Dear President Obama,

A great crime is about to take place.

Opportunity is about to be dampened down by a great leap backward.

Some call it a budget. I call it a crime.

Some say we have no choice. I say, we have every choice before us.

Some say it’s just bad weather, a great storm passing through. I say, like Katrina, our leaders are working through and with the forces of nature to wreak their path of destruction, their scorched earth policy, to make manifest their dark, fear-filled vision.

Back in the waning days of Gray and the beginning days of Arnold upon California, another D.C. administration had the opportunity to set our state aright. When the ghosts of robber barons rose from the dead to clear cut the vast riches once more, it was prudent to look the other way, to chuckle at our plight, to partner in crime because they only saw unfriendly blue on the western shore.

Arnold, once again, made a bargain with the devil to take power’s seat, and many millions will feel the pain. As his first act, he stopped the effort to recover the stolen treasure and set the state on the downward path we now follow.

He came with a plan. “Government doesn’t work,” he said, and proceeded to make it so. Why are we surprised at this? It should be clear to all by now, a snake is a snake and a bad actor is a bad actor.

We know the perpetrator, we know the weapon, we know the place, all’s that needed to seal the deal is a simple two-thirds vote and a drop of red ink on paper, and our fate is sealed.

The government has a responsibility to not just protect us from evil, but to offer hope. To provide for the positive freedoms, you said, not just freedom from oppression, terrorism, coercion but freedom to become all you can dream (with all your rights granted under the constitution: the Bill of Rights II, healthcare, homes, education, and meaningful work).

Will you come to freedom’s aid in our dark hour?

American Union Heroes

http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2009/06/11/american-heroes-american-union-members/

Obama message and National Day of Community Service

On Jan. 20 a new president and administration begins in Washington, D.C. I was asked what this means to me and this is what I said: “As a labor leader fighting for the rights of state employees every day this inauguration has special meaning. After eight years of draconian policies and outright attacks on working people there is no question I would rather be supporting a new agenda in America taking us in a new direction. I see President Obama doing these things: returning us to civility in government and public debate, reaffirming domestic and international law, giving us an acknowledgment of and commitment to addressing the catastrophic affects of global climate change (not to mention science in general taking its rightful advisory role in public policy once again), and reordering our national priorities to put workers and their families — and their dreams — out in front because their daily toil is the bedrock of what makes this nation great.”

This is my expression of hope and I realize no one of us can do this alone, including the president. I encourage each of you to share with me what this change in government means to you and I can post them on our website or in our newspaper. Thanks. Now let’s get to work.

MLK Day is National Day of Community Service
One of our negotiated holidays is ML King Day on Jan. 19. This is also the National Day of Community Service. I encourage you to go to this webpage:
http://www.usaservice.org/page/content/eventsearch and find a community service event near you. I did a search within 10 miles of my home and came up with way too many choices. Lots of good groups need our help for those less privileged, whose numbers are increasing during these hard economic times.

Support the Employee Free Choice Act

<a href=”http://www.freechoiceact.org/aflciovideo”><img src=”http://www.freechoiceact.org/page/-/efca/oms_150.jpg” /></a>

Speech to rally for social and economic justice

This is a speech I gave today at a rally in San Francisco put on by the San Francisco Living Wage Coalition. 

Greetings — I’m Russell Kilday-Hicks and I work in the 23-campus Calif. State University system. My union, the Calif. State University Employees Union, part of the Calif. State Employees Association and SEIU Local 2579, represents 16,000 of the non-faculty staff forming the backbone of the CSU.  We do the mostly invisible work of cleaning the floors and toilets, tending the gardens and cutting the grass, filing records, looking after student health, and running computers and offices that enable the faculty to teach and a university education to transform lives.

 

We’ve seen the CSU cut by well over half a billion dollars since 2003, with another 212 million dollars just this year. Each year different campuses take turns going into fiscal crisis and start cutting programs and classes and hemorrhaging faculty and staff. Meanwhile, with the backdrop of Chancellor Reed playing violin, the trustees make deals in the back room to make sure CSU executives can afford a vacation home, or a yacht, or however the well-to-do spend labor’s wealth. Meanwhile, the students and their families are paying double the fees of just three years ago and each year threatens more increases, and the CSU can’t even come close to meeting demand, turning away tens of thousands of qualified students, and those in classes can’t get the courses they need to graduate — harder to get in and harder to get out is the new CSU creed. Meanwhile, we who run this place are expected to take on more students every year with fewer resources. In old-fashioned labor terms this would be called a factory speedup.

 

The workers and students are suffering the effects of a starved system, true, but the ones who ultimately suffer are all of us, the entire State of California. Every fee hike is making that door to opportunity a little harder to open. The citizens of California need to understand that cutting funds to the CSU is the very opposite of what needs to be done in hard economic times. Our higher education system is what made California a leader in the world and we are being told there is no money to continue to invest in our future. There’s plenty of money for illegal invasions and occupations, financial bailouts, and new prisons — this is certainly someone’s twisted dream of a future, but it need not be ours.

 

Education is a right not a privilege.  Work with me to restore California’s commitment to our collective future. A free public education is not unfair competition for the so-called for-profit University of Phoenix. A free public education is a necessity for our times and for restoring hope in our youth and real profit for us all instead of society’s wealth for just a few.  

Not socialism for the rich

I keep hearing this phrase used to describe the current economic meltdown and the Bush Administration’s solution to the tune of close to a trillion dollars of the nation’s wealth to prop up “the economy”: Socialism for the rich. The term bugs me because of its inaccuracy in a number of ways.

 

First the overall situation reminds me of a time when my first wife wanted to loan money we didn’t really have to a friend of hers. You see, her friend had gotten herself into a little jam. She had gambled away in Reno, Nevada, her mother’s life savings for retirement and needed a little seed money so she could win it back. All she needed was one good day on the market, oops, I mean the roulette wheel, and she would not have to tell her mother the bad news.

 

Every citizen is being asked to come up with roughly $3,000 seed money so the gamblers (and those who entrusted our wealth with them) don’t have to face what they have done (are you listening Phil Gramm?). We are all being asked to trust that a “good day at the table” is just around the corner. Does this sound like socialism to you?

 

There used to be more support for a concept that came out of the Great Depression Era called public pooled risk. This is the foundation of the Federal Social Security Insurance public safety net. If all of us put in a little then we can socialize the risk so none of us loses big and ends up with nothing. There are those who have been telling us slow and steady does not win the race. You have to take chances to make it big. Well, they happened to be in power for the last 30 or so years and we are now reaping the wisdom, such as it is, of their ideas. This is in fact the very opposite of socialism. And I like to remind people that Darwin himself was against the idea of “social Darwinism.”

 

So how do we describe better what is going on? We could call it the Great Republican Engineered Economic Disaster, or GREED for short, but we would have to ignore bipartisan culpability. Perhaps a better description would be crony capitalist pathological gambling syndrome. If that is too awkward for you, try “lemon-socialism,” which is defined as: if it makes money, it’s private; if it loses money, it’s public. (A good example of this would be the many “superfund” cleanup sites in the country. These are places where “private” industry turned their profit and left the toxic cleanup to the public. There are many examples, especially in the daily headlines.)

 

As you can plainly see, the root of socialism is the word “social” as in public. Behind that is the idea that there is an overall “public good.” Classical theory of government says the goal of all good government is to find this ideal and strive to support it over other competing interests, what the founders referred to as the inevitable “factions” that divide nations. What we are witnessing is the culmination of leadership that does not believe there is a public good, that in fact, the way to a healthy society is through the private, self-interested acts of individuals alone, “free” of government regulation and “politically correct” restraints. Believe me, if we continue to follow the ideas that got us into this mess we will continue to fall apart, and socialism is not on the table, especially for the rich.

 

It really is a crime of history that the examples of socialism and their demise are understood to be proof of a failed idea. The Soviet Union had strong elements of state capitalism (not to mention totalitarianism) that made calling it socialist questionable (as does China today). Their failure to liberate humanity, to put it simply, stems from a lack of commitment to democracy. Our nation is facing the same risk. Don’t be distracted by false claims of “socialism,” anti-democratic capitalism will be back, with a vengeance. 

 

To learn more about what’s really going on, read Namoni Kline’s “The Shock Doctrine” and Thomas Frank’s “The Wrecking Crew, How Conservatives Rule”

SF State President Corrigan, comment on 20 years at the helm

An SF State journalism student called asking me what I thought of President Robert A. Corrigan’s running of SF State for 20 years. Here is what I wrote.

 

I have the experience of seeing Dr. Corrigan from a number of perspectives over the last 14 or so years. As a student I often wondered where he was when I attended various events on campus. It seemed to me that he was better known off campus, even nationally where he was doing commendable work, than here at home. (I heard rumors that the university did have a president, and a friend in journalism used to joke about doing a headline in the Golden Gator announcing a “Corrigan sighting” on campus.) Later, as an employee of the university, where Dr. Corrigan was essentially my boss but insulated with many layers of middle managers, my perception of him and awareness of his direction of the university slowly grew. As I developed professionally with increasing responsibilities I had sparse direct contact but was learning what was important to him. (For example, a successful commencement “makes the boss happy,” and it’s nice to get his acknowledgement each year for a job well done — SF State has an awesome campus-wide team headed by Norma Siani, who has been here more than 50 years.) For the past 10 years, as a union leader on campus, I have dealt directly with his manager-representatives always wondering how much their positions were informed by his wishes. Again, not having any direct contact and certainly never meeting with him to discuss staff issues like I understand the faculty do regularly and other non-faculty staff leaders do on other campuses in the CSU.

 

 

In the last few months, with the growth of the Alliance for the CSU, I’ve had more direct contact with him than all the previous years combined. We lobbied state elected officials together and shared the stage to rally the campus behind the effort to get the CSU adequately funded and to stop the student fee increases in the state budget battle. Now, he regularly calls upon me for my staff-informed perspective when I attend the University Budget Committee meetings as a concerned bystander. I’ve always enjoyed his writings and speeches and I sometimes feel that the rest of campus should know about them. But you have to seek them out. His last two convocation speeches were very moving. He spoke personally and passionately about his own experiences in academia and how the Civil Rights Movement shaped his life. But the listeners were primarily new faculty and administrators. For the most part, the rest of the campus has no idea who he is and what makes him tick.

 

On some crucial questions I can only surmise where he stands. Where is he on the major issues facing all universities: the corporate takeover of America and universities being relegated to “serving the master” producing cogs to fit corporate wheels rather than turning out informed, critical-thinking citizens in our quasi-democratic experiment with nationhood? The expansive growth of the development office in the last ten years could be merely an indication of necessity and expediency; are there any attendant concerns for the integrity of the institution? I can only hope. From my experience there is a marked disconnect between the administration of the university and the legacy of SF State as a part of the 1960-era questioning of the status quo. True, we have the only college-level ethnic studies department but maybe it should be an ethnicity and worker studies college. How are the lowest among us treated and how do the intersections with race and gender play out right under our noses every day?

 

In the end it comes down to this. A university structure is the last vestige of feudalism and Corrigan is the lord of the manor. However, even Corrigan himself is still but a worker (true, a very privileged one with lots of say over his own and other’s lives comparative to say a janitor), but a worker with less job security than I have because he is an at-will employee and I have collective bargaining protections. Ultimately, even he, as powerful as he may seem, has to answer to the king.

Proud to be a state employee!

Take a moment to consider the current state of the state of our nation and California: a systemic budget crisis that promises to be ongoing for at least the next few years. Every year we go through the painful process of once again having to cut social programs, as if we aren’t doing enough. As if we didn’t have huge problems in our society: millions with no or wholly inadequate health insurance; millions unemployed and underemployed; a crumbling infrastructure; hunger in a wealthy land; universities turning away students; the young joining the military for “opportunity.” Working people are struggling like it was the 1890s.

For me, the most demoralizing aspect of all this is the disrespect afforded state employees. Follow the online paper in the state’s capital (the Sacramento Bee). Read any political story and then read the public discussion by the readers in the “Comments” space. Inevitably more than a few go off against us “lazy, privileged, pampered, etc.” state employees. We are the problem, don’t you know. Oh, and don’t forget their lousy (all too powerful) unions. I only wish we had a quarter of the power proscribed to us. Sort of like the way the Democrats are described in the media as “controlling” the state legislature. (Everyone knows that money is power. The Dems may have a majority but in this state it takes two thirds to control the money, so who has the power? Oh, and why don’t we have a budget yet?)

We can examine why the need for a scapegoat. After all, it’s an easy way out of seemingly intractable problems. But why state employees? There’s no doubt that some state employees are next to worthless, going along to get along and taking advantage of us all. But is it fair to characterize them all this way? Hardly. Every sector has its freeloaders, but there is this concept in economics called “socially necessary labor” in determining the value of something and along with that comes the idea that it all evens out. In other words, for every bum on the dole there are type A’s like me carrying their weight — and some.

In this case, the scapegoating of state employees is done because it works as a way of getting what you want while avoiding a real discussion of means and ends, values and priorities. Throw the bums out, and while you are at it, bring in the business leaders who really know how to run things to follow the “free” market and make it more “efficient.”

One problem with this is it just isn’t true. There is a strong empirical case to be made that state employees are very efficient. Look at just two pieces of evidence. Arnold made a campaign promise to root out and terminate waste in California government. Only his commission, The California Performance Review <http://cpr.ca.gov/report>, didn’t find much in the way of corruption or excessive waste. (Oh, they do make many viable suggestions to save the state 32 billion dollars over the next five years but the gov’ seems to have little interest in making these changes come about. Election time is over, I guess, but didn’t I hear something about a budget crisis?) Plus, when you compare just the number of state employees to population, California has one of the better ratios in the country, not to mention our high level of services that most states can’t even approach. Despite it’s strength, this evidence will not convince. People are not going to give up their easy out, and there are powerful interests that benefit from their promotion.

Besides, there are plenty of examples of historic precedent. Look at the attack on labor post the New Deal. There were the reactionary legislative attacks with Taft-Hartley and [tk]—damaging sure, but those were just the nails in the coffin. What built the coffin was an attack on the people of labor. Equating labor leaders with the world communist conspiracy was a stroke of genius. Along with the entertainment industry, labor was purged of anyone with the slightest hint of progressive values. Labor still struggles with that damaging legacy.

I could give some advice to the reactionaries who worship the “free” market, who would have us return to the heyday of American Federalism (their idea of democracy, one that limits empowerment to a few) when negroes were three fifths of a human, if that, and women were in their place—barefoot and pregnant and certainly not in the voting booth let alone elected office. The advice is this: Don’t attack the Social Security Insurance program if you want to dismantle it, attack the people who run it, or, better yet, attack the bums who live off it. Attack those who didn’t “work hard enough” or didn’t “invest” in some miracle stock to ensure their easy retirement. It’s their own fault they are not rich. (It goes without saying, shouldn’t everyone be?) Attacks on a program that works, that keeps many elderly out of retirement poverty just aren’t going to be as effective. (Not to mention the other aspects of the program that pool risk and provide benefits way beyond retirement.)

So we arrive at today. We are public employees at a great public institution. And that’s the problem. Haven’t you heard? Since the Ray-gun Revolution everything run publicly is suspect: inefficient, downright un-American. When the University of Phoenix attacks public higher education there’s charges of “unfair competition.” When it wants to lower all higher education standards so that they can increase their profit margin with more widgets produced (a.k.a. graduates) who gains really? These attacks have traction because of the groundwork laid—after all, they are public institutions staffed by state employees (need I say more?).

There was great vision and sacrifice (bi-partisan, I might add) to create the higher education system that has without doubt fed California’s world leadership. Now our problems are daunting because we live in an eternal present. Investment in the future? Who’s going to pay for that? God forbid we should even look to the future, let alone invest in it for someone else’s benefit (like our children and their children and their children, etc.).

I’m fond of telling people that I’m a very lucky man, doubly blessed. As a labor leader and employee in the CSU, not only do I get to daily defend workers rights to be full Americans in the workplace (you know, with rights such as free speech and assembly that workers in the “more efficient” private sector leave at the door), I’m a public employee both working at and defending a public institution that added greatly to the richness of my life (more quality but some quantity too) and to that of an already rich state and country. To condense my point: I’m a proud state employee. And if you work for the state, you should be too.

How should state employees react?

The governor signed his order to temporarily reduce state employee pay to the federal minimum wage. Fortunately, we in the CSU are insulated from his antics (”We are working to ensure that CSU employees will receive their regular paychecks and can expect their normal compensation until a new budget is signed,” Chancellor Reed said in a recent press release.), but we are state employees and the governor has asked the CSU to comply voluntarily with the order, so his intent was that it would affect us too. What to do? There is no question we should stand in solidarity, not only with our sister union in CSEA, SEIU Local 1000 — who would be affected, but with all state employees, whether unionized or not (his order affects non-unionized managers as well). There are two arguments that I’ve heard so far on what action, or not, to take.

On one side there is the “we need to be professional” argument, sometimes stated as taking the higher ground and not stooping to his level. This side is not happy with the turn of events but argues we should not take the bait and get involved. There is something to be said for this argument, having to do with integrity and seeing yourself as the consummate public servant. Of course, it would be hard not be involved if you are one of the 22,000 “temporary” or seasonal workers losing your job. Republican state employees are more inclined to take this tack as they are embarrassed for their governor but don’t want to abandon all hope that he will come to his senses. For some reason they saw Arnold as more than just a CEO for the state, so this corporate behavior can be a little disconcerting. States, nor businesses for that matter, don’t have to be run this way, but it does seem to be the current fad. 

On the other side there is the argument that the governor apparently needs to hear from us again, like he did with his special election attack on state employee unions a few years back. There are two approaches on this side. One says if employees are to be paid minimum wage then they should deliver work that is only worth $6.55 an hour. There are two major flaws with this particular argument.

One is that state employees are to be paid eventually (I’m assuming without interest because I haven’t heard that mentioned, which can hurt those who have to borrow money to get by) so this argument to “work to rule” doesn’t quite make sense. (BTW — The state employee credit union, Golden One, has said that for existing members with direct deposit they will provide interest-free loans equal to full wages until the budget passes. This is one of the many advantages to having your money in a credit union owned by the members, as opposed to a for-profit bank, owned by private shareholders.)

The second flaw in producing like you are being paid minimum wage has to do with the underlying assumption of low-paid work. This fallacious assumption feeds into the economic myth of meritocracy, which says that the harder you work, the more you are rewarded. While this may be true in a few lucky exceptions, the reality of our economic system is often just the opposite: the harder you work the less you are paid. So if we follow this through, state employees should be working harder than ever under minimum wage. We are, of course, speaking of working for wages and not for yourself. (I’m also not confusing physical and mental work together, comparing apples to oranges, so to speak. The mental/manual split is another myth of the working world. This idea pretends that physical labor is “unskilled” and mentally easy, again often the opposite of reality. Lots of very physical work also takes great mental discipline, skill and agility, and concentration — especially if you want to avoid injury. And on the other side, I know you’ve heard that stress kills. How is that not physical?)

The second approach to letting the governor know what we think about what he thinks about our everyday efforts on behalf of the state, assuming you agree that there is a need for us to react, is to put pressure on the process somehow. The trick is to do it not in the way the governor intended — which was to demand the Democrats give up the idea of new revenue and make deeper cuts than already proposed — but to help get a budget that doesn’t hurt working people in the state and continues to ensure that we are investing in our collective future. 

With all the press coverage provided on the budget impasse what is often missed is the bottom line, which is that the Republicans, a minority party in California, are holding the budget process hostage. Calls to reach budget compromise, often spoken against the entire legislature as “not doing their job,” miss the mark. There is not equal weight on both sides in their unwillingness to compromise. The fact of the matter is: the Democratic budget proposal is a compromise because it contains both cuts and suggestions for new revenue. If the Democrats were to present a parallel proposal to the Republican “no new taxes” mantra, it would not include any cuts to social programs. Holding an absolute “no new taxes” agenda avoids any public debate over whether everyone is paying his or her fair share. The Republicans represent a minority, unfortunately, a powerful minority. For them, holding the budget hostage is a wedge to loosen labor laws and environmental restraints, etc. — things having little to do with the budget directly.

So the message should be, loud and clear, hold the line Democrats; don’t cave. You’ve compromised enough. How long can they hold out? It may be up to state employees. We may be able to last through the November election. It’s a long shot but possible that the Democrats can pick up enough seats (the question is: how big are Obama’s coattails?) to have a 2/3 majority outright. Just two seats in the State Senate and six in the State Assembly are all that’s needed. The governor at any point after a budget is passed can still exercise his line-item veto before he signs it and make any cuts he thinks he can politically get away with.

Other than that, I don’t have a short-term fix to the budget process because we are too deep in the dodo. I do have long-term ideas, with the strong bias that any eventual fixes to our budget process be democracy-enhancing (e.g. a simple return to majority rule would be a good start).

I’ve said it before, the budget process is about values. What kind of state do we want to be? One where quality of life for everyone (especially working people) is a focus or one where a powerful minority who are bent on playing Monopoly in real time get their way with the majority. We call this a democracy, but sometimes you have to wonder.

State budget revealed

Analysis by Russell Kilday-Hicks printed in the November 2007 issue of “University Employee” CSUEU newsletter

The here and now
It’s a truism that California has a thriving movie business. And like the movie “Groundhog Day,” the California legislature is stuck in a yearly remake called “Groundhog Budget Day.” And, just like some overused Hollywood blockbuster, we just saw sequel number 17 (six in the last seven years, all filmed over the last 30 years). But, you can relax now. California finally has a state budget. This was not the latest they’ve ever been at getting the job done. While the constitutional deadline was mid-June with the real deadline the start of the new fiscal year at the beginning of the summer, July 1, in the end, they were only 52 days late. The latest the state has ever been was in 2002 when it was more than two months overdue.

This tired script repeats, and may go on repeating, year after year, because the major elements: the competing powers, the budget structure, and the reluctance of key entities in the state to take responsibility for paying their fair share, all resist change. What’s at stake doesn’t change, however. But if the state is going to be serious about investing in its future, which would include our particular charge of supporting the higher education of the children of the working class in California, change—of a particular sort—is just what we need.

BTW—You may have heard that we will still most likely get most of our negotiated raises. While our raises may not be as large as we had hoped, due to some contingency language in the budget tied to the whims of the legislature to provide more funding than previously planned to the CSU, the language just drives us back to the bargaining table.

Not to say the legislature didn’t explore taking away what was minimally promised. That trial balloon was floated and something quite unprecedented happened. The legislature got a joint letter from the chancellor’s office and the unions representing the majority of the staff in the largest higher education system in the world (nearly 40,000 of us) saying that this would be a bad idea. Of course, we don’t need convincing but sometimes you have to make some noise to stop a dog from barking up the wrong tree.

Budget and bargaining past
That letter and the new climate of cooperation reflect a power shift and our very real gains in our involvement and influence in the budget process. Here’s the story: In years past when we first went to the bargaining table (usually in February or March, before the “May revise” when the governor adjusts his numbers based on actual state revenue rather than January’s projected numbers) the CSU would steadfastly refuse to talk money. They would talk anything else, from the weather to the dotting of “i’s” and the crossing of “t’s” but their stance remained: “There was no point in talking money until the state budget passed,” they would say. “Only then will we know how much we are dealing with.” This whole process was bass ackwards, so to speak. Our needs mattered little to the CSU. That’s not real bargaining and was probably a violation of the spirit if not the letter of the bargaining law laid out in the Higher Education Employee Relations Act (HEERA).

Then, after the legislature passed a budget, with funding for the CSU at least partially based on the CSU’s own stated needs in their budget request to the legislature, the CSU would skip happily over to the bargaining table saying: “Here’s the pie CSUEU; how do you want to slice it?” Unfortunately, that pie was often pretty lean to begin with, which is why we saw pitiful raises of nothing or a measly 1.5 percent that hardly kept pace with inflation these years past. Upon closer examination there was a fatal flaw in this game. CSUEU President Pat Gantt understood member frustration but felt people were too quick to blame a seemingly powerless union. “Many people forget that we can’t get more dollars on the bargaining table until the Legislature allocates it to the CSU in the budget,” he said. The problem: the CSU was not asking for enough money to begin with. We, your union, were determined to change that.

We entered the process like never before with rallies on almost all the campuses (some held more than one), with letters and e-mails (Chancellor Reed was heard to complain about the number of e-mails, once asking a gathering of CSU labor leaders “What good does it do for me to get 500 e-mails a day?”), with visits to lawmakers, and, along with our sister union, the CFA, by putting pressure on the media to cover what was really going on. “Something happened; we did something they have never seen before,” President Gantt said. This is the key to our future.

The budget this time
The almost-yearly budget stalemate is usually characterized as bipartisan bickering. This time around the “partisan gridlock” of two competing political parties came with a new twist—a Republican governor siding with the Democratic majority. After Republicans and Democrats in the Assembly came to agreement (only a month late at that point) it seemed like we were close to a resolution because only two Senate Republicans were needed to sign on to get the two-thirds majority needed (the two-thirds requirement is from a law passed in 1879, and California is one of only three states in the country with this rule). In all other areas of state governance we have majority rule (a.k.a. democracy) except when it comes to (what some would say is the crux of power) finances. In 1978 a majority of the voters of California added tax increases to the short list of a two-thirds legislative voting requirement. Passing a tax cut is not held to the same standard, however. And that outlines one of the issues needing to be addressed to fix this perpetual mess.

While trying to hold the “high ground” on why the Senate Republicans needed to delay agreement (to be “fiscally responsible” in a time when state spending exceeds income, so they said) an examination of the proposed last-minute cuts they demanded tells a different story. Some had nothing to do with the budget.

In the end, the state was held hostage for an extra month by a handful of Republican senators acting without the approval of even the state leader of their party. This had the affect of exposing the game like never before. The first Senate Republican to turn, Abel Maldonado, stated that his colleagues had essentially moved the goal posts. He said they had already gotten everything they asked for at the beginning of the process. Senate majority leader Don Perata demanded the Republicans “tell us what you want.” One of the items on their over $800 million list of additionally proposed cuts they responded with included the yearly attack on the “UC Labor Union Institute.” Of course their real name is the Miguel Contreras Labor Program. Nowhere on the institute’s website is there a mention of unions. The Republicans call this non-profit research group a “special interest” because it’s one of only a few groups in the state doing research on the working population in California and occasionally that research shows the advantages of unions for working people (and unionized businesses too, by the way). There are countless groups doing “pro-business” (anti-union) research that the Republicans do not call “special” and are perfectly happy to keep funded.

The Republican holdout may have convinced the governor to use his “line-item” veto to cut an additional $700 million from the budget after it “passed” but he may have done that anyway. He promised not to touch the CSU and he kept that promise. In the final analysis, like the answer to the question of why a dog licks his private parts (because he can), nothing more was gained for the Republicans but the crass display of power for power’s sake. It must be tough to be a minority party for years on end, but there is a chance their manipulation and abuse of their budget responsibility, as Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez characterized their position, will backfire on them.

Long-term fix
The problems are not that simple but many of the solutions are. The Republican “hammer” on every “nail” deemed a “special interest” will not rebuild our state. How does one of the wealthiest states in the wealthiest country on the planet have a yearly problem with revenue outstripping income? The problem comes from having to rely on sales; when sales go down, fees go up (like student fees) because fees don’t take a two-thirds vote. The Republican mantra of “no new taxes” is smoke and mirrors. They are just pushing up “taxes” by another name. What they mean to say is the little people should pay and the rich shall get richer. And they are, believe me.

For now, what is to be done?
Here’s the real deal: political pressure. It’s the only game in town. Like we saw when the legislature floated the idea of not fully funding the “compact” made between the governor and the chancellor, the pressure turned them back. We must get better at this, not only with our coalitions like the SEIU State Council but in the local relationships we create and the noise each and every one of us can make. We need to convince both the legislature, one lawmaker at a time, and the taxpaying citizens in the state that not only can we afford an investment in the CSU, we have a bleak future if we don’t do just that.

The only long-range fix: change the two-thirds requirement (we tried and failed in 2004); return to majority rule and fix this tired script. I can’t bear to watch another Sacramento sequel.