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COMMENTARY
California gets its groove
back
By John Berthelsen
SACRAMENTO, California - A look at the 135
actors, dwarves, porn stars, skin merchants, television
commentators, billboard models, Silicon Valley
billionaires and ex-felons running in an unprecedented
election to replace Gray Davis, the disastrous governor
of California, might give the impression that here we go
again, good old wacky California is up to its good old
goofy tricks.
But the real story is that
California is turning into the Philippines. This is not
just because of the parallels between Arnold
Schwarzenegger, an untried movie action hero and
bodybuilder, and Joseph Estrada, another action-movie
hero with few political credentials known as Erap
(Buddy) when the voters overwhelmingly elected him
president of the Philippines. The story is People Power,
and it has the same ominous connotations for California
that it has had for the Philippines, where democracy in
the streets has weakened institutions and helped to
drive the country into a cycle of economic and political
instability.
It was People Power I that brought
an estimated million Filipinos to Manila's Epifanio de
los Santos Avenue (EDSA) in 1986 to defy army tanks and
drive the odious kleptocrat Ferdinand Marcos into exile
in Hawaii - although not before he had stolen as much as
US$12 billion and outfitted his wife, Imelda, with
enough shoes - 3,000 pairs - to make her forever the
Marie Antoinette of Asia. It was hope for People Power
II that led a succession of Rambos to believe they could
bring the people into the streets to overthrow the
constitutionally elected Corazon Aquino several times in
the late 1980s and early 1990s.
It was the real
People Power II that came along later and ousted the
constitutionally elected Erap, who is reliably reported
to have been stealing money even faster than Marcos had,
although not as brutally, and replaced him in 2000 with
Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo without the inconvenient
nuisance of a legal transfer of power. It was hope for
People Power III that this year led a group of young
Filipino military officers to hole up in a luxury hotel
in the Makati financial district of Manila to wait
vainly for the uprising to drive Gloria from office. It
is the continuing hope of a variety of coupsters that
millions will reappear on EDSA and end her term and
install them in power. People Power lives!
California has its own version of People Power,
which lay largely dormant from the time in 1911 that a
reformer named Hiram Johnson was elected governor and
created the initiative and referendum and the recall,
today the bedrock foundations of California state
government and as much as anything government's bane.
Under the provisions of the three measures,
passed in a successful challenge to break the power of
the railroads in California politics, voters were
empowered to create laws or constitutional amendments
directly, and the referendum allowed them to veto acts
of the legislature. The recall permitted voters to
remove from office any elected official. All three
require the collection of the signatures of a
significant number of voters.
Nobody bothered
much with any of the three for about 50 years, although
in the 1950s an advertising genius from San Francisco
named Clem Whittaker, with his partner, Leone Baxter,
promoted a seemingly innocuous amendment to the state's
constitution, to be voted upon by the people, under the
slogan "Keep California Green and Golden". That slogan,
and only that, appeared on billboards all over the state
and ensured that the measure passed overwhelmingly. It
is uncertain whether the voters ever learned that what
they had passed was a tax break for golf courses.
People Power, California style, first popped up
with a vengeance in 1978 when a pair of political
troglodytes named Howard Jarvis and Paul Gann
capitalized on voter outrage to engineer a
constitutional reduction of local property taxes that
remains the third rail of California politics and has
been emulated by states all over the US. Under its
provisions, property taxes are frozen when an individual
buys a house, and cannot rise faster than 1 percent a
year until the house is sold, at which time it can be
reassessed at the new market value. It has kept property
taxes so low that the financier Warren Buffett recently
noted that he pays less tax on his priceless house in
Malibu, on southern California's windswept beach, than
he does for the plain one he owns in the heartland of
Omaha, Nebraska.
But the real secret of
Proposition 13, as it is known, is that by and large
Californians sell their houses and move approximately
every five years, and thus their property taxes go up
with each new reassessment. But big corporations and the
owners of large apartment blocks - which Jarvis
particularly represented - sell their property much less
frequency, sometimes almost never, and thus are never
reassessed upward. Therefore, they are still paying
largely the same property taxes that they paid in 1976.
Nonetheless, every time anybody tries to introduce new
legislation to amend the tax measure, the voters rise up
in indignation, unaware of or unwilling to believe how
comprehensively their pockets are being picked, and not
only defeat the measure but threaten to end the
political career of any politician who dares to seek
reform.
Angry citizens have pushed through a
wide variety of other measures that have mostly screwed
up California's unwieldy constitution far beyond
anybody's capacity to read it, let alone repair it,
which has led to increasing irritation with the equally
dysfunctional California legislature, once the nation's
premier state lawmaking body. In 1990, the voters passed
a bill limiting the state's lawmakers to three two-year
terms in the Assembly, the lower house, and to two
four-year terms in the Senate, the upper house, in the
quite rational belief that a class of professional
politicians was living large and permanently in
Sacramento, happily dallying with lobbyists and eating
and drinking on the public payroll.
But the
effect of the term-limits measure was to produce a class
of citizen politicians - nice sound! - that knew nothing
when they arrived in the capitol and were gone before
they found the bathrooms. Because of their inexperience,
they were fair game for the lobbyists who are paid
millions to make sure their companies and industries are
protected from the vagaries of the law and the anger of
the people. The lobbyists the voters thought they were
neutralizing actually became the ones in charge, because
without any lawmaking experience the legislators turned
to them to write the bills.
"Remember when the
British in Kenya used native beaters to drive the game
to them?" chuckled a banking-industry lobbyist. "That's
what term-limits has done for us."
Then, in
1994, California's voters, fed up with what they thought
was a serious crime wave that was exacerbated by
sensational television broadcasts of various child
kidnappings, although crime rates in California actually
had been falling for several years, rose up and approved
a ballot initiative known as "three strikes and you're
out". Under its provisions, those convicted of three
felonies end up facing life in prison.
Three
Strikes, as it became known, undoubtedly took a lot of
undesirable felons off the street. But it also had the
unintended consequence of jailing for life petty
criminals whose third offense often consisted of
shoplifting or a variety of other inconsequential
crimes. California's prison population skyrocketed as
judges were left with no alternative but prison
sentences, making the state the biggest incarcerator of
criminals in the United States and putting more people
in jail as a percentage of its population than any
country in the world.
Instead of slackening off,
People Power actually picked up, in the form of more
initiatives for the people to decide. One measure passed
by the voters mandated that 40 percent of all state
spending be reserved for the schools, eliminating
virtually all the discretion lawmakers had to deal with
the state budget.
State government was thus
increasingly paralyzed when the luckless Davis, a man
who drinks tofu milkshakes for breakfast and eats turkey
sandwiches with mayonnaise on white bread for lunch and
acts like it, squeaked between two warring high-powered
candidates and was elected to office. In the flush of
the dot-com boom, there were rumors of a presidential
bid. His career first went well as capital-gains taxes
on a rising and churning stock market poured ever more
money into California's treasury - which the legislature
happily spent. But the first thing that went wrong was a
major energy crisis that hit California, delivered by
the energy companies who wrote deregulation legislation
and then gamed the system to make billions of dollars
from it.
Brownouts and soaring energy prices
infuriated the voters. Then, in 2000, as the dot-com
industry cratered - its epicenter in California - and
the stock market collapsed, the state's revenues from
capital gains disappeared. Suddenly, not only the state
but the nation were in a recession. California has done
no better, but certainly no worse, than most of the rest
of the country despite the fact that it had lost a major
industry in information technology as a result of the
collapse of the dot-com bubble. The national treasury,
under the largely inept economic management of the
Republican administration of President George W Bush,
went from a fiscal surplus to a US$400 billion deficit
that is growing larger daily, although Bush has managed
to remain largely unscathed because of his position as
warrior-in-chief in the "war on terror".
Gray
Davis, throttlebottom that he is, seemed unable to act.
People Power was on the march. For the first time since
Hiram Johnson thought of it in 1911, the perpetually
furious voters actually signed enough petitions to
demand that Davis, a Democrat, be recalled from office.
The supposition in 1911 and for the years thereafter was
that the recall was there to rid the government of
thieves and crooks. Davis is merely a relative
incompetent, saddled with a $38 billion budget shortfall
that is largely the result of the lackluster national
economy, and a squabbling legislature that refuses to do
anything about it.
Nonetheless, a San Diego
Republican congressman named Darrel Issa, who had made
his fortune off an alarm system that warns presumed
hoodlums away from cars in his own recorded voice, paid
more than $1 million for paid signature-gatherers to
round up the names.
Under the provisions of the
recall process, the vote to recall the governor is made
on the same day the voters choose his successor.
Californians would thus be confronted with a first
choice - whether or not to recall - and a second choice
- whom to replace him.
A free-for-all ensued,
with 135 of California's best sun-addled citizens lining
up to pay the $3,500 and deliver the 65 signatures that
qualified them to replace Davis. Prominent among them
was Issa, who broke into tears and quit later when the
Terminator himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger, made his
announcement for office - from a chair next to Jay Leno,
one of America's most prominent talk-show hosts.
Also among the candidates is Cruz Bustamante,
the lieutenant-governor and equivalent of a kind of
powerless vice governor, who loathes Davis. Bustamante,
who physically resembles and mostly acts like a
concierge at a four-star hotel, was put in the
uncomfortable position of saying out of party loyalty
that the voters should vote against recalling Davis, but
if they did vote for the recall, they should vote for
Bustamante. In the later stages of the campaign, he
started saying they should just vote for Bustamante.
In a political spat with Bustamante a few years
ago, Davis, as governor, took away the
lieutenant-governor's parking spot in the garage under
the State Capitol. Ultimately, after some uproar, the
parking spot was restored. But presumably, if Davis
somehow manages against extremely tall odds to defeat
Schwarzenegger, Bustamante, who will retain office, will
be operating out of his car - outside the capitol.
In the past few days, Schwarzenegger has begun
to pull away from Davis, Bustamante and all of the other
candidates. Unless there is a sea change in voter
attitudes, it appears that People Power will make the
actor the governor of California, much the same way
enthralled voters made another muscleman, the television
wrestler Jesse Ventura, the governor of the state of
Minnesota.
As did Ventura, Schwarzenegger has
vowed to come to Sacramento to clean house and knock
heads. Ventura, his popularity at record lows and his
legislative record a political travesty, ultimately gave
up and went back to showbiz. The smart money is that for
Schwarzenegger as well, cleaning house and knocking
heads in the ornate State Capitol is going to be a lot
harder than the Terminator found it to be in his movies.
And People Power is going to be back on the road.
Bustamante said in a nationally televised debate
between the top five candidates last month, "I think the
recall is bad for democracy, bad for our state. I know
people right now who are organizing to recall our next
governor if it's a Republican. I think that is a bad way
of doing politics, a perpetual way of politics."
So there are already people planning for Recall
II. And if you hear anybody shout the equivalent of
"Bayan Ko!" ("Our country," the EDSA rallying cry
for millions in 1986), on, say, Market Street in San
Francisco or Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, look
around. Things may be picking up.
(Copyright
2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved.
Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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