unrest showed that government cannot bring back a blighted community by itself. Only residents and local business can.

L.A. is an extremely diverse community. What I learned in South L.A. is, it’s not about black, brown, white—it’s about green. At the end of the day, it’s economics that separates us. And it’s even worse today. Economics more than ever defines L.A. Unless we begin to have a strategy that is based on business and jobs—and jobs for all—we’re going to have pockets of paradise that are surrounded by neighborhoods that are still wanting. Los Angeles has a ways to go yet to serve the majority of its population.

I think Occupy Wall Street and Occupy L.A. was a message. People are saying we have a broken system. We have a population that isn’t sharing the American Dream. Before the civil unrest, we didn’t get a message. We just got the riots.

Hyepin Im
Founder and President, Korean Churches for Community Development (KCCD)

I was an MBA student at USC living in Long Beach and interning at Toshiba down in Irvine, and when I first came back and heard about the riots, I was in shock. I came to realize that the fabric of society was so fragile and chaos could happen in a split second.

As a young Korean single woman, I often went to Koreatown for the restaurants and the nightlife, and I was involved somewhat with a nonprofit called Korean American Coalition. A place where I felt so safe overnight became dangerous.

I had never heard of a black-Korean conflict, and when the media kept talking about that, I was really confused as to what this conflict was about. In the aftermath, seeing how the community was depicted in the media proved we didn’t have the established relationships to have real representatives speak for us. Really, our story was not properly told.

It was just a painful experience to see a community depicted and accused of being isolated, one that doesn’t give, and to be told to go home, when in reality I knew that our community was so much more than that. I remember feeling a lack of power. But we lacked the capacity to build successful partnerships with the greater community.

I visited Koreatown again not too long after the riots, and then the African American community and the Korean American community were invited to the Oprah Winfrey show. It was interesting because the Korean community spoke first, and they started off saying something like, “Our community has room for improvement,” and the African American community leaders just jumped on it. I took a lesson from that: If you are ever on a TV show, you need to say what you need to say. I remember Oprah turning to a pastor at the end and asking if he would close the show with a prayer. Seeing faith transcend the walls of the church was a very poignant moment for me.

With First AME I saw a church serve as a vehicle for integration, assimilation, and education about the greater community. I saw this amazing model where the church can have a real impact when it partners with the greater community. It was able to help people systematically. It was a model I wanted to bring to the Korean community. It was the inspiration for our organization.

If I were to focus on the positives of L.A. today, I would say many ethnic communities are coming of age. Individuals like Roy Choi, with his Kogi truck, are able to take their ethnic roots and their experience and bring together a lot of cultures in a way that is changing whole industries. We’ve become a global community that is connected. There are less walls and a greater understanding of each other.

I talk about L.A. everywhere I go. Am I proud of L.A.? I am. Is there room for change and growth and understanding? Absolutely, yes.

If we could have a greater platform for building understanding and lifting up the different communities and helping them reach their full potential, we could have more successes. The cultural world is in our own backyard. We could take it to the next level.

Dr. Maulana Karenga
Professor and Chair of Africana Studies, California State University Long Beach
Executive Director, African American Cultural Center (Us)

The Los Angeles Revolt of April 1992 engendered for me a series of interrelated experiences, including moral outrage, a renewed socio-historical understanding, a sense of unfolding opportunity, informed suspicion, and hopeful determination. It understandably began with a profound sense of moral outrage at the inhumanity and injustice of it all, which was a shared sense of outrage for most people who saw the sustained brutal beating of Rodney King on TV and witnessed the shocking acquittal of the policemen involved. The beating appeared both savage and senseless, with no justification and a vivid and violent expression of police abuse and brutality. And the acquittal and the reasons given appeared to provide a racialized social sanction for this and other forms of police violence and abuse.

Secondly, as an activist-scholar, there was also a renewed socio-historical understanding that the brutal beating and racialized acquittal by the jury in Simi Valley were not isolated and unrelated events but rather were rooted in and reflective of a context of race and class disparities and disadvantages of wealth, power, and status. The video camera had captured an example of a defining feature of the lived experience of the African American community and other communities of color: a persistent pattern of police violence and abuse that demonstrated a reckless and deadly disregard for their lives and rights. But it also reminded us of community vulnerabilities, not only in regard to police abuse and brutality, but also systemic issues of poverty, asymmetrical power relations, unemployment, poor housing, an ineffective and underfunded educational system, lack of access to affordable health care, an unequal and oppressive legal and criminal justice system, a racially degraded status, and other sources of suffering and problems in the communities of color who would respond in revolt. And such response in revolt to real and perceived social oppression and injustice has been the case throughout history, not simply in 1992 or in the 1960s, which witnessed social revolts throughout the country.

Thirdly, there was for a brief moment also a shared sense of opportunity to move collectively to correct the problems that provoked the Revolt. Indeed, there were the usual proliferations of community, interracial, interfaith, and governmental meetings to search for answers, calls for calm and healing, and press conferences and media stories on these and a host of related issues and events. And there were joint projects and numerous plans and efforts to better interracial and interethnic relations, rebuild the city, and begin a new chapter in police, government, and community relations and cooperation for common good.

However, joined to this sense of opportunity was an understandable and informed suspicion that the cooperative spirit and efforts and the rightful attentiveness for the problems that provided both the social foundation and the sustaining fuel of the Revolt would not last. For there was a sense of déjà vu to it all, since it was essentially an immediate disaster response rather than a long-term developmental planning for the city and county that self-consciously concerned itself with the lives and future of all the people, especially the most vulnerable among us. Certainly there were good ideas and intentions in these post-Revolt efforts and initiatives, but the problems were and are long-term and require a determined, ongoing, and persistent demonstration of ethical commitment, political will, and relentless social struggle to achieve any real, serious, and enduring social change.

Finally, in spite of a healthy and correct suspicion that these immediate-focused, disaster-response efforts would go the way of their predecessors, my colleagues and allies in struggle and I maintained and continue to maintain a hopeful determination. We know that the struggle for justice and good in society and the world is a long, difficult, and demanding one, and we are determined to continue this struggle. For our work is in self-conscious, committed response to the ancient and ongoing African ethical mandate “to bear witness to truth and set the scales of justice in their proper place, especially among those who have no voice.” Indeed, our people’s history is a history of righteous struggle for good in the world, and we strive to honor it. Thus, we ask ourselves daily, in the tradition of our ancestors, “What is our duty?” And we answer in that same tradition: “It is to know our past and honor it; to engage our present and improve it; and to imagine a new future and forge it in the most ethical, effective, and expansive ways.”

Could Barack Obama Lose California in 2012?

Compiled by Shayna Rose Arnold — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 18:49:00 GMT

Photograph by Forest Casey

Dr. Tony Quinn
Co-editor of the California Target Book

The answer is yes, Obama could lose this state. However, if he did, it would be part of a national landslide. You have national landslides once in a while—Obama sort of had one in 2008—but otherwise you have to go back to Ronald Regan against Jimmy Carter, and he carried all but about five or six states. Now California is probably the fourth or fifth most loyally Democratic state, so if you got down to a situation where the Democrats were losing every state but Vermont and Rhode Island and a couple of states like that, California would probably get swept up in it.

Landslides occur when the economy is bad, and voters tend to blame the party that is in office. That’s the danger that Obama is facing now. The danger to his reelection is the 9 percent unemployment—and it’s 12 percent here. So that sets up the kind of dynamic that could lead to a national landslide. If the economy was really good, like it was when President Bill Clinton ran for reelection or even like it was in 2000, the likelihood of a landslide would be virtually impossible, but in an economy as bad as this it could happen.

I think it’s most likely that Mitt Romney will be the Republican nominee. He’s the only one who’s out there now who seems to be a credible candidate. I think the rest of them have so many flaws that they really can’t be taken seriously. If for some reason Romney were to collapse, the Republican race could be thrown into complete chaos, and I don’t think they would turn to Rick Perry or anyone running now because they seem so badly wounded. They might turn to somebody we never ever heard of. A lot of things could happen. But if you assume that Mitt Romney is the nominee, then you have to look at how he would run in California, and he would probably be a reasonably strong Republican candidate here, better than McCain or George W. Bush, but that doesn’t mean that he would carry the state absent a landslide.

My guess is that this will remain a safe state for Obama and that California will be viewed as sort of off the radar and won’t be seriously contested. It’s very expensive to contest California. For $20 million you can win North Carolina or Indiana, which are close states, and get all those electoral votes. Twenty million dollars doesn’t get you very far in a presidential race here.

California has been one of Obama’s very best sources of campaign funds. All the candidates come here to raise money, but virtually no one—from either party—has come here in the past 25 years or so to seriously campaign. That’s very frustrating to a lot of people in California because this state gets forgotten. But Obama is doing what Bill Clinton did before him and what George W. Bush did before him and going back for years, and that is coming to California simply to raise money. He probably doesn’t need to campaign here since the only way Obama could lose the state—which I think he could—is for there to be a big national landslide.

This election is particularly interesting because you have a president running for reelection with very high unemployment and a whole lot of dissatisfaction across the country, and if you take a look at Europe, which is having the same problems we are having, you see in the last year or so quite a few governments being voted out of office. Usually a president starts the reelection process in reasonably good shape with the likelihood that he will be reelected—generally we give our presidents two terms—but in this case, because of the unhappiness and the economic condition, we do have a much more interesting race. In many ways Obama is starting out weaker than he did in 2008.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Political analyst and author, How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge

The short answer to "Can Obama lose California?" is no. It's a lockdown Democratic state. Now here’s the longer answer as to why the question is even posed: It’s true that the Democrats have a crushing numerical advantage over the GOP in terms of vote numbers and percentages here. The state's two major cities, Los Angeles and San Francisco, are rock solid Democratic, labor, environmental, and minority voter friendly. San Diego, another major city, is increasingly environmental and multi-ethnic friendly. No GOP presidential candidate has won California since George H.W. Bush did in 1988.

However, there are short- and long-term perils for Obama in 2012 and for the Democrats beyond that election. A centrist-friendly GOP presidential candidate—that is, Mitt Romney—can appeal to independents and conservative Democrats. A continued souring economy, a lackluster turnout by Latino voters, and an equally lackluster get-out-the-vote effort by Democrats in the state can appreciably narrow the vote margin that Obama will get.

A concerted effort by the GOP to get a coherent centrist, immigration-friendly line, and an equally concerted effort on their part to appeal to Latino voters on the issues of patriotism, family values, small-business support, and even religious values, and to cultivate some young Latino and even black potential officeholders and put money behind their campaigns is a future possibility. If the GOP chooses to go that route, it could pay some dividends. The point is, for the GOP to be competitive again in this state it has to transform itself from a narrowly rigid, ultra-conservative white guys party into a party that preaches and practices diversity. If it can pull off this political magic hat trick, it can be a force again in California. This won't happen in 2012. But the possibilities are there for the future for the GOP. The ball could then be in the GOP’s court, but for now it will stay in Obama’s and the Democrats’ court.

Darry Sragow
Partner, SNR Denton and former chief campaign strategist for the Democrats in the California State Assembly

In a traditional two-way race between a Democrat and a Republican it is virtually impossible for the president to lose California. He is still more popular here than he is in many other places. He certainly has a reservoir of personal goodwill to draw on and is facing a Republican Party that is an endangered species in California. Republicans continue to constitute a smaller and smaller part of the California electorate. Their registration is down to about 31 percent, and the Republican Party in California is viewed pretty widely as hostile to people of color—Latinos and every Asian American group but one, Vietnamese Americans, who tend to be conservative. Obviously this is now a minority white state, so the trend is inevitable.

The interesting thing is that there is going to be a third choice on the ballot. About a month ago I got significantly involved with an organization called Americans Elect. It’s a nonpartisan, nonideological group that is creating access to the ballot in all 50 states for someone who is going to be nominated in an online convention next June, and it’s a pretty dramatic effort to increase the competition in politics. Nobody has any idea who the nominee will be. The legal barriers to someone new coming in are very high, so this organization is spending the money that a candidate would need on lawyers and gathering signatures to make sure that there will be somebody nominated in an online convention running for president. With those circumstances it is very unclear what will happen.

From what I can tell, the voters in California who seem to be attracted to the thought of having a new third choice are very much in the center, and that means there are a lot of Republicans who seem, at least based on polling, to be interested in this. In California one of the reasons the Republican Party is losing market share is not only the issue of how they treat people who are not white, but also because of how conservative it has become.

You could certainly make the argument that if that third candidate is a centrist and is popular and runs a good campaign, it could affect the outcome in California. That’s the unknown factor.

Jobs is the number one issue, and the number two issue, and the number three issue. We have at the moment the second-highest unemployment rate in the country. Roughly one out of eight Californians who claims to be in the workforce doesn’t have a job. So the economy and jobs is absolutely critical. The disconnect that makes it difficult for the Republicans to take advantage of the situation is twofold: First of all, there isn’t much evidence that the Republican Party offers a better solution to the problem. Based on polling, people are clearly not satisfied with the job the administration is doing, but voters haven’t said Republicans have the magic answer. Secondly, the Republican Party in California–this is not true in all states—is just not considered to be a viable option by a lot of voters because they are so conservative on social policy. The Republicans in California are out of touch with the libertarian ethos of the state. We always get described as crazy liberals by our relatives somewhere back East, but we’re not. We’re Liberatarian. The Republican Party in California has been captured by people who like the idea of regulating social and personal behavior. There’s no question that the economic problems facing the state are very serious, but on issues relating to our personal lives and to the environment, which is very important here, Californians think the Republicans are just totally out of step.

Another thing that hurts the Republicans in California is, they have become obstructionists. They are the ones who refused to give their votes to get a budget and threw the state into a crisis. Voters know that the Republicans are wiling to bring the state government to a standstill over something that frankly the voters don’t understand. That’s very damaging to their party.

All of that, to go back to the original question, makes it virtually certain that President Obama will win California in 2012 irrespective of whatever else is going on. It’s not because we are zombie voters whose brains have been eaten by the Democrats. It’s because the Republicans have totally forfeited the political opportunity that awaits them if they make some decisions differently.

ALSO: Read Bad News, Bear Anne Taylor Fleming's December column on the president's current standing

Street Fight

By Shayna Rose Arnold — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 07:00:00 GMT

We asked a street artist, the LAPD, the executive director of Los Angeles’s Department of Cultural Affairs, and a local art history professor to weigh in:

GREGORY
Street artist

If you have something on your chest and in your heart and you want everyone to hear it, the street is a very good megaphone for that. There are poets, sculptors, and painters inside all of us. If you listen to the call, act on it, and share it in the public sphere—that to me is "street art." Bad or good, good or bad, people will love it or hate it.

The fact that you have the balls to take the wall and communicate your fire is what I have respect for. Those who see it as vandalism should take note of where most of the street art/graffiti is being painted. It's not on cars or operational businesses and homes; it's on force-fed billboards, run-down for-lease spaces, and eyesore electrical boxes. There is power in the act, the aesthetic, and the message. You can affect things. You just will.

Lieutenant Paul Vernon
Commanding officer, LAPD Central Detective Division

Street art is kind of a mixed bag for the LAPD in that we are here to protect property and people’s rights, and art has an aspect of people expressing themselves. But when it comes to street art, it’s often people expressing themselves on other people’s property.

So that becomes problematic for the police department, and we have to investigate that.

Recently we had an issue come up regarding street art that has never really raised its head before. We responded to a call about what appeared to be an apple hanging from a tree on 1stStreet, east of Alameda near the Gold Line train station. An ex-marine walked by and saw what looked to be an apple hanging from a string, and he noticed the top looked like the top of a hand grenade. He realized, Oh, my God, that might be something disguised, and we called in the bomb squad. Hundreds of man-hours later, it ended up being a piece of Styrofoam with the top of a real hand grenade.

I researched it the next day and found out that the apple was street art hung there by an artist, and several Web sites were mocking us for responding and not recognizing it for what it is. When street art resembles weapons in the days of terrorism, we have a huge problem.

Here’s the potential threat something like that gives to the city: Should the police become climatized to the idea that it’s street art, so should we just ignore it? Or do we continue to respond to these situations even though they’re probably not a threat, because we have to make sure terrorists aren’t using street art and it becomes a trend? The shocking thing and scary thing about this is a terrorist could now try to hide a bomb in plain sight under the guise of street art. So we have to respond in spite of the mocking, in spite of what the artists think. That means taking the police department away from other crime and investigating other threats, all because someone wants to express himself or herself in public. In that way, street art can present significant danger to the city. And that probably costs thousands of dollars for the city when we don’t have enough money to budget for police.

If someone starts throwing up slap tags in your neighborhood or on the street where you live, near the house that you are trying to sell, how does that affect you? Doing that is the hype of ego. It’s the hype of narcissism.

So street artists, while you want everyone to respect your opinion and your right to express yourself, respect everyone’s personal property and their right to be able to live their lives without having your opinion foisted on them. Please don’t compromise public safety for your ability to express yourself.

Olga Garay
Executive director, City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs

How does street art affect Los Angeles? In its broadest sense, street art can encompass a remarkable diversity in message, style, materials, and community involvement in the creative process. The art of the streets, whether traditional murals, aerosol graffiti-style works, paper handbills, or other forms, can express the concerns, cultural icons, and celebrations shared by a community. It also has the ability to expose divergent aesthetic perspectives and social tensions within and between communities.

Los Angeles is incredibly heterogeneous in all aspects of society. Within this unique urban environment, the diverse interests of the city, residents, property owners, artists, and other community stakeholders converge in impassioned dialogue over visual space. There is a continuous debate over the rights of the individual, private entities, and government over the control of the public realm. Los Angeles also has a long history of artist and community expression through art and mark making, whether officially sanctioned, created with owner permission, or illegally applied.

There are few easy answers to these concerns, but it is a testament to L.A. and its people that this debate can happen in a civil, thought-provoking manner. Recently questions about the nature, appropriateness, and role of street art have made headlines and broadened this discourse. It is in this role as a catalyst for conversation about these issues—and, at its core, recognition of our values and desires for our visual landscape—that street art can have its greatest impact.

Donald Preziosi
UCLA professor of art history and co-author with Claire Farago of Art Is Not What You Think It Is

What makes street art “art”? The most basic and obvious answer is that it occupies a street or a part of one. The difficulty comes in when you try to specify what you mean by “it” (art), whether occupying or inhabiting a street or a living room or a gallery or a shopping mall. The most fundamental point is that art is not what you think it is, because, essentially, it is not an “it” at all but a way of using things—potentially any things, including your own and other’s bodies. The term “street art” is basically meaningless except as a marketing strategy to call attention to something as artistically intended in public or civic space. But then anything in civic space potentially has artistic or aesthetic uses, either by intention or by how it is attended to, how it is construed under certain conditions. Which is yet another essential factor about the subject: Anything (an object, event, or phenomenon of any material or virtual kind) can serve aesthetic or artistic functions at certain times and under given conditions. So art is not only not a what but a when, and it’s also a how, a way of approaching or using objects or phenomena of any kind.

So the question “What makes street art ‘art,’ ” which on the surface seems to beg for an answer about what kind of thing street art may be—that is, what kind of art is art for the street, is an extremely important one, and in fact it opens up and challenges some of our most basic ideas about what art in general is or should be. And it raises the fact that basically, art is a problem and may be an exceedingly troublesome issue for a community. Art is in fact dangerous, even terror inducing. The earliest documented text we have that extensively discusses the nature of the relations between art and social or civic life, Plato’s Republic (Politeia), written 2,500 years ago, argues strongly that art in public spaces should be banished from the city because it adversely affects the souls and mental equilibrium of citizens, potentially causing them to think otherwise from what those holding or desiring power would want them to believe is natural, real, or true. The logic of all this is very basic and fundamental: Once something (anything) is put into public or civic space, how it may be received or used is simply not controllable by the object’s makers, producers, sponsors, or patrons without external management, without a guide as to what to believe about what this intervention into civic space means(or should mean).

So the whole question about what street art “is” (as art) is a question that goes straight to the heart of the oldest, deepest, and perennially unresolvable questions about the arts, troubling notions of art imagined as a kind of thing rather than a way of using (any) things. At the same time, it goes to the heart of the problem of the connections and distinctions between art and religion, because both share the quality of being complementary and (to some) antithetical approaches to the problem of representation, or how things mean, rather than being independent “things” in and of themselves. Religion, like art, is primarily a when and a howrather than a what. Perhaps that is an issue for another City Think column.

Photo: Wall painting by GREGORY; dog stencil by Dog Byte. Photograph courtesy GREGORY

The Unpolitician

By Gabriel Kahn — Sun, 01 May 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Hardly anyone in L.A. has heard of Austin Beutner. But for more than a year he has been arguably the most powerful person in the city—so powerful that some say he has eclipsed his boss, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. He’s even considering the next step: running for mayor himself in 2013. It’s an ambitious goal for any local politician but especially for a newcomer who’s, well, not a politician.

Fifteen months ago Beutner, a former Wall Street prodigy, didn’t know the mayor. After just three meetings with Villaraigosa, he was charged with managing a vast swath of the city. The mayor came up with a new title for him—first deputy mayor—along with a new office called Economic and Business Policy. He also gave him a hefty mandate: Create jobs, attract businesses, and improve the local economy. Beutner, who had decades of experience in investment banking but none in local government, was granted oversight of 12 city agencies, from the Port of Los Angeles to the Housing Authority. That's 17,000 employees. His pay: $1 a year.

Beutner might not seem like he’s cut out to steer such a sprawling bureaucracy. He favors gray suits, is reserved in public, and is so soft-spoken that people often lean in to hear what he says. In meetings he’s as likely to nod his head and listen as he is to give orders. But people who have worked with him have been struck by what a quick study he is and by his confidence in his own judgment. Within weeks he drummed up new convention business for the city and found ways to cut red tape. “I was surprised by what had not been done before,” he says. “There was lots of low-hanging fruit.”

The new first deputy mayor became the point person in the city’s effort to lure an NFL franchise to AEG’s proposed stadium downtown. He received visiting dignitaries and traveled to China to forge ties with businesses. For nine months he served as general manager of the byzantine Department of Water & Power. As Beutner describes it, there were “bits and pieces” of city government he didn’t control, such as the police and fire departments. But his authority extended over “everything else.”

He did all this, he says, without much direction from above. Beutner and the mayor have held one regularly scheduled meeting a week, though they check in by phone. “His style, his approach, is very different from mine,” Beutner says of the mayor. “I don’t need a lot of adult supervision.” For his part Villaraigosa credits Beutner with being a strong manager, though he makes sure to point out that his deputy calls him boss “like everybody else.”

Still, Beutner’s reign has left people wondering. “Whom do you listen to?” asked City Councilman Ed Reyes. “Do you listen to the mayor? Or do you listen to Austin?” For many it has been a dizzying spectacle. “I don’t know if the mayor purposefully stepped aside to let Austin do his job or whether Austin just walked in there and said, ‘Get out of my way,’ ” says outgoing city councilman Greig Smith. The council wields considerable power under the city’s charter and often sees itself as a rival to the mayor’s office. Beutner’s private sector mentality, however, has made relations frostier than usual. He seems to have little tolerance for being second-guessed by a bunch of politicians. “He could barely conceal his disdain for us,” Smith says. Beutner makes no secret of his disregard for the council. “Look at what the city council is up to. The city is broke, and they’re holding hearings on Billy the Elephant,” he says, referring to the battle over the zoo’s new pachyderm enclosure.

Griping isn’t unique to L.A. politics, but the constant quibbling here has a way of wearing people down or chasing them out. Former police chief William Bratton characterized L.A. politics this way after announcing his resignation: “Here it’s basically, ‘Don’t have it out, hold a grudge, and try to undermine each other at every step and every turn.’ ” What’s surprising is how difficult it is to find critics of Beutner. Many have viewed the shift in power as a welcome change. “When I first heard of his appointment and that he had this Wall Street background and a lot of money, I was skeptical,” says María Elena Durazo, the Los Angeles head of the AFL-CIO. “And nobody called us to ask what we thought.” Like most everybody who has worked with him, though, Durazo came away impressed. “I’m so used to hearing why something can’t be done or why it’s going to take so long,” she says. With Beutner it’s the opposite. “He just gets it done.” She says that when she needed advice on city business, she would “absolutely go to Austin first.”

Beutner’s path to public service began on a dirt trail in the Santa Monica Mountains. In 2007, during an early-morning bike ride, he crashed and awoke in a pool of blood. Some joggers found him. He’d broken his neck and needed to be airlifted out.

He had been a rising star on Wall Street. Raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan, he became an investment banker after attending Dartmouth. At 29 he was the youngest partner ever at the financial firm Blackstone. By 33 he had made “enough money not to have to work for the rest of my life,” Beutner says. So he took a detour, working two years in Russia for the State Department. He returned to Wall Street in 1996 to found the investment bank Evercore Partners with Roger Altman, former deputy secretary of the Treasury. When it went public in 2006, Beutner made more than $100 million from the IPO alone.

Beutner came to L.A. to run Evercore’s West Coast office, settling with his wife and four young children in the Pacific Palisades. After breaking his neck, he found that the world of high finance had lost its appeal. He retired and spent months traveling with his family. By the fall of 2009, he began to scout for new challenges.

He discovered his opportunity at a power breakfast held at former mayor Richard Riordan’s Brentwood home. It was December 2009, and the Los Angeles economy was in the tank. The city’s unemployment rate was (and remains) above 12 percent. Business leaders were frustrated by what they say was Villaraigosa’s feckless response. “There is this overall sense, fair or not, that the mayor talks big but doesn’t produce,” says George Kieffer, a partner at the influential Los Angeles law firm Manatt, Phelps & Phillips. Companies, thwarted by burdensome regulations, were leaving the city.

Riordan wanted to bring together some of the most prominent people in L.A. to see what could be done. Among those attending were Michael Milken, Eli Broad, and Disney senior executive Jay Rasulo, along with Kieffer, City National Bank chairman Russell Goldsmith, and Jay Carson, who was chief deputy mayor at the time. Beutner also had a seat, though few of the guests knew him well. One after the other they rattled off ways to address L.A.’s most glaring problems: slash the lengthy business permitting process, do away with arcane business taxes, tackle runaway pension costs. Then Beutner spoke up. The proposals were all fine, he said, but until a person inside city hall is charged with implementing them, nothing would change. Those present took notice.

Carson arranged a meeting between Villaraigosa and Beutner about a possible job in city hall. The mayor was impressed. He became more impressed when Beutner told him his salary demand. “We can get someone like this for one dollar a year?” Villaraigosa recalls asking. Beutner wanted to make sure he would have enough latitude to have an impact. “Make sure you get something in writing from the mayor,” Broad cautioned. A confidential letter would outline their relationship.

*****

On January 11, 2010, Villaraigosa introduced Beutner to the public. The press release trumpeted that he would “change the City’s approach to job creation and economic development” and be given “a large portfolio with unprecedented oversight of City resources.” To observers it sounded like the latest reshuffle in an administration that had made many promises but delivered on few. Only days earlier Northrop Grumman, the nation’s second-largest defense firm, announced it was moving its headquarters from Los Angeles to Virginia.

L.A.’s bureaucracy is notoriously territorial, with little cooperation among the various departments. Beutner figured that if he could force city department heads to sit down together instead of being at odds, he could bring results. “Getting everyone to work for the same objective in this city is not easy,” he says. “This might sound less than humble, but it’s the hallmark of a good leader.”

The Chinese electric car and battery manufacturer BYD had been considering L.A. as a possible U.S. headquarters. It all but gave up after learning of the red tape involved. Beutner summoned his department heads to a meeting where the city would try to pitch itself one last time. He set the ground rules for his staff. BYD would go through its wish list. Only two responses would be acceptable: “Yes, we’ll do that” or “Yes, we’ll look into that.” Saying no was off the table. Beutner tried to sweeten the deal by promising that the mayor would ride in one of the cars when he goes to the Academy Awards (this has yet to happen) and that a BYD vehicle would be prominently displayed at LAX. The company changed course and is now opening an office downtown that could have a staff numbering up to 150.

Other companies have followed. The architectural firm Gensler decided to move its headquarters from Santa Monica to downtown, bringing close to 300 jobs back into the city. Later this year Google will be relocating more than 500 jobs from Santa Monica to Venice. Both Gensler and Google will benefit from a new business tax holiday, which Beutner shepherded through the city council. It grants any business that moves to or opens in Los Angeles a three-year break from the city’s gross receipts tax. “A city that is doing that kind of stuff?” says Rob Jernigan, Gensler’s managing director. “That’s a city I want to be in.”

In certain ways Beutner has been simply cleaning up after the man who hired him. In 2008, Villaraigosa and Eric Garcetti, the city council president, launched the “12 to 2” program, which was designed to slash the city’s bureaucratic thicket by reducing the number of agencies involved in permitting from a dozen to two. Beutner called a meeting of all the people who had been working on the program. “The conference room was empty,” he remembers. Despite the hype, Beutner determined that no one had done a thing.

He hired a consultant to design a system that’s supposed to be faster and more transparent. Until it rolls out, city workers are being assigned to guide applicants through the permit process. Curtis Fralin, proprietor of the historic Crenshaw District soul and jazz club Maverick’s Flat, says, “I wouldn’t be open if it weren’t for Austin.” Fralin’s plans to relaunch the establishment became mired in bureaucracy and funding troubles. Beutner had someone help him through each step. “They would walk me over to Building and Safety, walk me over to Health,” says Fralin. The time it takes to permit a restaurant has been cut in half, but many still think that’s too long.

While Beutner won respect as a manager, he’s an unknown quantity as a politician. His voting registration declines to state any party affiliation. The field already seems crowded with veterans—Garcetti, Controller Wendy Greuel, County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, among others, are all considering a run—who will be able to play up what they’ve achieved in office. Beutner says he’s not intimidated by what he refers to as a group of “tenured insiders.” The city has been so poorly managed, he maintains, that the current crop of elected officials don’t have much to run on. “I’d be delighted to match my track record against theirs,” he says.

City Councilman Bernard Parks, who squeaked by to avoid a runoff in the last election, says it’ll be “a crapshoot.” He wonders whether Beutner is ready to forfeit his privacy and undergo the scrutiny of a citywide campaign. Riordan remembers facing similar questions when he first ran for mayor. But he notes that Beutner is a lot wiser after his time at City Hall. “I had less experience then than he does right now,” says Riordan.

No matter what happens, Villaraigosa says he wants someone doing Beutner’s job. After all, someone’s got to run the city.

Photograph by Dave Lauridsen

Read The Long Run, our most recent Q&A with Austin Beutner

The Breakfast Conversation: Alejandro Mayorkas

By Shayna Rose Arnold — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 08:00:00 GMT

Los Angeles hosted a “Breakfast Conversation” with Alejandro Mayorkas, the former Los Angeles federal prosecutor and current Director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). Over French toast, scrambled eggs, and oatmeal, guests like LA County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, political doyenne Roz Wyman, inexhaustible journalist Patt Morrison, Jamie McCourt, and Michael Kelly from the Los Angeles Coalition (who cohosted the event) heard Mayorkas talk with editor Mary Melton about the value of immigrants to the U.S. culture and economy, the challenge of passing comprehensive immigration reform, and the effect Arizona’s SP 1070 could have on California law

Here are a few highlights from what Mayorkas had to say:

On the value of immigration and the immigration process:

“We are the country that accepts the most refugees of any nation in the world.”

“Despite what we read about and what we live, especially now with the shadow of the tragedy in Arizona, I think even with that, we take for granted our ability to express ourselves and our ability to make lives for our children that are better than those we ourselves enjoyed. I don’t think that the shine of this nation as a land of opportunity for people has been decreased.”

“There are times when the situation that one is confronted with and one’s inability to remedy it can be emotionally devastating. But the opportunity to confront these situations and at least give it everything you have is a tremendous treasure.”

“The value that an immigrant brings to this country is something that maybe we do and maybe we do not agree on. My mother probably wouldn’t have scored high on a point system in respect to being an outstanding academic or performer, but she brought immense value.”

On immigration reform:

“Comprehensive immigration reform is not really a failing of our agency, but it is certainly, I think, something that we as a nation have failed to achieve. The administration remains as committed if not more committed to it than ever before. The President spoke passionately about the Dream Act when that was unfortunately defeated but a few weeks ago. I think it’s going to be tough in the legislative environment, but strategies are being developed to have it succeed.”

“The point of greatest contention, I think, with respect to comprehensive immigration reform, was not who should we allow in, but rather what to do about the people that are here.”

“We have achieved certain results. I think that the shift was deliberate in terms of priorities. The concern was that those people who knowingly employee undocumented workers were not the focus of prior efforts and the workers were. The shift in focus is not only more effective but more just.”

“Never has the language or the emotions around the issue [of immigration] been as vitriolic and extreme as is currently the case. … I think a tough economy sometimes brings to the surface deep-seeded feelings and sometimes makes those feelings more extreme.”

“The effort to achieve comprehensive immigration reform that has transpired over the last eighteen months or so as not without an enforcement strategy. In fact, our Southwest border is now more secure than it ever was. … And so, a focus on enforcement has not been absent, and comprehensive immigration reform has not passed.”

Will a simple enforcement strategy implemented now pave the way for reform later?
“I don’t know. I don’t know. But I believe in reform now.”

On Arizona law SP1070:

“I’m not in favor of it. It will be very interesting to see. I think the Supreme Court should be issuing a decision in the next couple months on this.”

“I think if the provisions that were challenged are stricken by the court on Constitutional grounds, that will of course shape what other states do, and if those provisions are upheld then I anticipate a copycat legislation elsewhere.”

“I think California, just like Arizona and Texas, is one of the states that is on the front lines of the issue because of the sheer number of immigrants here in this state and because of the reported number of undocumented people in this country. I think that people live the issue [here] much more than in other cities and states.”

On U.S./Mexico relations on immigration issues:

“We collaborate very, very closely, the two governments. Actually, at an unprecedented level with respect to border security issues, with respect to issues of drug trafficking, citizenship education for the individuals who are here with undocumented status and don’t understand the path to citizenship and what it takes to be naturalized in this country.”

Photograph by Forest Casey

The Reformers

By Shayna Rose Arnold — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 08:00:00 GMT

RICHARD LEE
Marijuana activist and chief promoter of Proposition 19

You discovered the benefits of marijuana therapy after breaking your back and suffering paralysis in 1990. Since then you’ve become a successful pot entrepreneur under Prop. 215. Why push for greater legalization?
Because it’s the right thing to do. It’s unfair, unjust, and hypocritical to lock people up for cannabis while booze is not only legal but advertised on radio and television to kids everyday. I think freedom and individual liberty are good things that this country has forgotten a lot about. And of course there are all the problems that come with marijuana prohibition, like violence and the wasting of our police resources. More violent criminals get away because the cops are out there looking for people like me instead of real criminals.

Legalization opponents have made the argument that legalizing marijuana would lead to an increase in the number of people who use marijuana and, as a result, an increase in marijuana-related crime. What’s your response?
There’s no proof that’s true. Forty percent of high schoolers already have tried cannabis, and 80 percent say that it is easy to get. So I don’t see how there could be more kids who could get it if it were legal. It’s not like what we are doing now is working. If you look at places where cannabis is legal, like Amsterdam in the Netherlands, actually only half as many kids try it there as do here. One of the theories is to get rid of the forbidden fruit. Cannabis is not as exciting and not as attractive to kids when it’s legal. Also, you have to compare the relative dangers of cannabis to alcohol. Maybe if cannabis was legal, more people would choose cannabis over booze and we’d have fewer problems with booze. It’s not a simple equation.

You once told the San Francisco Chronicle that you were “kind of a conservative.” Your mother told the paper she once saw marijuana as “the weed of the devil.” Do you think legalizing marijuana is a political issue, a moral issue, or both?
It’s a moral issue. Like I said, it’s hypocritical, unfair, and unjust to lock people up for this while booze is legal. If you look at the racist history and the current racist enforcement of the laws, there’s another moral issue. When cannabis was first made illegal, it was mostly consumed by people who were Hispanic or African American, so prohibition was a backdoor way of going after those minorities. And there are lots of current studies that show how the drug laws are unevenly enforced against non-whites, even though now we all consume about the same amounts of cannabis.

Prop. 19 had some serious opposition: Barbara Boxer, Jerry Brown, and the California Police Chiefs Association all opposed the bill. Why do you think that is?
Well, it’s easier for them to be against it and for the status quo. But I don’t think that is the reason it didn’t pass. All those same people were against Prop. 215, and it passed. A lot of the people who were against medical marijuana then are for it now. So on this issue the politicians lag behind.

Are you hoping to get a second proposition to legalize marijuana on a future ballot?
Yeah, there is already a group working on the 2012 initiative.

Who is working on the next initiative with you? Any new prominent faces at the table?
At the moment we are starting off with the base of what we had on Prop. 19, but I’m sure we’ll welcome a lot of new people over the course of the campaign.

What changes are you considering for the next proposition to make it more voter friendly?
One issue that we are looking at is employee rights and the protection from unfair drug testing that affects your job. Not including that protection is like legalizing beer and then saying you can’t have a job if you drink beer while watching a football game on the weekend. But we are doing polling and research to see what people liked and what they didn’t, and that was one of the things that could be an issue. We may have to deal with employee rights separately. We may have to legalize use and not be able to protect people’s jobs with the first initiative, like Prop. 215. Under that proposition the courts have ruled that you have no right to a job if you are a medical marijuana patient. Employers can still drug test and fire you if you are a legal patient in California. Maybe guaranteeing less employee rights would get more voter support. We did try to make it clear that the proposition didn’t protect anybody from being impaired, but there were still some complaints about that.

Is that a difficult concession for you to make?
It’s all tough decisions. Writing the initiative is the hardest part. We spent five months and 13 drafts going through it, and we had a lot of different arguments around the table about what to take out and what to put in. We’re trying to write the best law we can, but it has to be politically accessible for the voters to pass it.

You’ve spoken about recognizing the state’s economic crisis as a unique opening for a controversial proposition like Prop. 19, which, advocates argued, could offer the state substantial revenue. Do you think a future proposition will need a similar economic climate to pass? And if so, how are you approaching the 2012 initiative?
That will be part of it, of course. The state is broke, and a lot of the cities are broke. California is $20 billion in debt. It’s not like the state’s financial needs are going away. Ten cities passed medical marijuana taxes on the 2010 ballot. I think there’s going to be lots more taxing going on between now and 2012, and that’s going to continue to be an issue.

Finally, how do you measure the outcome of Prop. 19?
It was very successful in that we got the debate moved farther forward than anybody had before. We got four-and-a-half million votes for legalization, and it was interesting how the opposition didn’t really argue against legalization—they were just fighting technicalities in the language, like the employment rights. I think we have really set things up for a win in 2012.

ALLISON MARGOLIN
The criminal defense attorney self-described as L.A.’s “dopest attorney”

You were a vocal advocate of Prop. 19. Why do you think it did not pass?
I think it didn’t pass largely because the human rights violations, in my opinion, that go along with this war against marijuana weren’t focused on. What I mean by that is, I don’t think the campaign humanized the unfortunate reality of how it is for people who can’t afford to post bail for marijuana crimes to be waiting in the county jails. Let’s say over a thousand people go to prison. Many become felons as a result of a marijuana charge and face greater consequences. Let’s say they are at the wrong place at the wrong time and pick up a gun—they can go to a state prison because now they are an ex-felon with a gun. So in the attempt to make legalization look like an economic issue, they didn’t focus on and highlight the reality. Look, any attorney who has appeared in the downtown central arraignment court and seen how people are in custody there, where there’s one toilet and people are caged in what I would call subhuman conditions—

Isn’t that really more a complaint against jail conditions than an argument for legalization?
If people realized how marijuana defendants are being treated, if that reality was brought home on this issue, then I think legalization would become a human rights issue. People don’t realize that people are going to prison and being housed and the way they are being housed for marijuana crimes. Yes, this is marijuana and it is different from other drugs. However, it is part of an overall problem we have in our criminal justice system and the way we treat people in this state and all the states. Marijuana defendants are a clear example of people who should not be in this situation.

And then another thing, of course, is that there were a lot of problems in terms of the drafting of legislation. There were some glaring mistakes, and the prop did not really appeal to the medical marijuana community. Advocates let them feel this prop would somehow override the medical marijuana initiative. The word didn’t get out to these people that that wouldn’t be the case.

In a recent opinion piece you wrote, “Criminalizing drug use and sales is not the way to deal with the public health effects of drug abuse.” What is the way to deal with the public health effects?
My preliminary thoughts are that people should not face jail or prison time for the sale or use of any drugs. Drugs should be available by prescription, and the reason I believe they should be available by prescription—and I mean even hard drugs like cocaine and heroin—is so that people can go for the counseling that is needed with the use of those drugs. And of course you have to work out the details for people who have children—that’s a whole other issue. But the system should take a harm reduction approach. I really think that legalization and developing policies on how to prevent people from abusing drugs and figuring out how to treat people who do abuse drugs in a way that doesn’t stigmatize them is the way to handle it. People forget it’s only been about a hundred years since the first federal legislation was passed regarding drugs. And those laws passed in order to clean up products like Coca-Cola and cough medicine and to make consumers aware of what they were consuming. Now we have a situation where people face life sentences for marijuana in federal court.

You’ve said that the next legalization bill should be written by attorneys. What specifically would have been different had Prop. 19 been written by lawyers?
Well, one suggestion at least came from a lawyer, Charles Linder. He was thinking they could have just repealed the criminalization of having less than an ounce. That’s one idea. And then, when you look at the actual proposition, there was a clause about furnishing marijuana to a certain age group, but it was left open-ended. It was just poorly drafted. Attorneys would have done a better job. And leaving the legislation up to the state would have thwarted the naysayers who thought this prop was going to be overturned by the department of justice anyway. I think the state legislature could have come up with a good plan.

Do you or your father, Bruce, have any plans to be involved in the writing of the next bill?
Right now I am trying to form for us our own political action committee, and I’m going to people who either funded Prop. 19 or have funded harm reduction drug policy and I’m trying to raise money for us to go lobby. I’ve talked to the campaign, and I do want to be involved in writing it. I was a guest speaker for the last one, but they don’t really agree with my approach. That’s why I am trying to form my own committee, so that I can go and lobby Congress and lawmakers.

How is it going so far?
Right now I’m only in the beginning stages of forming a PAC. I have a Southwestern law student helping me.

Richard Lee let us know that as he’s working on an initiative for 2012, he is looking at making changes to the employee rights clauses. What do you think of that?
I think that’s an excellent idea. I think changing that would probably be very good. There was also a suggestion from the naysayers that people are not currently being prosecuted for driving under the influence, but they are, and I think they should focus on the fact that driving under the influence of marijuana is still a crime.

You and your father recently merged firms, and it occurs to me that you both have a lot riding on the legal defense of marijuana offenders. Wouldn’t complete legalization put you both out of business?
No. We both do a lot. My dad has been a lawyer for 42 years. I’ve been a lawyer for eight. A lot of our practice is marijuana and drug defense, but there are still the rest of the drugs that are criminalized, there’s still the federal regulation, and there are all the regular crimes. If drugs were legalized, I’d be very happy to devote that part of my career to being a professor or working for the government on whatever the harm reduction scheme is. And we’re very happy to do other cases, also. Shockingly enough, medical marijuana defense is very complicated and labor intensive, more so than any other type of criminal defense. So whenever we get other types of cases, even though we believe in marijuana defense, we’re very happy to have the variety. We’re criminal lawyers at heart. It just so happens that right now we have to fight the war on drugs.

Photograph courtesy goldenseed.co.uk

Radical Defense

By Richard E. Meyer — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 07:00:00 GMT

It’s a good thing Brian Jenkins is on our side. For nearly three decades, first on countless index cards and now in 15,000 computer files, he has amassed an arsenal of information about the violence known as terrorism, intended to create fear. Jenkins knows more about terrorism than most terrorists. He is a senior adviser to the president of the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research institution that provides information and analysis to the government and to corporations. Don’t let his easy laugh fool you, or his soft-spoken manner, or his artistry with oils on canvas. Jenkins, who is 68 but looks 55, is a former army paratrooper and Green Beret captain whose every knuckle has been broken and whose jaw whiskers have all the warm fuzziness of steel wool. A Fulbright fellow, he also is a decorated combat veteran who served in the Dominican Republic and three-and-a-half years in Vietnam.

Los Angeles is more spread out than, say, New York, and apart from Dodger Stadium and the Coliseum, it has fewer places where people gather in large numbers. Is L.A. safer from terrorism than other cities? What makes the difference?
Terrorists see New York as the world’s financial center, where infidels worship money. They see Washington as the nerve center of American military aggression. I suppose jihadist terrorists might see Hollywood as an icon of sin, but who knows what that may mean in terms of targeting? We can also imagine that terrorist strategic planners might see the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles as a logistics choke point, a lucrative target to bring down America’s economy. But today’s battered Al Qaeda is in a do-it-yourself mode. Self-radicalized would-be warriors are being exhorted to do whatever they can wherever they are. That means low-level but potentially lethal attacks on easy targets—nightclubs, restaurants, churches, synagogues, trains, subways, buses, any assembly of people.

How safe is LAX, and how can we make it safer?
Security at LAX is good. But it’s not simply what a single airport does, because whether you board a plane at Los Angeles International Airport, or JFK, or in Elephant’s Breath, Ohio, you are now inside the system. You can board a plane at a small airport and transfer to a wide-body jet somewhere else. So we are obliged every time we make a change in security to implement that change at more than 400 commercial airports. That is costly. In the wake of the Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab episode—the guy who had a bomb concealed in his underpants—even though the bomb didn’t work, there was a great deal of alarm, and in response we decided to deploy full-body scanners. That’s considerably more than 1,000 scanners. Hundreds of millions of dollars. One guy, one small device in his underpants, and we’ve just spent hundreds of millions of dollars. It’s not a good trade.

Why haven’t all the scanners been deployed yet?
It’s not like you can go down to Ace Hardware and say, “Can we have a thousand body scanners, please?” But there’s a bigger problem. Adding technology adds one more procedure. When we introduce the body scanners, somebody has to operate them. And somebody else has to resolve the security alarms they create. At the same time, our airports are getting busier. Travel has flattened out a bit because of the recession, but overall the long-term trajectory is going up. More passengers, more flights, more procedures—but not more screeners. We’re giving a finite number of screeners too many tasks to do on too many people, and they are going to start doing them poorly. We are going to break the system.

So what do we do at LAX and elsewhere?
We need a fundamental review. We should start over and say, “This is the threat we face. How can we set this up in a way in which we can manage the risk?” One possibility is that we do something other than search every single person for prohibited objects in the same way. Bombs are getting to the point that they can be concealed in places where we won’t find them without the most intrusive physical inspection. We’re going to end up wearing Saran wrap and doing body cavity searches. We should create a more discerning system that allows us to better focus our security efforts.

Right now we are doing that only in a very limited way. For every flight there’s something called a PNR. It’s your passenger record. It’s created when you make your reservation, when you check in, and so on. Your PNR says this is so-and-so, and he’s flying to so-and-so, and he used this credit card, and he has a rental car. This is a rich source of information that we use to assist security. For example, the American Association of Retired Persons group tour to Orlando is probably not a high-risk population. But, say, someone comes up to the counter at the last minute and asks, “How much is it to go to 39,000 feet?” With this guy we take a closer look. He becomes a selectee and gets extra scrutiny.

Isn’t that profiling?
It’s not profiling, or selecting people because of their race or ethnicity, which would be wrong and poor security. It’s selecting people because of what is known about them and because of their behavior. We also pick some selectees at random. Three reasons: One, it’s good security, because you cannot game random selection. Two, it creates uncertainty, and you always want to make your adversary a little uncertain. Three, it’s the civil liberties issue. That is something I fought for on the White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security. If you don’t know whether someone is a selectee because of his PNR or because of random selection, then you’d better treat every selectee properly.

Now we need to take that idea a step further and think about going to a three-tiered system. We should add a category called “registered travelers.” They would volunteer information about themselves, just like people who work on the ramps at the airport. They would agree to a background check and supply some form of biometric confirmation. It might be a thumbprint or hand geometry. These registered travelers—probably most of them would be frequent fliers—might go through a level of security that was, say, equivalent to pre-9/11. Normal travelers would go through current procedures. That would allow greater effort to be focused on fewer selectees.

Isn’t that taking a risk?
But now we’re taking the risk of poor performance. And, you know, I’m not entirely certain that a body scanner would have detected Abdulmutallab’s bomb.

Maybe it’s not even likely?
I don’t want to get into technical details, but it’s not certain. Now back to your LAX question. One thing you don’t want is huge backups at check-in and at security points. If you go to LAX in the early morning, at Terminal 1, where the commuter flights take off, there will be 200 to 300 people out on the sidewalk. On the other side of the airport at Terminal 7, where the transcontinental flights operate, there will be 200 to 300 people right inside the glass. Terrorists don’t attack just airliners; they also attack airports. We don’t want to create a lucrative target for terrorists by having several hundred people all jammed together.

Move them in. Get them to the other side of security fast. What’s an approach to doing that? “Well,” you say, “we can’t rebuild the airport right now.” So maybe we should think about off-site secure check-in. We can create satellite terminals—one downtown and others wherever—three or four satellites. You bring your luggage there, and it gets checked. Then it goes into a sealed container and straight out to the airport and onto the plane. Passengers could also go through security procedures there and then into a sterile area. The only way out is onto a bus that takes them straight to the terminal and unloads them into the secure area. We can do a better job of security in smaller locations, and we reduce the vulnerability at LAX. And the car traffic.

The Port of Los Angeles covers 7,500 acres. On a normal day it would take 18,000 containers, each 20 feet long, to hold the freight that comes in. How safe is that?
The port is a huge target, but it’s not easy to attack. The biggest fear is that terrorists will somehow introduce a weapon of mass destruction—a nuclear bomb. Conceivably they could try to smuggle in a chemical or a radioactive device, although I think the ease with which terrorists might build a nuclear weapon has been greatly exaggerated.

Despite all the instructions on the Internet?
Instructions on the Internet don’t get you a nuclear device. The principles are well understood, but the materials, expertise, and precision that are required pose tremendous obstacles. Someone can publish on the Internet how to build a diesel engine, but I’m not sure you and I could build a diesel engine in our garage. It’s not that easy.

Couldn’t terrorists buy a nuclear weapon on the black market?
We are constantly working on that with intelligence efforts, detection technology, and stings—but most of all by locking up weapons and fissile material. We also buy billions of dollars’ worth of reactor fuel from Russia blended down from weapons-grade material. Short of a catastrophic event, however, I worry that if we find a weapon, then the presumption will be that if there’s one, there could be two—and we will shut down the port while we try to open every freight container. That’s a lot of containers. Or we’ll become so alarmed that we impose new procedures that slow down the port operation. That would have an insidious effect on our economy. You slow down transportation for 24 hours, and you’re starting to close assembly lines. So it’s not simply the nightmare scenario of blowing up the port; rather it is that security itself begins to drag down our economy.

What could we do differently at the port to keep this from happening?
We have improved our inspection capabilities. In addition, we have implemented the equivalent of a registered traveler program for containers. If a container is loaded and sealed by a cooperating high-tech firm sending components out of China or elsewhere, and if the shipping manifests are sent in advance, that gives us a higher degree of comfort—and security procedures can be accelerated. What we are most worried about are containers that come in with mixed shipments. Those get more scrutiny. The big test will be if there is, heaven forbid, an event—or even if a container is found with a mass-destruction weapon inside that doesn’t work. Will we overreact—“Shut down all the ports!”—and destroy ourselves with our own response? Security is necessary, but security itself can destroy us.

What can be done about that?
It has a lot to do with public attitudes and communication. Our adversaries have been very, very successful at creating fear, and when something happens, society has a tendency to overreact. Part of it also has to do with hyperactive electronic media, where everything is breathtaking end-of-the-world news. I’d like to see some of the media do a better job with this. They always say they will, but saying it is like being a vegetarian between meals. When red meat is on the table, they will go for it. I also would like to see less partisanship and finger-pointing for political gain: “Your fault!” “No, it’s your fault!” Part of our fear has been driven by a message of fear coming out of Washington. Orange alerts, red alerts: “We have credible evidence that a terrorist attack is imminent, but keep shopping!” That has contributed to our anxiety. It’s better now, but there is still a lot of needless threatmongering.

In terms of the average citizen, we have come to expect a risk-free society. That’s unrealistic. Given the role of the United States in the world, we are blamed for the world’s problems, we are blamed for not solving the world’s problems, and we are blamed when we try to solve the world’s problems. We are a target. My friends say, “Brian, we’re going on vacation abroad. You’re supposed to know about this stuff. What should we do to have a safe vacation?” I tell them, “Drive very carefully on the way to the airport.” We accept risks every day. The average American has a 1 in 8,700 chance of dying in an automobile accident. He or she has a 1 in 22,000 chance of being a victim of ordinary homicide. What are the odds of becoming a victim of a terrorist attack? Take a decade, include the deaths in 9/11, and the odds are still less than 1 in a million.

A RAND study noted last year that L.A. has the smallest big-city police department in the country per capita. How good is the LAPD at counterterrorism?
It has been very effective. There are only three or four departments across the country that have the capacity and savvy to deal with the issues that we are facing. NYPD, a huge department at ground zero, is one—for obvious reasons. The LAPD and the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department are others, not only in dealing with the terrorist threat, but also in managing the response should a major incident occur. There’s a reason. Because of our unstable geology, our wildfires, and our mud slides, we are pretty good at dealing with disasters.

You mentioned civil liberties. We want to crack down on terrorism, but sometimes we do it abusively. How productive is that?
There’s a dark streak in America, a continuing current that has a xenophobic, racist component, and I think we are seeing a bit of it emerge in the current Islamophobia. It’s not warranted. Look at the controversy over the proposed New York mosque. On that issue, frankly, I’m more conservative than most conservatives. Where one builds a mosque is simply not the government’s business. We also have some damn fools who wanted to burn the Koran—and look at the media attention. We’re going to pay for that. We’re going to pick up two or three would-be terrorists a year from now who will trace their radicalization back to what we are seeing now.

Our strength derives from our fundamental American values: courage, self-reliance, tolerance, a sense of community, pulling together in danger. These values are not luxuries that we toss overboard when we get into stormy seas. They are part of our arsenal. If we throw them away, we throw away our most powerful weapons. Our young men and women go into the military and risk their lives—sometimes give their lives—to protect our values. Squander those values, and we weaken ourselves. We destroy what we stand for, and the other side wins.

Photograph by Gregg Segal

House Keeping

By Rick Jacobs, founder and chair of the Courage Campaign — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Photograph courtesy miketidmus.com

For most of the 20th century, California had virtually no role in congressional leadership. The all-powerful committee chairs were from the South, the rust belt, and the northeast. Even though California was fast-growing and a substantial contributor to the nation’s power, the “pork” and federal attention disproportionately found its way to states such as Arkansas, West Virginia, Mississippi, Texas, and Massachusetts because that’s where the committee chairs and speakers were from. Nancy Pelosi made history not only as the first woman to ascend to the high office of Speaker, but as the first Californian.

Obviously, if the Democrats lose control of Congress next month, Madame Speaker will become Madame Spoken. But so much more is at stake. Four California members of the House of Representatives chair some of the most powerful of that body’s committees. Two of the most powerful are from Los Angeles, the first time L.A. and not just San Francisco has had that kind of influence. They’d all be gone.

In the Bay Area, liberal stalwart George Miller chairs the Committee on Labor and Education, a key post for the most important Obama administration priorities on the agenda, with education reform especially important to California. Much more is ahead, but his bill providing $10 billion in new federal education funding is estimated to save or create almost 17,000 jobs for teachers in California alone. Our state budget is already in tatters; without Miller, we’d have to lay off even more teachers.

In San Diego, history of science professor and conscience of the left Bob Filner, has been leading the Veteran’s Affairs Committee through perhaps the most important test since World War II of Abraham Lincoln’s imprecation “to care for him who shall have borne the battle.” Hundreds of thousands of Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans are returning to the United States, and many of them to California, with almost unimaginable wounds—physical and mental. Los Angeles has one of the largest VA complexes in the country; Filner’s term as committee chair has seen the VA budget grow by 60 percent—far more than under the Republicans who started the wars.

The San Fernando Valley’s Howard Berman, whose name is synonymous with political power in our state, chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Berman’s combination of real politik and global vision is crucial to Obama’s—and therefore the country’s—success in this messy new world disorder. His leadership in lifting the travel ban to Cuba and sanctioning Iraq are in sync with L.A. But most important to our local economy, Berman champions legislation to prevent “runaway” filmmaking. Can you imagine Florida’s Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, who would be the Republican chair, caring for a second about L.A.’s economy?

And then there’s Henry Waxman of Beverly Hills. Waxman chairs perhaps the most powerful committee in the House: Energy and Commerce. From his perch atop that banal-sounding committee, Waxman guides healthcare, environmental, energy, and certain financial reform policy. Waxman is nearly unique in Congress: He is a policy wonk who knows how to legislate. He has little time for politics, but without him in that post, huge swaths of the Democratic agenda would likely run aground. For Los Angeles, whether it’s Red Line funding (finally) or pushing for universal healthcare, Waxman is irreplaceable.

And all of these leaders, including the Speaker, unequivocally support equal rights legislation for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. As slow as progress is on that front, it would simply die if the likes of Republican David Dreier of San Dimas returns to power.

The Speaker. The chairs of four key committees. Our committee chairs not only represent us on the national stage, but they assure that our state and communities receive all they should from the federal government. Even now California still only receives about 78 cents in federal investment for every dollar we export to Washington. We can’t afford to lose any clout.

Democrats take it all for granted. California, after all, trends blue. If that “enthusiasm gap” people like to talk about translates into a vote gap that gives the Republicans a majority in the House, California has perhaps the most to lose. This nation-state of 36 million people could forget about help from Washington.

Worse, would some of our chairs, who have achieved seniority because they have been in office a long time, decide that life is too short to serve in the minority? When David Dreier chaired the agenda-setting House Rules Committee, he excluded Democrats completely. Morale among Democrats was low. Would Henry Waxman throw in the towel rather than face that fate? Some of our best talent could easily disappear and with it, prospects for vigorous representation of our state at the federal level when we do have the majority.

A loss of the House could shake the nation, but it could devastate California.