Outis

Like some of my fellow citizens, I have been catching up on the state of California, my adopted home for the last eight years.

The more I learn about the political culture and history of this, the most populous state in the union, the more I am ashamed to have been so ignorant of its leading political figures for so long.

Adding to this humbling experience is the realization that I should and could have known better, primarily due to the 1998 publication date of a book called “Paradise Lost” by Peter Schrag.

Suffice to say that whatever cogent ideas are to be found in the highly publicized and perennially hip book “City of Quartz” by Mike Davis they are outnumbered and rendered far more clearly — and systemically — by Schrag’s highly erudite and gripping account.

“Paradise Lost” is a page-turner with footnotes — and, perhaps, thanks to my previous if superficial relationship with many of his sources, from the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office to the California Budget Project, those footnotes actually prove useful and unambiguous.

After a week during which I’ve read David Broder’s “Democracy Derailed” (on the initiative process in California, among other states), Schrag’s book and, during email breaks, countless stories on the Web about Golden State politics, I feel like I’ve gotten the political science education I never wanted when I was in school.

A few weeks ago, prior to my bath in the river of history, I asked whether the California gubernatorial recall election could be seen as a decision about progress and, thus, teleology, taking the occasion to reflect on Christianity and its offerings on the question.

Since then, Alabama has emerged as a more deserving candidate for my theological arguments while California, though undoubtedly in the throes of a highly ideological political crisis, has shifted quite clearly into the realm of the word made flesh — of fact rather than fantasy.

Yes, California is deciding on the question of progress. But this decision is shaped largely — if obliquely, as if a re-enactment of Plato’s Cave — by figures and factors that are not of a metaphysical nature.

Instead, we are dealing with the repercussions of a series of specific decisions, most written into law — and the highest law of this land, at that, the state constitution — and their equivalent in fiscal policy. Dollars and cents. Wealth and poverty. Freedom and power.

The specifics of this story are outlined, persuasively, in the August issue of the California Journal as well as in an essay on the recall election and its antecedents published by The Nation and penned by Schrag, himself. A longer, less eloquent version follows.

Preface
By way of introduction and warning, the following account attempts to skirt partisan politics and the role of money, of corporate and private interests, then and now, in the history of California’s political culture. Perhaps, this is a futile effort. Whether it makes this cursory summary useless or useful, I cannot say. Finally, this timeline does not discuss the specifics of the effort to recall Gray Davis.

1900-1978

California’s political framework, its constitution, is forever altered by a reform movement that swept the nation in the early 1900s. The goal of this reform was to limit the power of a corrupt legislature by reducing its powers and increasing those of the general populace through such instruments as the recall, the referendum and the initiative.

Because the United States is a democratic republic, its leaders are entrusted with decision-making powers. The people, the demos, are, in turn, entrusted with choosing the decision-makers. This relationship was modified by the reformers when they gave the people the ability to draft and pass laws without consulting or requiring the approval of the legislature.

However, because many of the reformers who sought to add these tools to American politics were themselves elected into office (e.g., President Theodore Roosevelt and Governor Hiram Johnson in California), the recall, referenda and initiative were used sparingly for more than half a century after their adoption. The reformers and their progressive campaign had become part of the institution, to positive effect.

During the 50 years that followed, California grew, mostly after — and, perhaps, as a result of — World War II. That growth was magnified by the creation of a society and accompanying political program that approved of and benefited from massive construction projects [.PDF, see pp. 35-44] which ranged in kind from education to water infrastructure to the state’s highway system. Of course, all this massive public spending depended upon massive public revenues which in turn were generated by such financial instruments as property taxes, income taxes and the sales tax.

In 1962, California becomes the most populous state and is generally regarded as one of the best places to live — largely as a result of the social and political cohesion that is driving and financing its growth. By the mid to late 1960s, however, these same engines of change would confront reality in a variety of discomforting guises — from socio-cultural to economic upheaval as well as the start of a major shift in California’s demographics. [PDF]

In 1962, Cesar Chavez organized the National Farm Workers Association in Fresno. In 1963, the California legislature passed the Rumford Act, banning racial discrimination in sales or rentals of housing. In 1964, the same year that the federal Civil Rights Act was passed by the U.S. Congress, California voters passed Prop 14, a constitutional amendment initiative to repeal the Rumford Act and its fair housing mandate. In 1965, the African-American community of Watts in Los Angeles erupted in a six day-long riot.

1978-1996

Nevertheless, many of the larger projects which created California’s vast infrastructure and enabled its wealth and economic well-being would be completed despite this turbulence. However, the fallout of these socio-political changes would coincide with widespread economic problems in the 1970s to create a crisis in values that culminated with the passage of Prop 13, an initiative that amended the constitution so as to limit the amount of money the state could raise via (quite inefficient) property taxes.

The passage of Prop 13 set off a national movement that would later be credited with the Reagan presidency and numerous other legislative — rather than plebiscitarian — changes to the state and the nation’s political landscape. It continues to be called a “tax revolt.” In fact, a second constitutional tax-cutting initiative, authored by one of the proponents of Prop 13 and marketed as the “Spirit of 13” would pass a few years later.

The loss in revenues and related restrictions on future tax laws — both the consequences of this one instance of “direct democracy” — forced local government to rely on state government for monies in order to meet its obligations and eventually led the state government, with its now limited powers to raise revenue, to a perennial deficit.

This deficit coincided with a Republican governor (and White House), a Democratic legislature (controlled by urban, minority-group liberals), a rapid growth in the state’s immigrant population and the continuing freeze in the growth of the middle-class, white population for whom the California Dream of the 50s and 60s was supposedly designed.

One possible cause for this demographic shift is attributed to the 1986 passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act. Signed into law by President Reagan, a former governor of California, the IRCA gave amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants — mainly from Latin America — and, perhaps, spurred them to petition the INS on behalf of their spouses, children and parents. All told, the population of California increased one and half-times between 1970 and 1990. California received over 34% of all immigrants to the U.S. in the 1980s.

By the late 1980s, the governor of California (Republican) was taking money out of K-12 education funds in order to pay for the services no longer financed by property taxes. His decision to do so many not have been helped by the legislature’s apparent inability to confront the fall-out of the “tax revolt” with pragmatic resolve. It should be noted that since 1933, California has required a super-majority consensus or two-thirds vote by the legislature to pass its budget and partisan tensions have seldom made that process efficient.

Because education continues to be a “push-button” issue for Californians, the siphoning of money from K-12 education funds led to yet another constitutional amendment, Prop 98. Whereas other initiatives had attempted — and failed — to modify the anti-tax amendments of the preceding decade, Prop 98 avoided the question of financing altogether and simply offered to set a constitutional baseline for K-12 education spending.

In a pattern than has continued to this day, Prop 98 presented a solution without any concern for its cost. While it prevented future governors and legislators from taking funds out of education, it encouraged them to take funds out of other programs: welfare, health care — nevermind infrastructure.

Likewise, the problem of the urban, minority-group liberals who controlled the legislature — i.e., State Assembly Speaker, Willie Brown — would be summarily solved. Another constitutional amendment, also introduced via the initiative process as Prop 140, set term limits which prevent California’s legislators from serving more than a single term in the Assembly and no more than two terms in the state Senate.

The same initiative also nearly halved the number of professional staffers that could be hired by legislators to sort out the fiscal and policy concerns of the state that ranks as one of the six largest economies in the world. Such term and resource limits were not imposed on lobbyists who can remain in contact with the legislature for decades and hire as many experts as they can afford.

In the early 1990s, California suffers a recession. It is possible that some manufacturing had leaked out of the state in the 1980s, possibly as a result of the emphasis on sales taxes that Prop 13 foisted upon local governments. When presented with competing development projects, regional planners would choose retail facilities over manufacturing in order to earn sales taxes and recoup the loss of property tax funds lost to Prop 13.

During this economic downturn, the new governor, Pete Wilson, raised taxes (eventually reducing them for the highest income bracket earners and corporations), took flak for doing so, and, eventually, settled upon a series of initiatives that could bolster his standing in both the general population and among fellow GOP politicians who had harshly criticized his use of taxes despite the circumstances.

Those democratic initiatives, now serving the interests not only of well-heeled private parties but, remarkably, of an elected politician, would amend the constitution to exclude illegal immigrants from a variety of public services (including U.S. citizens born to illegal immigrants) through Prop 187, create mandatory sentencing guidelines for persons convicted of a third felony (violent or not) through Prop 184, and abolish affirmative action programs managed by the state government through Prop 209.

In each of these cases, as with Prop 13 and Prop 98 before them, an undeniable problem that may or may not have been gradually resolved through legislative reforms, possibly involving the general population, were dealt with quickly and without room for future adjustments. In fact, a mandatory-sentencing law had already been passed by legislators the year before Prop 184 was put to vote. Moreover, a competing measure would have made a distinction between violent and non-violent offenses (e.g., stealing a bicycle or videotapes).

The importance of allowing for future adjustments cannot be understated. Laws respond to a changing set of factors: from federal funding to economic developments, from judicial rulings to demographics trends. Constitutional amendments, on the other hand, are fixed — regardless of the reality on the ground.

Moroever, here is an instance of a governor using an instrument of the general population to enact laws that would otherwise be crafted in a deliberative process between his office and that of the legislative branch of government. In the end, all of these initiatives would be challenged by the courts — the third branch. Wilson would be unsuccessful in his bid for re-election as well as his campaign for president.

1996-2003

However, the political, social and economic consequences of these three measures would endure.

The rhetoric of alien exclusion, which was used to push through an issue of federal vs. state fiscal policy (the federal government had reneged on promises to compensate California for the influx of illegal immigrants, an influx probably precipitated by federal decisions — to say nothing of U.S. foreign policy), resulted in a very strident symbolic rebuke of all immigrants, particularly Mexican and Latin Americans.

Though this initiative failed a constitutional test — a test that, given California’s initiative system, can only be applied after an election and, thus, after tens of millions of dollars in television ads and similarly manipulative propaganda — the issue continues to linger on the edges of the state’s political discourse.

The sentencing amendment did pass muster, all the way up to the U.S. Supremer Court. As a result, California’s prison system has expanded at a rate that is several times that of the other most populous states. The cost of such expansion has come out of that shrinking portion of the state’s budget which is left after Prop 98 takes its share. It has also elevated the power of the prison guards union (just as Prop 98 has propped up the teachers union).

Because Prop 13 ties state revenues to income and sales taxes, the national recession which began in 1999 has cost California a great deal of its funding. There is less money to go around and more mandates to spend what little of it is left.

Governor Davis, elected in 1996 and re-elected in 2000, benefited from the boom of the late 90s but apparently did not care to prepare for the all-but-predestined bust. As a result, none of the structural and mutually exclusive demands written into the state’s constitution were addressed during his first term. Nor are the largely inexperienced legislators swept in by term limits — and, apparently, disinvested in any long-term solutions given their short-term agendas — making any effort to address the implications of the past for present and future needs.

Adding to the legislative gridlock in Sacramento are three decades of reapportionment which have allowed both parties to carefully carve out safe districts for their members. By 2003, the percentage of electoral districts where Republican and Democratic candidates for the legislature primarily compete against members of their own party for election is estimated at 86%. This lack of bipartisan competition at the polls has resulted in ever more ideologically orthodox politicians for whom compromise is seldom necessary or expedient — regardless of the outcome for the state’s 32 million residents.

Meanwhile, the demographics of California continue to shift towards an evermore diverse — and, for the moment, polarized — population. On the one hand are the still largely disenfranchised (non-voting) majority of minorities — mostly immigrant, many with Latin American roots — and their limited economic and educational prospects. On the other hand is an aging white populace, middle class, most of whom vote, many of whom will may turn to tomorrow’s government coffers for assistance with medical costs and related services.

Finally, the voters of California have been asked to use an instrument of direct democracy yet again to intervene in a system that is largely considered broken because of both a lack of courage on the part of legislators and a lack of legislative foresight on the part of voters who have been sold on the initiative as the political equivalent of such American panaceas as the diet pill, the credit card, plastic surgery and lawsuits. Sold, that is, by mass media which collects the lion’s share of campaign spending (through advertising) while mostly overlooking the legislative process.

It is, nonetheless, a remarkable moment for the citizen-as-legislator. For all the damage done by previous plebiscites, with their hit-and-run approach to problem-solving, at least 100 private citizens have paid the $3,500 fee to run for governor. While they will not win out over the well-heeled interests that have determined the outcome of most initiative and legislative races in recent history, they do at least represent a willingness on behalf of the citizen-as-legislator to rise to the occasion and spend more than 20 minutes of their time on the future of California — and, possibly, its history and current of opportunities.

postscript
A more concise and entertaining version of the above appeared in the L.A. Weekly by D. J. Waldie.

I’ve been on holiday, working a scant 32 work hours a week and spending a great deal of time at places like St. Louis International Airport.

In the interim, I’ve also taken to and drifted away from and been pulled back into the wonderful if limited world of Friendster.

Somewhere deep inside this database-driven retread of SixDegrees.com is a very powerful tool for exploring the fertile roots we lay as typically nomadic citizens of the First World.

We move — our friendships stay put. Something like Friendster could help our friendships move along with us by tying them, somehow, to the Internet.

Mostly, I’ve connected with old friends despite the distances that separate us. I’m terribly happy about the security this gives me, the reassurance that “friendship never dies” despite the fact that once the Friendster-enabled “hardware handshake” is complete, I don’t really know that we will always see each other again or, even, exchange words. In the dark cave, our hands have clasped and released. And that’s really enough, isn’t it?

I’ve also had to ponder the meaning of “friendship.” Apparently, in America, the word “friend” — like so many other things — is one-size-fits-all and that size is Extra Large.

Of course, there’s nothing distinctly American about discrepancies between our varying definitions of what constitutes a relationship– its beginning, its end, its depth and its implications. For example, I consider one person in my Friendster “network” to be an intimate friend who, for a variety of reasons, must surely not think the same of me. Nevertheless, there is a wealth of common experiences between us — not all good, many wonderful — which upholds the designation of friendship.

I cannot say the same for all with whom I am currently aligned. Thus, despite the fact that Friendster was designed to make visible and, in turn, useful, the connections that exist between people on a schematic plane, I am unable to manifest the very gradations that render relationships meaningful in the real world.

One simple solution to this possibly important lack of information would be to introduce “distance.”

It might seem ironic that I would suggest putting some space between myself and my friends given what I’ve written above (being reunited with those who are now far-away) but the distance of which I speak now is neither physical nor insurmountable. Rather, it should suffice to demonstrate how it is that most of us likely envision our own universe — in my case, as a drifting nucleus — using the logic of a place rather than a logical expression (e.g., “I am a friend of Jane, Jane is a friend of Juan, ergo I am a friend of Juan.”)

Or am I the only person to ever think that there are such things as “close” friends? From whence this distinction of “close” and “not so close” if not some perceived continuum through which our relationships are ordered — perhaps, by values that are hardly universal, but ordered, nonetheless.

Expressed in this graphical fashion, we would be able to quickly deduce how our perceptions of our own intimate circle differ — often drastically — from the perceptions of those same people with whom we credit one’s intimacy.

The resulting landscape might be no different from the kind of mental image you get by inspecting the “testimonials” that Friendster prods one to produce, value and trade.

The advantage, I suppose, is that the brand of euology available on Friendster as a “testimonial” strikes me as needlessly performative — a social rite not unlike disbursing a limited number of “My Little Pony” stickers at a party. Surely, we should be able to preserve some element of privacy if scheme’s like Friendster are to truly live alongside reality — and not, temporarily, in its place.

There is nothing permanent. The same applies to emotions and to our own self-understanding. One of the best things about friendship, that enduring bond that has both changed and endured through centuries of radical cultural transformations, is the way in which it behaves with elasticity.

In this sense, friendship is a rubber band. It would be far better to represent some of the kinetics this type of ligature implies visually than to subsume all such bonds into a single category with vague, generic properties and implications.

Unless, of course, you concede that the original purpose of Friendster, as admitted by its designers, is simply to exploit such bonds for the sole purpose of dating and mating. In which case, all is fair — is it not?

postscript
The Visual Thesaurus is a strong example of an interactive tool that allows us to visualize a set of relationships.

A shitload of Friendster “news” can be read here which is where you will find a link to one man’s hand-drawn and then computer-aided representations of his own Friendster network.

completely unrelated
NASA has produced an excellent, breath-taking web site devoted to satellite imagery of the earth that is tied to specific natural disasters (from storms to malaria). While it only barely counts as a visual depiction of our relationships to one another, these images of the recent blackout in the northeast region of the United States say something I can’t.

Yesterday, a friend and colleague sent me a story from the wires about a woman who’d locked her three year old daughter in the trunk of a car. Eventually, authorities detected the child’s presence and the toddler was rescued, unharmed.

The email, titled “…you had faith in humanity?,” was one of those stories that circulate best via email, the kind that are not tethered to a current event but, rather, serve to plumb the depths of human stupidity or indifference.

It was, in fact, one of those stories that gets catalogued under such glib headings as “Oddly Enough” or “Strange News.” Typically less than 500 words, these polished anecdotes make great trading cards. Collect them all.

But what of that girl and what of her mother?

It turns out that the mother and daughter were visiting a prison — an imprisoned husband, for that matter. They were there to visit the mother’s husband, but, because the infant was not on the inmate’s visitors’ list, she was turned away at the door.

At this point, the mother could have gotten back in her car and driven another 3 hours and 37 minutes back to her home in Montgomery County.

But, instead, she made a very callous and stupid decision. She put her daughter in the trunk of her car, possibly thinking this would keep her out of harm’s way, and the rest is, well, a matter of attempted aggravated assault, endangering the welfare of children and reckless endangerment.

The child is now in the custody of the state — as is the mother, and, of course, her husband.

I’ve checked for updates to this story. There have been none.

As far as the press is concerned, we’ve learned all that we can from this particular misfortune.

But, have we? Where others might see only a child rescued from the hands of an unfit mother, I see, as well as that, a series of juridical and economic circumstances that may have placed that same child in harm’s way. For example:

Why did this prison not have a day-care facility for the children of those families who care enough to visit its inmates?

Was the imprisoned husband the girl’s father? Was he in prison for life or for another few years? Had he been sentenced for murder or for writing bad checks?

Does the mother have access to a caretaker for her daughter? If not, does the mother work?

Will the three year old be turned over to a member of her extended family or be placed in a foster home while her mother awaits trial?

I raise all these questions not to excuse away or otherwise diminish the gravity of the bad behavior described above. Rather, I wanted only to deliberate a bit on just what sort of a conclusion I am to draw from this account.

My answer, at this time, is uncertain.

Oddly enough, it was President G. W. Bush who, just a few days ago, cited the Biblical passage “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?” Though he did so while deflecting pressure to chime in on same-sex marriage and thus strain his relationship with social conservatives, the imperative expressed by this sentiment is not as easy to dismiss — or explain — as the president’s motives for citing it.

The belief that one should not look without for wrongdoing before looking within is about as difficult a moral principle as any I can imagine. This restraint becomes even more meaningful in a society where poverty very often determines one’s relationship to the courts of both law and public opinion — i.e., the press.

Taking such a pause, I look beyond the child and the mother, the trunk and the prison, and ask what leads parents to neglect their children? Is it always malice? Or is it often ignorance?

Parents, even those who consciously wish their children no harm, do all manner of bad things, from accidental starvation to simply failing to read to them on a regular basis (only 53% of children ages three to five receive that attention.) Prior to the 1980s, there were no child restraint laws on the books and, quite likely as a result, the number of children who died in automobile accidents then is twice what it is today.

As a child, I was no stranger to domestic violence. Nor was my childhood untouched by the long-term repercussions of imprisonment — of crime and punishment. While in my own case, the crime was of a political nature, the punishment and its implications for the family of the punished were hardly of an “immaterial” or “ideological” nature.

If, in my homeland of Cuba, it is a crime to be an active member of a political minority, what of a society like that of the United States, where being a member of an economic minority — i.e., poor — is often tantamount to a “suspect” life?

How many imprisoned mothers and fathers in the U.S. are severed from their children — their children, in turn, “incarcerated” either in foster homes or in a mental state of hopelessness and isolation — because of crimes committed solely through participation in America’s booming “black” markets?

Actually, I can answer that last question: there are now more than two million people in America’s prisons. How many are parents? A very, very conservative estimate of 1 out of every 25 inmates would still put the number of families affected by incarceration to include roughly 80,000 children.

I suppose, to make this short, I do have an answer to my friend’s rhetorical question.

Yes, I do have faith in humanity. My faith, like that of our legal system and our supposedly egalitarian society, is based on the irrational assertion that prevention and rehabilitation are the just responses to crimes where there is no mailicious intent.

My faith in humanity leads me to ask what happens next for the real people involved in the misfortune described above — as well as what happened before.

Of course, I doubt we’ll read that story anytime soon in the pages of “Oddly Enough” and “Strange News.”

postscript [08/06/2003]

However, I would find a related story in the “Health” section of Google News. On poverty, power, inexperience and abuse:

If the rest of the country reflected what happened in North Carolina recently, an estimated 1,300 U.S. children experienced severe or fatal head trauma from child abuse during the past year, a new study concludes.

Of those, 1,200 were in the first year of their lives. Infant boys born to younger, unmarried mothers faced a significantly higher likelihood of suffering serious or fatal head injuries from abuse than infant girls or children under age two with older, married mothers, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill study showed.

Infants born to non-white mothers or who were first born also faced a higher risk of such injuries, scientists found.

“Estimated 300 children died in the U.S. … ” University of North Carolina, 8/06/2003

Why, you may ask, is this statistical projection significant? According to the same press release: “It is important to have this baseline information so that when preventive interventions are done, we have a way to judge our possible success.”

Preventitive interventions. How about that child-care facility?  

On prisons [8/07/2003]

Study Finds 2.6% Increase in U.S. Prison Population .

On sentencing and mercy [8/13/2003]

“High court justice crusades for mercy, calls sentences too severe, too long,” San Francisco Chronicle. Courtesy of the same friend who sent me the original wire story.