In June, in a move that rated only a brief in the local newspaper, one California county found a way to express this frustration:

At the urging of Supervisor Ryan Coonerty, the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday not to invest for five years with the five banks that recently agreed to plead guilty to felony charges.

 

The Department of Justice announced in May that four major banks — Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, Barclays and the Royal Bank of Scotland — have agreed to plead guilty to felony charges of conspiring to manipulate the price of U.S. dollars and euros exchanged in the foreign currency exchange spot market. In addition, a fifth bank, UBS, has agreed to plead guilty to manipulating the London Interbank Offered Rate and other bench mark interest rates.

 

While the action of Santa Cruz County alone may not have a major impact on Wall Street, Coonerty will be contacting other local jurisdictions across the country to urge them to consider taking similar action in order to send a message to Wall Street.

That’s the entire item in the Santa Cruz Sentinel. Scroll down; it isn’t the lead item in that day’s news briefs.

Former secretary of labor offers praise

But if this gesture wasn’t seen as very important in Santa Cruz, former Clinton administration Labor Secretary Robert Reich, a UC Berkeley public policy professor, disagreed later in June on his personal blog. Here’s part of the lengthy post:

A strong case can be made that employers shouldn’t pay attention to criminal convictions of real people who need a fresh start, especially a job.

 

But giant banks that have committed felonies are something different. Why shouldn’t depositors and investors consider their past convictions?

 

Which brings us to Santa Cruz County.

 

The county’s board of supervisors just voted not to do business for five years with any of the five banks felons.

 

The county won’t use the banks’ investment services or buy their commercial paper, and will pull its money out of the banks to the extent it can.

 

“We have a sacred obligation to protect the public’s tax dollars and these banks can’t be trusted. Santa Cruz County should not be involved with those who rigged the world’s biggest financial markets,” says supervisor Ryan Coonerty.

 

The banks will hardly notice. Santa Cruz County’s portfolio is valued at about $650 million.

 

But what if every county, city, and state in America followed Santa Cruz County’s example, and held the big banks accountable for their felonies?

 

What if all of us taxpayers said, in effect, we’re not going to hire these convicted felons to handle our public finances? We don’t trust them.

 

That would hit these banks directly. They’d lose our business. Which might even cause them to clean up their acts.

Coonerty hopes that other government bodies follow suit. The reprinting of Reich’s commentary on some prominent left-wing sites gives him  hope. He’s also now getting more favorable coverage of his plan from his hometown paper.

Whether or not it becomes a national cause, in California, it could possibly become a ballot initiative to help get out the liberal vote in the 2016 election. As this Southern California Public Radio story notes, ballot measures on “hot-button” issues are just another tool in the voter-turnout playbook in the Golden State for liberals and conservatives alike.

The historically low turnout in the 2014 general election will dramatically lower the number of signatures required to qualify ballot initiatives in 2016. As of November 17, turnout was at 40.1%, far surpassing the previous low mark of 50.6% in 2002.

Article II of the state Constitution dictates that the number of signatures required to qualify a ballot initiative is based on participation in the previous gubernatorial election – currently at 6.9 million votes with some outstanding ballots yet to count.

There are other factors playing into 2016’s initiative landscape:

1) With the passage of SB 202 in 2011, all initiatives and referenda are pushed to November general elections every two years

2) Democrats and independents are expected to be a larger percentage of the 2016 electorate, a speculation which could produce initiatives more favorable to that electorate

3) SB 1253 (2014) made several changes to the initiative process

• Extends the collection window from 150 days to 180 days
• Adds a 30 day public review period upon submission of a measure to the Attorney General for title and summary
• Requires notification to the Secretary of State immediately upon collection of 25% of the required signatures
• Requires a legislative informational hearing upon this notification
• Allows proponents to withdraw a qualified measure any time before 131 days before an election

Several factors can impact the cost of signature gathering, such as competition with other initiatives, timeline, and the subject of a measure. But the lower signature threshold and extended collection window very likely will make qualifying initiatives far less expensive than ever before, potentially producing a very long ballot in 2016.

In 2014, it took 807,615 valid signatures to get a proposed state constitutional amendment on the ballot. The Redwood officials expect that in 2016, it will only take 560,000.

In 2014, it took 504,760 valid signatures to get an initiative on the state ballot. It looks like it will only take 350,000 in 2016.

Of course, this relative ease in getting ballot measures before voters extends to potential measures from any political camp. But given unions’ increasing focus on monkey-wrenching signature gathering for ballot measures on causes they oppose, this could be especially helpful to those who back such causes — starting with pension and tenure reform.

By Chris Reed

Joe Mathews, one of the least ideological mainstream California political pundits, has weighed in on the analysis I did last week on the evidence that unions are trying to stifle direct democracy in California by monkey-wrenching petition drives, trying to invalidate successful anti-union ballot measures and urging union-allied lawmakers to interfere with the initiative-drafting process.

I think Joe is a bit naive, but I welcome him taking this issue seriously, unlike California’s myopic mainstream media. Here’s the link to his column.

I left a Facebook comment on his piece, but as of 11:30 p.m. Wednesday night, it wasn’t showing up, for whatever reason.