Calls to Action: Citizens - Archive

For years public school families in California have been poorly treated by elected officials. That’s because they haven’t had political muscle. Fortunately that’s changing.

Whoever wins today’s elections will need to govern. While some elected officials will continue to talk about fighting or resisting, others will be ready to roll up their sleeves and to work across aisles. To succeed, they will need the protection of political philanthropists.

As we reported last month, if you’re an LA voter in search of guidance, we recommend the LA Voter Guide from Thrive LA, which is a fast-growing political philanthropy that we also recommend for your financial support.

Last year I wrote about GFC’s most expensive failure, which is our continuing lack of success in reforming the public-employee retirement system, and earlier this week CalMatters columnist Dan Walters wrote about what I consider to be collectively our most shameful failure, which was the prolonged shutdown of California’s public schools during the pandemic.

For years the University of California has been treated like a doormat by the state’s elected officials. That’s because UC supporters have not flexed their political muscles. That’s changing.

Inspired by the success of pragmatic political coalitions in San Francisco, two GFC chapters led by Alistair Thornton and Eli Bildner have identified political giving opportunities in the East Bay.

Earlier this month we wrote to you about $195 billion in annual spending by California governments on compensation and benefits for public employees but that figure did not include spending by counties, which the Mercury News reported yesterday to be $45 billion per year.

Last week I wrote you about the $195 billion California governments spend every year on compensation and benefits for public sector employees. Part of that cost is annual service on $270 billion of debt issued to public employees by lawmakers, none of which was approved by voters.

If ever you had any doubt that governments in California are run primarily for the benefit of public employees, look no further than $195 billion of annual spending by those governments on compensation and benefits awarded by elected officials who receive support or avoid opposition by public sector unions.

As we’ve reported to you before, GFC is already focused on the 2026 governor’s race because California’s next governor is likely to inherit a precarious situation from Governor Newsom, the candidates who have announced so far are from the usual depressing cast of characters who specialize in loudly signaling virtue to the common person while quietly doing the bidding of special interests, and we are hoping the prospect of early backing by GFC could help elicit a bolder alternative.

Yesterday Governor Newsom, Senate President pro Tempore McGuire and Assembly Speaker Rivas confirmed they still intend to close the budget deficit in part by drawing half of the state’s budget reserves when they finalize the budget in June.

As recent election results demonstrate, San Francisco has become ground zero for the effective political philanthropy movement. Next up is the November General Election, which will offer an all-important opportunity to elect a majority of pragmatists to the Board of Supervisors, protect a public-safety-oriented District Attorney, and enact important changes to the city’s charter.

We always encourage readers to explore Cal-Access to gain a sense of how campaigns are financed in California.

Our last email elicited several questions about campaign finance so over the next few months we will provide you with short briefings about that subject. Today we address direct donations to candidates and committees that can donate to candidates.

With the Legislature on recess this month, we thought we would devote an email or two to some other subjects. One about which we occasionally get questions is how GFC Courage Committee Chapters work. We describe that process in some detail here. Authorized by two private letter rulings from the California Fair Political Practices Commission, each chapter is independently governed by two or more chapter co-chairs who participate in monthly GFC briefings to keep them informed on legislative and campaign developments. Chapters are not a new idea in Sacramento. In fact, we got the idea from SEIU, which as you can see on Cal-Access has a whole host of political committees.

As you know, there’s nothing we dislike more than whining about poor governance by people who don’t do the serious work required to fix that governance. But there’s hope on the horizon, both from our own growth and the launch of two other general-interest political organizations, Effective Government California and 21st Century Alliance. You might want to check them out.

Unlike their counterparts in California, poor students in Texas and Florida didn’t fall behind in math during the pandemic. That’s because they were allowed to attend school in person. According to a new study by Harvard University,

Readers of our latest Weekend Update will notice several letters of support GFC issued that address a wide variety of subjects ranging from blood withdrawal to fire suppression, mental health and substance abuse databases, licensing via videoconference and more. They are examples of the minutiae into which state legislatures dive and the risks to the general interest when only special interests are paying attention.

Earlier this week we wrote about a committee hearing concerning a noxious bill. Later, a reader asked why we didn’t oppose the bill during the hearing. The answer tells you a lot about when and how to offer resistance in Sacramento.

Earlier this week we virtually attended a State Senate hearing about SB 868, a bill to provide a retroactive pension increase to some long-retired public employees. This isn’t the first time lawmakers have considered a retroactive increase. As I explained in a Wall Street Journal op-ed in 2010, the last retroactive pension increase was the largest issuance of debt in state history.

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU), one of the largest recipients of government spending in California, has been putting the following questionnaire in front of candidates for the legislature:

On top of political contributions, GFC spends more than $1 million per year on Sacramento-based staff and lobbyists, and now that things are opening up again, we will spend even more as we host events and activities with legislators. Visibility matters, both to remind legislators of our general-interest agenda and to give them comfort that we will always be there for those who serve the general interest.

Among the 2,167 bills we are reviewing are several dealing with mental health and homelessness. Recently the Newsom Administration issued a proposal to establish CARE (Community Assistance, Recovery and Empowerment) Courts “to deliver behavioral health services to severely ill and vulnerable individuals while preserving self determination and community living.” Yesterday we joined a webinar about CARE and will be paying close attention going forward.

GFC President David Crane walks through the surprising statistics and lesser-known history behind California’s state government and how the public can help to elevate the quality of their state government.

One of our jobs each year is to review every bill and resist those not in the general interest. Legislators have submitted 2,115 bills* so far this session.

More than 30 open-seat races for the state legislature will be contested this year. Some of you have asked about our process for considering pre-election endorsements.

State legislators introduced nearly 1500 bills this week, bringing the total number of bills submitted this year to 2103. Here’s a small sample of measures proposed this week:

Three years ago, a California businessman/philanthropist who had spent $19 million to help elect charter-school-friendly state legislators asked me why so many of those he had helped to elect had joined in passing anti-charter legislation. I responded that they couldn’t count on him to be there for them. When it comes to political power, reliability beats wealth. Just ask former state official John Chiang, who during a recent forum said that politicians “make calculations about which interests will be there for them through thick and thin . . . cycle to cycle,” or former US Senator John Kerry, who once told me legislators favor interests who “are always there” for them.

USC Center for the Political Future (CPF) Co-Directors Bob Shrum and Mike Murphy were joined by former California State Treasurer John Chiang and former Gov. Schwarzenegger advisor David Crane to assess California’s governance and government services amid rising housing costs and tax rates, and the future of the Golden State on Wednesday, February 9. In partnership with Govern For California.

We looked high and low for an article that exposed the poison pill buried in Section 100610 of AB 1400, a single-payer measure recently proposed and withdrawn in the California State Assembly, but found none. That’s worrisome. Typical single-payer systems are not governed by boards dominated by providers as called for by Section 100610, which would put the fox in charge of the henhouse. California already has a fox/henhouse problem on its public pension fund boards, which since Proposition 162 passed in 1992 must give precedence to beneficiaries, thereby delegating residents and taxpayers to subordinate roles. That’s how, eg, CalPERS’s board employed biased actuarial assumptions in 1999 to justify a retroactive pension increase the cost of which is still crushing services and taxpayers today.

We are pleased to report that, thanks in significant part to excellent work by GFC’s Sacramento team and more than 10,000 personalized letters of opposition from members of the GFC Network to 47 lawmakers, AB 1400 will not be brought up for a vote in the State Assembly. AB 1400 sought to establish a health care system governed by providers…

It’s that time of year when California state legislators rush to introduce bills before a February deadline. Because it’s also an election year, many — including some to whom we give support from time to time — support bad bills that are good for them politically. We will work to defeat those bills but not to defeat those legislators unless alternative candidates from their districts are better bets for us.

The quality of government services in California declined because for decades there was little resistance in the legislature to special interests who profit from providing those services. That started to change in 2011 with the launch of GFC to support legislators who serve the general interest.

The CA Legislature reconvened this week and will spend the next nine months deliberating over thousands of bills and more than $300 billion of spending. GFC’s 11-person Sacramento team is:

For decades, public employee unions and crony capitalists faced no resistance when using the CA Legislature to obtain financial and legal privileges at the expense of residents and taxpayers.

When a private equity executive filed papers to run for governor of Illinois in 2013, I wondered if he had done due diligence. That’s because Illinois governors can do little without the consent of a majority of legislators whose terms of office, unlike the governor’s term of office, are not term-limited. To me, being governor of Illinois would be like being CEO of a business with 177 board members the consent of a majority of whom I would need to do virtually anything but unlike me with no deadline to act.

A couple of supporters wrote to ask how this line in a recent WSJ op-ed — “Teachers were the fourth-largest campaign contributors to California’s legislative races in 2020 behind energy, prison guards and healthcare” — fits with our assertion that GFC is the largest bundler of direct donations to legislators and candidates for the legislature. The answer is that the author included independent expenditures (IE’s), which are not donations but rather expenditures for communications advocating the election or defeat of a candidate. There is a big difference.

Explaining what we do in a pithy fashion isn’t easy but we got some help last week when a questioner translated my long-winded answer into “Low Cost Collective Action, Persistently Applied.” We like that! As informed GFCers know and many a special interest has demonstrated, political power in Sacramento is less about wealth than organization and persistence.

If ever you needed a reminder that our nation has always been a confederation of diverse states united only when facing a common enemy, re-read Democracy In America, Alexis de Tocqueville’s 1835 masterpiece.

Last year, the GFC Network made 1,100 donations averaging $2,000 each to more than 100 members of or candidates for the California Legislature. Do those figures surprise you? They shouldn’t. That’s the pattern of donations from active special interest unions or corporations in Sacramento.

In traditional philanthropy there’s likely a correlation between wealth and impact but that’s less the case with political philanthropy where steadfastness is more important. That’s because the path to political change is steep and narrow. To change any of California’s 29 codes of law, a legislator must gain the agreement of 61 other legislators, each of whom has their own priorities. What matters in that world are seniority, committee assignments and bank balances, and what legislators in that world need are supporters who are always there for them. That’s one reason we have 18 chapters, each of which is among the largest and most steadfast donors to legislators.

Recently a journalist concluded “the California Dream is dying.”

Each of GFC’s 18 chapters are chaired by volunteers such as Kathy Hallsten.

Often we are asked why GFC has regional chapters. The answer is that we admired the political power of the Service Employees International Union so much that we copied it. SEIU knows how to punch its political weight.

Last week I wrote that we believe a 10-year-old GFC in 1999 could’ve stopped the enactment of SB 400, which granted a retroactive pension increase. That’s because of the political muscle we’ve added over the last decade. We will discuss that subject and more at our October 22 Legislative Session Review for donors. For now, see below.

It was 22 years ago today that Senate Bill 400 granted a retroactive pension increase to CA state employees that amounted to the largest non-voter-approved issuance of debt in state history. One result has been a nearly 10-fold increase in pension contributions.

Govern for California GFC President David Crane — public policy expert and good governance advocate – is leading a masterly campaign to get California off this unsustainable trajectory and our politicians back to representing the public interest. GFC is leveling the playing field by putting serious money behind responsible candidates and advancing its own legislative initiatives that put ordinary Californians’ interests first. Crane is an authority on government finance, accounting, pension liability, and how the sausage gets made in Sacramento.

In June the governor and legislature quietly granted an unwarranted $500 million per year salary increase to state prison guards using a loophole inserted into state code in 1981.

Sometimes good legislators do bad things. Eg, Assembly Member Jacqui Irwin, pressured by county employees in her district and as a favor to another legislator, recently carried a gut-and-amend bill that we stopped. But we will still support her. That’s because generally she is supportive of the public interest when attending to the 29 legal codes that govern daily life in California.

When passed by the State Assembly on May 27, AB 826 was a bill to curb beach erosion, but by June 22 it had become a bill to grant Ventura County special treatment under state pension law. That process is known as “gut-and-amend,” an ugly late stage tactic to avoid full scrutiny. Gut-and-amend bills are very hard to stop, particularly when (as in this case) they are co-sponsored by a powerful special interest such as SEIU (Service Employees International Union). Once we learned about the bill we notified legislative allies of our opposition and asked the GFC Network to submit letters.

So far in the 2021-22 election cycle, Govern For California’s statewide political committee has made political contributions to 81 Democrats, 11 Republicans and 1 Independent. During the 2019-20 election cycle, the committee made political contributions to 79 Democrats, 18 Republicans and 1 Independent. Yet in an LA Times article yesterday about tech industry political contributors, Govern For California was identified as “a political committee that has backed a number of Republican candidates for state seats.” For the avoidance of any doubt, GFC is a non-partisan network that supports state legislators of any political stripe who serve the general interest.

In a recent essay, former US Ambassador to Pakistan Ryan Crocker wrote the following about that country’s reluctance to agree to US requests to deny safe havens to the Taliban:

A number of you have written seeking advice about the recall election. We don’t have any to give. Our focus is the legislature and we must work with whoever sits in the governor’s office. If it’s helpful, below is a piece I recently published about the subject.

School employee unions in California weren’t always powerful. That started to change in 1975 when they were extended collective bargaining rights but that alone didn’t confer their dominance. The other ingredient was the failure of good government organizations to persistently resist their demands. Nearly six million California kids heading back to K-12 schools this week suffer the consequences. Treated more like captives than customers and all too often served by poorly-performing employees who can’t be fired, they haven’t even benefited from a doubling in spending per pupil eaten up by faster-growing pension costs.

Everyone knows 1968 shook the national political landscape but few know that was also the year the California Legislature and Governor Ronald Reagan quietly rolled California’s political environment — and not for the better. That’s they year they enacted the Meyers-Milias-Brown Act that endowed local and county personnel with the power to bargain collectively with the governments that employed them, thereby obtaining the power to collectively influence the lawmakers who approve their pay, benefits and work rules. Once the collective-bargaining door was opened, school and state employees set their eyes on the same prize, which they acquired in 1975 and 1977.

When I made San Francisco my home in 1977, little did I know that the California Legislature and Governor Jerry Brown had just made prison guards lords over state politics and policy. That’s the year lawmakers enacted the Dills Act, which extended collective bargaining rights to state employees. Since then, CA lawmakers have worked hard to please them, especially prison employees.

The principal job of states in our federalist system is to provide domestic services such as education, health and public safety. California executes some services well (e.g., Covered California) but generally residents are served poorly, students are treated more like captives than customers, insufficient value for money is obtained from healthcare providers, and public safety employees are excessively compensated. All that is fixable.

Often we’re asked by GFCers whether they should help finance a statewide ballot measure. Our response is two-fold:

Recently I spoke to an organization that operates in fear of a Sacramento special interest. My response won’t surprise you: “Stop whining. Punch your weight. If your opponent runs their political affairs like a business, so must you.”

In 1999, California’s Legislature and Governor enacted SB 400, a retroactive pension increase pushed by government employee unions. At that time, the state pension fund (CalPERS) based pension contributions from employees and employers upon an expected annual return of 8.25 percent. (The higher the expected return, the lower the required upfront contributions.) Advocates for the retroactive increase claimed that, because CalPERS could be expected to earn at that rate, the retroactive increase would not cost “a dime.”

I left the private sector 18 years ago and every day miss this feature: Failure matters. Just imagine the consequences for private enterprises from Amazon to Zoom had they not delivered during the pandemic. They’d be out of business. But not the State of California. It provided lousy services during — and before and after — the pandemic, yet not only can it not go out of business but it’s extracting record revenues from value generated by those great-performing private enterprises.

In 1968, Governor Ronald Reagan signed the Meyers-Milias-Brown Act endowing police and other local personnel with the power to bargain collectively with the governments that employ them, setting cities and counties on a path to fiscal disaster and turning local and county public employees into political powerhouses. The next decade, Governor Jerry Brown signed the Rodda and Dills Acts extending the same powers to school and state employees, producing the same disastrous outcomes. No three bills have done more damage to California’s governance.

Sacramento is back in full swing and that means our office in the historic Senator Hotel across the street from the Capitol is open and getting ready to host lots of events with lawmakers and GFC’ers.

In case you hadn’t noticed, we gave you a lengthy respite from our missives while the Legislature and Governor negotiated the budget for the fiscal year starting July 1. Through June 10 we had supplied legislators, you and reporters with several notes describing the need to dramatically boost budget reserves.

Among conventional reasons offered for poor governance is that today’s media does a poorer job of holding officials accountable. While I think that’s too rosy of a view of the past (how well did 1999 media cover the CA Legislature’s vote to issue more than $100 billion of retroactive pension increases?), even if it’s true, most stories attract public attention for just a day or two.

Dear GFC Supporters,

It’s been nearly 20 years since I left business for state government. Though my time zone didn’t change, the pace of change sure did. While the state takes weeks to process unemployment insurance claims, a new technology developed by a California company (Snowflake) formed less than a decade ago enables low-cost processing of complex data in minutes if not seconds. In business, better ideas prevail, execution matters, and enterprises that don’t satisfy customers fail. In government, only power matters. That’s how California can spend $300 billion a year on services that satisfy few customers.

Recently a friend sent me his notes from Infinite Games, a book about the mindset needed to succeed in non-finite endeavors such as business. That same mindset is employed by unions and corporations for whom California’s government is a customer that provides them with more than $200 billion a year. They know that politics is an infinite-round fight.

Last weekend some friends asked me when California would “hit a wall,” by which they meant have so many governance problems that it would have no choice but to reform. I responded, “probably not in our lifetimes, if ever.” I explained that California is more like a frog slowly being boiled to death. This is what that looks like:

Earlier this week, the New York Times reported on a study ironically entitled “Outsized Influence” about 12 individuals who spent $3.4 billion on politics but were anything but influential. To put it in perspective, the dozen spent 1000x more than CA’s prison unions, whose members obtain $10 billion per year from the state, a return even Silicon Valley might admire. As we explained recently, political success requires more than money.

Though we often disagree with them, we have great admiration for two groups — SEIU and the Construction Unions — for politically punching more than their financial weights. Both treat politics like a business and have chapters that persistently donate to lawmakers. You can be sure lawmakers pay attention when either organization pays attention to them. GFC modeled its chapter structure on theirs and aims to run things as professionally as they do.

Early GFC supporters will recall that I expected pension reform to happen by now. I was way off.

Today is GFC’s 10th anniversary. In the past decade, we’ve grown from three supporters to the largest bundler of direct donations to members of the California Legislature. And we’re growing faster than ever.

A US Senator once told me that special interests get their way because “they’re always there for us.” I’ll echo that: GFC will always be there for lawmakers who serve the general interest.

Conventionally, Ronald Reagan is characterized as conservative, but as governor in 1968, he signed the Meyers-Milias-Brown Act that endowed police and other local public employees with the power to bargain collectively with the governments that employed them, thereby handing political power to employees who were the principal beneficiaries of government spending. Conventionally, Jerry Brown is characterized as liberal, but as governor in 1976, he signed the Uniform Determinate Sentencing Act that converted most sentences to mandatory-minimum periods specified by the state legislature, leading to an explosion of the state’s prison population. Today’s exaggerated convention is that California suffers from exploding employee costs because of domination by a single party. Not true. Both parties enabled and capitulated to public sector unions seeking ever-higher compensation and benefits.

Conventionally, Ronald Reagan is characterized as conservative. But as a first-term governor of California in 1968 (Reagan earned the job in 1966, denying Pat Brown a third gubernatorial term), he signed the Meyers-Milias-Brown Act, which endowed police and other local personnel with the power to bargain collectively with the governments that employed them, handing political power over local budgets to government employees who were the principal beneficiaries of those budgets.

If ever you wanted a description of what it’s like for a legislator to go up against special interests, the New York Times provides an excellent one here today. That’s why fear has dominated California policy for so long, and it goes well beyond police unions.

Disruption of businesses can happen fast but the same isn’t true about public policies. Eg, one-third of the names that make up the Dow Jones Industrial Average have changed since 2005 but next to nothing has changed about California’s pension policies that I and others started raising alarms about that same year. That’s because the only way to disrupt public policies is from the inside. That takes persistence and power. So if you think we already hammer too much about this or that problem, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. So long as we are persistent and powerful, legislators will eventually act.

Several of you have asked our opinion of efforts to create new political parties in California. The principal value of a political party in California is the ability to coordinate independent expenditures with candidates who are members of that party. A new party would provide willing legislators* and candidates with that value, which can be significant. Though parties are not panaceas (as I describe in a draft essay here) and we are not involved in any such efforts, our objectives would be furthered if legislators and candidates had more party options from which to choose.

Nowadays it’s easy to rate most consumer services. Consumers get an email right after the service has been completed asking how well the supplier performed. But political services are different. Most constituents know only what legislators tell them.

Car dealers always say their cars are great, and once purchased, it doesn’t take long to find out. But political consumption is different. Legislators always say they’re great but consumers have a tough time evaluating performance. That’s bad, because the gulf between political words and deeds is wide.

We don’t like to bother you two days in a row but we had to make an exception after this New York Times article about Rhode Island’s schools. An extraordinary lawmaker who even more extraordinarily walks her talk, RI Governor Gina Raimondo is the only non-CA lawmaker we’ve supported and an exemplar for CA lawmakers, who she addressed at a GFC Retreat a few years ago.

I write today in praise of Twitter, which we started using in earnest last year to communicate with state legislators, who pay rapt attention to what GFC has to say. Eg, last week state legislator Alex Lee tweeted this message, which was appended to one issued by federal legislator Ro Khanna:

Yesterday’s opinion piece about California by Ezra Klein in the New York Times got a lot of attention, and deservedly so. But it missed a key point. Whether California’s progressivism is rhetorical or substantive, public sector employees always win.

After just two years on the job, a public school teacher in California can be granted “permanent employment” status that’s almost impossible to terminate even for significant misconduct. Does that make sense to you? We don’t think so, which is why we are pursuing reform of that statute. Another target this year is a practice that has CA passing up billions of federal dollars at the expense of state services and taxpayers. Both efforts will be wars with powerful special interests, as will be stopping tax increase and other bad bills.

Last year we spent as much time blocking tax increase proposals as liberating nurse practitioners. This year will be the same. Reform efforts will focus on OPEB and tenure but at least as much time will be devoted to blocking tax increases, bills to extend collective bargaining rights to legislative staff, and more.

It’s not only public sector unions that earn huge returns from donations to elected officials. Tesla probably wouldn’t have survived its early years without the benefit of incentives and favorable regulations from California and other jurisdictions. Like the prison guards, Tesla learned there’s no ROI like ROPS — Return On Political Spending.

As 2020 comes to a close, we are pleased to report that GFC raised $7,152,548 during the 2019-20 legislative session. Launched in 2011 with seed funding from three donors (Ron Conway, Greg Penner and me), today GFC has nearly 900 donors plus 16 chapters that together are among the most powerful forces in Sacramento. Special interests have been there longer, but we are bigger and growing faster.

Today’s WSJ has an instructive piece (link here and attached) about the power of persistence. The key words:

On Taxes: Few things bother us more than folks who write us about an objectionable piece of legislation but don’t get in the trenches with us. Tax increases such as AB 2088, about which the WSJ has an opinion piece today, really get them going. GFC leads the efforts to kill such bills and to enact the fiscal and other reforms required to govern CA well but we have only as much power as you give us. So here’s some tough love for anyone reading this who is not already a financial supporter: Either get in the war or leave us alone. In January, we will send a slate of 16 GFC Courage Committee chapters to which one will be able to donate up to $8,100 per chapter per year. Money managers subject to SEC Pay to Play rules who cannot make political donations may make non-political donations at anytime here towards operating costs (ie, lawyers, lobbyists, staff*, etc) running >$1mm per year and en route to $2mm.

CA State Assemblymembers David Chiu and Luz Rivas were early supporters of our nurse practitioner bill, helped stop a bill targeting Teach For America, are potential supporters of retirement and education reforms, and are better for GFC than Sanders-backed opponents in their left-leaning districts. But also they co-authored a noxious tax increase bill that GFC is leading the effort to defeat. Should GFC never again provide support to them?

Special interests don’t have more money power. They’ve just had more willpower — until now.

It may not surprise you to learn that Tesla has been the recipient of millions of dollars of subsidies and regulatory benefits from California. But it may surprise you to learn those rewards haven’t taken much political investment from Tesla. Eg, from 2017 to 2020, Tesla contributed just $305,000 to California legislators, no single contribution exceeding $4,700:

GFC has climbed the chart that matters in Sacramento:

Now that I’m on Twitter I follow some folks who occasionally comment about California. Today I saw this tweet by a VC I don’t personally know who has a significant following:

Yesterday a GFCer wrote me to encourage immediate action on pension reform. In response I wrote,

In 2016 we helped Bill Dodd win election to the State Senate. In 2019 he introduced a terrible bill to require a public transit worker on autonomous public transportation vehicles. We successfully led the opposition to the bill . . . and we continue to support Dodd, who is better than alternatives from his district, has supported important reforms, and we expect to support reforms to education, retirement spending and more down the road.

Yesterday, former California Speaker Willie Brown wrote what every insider knows: “[US Speaker Nancy Pelosi] is one hell of a fundraiser, and that is what the speaker’s job is all about.” That’s what our job is all about too, but the objective of our fundraising is to liberate legislators of any stripe to serve the general interest. An example of our success appeared at the end of an article last week about the California Medical Association, long a power in Sacramento that suffered a rare defeat when legislation backed by GFC over CMA’s opposition was enacted into law. That’s liberation funding at work. Before GFC, that legislation would not have even made it to the floor of the legislature.

GFC President @DavidGCrane sat down with the Gridlock Break Podcast to talk about GFC’s history, mission and the importance of knowing your state legislators.

We can’t help but notice all the press about Governor Newsom’s acknowledged mistake in attending a dinner that didn’t meet state guidelines for gathering during COVID-19. We tend to be forgiving about such personal mistakes that have little to no bearing on the daily lives of Californians, which are much more affected by policy and performance.

We are starting to wonder if some journalists are viewing different state and local records than we are. Last week it was an article in the New York Times containing an unsupported assertion reported as fact, then the Los Angeles Times didn’t question an assertion by a LA Councilman about that city’s budget, then CALMatters omitted reference to state revenues running well above budgeted revenues in an article about school funding.

We are eager for January 4 to arrive as that’s when the California Legislature reconvenes. All Californians need attention but two groups in particular — blue collar workers and families with kids in public schools — are in special need of attention.

According to a new documentary (The Social Dilemma), social media is destroying the country. I don’t know about that but I do know social media has consequences for our mission.

No organizations ignite more fear in the hearts of California lawmakers than California Correctional Peace Officers Association, California Teachers Association, California Medical Association and Service Employees International Union. But like the Wizard of Oz, there’s not as much behind the curtain as most people think:

Next Monday Bernie Sanders will address the Democratic National Convention where no doubt he will slam private enterprise and urge more public enterprise. Yet if he compared the performance of private enterprises supplying services to his listeners with the performance of public enterprises in (say) California, he would be embarrassed to make his case.

Listen to an interview with David Crane on Christopher Lochhead’s Follow Your Different™ Podcast.

Occasionally some GFCers ask whether the dominance of public employee unions over California politics and policy can ever end. The answer is “yes.” Below is an example of a once-dominant power being dethroned.

Let’s say you run a business that collects $6 billion in annual revenue from a single customer. Would you spend $2 million to keep that customer? Of course you would. That’s how CCPOA, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association that represents state prison guards, operates.

Several members of the GFC Network have asked, “how can a state legislator get away with saying one thing but doing another?” Here’s how:

If like me you’ve marveled at the largely uninterrupted supply of food in the US during the pandemic, you might appreciate what The Economist had to say about that subject in The global food supply chain is passing a severe test.

Long time GFC’ers know of our disdain for whiners who complain about political problems but do nothing to help legislators address those problems. In the same category also fall those who complain that “the system is broken” or “the system is rigged.” Neither statement is true and both express more about the statement-maker than the system.

The Washington Post’s masthead reads “Democracy Dies in Darkness” but sometimes democracy dies in plain sight in Sacramento, where unverified assertions are often employed to justify billions in spending, cover up accounting frauds, shift blame for undue political influence, and more.

It’s easy to pretend that we’re living in the worst of all possible worlds.

Recently, a writer in The New York Review of Books characterized 2019 as “dystopian.” If he believes that 2019 is dystopian, then how might he characterize 1919, 1929, 1939, and the other ninth years of decades between then and now?

Last night at the presidential debate in Atlanta more than one contender blamed political dysfunction on the political power of billionaires. But that’s a myth. Try finding a billionaire who earns anything close to the 10,000x return on political spending earned by California’s 57,000 public prison employees who collect $10 billion in annual compensation and benefits for $1 million in political spending. Political power is correlated more with focus than wealth.

Because voters pay more attention to what legislators say while special interests pay more attention to what legislators do, legislators have learned to loudly signal virtue to voters while quietly doing the unvirtuous bidding of special interests.

A number of people in the GFC Network have asked our opinion of presidential candidates. To date we have begged off, citing our expertise as limited to state politics. But on reflection we think there’s one piece of advice we could offer: a checklist for assessing candidates. While federal and state governments take on very different tasks — the federal government is (as one pundit puts it) “an insurance company with an army” while states provide most domestic public services — both are American-style democracies with co-equal branches of government that require particular talents from legislators and executives to be successful. So, for what it’s worth, here’s our approach…

Those are the inspiring — yes, inspiring! — words of Wolfgang Schäuble, longtime German politician and Angela Merkel’s finance minister until 2017. When asked in a Financial Times interview why he had once compared himself with Sisyphus, who was condemned forever to push a stone up a hill only to see it roll back down, Schäuble said:

Alfred Hitchcock often made use in his films of a “MacGuffin,” which according to Merriam-Webster is “an object, event, or character in a film or story that serves to set and keep the plot in motion despite usually lacking intrinsic importance.” (emphasis added.) The MacGuffin itself is usually irrelevant to the plot. What matters is the effect it has on the audience.

Why support must continue long after winning elections.

Pasted below are screenshots from opensecrets.org showing 2017–18 campaign committee* fundraising by the two most senior members of the powerful Ways and Means Committee in the US House of Representatives. Until the Democrats flipped the House in November, Republican Kevin Brady was the Chairman and Democrat Richard Neal the Ranking Member (the most senior member of the minority party). After the flip, Neal is now the Chairman and Brady the Ranking Member. First let’s look at Brady’s fundraising…

Use the Internet, don’t blame it.

China’s government fears an Internet that exposes people to political truths. Today some in Congress fear an Internet that exposes people to political lies.

Arnold Schwarzenegger was not on the ballot in the midterms, but the former California governor’s influence was apparent in the outcome of reform initiatives in Michigan, Missouri, Colorado and Utah. Those four states were the 2018 battlegrounds in Schwarzenegger’s campaign to have independent commissions, rather than politicians in power, draw congressional boundaries after the 2020 census.

As much as we wish it otherwise, two recent bills illustrate how far our state legislature still has to travel to be fully liberated from special interests.

Most political reporters know that the California Legislature is a co-equal branch of government but few know much about the legislators themselves. As a result, all too often they place legislators in traditional categories — eg, “pro-business, “pro-labor,” “pro-environment” — when California’s political world has moved well past those old and uninformative designations.

Most everyone knows the names of the two people vying to be California’s next governor. Hardly anyone knows the names of the two people who more than anyone else will affect the success or failure of the next governor.

Well-informed Californians can get a glimpse of poorly-informed journalism about their state legislature with a peek at an article by Washington Post reporter Dan Balz, who writes that Top Two Primary’s ”promises remain mostly unfulfilled” and that “even in Sacramento, the differences are minimal.” Oh, really?

Govern For California’s Primary Election Slate consists of 21 people who meet five tests: intelligence, financial literacy, legislative temperament, ability to win, and courage, by which we mean they toil for something greater than themselves.

The California legislature is a co-equal branch of government. Governors are not CEO’s but rather more like committee chairs with veto power. They cannot enact legislation without the consent of at least 62 members of the state legislature. To get to those members they must go through two people: the Speaker of the Assembly and the President Pro Tem of the State Senate. Despite their power, few Californians even know their names*.

Good governance requires good citizenship.

One of my tasks as president of Govern For California is to help grow our network of political philanthropists. The bigger our network, the more courageously our legislators can act. Most prospects respond favorably. But some choose instead just to grumble. They fall into the following categories…

Nearly always too soon to tell.

When asked by Henry Kissinger in 1972 for his thoughts on the French Revolution, Chinese Premier Zhou En-Lai reportedly answered that it was “too soon to tell.”* The same may be said about gubernatorial performance in California. For example, who knew in 1968 that the granting of collective bargaining rights to public employees by Ronald Reagan would lead to public employee domination of California’s politics today? Or that Jerry Brown’s support for California’s Determinant Sentencing Law in 1976 would lead to an explosion in California’s prison population decades later?

Gov. Jerry Brown’s revised budget for 2018-19 predicts general fund revenues will be 30 percent greater than 10 years ago yet key services will receive less money than they did back then.

It looks like the race will come down to a contest among Judy Appel, Ben Bartlett, Jovanka Beckles, Dan Kalb, Rochelle Pardue-Okimoto, and Buffy Wicks.

No other Assembly race in California is as competitive as the East Bay’s 15th District this year. Twelve candidates in total are vying for the seat, traditionally a progressive outpost in the left-leaning legislature. Of the 12, six candidates have raised significant amounts of money so far and have successfully delivered their pitches to voters throughout the district, which encompasses everything along the bayshore between Hercules and Emeryville plus Oakland’s Rockridge and Montclair neighborhoods and the city of Piedmont.

The disgrace of uninformed political giving in California.

Every day at Govern For California we review public records of political donations. What we’ve found is deeply disturbing. Donors who label themselves as “progressive” have given to candidates who as elected officials have suppressed civil rights. “Free-market” donors have given to candidates who as officials have supported crony capitalism. “Fiscal conservatives” have given to candidates who as officials have created unfunded obligations crushing classrooms. “Social justice advocates” have given to candidates who as officials voted to enrich prison interests at the expense of social services.

California, the land of anti-Trump “resistance”, has its own problems both irresistible and intractable – mounting public pension debt, underfunded schools, and a revenue stream too dependent upon capital gains. David Crane, a Stanford lecturer, past economic aide to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and co-founder of Govern for California, weighs the health of the state so bitterly opposed to Trump.

Our Political Giving Pledge

My wife and I donate at least 10 percent of our income to the support of pro-citizen members of the California Legislature. Our objective is to free state legislators to govern in the general interest. We think of it as tithing to democracy. We also established Govern For California to help create a network of like-minded donors.

California already had Citizens United rules.

Recently an acquaintance complained about the Citizens United (CU) decision in 2010 by the US Supreme Court that held governments may not prevent corporations or unions from engaging in political spending. When I pointed out that the CU decision had no impact on California state politicsbecause the state operated under those rules before the CU decision, my friend disagreed. Unfortunately, his misunderstanding is common.

Do you believe everything you read? Of course not. While it’s true that corporations, unions, Russians and plutocrats spend money on elections and employ misleading posts on Facebook and other social media sites when doing so, far more impactful is that individuals don’t spend enough in direct support of good politicians.

Little about political contributions in California is hidden. Information is easily accessible at Cal-Access, a website run by California’s Secretary of State. For example, look here to see contributions to a special interest and then here for unfortunate consequences from political activity by that interest. There’s nothing dark about that money. Still, uninformed or lazy commentators all too often blame the state’s political problems on dark money. But that’s not true.

California’s wine country fires delivered a vivid demonstration of the critical importance of governments being able to assemble armies of public safety workers when needed. Citizens expect their governments to provide public safety — but they also expect parks, animal shelters, transportation, road, sidewalk and tree maintenance, housing for the homeless, libraries and much more. What citizens don’t know is that some of their elected officials are systematically reducing the ability of their governments to both field adequate numbers of public safety personnel and fund other services.That’s because those officials refuse to acknowledge or address the explosive growth in pension and other retirement costs crushing their budgets.

California has undergone a dramatic transformation over the last fifty years but not so the California Republican Party. Today, only 25.9% of Californians are registered as Republicans, down more than eight points of registration in ten years. At this pace, Republicans will soon be the third most popular party registration in California, behind Democratic and No Party Preference. Not a single statewide elected official is Republican and the party is a super-minority in both houses of the legislature. With an unpopular Republican as president and the number of new registrants willing to identify as Republican at record lows, in the absence of change the California Republican Party has lower to go.

Fast on the heels of Tuesday’s election will come announcements of more entrants to the 2018 contest to succeed Governor Jerry Brown. Antonio Villaraigosa jumped in yesterday, joining John Chiang, Delaine Eastin and Gavin Newsom. Before supporting anyone, learn what governors really do and look for clues to how candidates would really govern…