California Comeback from p. 1
July 12 - 25, 2013
Serving the Seven Cities of the Harbor Area
“We kept trying to talk to him, he didn’t want to talk to us,” said Rick Jacobs, head of the Courage Campaign, who moderated the panel. But the California Federation of Teachers put up the funding to circulate petitions for the millionaires’ tax and the response forced Brown’s hand. “Without [California Federation of Teachers] taking that risk and empowering the people here, the governor’s measure would have gone forward as it was, and we probably would have lost,” Jacobs said, “It was the first time in the history of the state a governor pulled a ballot measure he was circulating.” Anthony Thigpenn of California Calls, has a long history of innovative grassroots organizing, going back to LA Jobs With Peace in the 1980s, as well as coalition-building, with the progressive precinct network Coalition ‘88 in the 1988 elections. California Calls is a more diversified statewide version, involving 31 local organizations. “We came together to focus on tax and fiscal budget issues,” Thigpenn said, “We have a long-term strategy of essentially changing the California electorate, so that poor people, people of color, immigrants, young people would come out to vote consistently for progressive taxes.” A 2006 polling report by the California Public Policy Institute, “California’s Exclusive Electorates,” found that the voting-day electorate was disproportionately whiter, older and more conservative than the state’s population as a whole, as Random Lengths reported at the time. If the whole electorate showed up to vote, “California could have bigger government and
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higher taxes: Non-voters prefer higher taxes/ more services to lower taxes/fewer services by a 66-26 percent margin, compared to 49-44 percent among voters.” In effect, the coalition behind Prop. 30 is dedicated to making that larger electorate a permanent reality. “It was a unique blend of many different styles, many different strategies, but all toward the same goal of fixing California.” Thigpenn said of the initiative coalition. “Most important, we were all in this for the long haul. So we didn’t see Prop. 30—or the millionaires’ tax, for that matter—as the be all and end all. We saw it as an important step, to build relationships, to achieve a win, but also to mobilize a sector of our population that hadn’t been mobilized before.” “The environment going into the fall of 2011, with Occupy, was very much part of our calculation.... How could we translate the Occupy movement, the growing frame of 1 percent vs the 99 percent, into something that was real?” The Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment specialized in organizing lowincome communities of color. Random Lengths has covered some of their Los Angeles-area work fighting foreclosures. ACCE Executive Director Christina Livingston, explained that community need was a driving consideration behind ACCE’s decision to get involved in the initiative. “People were starting to experience need in a different way,” she said. “We knew there needed to be some of this long-term strategy.” But the strength of the coalition approach was that organizations were asked to continue doing what they do best—only with a coordinated intent. “Where ACCE has its real strength is where
Gov. Jerry Brown, enacting the familiar bill-signing ritual of executive power, is the perfect protagonist for the corporate media in writing about California’s comeback from the brink of disaster. The real story is neither so neat nor so flattering.
we are sort of scrappy, and like to be in the streets, bringing these issues into the public eye in a way that we can help reframe the debate in the media,” Livingston explained. “We really honed in on what Occupy was doing, and what people were feeling, and blew it up in a way that allowed us to go after the right target, which was not the state capital, and not city council, but in fact was the folks who had the money, the millionaires, the corporations.” As a result, ACCE “helped to build the viability of what was first the millionaires tax, and then Prop. 30.” “Part of what it means to come here and believe in democracy and to believe in the California dream and the American dream, and what have you, is that everyone has an opportunity and everyone has a voice, and everyone has something to contribute,” explained Aparna Shah, executive director of Mobilize the Immigrant Vote, which had previously worked primarily in political education and immigrant language outreach. Underlying a multitude of specific concerns, Shah explained, “We have to really look at the causes of poverty, we have to really look at the causes of disparity in this state and in this country, and the causes as to why our communities don’t have voice, don’t have real institutional power.” As a result, “We decided it was time to take a step into statewide coordinated campaigns, take a step into ballot initiatives,” and in turn, “2012 was the first time that voters of color, new American voters, actually matched turnout of white voters in California,” she reported. Turnout matters most, of course. But turnout builds on registration, and Shah also pointed out that 1994 to 2012 registered voters in California increased by 3.5 million, of which “over 90 percent of that came from Latino and AsianAmerican voters.” “When we look at the change in demographics in this state and in this country, we are such the tip of the iceberg,” Shah said. “There’s such a huge, huge arc, and what we saw in 2012 in this state and in this country is just the very beginning.... It’s just one very easy example of what we can see in a much broader and deeper way going forward to really build power and to really take back the general fund in California, take back the power structure in California and take back the power structure on a national level.” The potential is real, but it’s just that—potential— Thigpenn warned. “Demographics are not destiny,” he said.
“Just because the population in California and the country is changing, doesn’t automatically mean that we’re going to win. So turning out young people and immigrant voters and people of color and low income voters takes work,” he stressed. “It’s not just about demographics, its about a strategic approach to take advantage of those demographics.” This dovetails with something else Shah said, about the positive motivation: “It wasn’t just about what we’re fighting, what we don’t want, it’s about the California we do want, and the everyday lives of our communities that deserve to thrive and have a voice.” The key to making it all work was the California Federation of Teachers’ decision to fund a signature drive for the millionaires’ tax, as part of an overall funding commitment—but not, Jacobs noted, with the expectation of dictating to others, as unions commonly do when they foot the bill. Why was that? He asked CFT President Josh Pechthalt. “Moving this ambitious kind of progressive agenda around tax reform in a state where we’ve had 30 years of retreat on taxation, meant that this couldn’t either be a CFT-lead initiative—we don’t have that capacity, and we don’t believe it could be just a labor issue. It had to be broader,” Pechthalt responded. The cuts to education have been massive, he pointed out—six or seven years worth, totalling over $20 billion. “We’ve seen thousand and thousands of educators lose their jobs. We’ve seen kids warehoused, over-crowded classrooms, we’ve seen programs slashed... For us it became a question of survival.” And so they began thinking outside the box, considering the idea of a millionaires’ tax. “It was pretty clear based on our polling that we did in March of 2011, but also working with our partners…and then, underscored by movement on the streets with occupy that we were moving down the right path, and that we shouldn’t be dissuaded by the fact that the bigger institutional unions or frankly the Democratic Party leadership were not on board,” he said. Summing up, in terms of lessons learned, he said, “You have to be willing—you have to do it smartly and strategically—but you have to be willing to go outside your political comfort zone. It’s a lesson I think our politicians have not learned.” By way of explanation, he added, “We won a two-thirds majority in California [in the legislature] and the first words coming out of our leaders in California was ‘oh, let’s California/ to p. 19