How much change can we handle?

In my most recent posts, I have focused on the fact that the Democratic Party seems hell bent on returning William Jefferson to Congress from the 2nd Congressional District in Louisiana. This at a time when these same Democrats are cheering over their defeat of Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens. Both Jefferson and Stevens suffer from the same malady, they are apparently crooks. The only difference is that Stevens has been convicted and Jefferson still awaits trial, even though one of his aides has confessed, been sentenced and has agreed to testify against Jefferson.

This indicates that a lot of change is still required from both parties. There is one broad where the scope of the changes that this nations required so vast, the special interests so entrenched that you would question whether anything will change at all. I am talking about the conjoined problems of climate change, energy and the environment. Follow me to Read more!


Bill Becker, writing today at Climate Progress, makes the following assertion.

America’s de facto energy policy is a hodgepodge of self-defeating laws, programs and subsidies. Congress must make a critical decision: We either have to phase out fossil fuels or abandon any pretense that we care about climate change, despite its profound implications for public health, national security, peace and economic stability.

That hodgepodge has been crafted based on the inputs from all of those special interests that bring so much weight to bear on Congress, who can send armies of experts to testify at hearings and whose bottom line interest is just that, the bottom line.

Becker goes on to outline a basic action plan for the Obama Administration. As the head of the Presidential Climate Action Project, he has been responsible for the development of a series of policy statements that truly call for significant change.

What I fear is that we have a group of policy wonks who are buried in think tanks talking to themselves and nodding in agreement over the good things that they do. At the same time, we have an entire array of apparently well meaning people who are clearly not committed to any kind of change, conservative in the sense that they want to maintain the status quo, lacking the imagination to envision a new future.

Democrats talk about the need to support union jobs, while the Teamster's union calls for more drilling, more oil, exploitation of Canada's tar sands or the US large reserves of oil shale even though the results would be catastrophic, not only for climate change but also for fresh water supplies that need to be preserved as rainfall patterns change and our population continues to grow. I am not sure why we support unions that do not support us but that is a subject for a different discussion.

With think tanks policy wonks talking to each other and politicians making profound public displays of intention we often forget that the public is still not on board and that many legislators fear a public backlash that could cost them their seats. One of our Senators, Barbara Boxer chairs the Senate Energy and Public Works Committee and would appear to be in position to create the kind of forward thinking plans that we need. She surely sounded that way this week.

My skepticism about the wide chasm between public pronouncements and implementable policy is expressed in this week's GPCA press release, expressing the same agreement with the expressed intent of Governor Schwarzenegger's Global Climate Conference but asking that he replace Mary Nichols as Chair of the Air Resources Board specifically because the board has, under her leadership, abandoned compliance and put all of her faith in the same market mechanisms that failed when she introduced pollution credit trading as an assistant administrator of the US EPA.

We need to establish the fact that Green Change is somehow different, more attuned to the needs of the individual, of the public at large and not just another rant against the status quo. Rather than talking truth to power we need to be talking the future to the electorate; where are we going and how are we going to get there.

When Green is in.

Even neo-con NY Times Columnist Tom Friedman is beginning to sound more like a Green than like John McCain. Take this from his interview reported at Grist today.

... [B]ig energy companies? They're not on Facebook. They're not in your chat room. They're in the cloakroom, and they're in your face. So unless you get off of Facebook, unless you get out of the chat room into the cloakroom where the rules get made, you're not going to have an impact. So I'm all for the blogosphere; I love it. I love the fact that my column gets spread all over the world thanks to the internet, and that I can have this dialogue with so many people. And I love the blogosphere for all the wild, crazy ways it enriches the conversation.

But do not confuse that conversation with having an impact. At some point, the conversation has to stop and the lobbying and the arm-twisting has to start.

It makes me wonder why I keep writing this blog. I guess it is in the hope that some readers just might take the next step and start opening the door to the cloakroom, since the time for that has surely passed me by.

So, if your are reading this... stop... shut off the computer and go do something Green. Here are a few suggestions:

• Attend the next meeting of you local planning commission. That is where developers have their way with your future.
• Send a letter to your congress critter telling them that we don't want Federal Subsidies of Big Agriculture or of Bil Oil. The current farm bill and energy bill are embarrassments designed for short range, future be damned, political advantage.
  
• Write a letter to the editor of your local newspaper supporting a Green Party Presidential Candidate: Johnson, McKinney, Mesplay or Swift.
  
• Plant a garden.
  
• Send a letter to the Chairman of Home Depot asking them to remove Monsanto's Roundup from their shelves. Here are some reasons why and here are some more.
  

Post-Partisanship? Not likely

The media focus on the presidential election circus just about drowns out any other thought. Normally, new political studies from the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) will get at least a passing mention, but not the January 2008 At Issue publication that took a look at California's Post-Partisan Future. That term, Post-Partisan came right from the Governor.

Is the partisan divide in California so deep that it precludes such accord? Does the growing trend toward “decline-to-state” voter registration portend, instead, a reshaping of the two-party system?

PPIC CEO Mark Baldasarre presents a lot of demographic statistics that drive home the point that accommodation is not likely between Republicans and Democrats. They are just too different. You can dig that out yourself. I would recommend that anyone interested in electoral success do this.

What I want to call everyone's attention to is his (and the voters) assessment of the role and prospects for a third party in California.

Majorities of Californians say the two parties do such a poor job of representing the American people that a third party is needed. PPIC Statewide Surveys find that four in 10 independents were former major-party members and seven in 10 prefer to be
unaffiliated with any party

We have to ask ourselves then why we have not been more successful. While the demand for something other than Democrat or Republican is growing, our registration numbers are falling. That should not be, but it is true.

That being the case, what do we do to change the situation? It is obvious that what we are doing now is not working. Baldassare makes some suggestions, and I quote the liberally from the report.

POLICY IMPLICATIONS AND OPTIONS
With no signs that the deep rifts between Democratic and Republican voters are shrinking, Californians can expect to have state and federal legislators who largely reflect the liberal-conservative split of major-party voters in the party primaries. The two-party system will continue to reflect the will of fewer and fewer people in the future, unless the parties focus on expanding their base, on inclusiveness instead of ideological purity and exclusivity.

If you agree with Baldassare, then this represents a real opportunity for Greens, but only if we can show that we are substantially different from the duopoly, that we bring a new vision of what politics can be, of what California can be, of what this nation can be.

Since this relates to electoral politics, we have one clue as to what can be accomplished if we look at the impact of the independent voters on the Democratic primary. The Democratic Party is rather unique in California in that it allows those who are registered as decline to state to vote in the Democratic Primary. Neither the Republican nor the Greens do so.

Writing just before the Feb 5 presidential primaries in CA, Baldassare found that the independent voters had little effect on the choice of candidates by the Democratic Party. I have not found any analysis of these independent votes that is meaningful. Note here that some of the PPIC suggestions for reducing partisanship are very much in line with what Greens have been working for: Instant Runoff and Proportional Representation. Others, are not so attractive, especially the first suggestion of a completely open primary with the top two candidates staging a runoff regardless of party. This would almost assuredly eliminate third parties from most contests, even if coupled with a new districting formula that creates more evenly distributed contests.

We can suggest six proposals to involve more independent voters and increase the numbers of moderate voices involved in choosing elected representatives:
(1) State-level primaries could permit voters to vote for candidates regardless of the voter’s and the candidate’s party. Then, the two top vote-getters could have a runoff in the general election.
(2) State-level primaries could be eliminated and replaced with instant runoff s in general elections. In such a system, candidate victories are decided by general election voters selecting both their first and second choices.
(3) General elections could use a proportional representation formula. As a result, the numbers of Democratic, Republican, independent, and third-party seats in the legislature would be based on the percentage of the vote each receives, rather than
winner-take-all in local districts.
(4) Legislative races in general elections could be nonpartisan. In such a system, ballots would list candidates without party labels, as in mayoral, city council, and county board of supervisor races in California.
(5) Campaign finance reforms, such as public financing, could be implemented in elections. In this way, nonpartisans and moderates could become financially competitive against partisan candidates who can attract support from ideological and
interest groups.
(6) Future legislative redistricting could focus on party competition rather than incumbent advantages. In line with state trends, local elections with partisan parity would be decided by centrist and independent voters.

We have a lot of work to do.

Green Change

The new Green Change organization announced its web presence yesterday over on Green Commons. For those of you who are not aware of Green Change, it is a new committee organized under the FEC Rule 527. That is an interesting choice, since 527's are somewhat controversial.

GPCA member Steve Loebs found reason to question that choice in his comment (#1) to Green Change's announcement.

For those of you who do not know about Green Change, there is a real California connection as Matt Gonzalez is on the Board.

Take a look at the site, think about what they are trying to do and weigh in. It is only the future direction of the party that we are talking about.