Founded in 1985 by strategist Al From, the DLC thought the bad image of liberalism in the 1980s was well-earned. From’s goal was results-based government activism that understood incentives drove behavior.

Rule No. 1 was that throwing money at problems didn’t have a great history after a quarter-century of Great Society domestic liberalism. If this wasn’t working to solve a problem, try another approach.

Rule No. 2 was to accept the idea that government-centric efforts to address societal issues were not always best — that even Americans who weren’t Reaganites had a skepticism about what government could accomplish, and for good reason.

The DLC approach — touted by such folks as Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke, Massachusetts Sen. Paul Tsongas, Georgia Sen. Sam Nunn and the then-very-powerful New Republic magazine — eventually got a tryout when Clinton was elected president in 1992 after an amazing Democratic primary without a single serious liberal candidate.

Clinton had his hard-left moments. But after 1994, he “triangulated” against liberal lawmakers over and over again, including going along with sweeping GOP welfare reform in 1996. And Clinton never gets nearly enough credit from non-wonks for how he successfully tinkered with the Earned Income Tax Credit in a way that helped the working poor without disincentivizing work.

The DLC way never made it to California

But in California, the pragmatic DLC approach has no such substantive record. Its principles won lip service from Gov. Gray Davis briefly after his 1998 election when he fought for education reforms. But then Davis lost his spine and sold his soul with a series of concessions to public employee unions, and since then the DLC theories that results matter most and that throwing money at problems isn’t always smart have been abandoned by nearly all elected California Democrats.

If we have parsimonious budgets, it’s because state legislators don’t have money to spare; it’s not because they don’t still want to throw money at problems and ignore history.

This dynamic has played out in education, where Clintonian programs to force teachers to meet standards have gone nowhere.

It’s also evident on welfare reform. As Chuck Devore has chronicled, California never got around to implementing the sort of tough, mandatory welfare changes that in most of America proved to be the greatest anti-poverty program in U.S. history.

And as we’re seeing now in San Diego, the DLC approach on affordable housing — which would value results first and foremost — is considered bizarre and exotic.

Failed policy? Let’s pump it full of new funds

I dealt with the insanity of what the San Diego City Council’s Democratic majority is doing in an editorial Sunday on the six months that Council President Todd Gloria served as interim mayor:

“During his time as mayor, he provided the fifth vote on the City Council for a gigantic public policy mistake.

“That mistake was to sharply increase the ‘linkage’ fees on commercial and industrial development projects in the name of promoting affordable housing. If the program that council Democrats were funding had a history of working well, that’s one thing. But it doesn’t. It has a 24-year history of minimal results at high cost.

“Doubling-down on an approach that isn’t working is in keeping with the Golden State’s obtuse history on affordable housing. As the Public Policy Institute of California noted in 2003, local governments have a history of focusing on process — adopting programs that show their good intentions — instead of results.”

This is insane. In this “Moneyball” era — in which statistical analysis is able to readily quantify what works and what doesn’t work — the second-largest city in California and the eighth-largest city in America has embraced a failed policy in a way that will hurt the city’s economy in direct and obvious ways.

Is Ron Burgundy running City Hall? Stay stupid, San Diego.

So they oppose anti-union Walmart, even though the Obama White House’s top economist says Walmart’s low prices make it a progressive godsend for poor people.

So they back high taxes and heavy regulation, which prevents job growth and leaves California with the nation’s highest effective poverty rate.

So they back a public education status quo in which the interests of veteran, tenured teachers top the interests of every other “stakeholder” combined. If you think that’s exaggerated, remember that we have a 1971 state law requiring that student performance be a part of teacher evaluations. Not only is the state law ignored, insanely enough, a stage agency — the California Public Employment Relations Board — seriously argues that the law should be subject to retroactive collective bargaining.

Now comes another Dem-sanctioned pounding of the poor

But what’s not yet widely appreciated is how California’s greens’ energy policies, starting with AB 32, will hammer the less fortunate. Five years ago, air board documents forecast an increase of as much as 60 percent in retail energy costs after AB 32 took full effect in 2020. Who is least able to deal with such a rate shock? Duh. Poor people.

We’re getting a sneak peek at what the future holds from Maryland. This is from National Review:

“Governor Martin O’Malley’s aggressive green agenda has favored expensive renewable-energy sources, driving up the cost of electricity. The 784,000 Marylanders who are living in poverty, and many more on the brink of it, have been particularly hard hit, even though sometimes the cost is offset by subsidies.

“Since O’Malley assumed office in January 2007, residents’ electricity rates have increased by 43 percent, according to estimates from Change Maryland, a group chaired by Larry Hogan, a Republican who intends to run for governor. …

“By 2020, O’Malley wants 18 percent of the state’s energy to be supplied from green sources, even though natural gas is at least 37 percent cheaper an energy source than onshore wind, and solar energy is at least 98 percent more expensive than conventional coal. Working toward this goal, the governor has backed several green policies, despite their impact on electricity prices. …”

Higher cost a feature, not a glitch

“The increased cost of energy isn’t just a side effect of Maryland’s environmental agenda; for radical green policymakers, it’s the point, explains Myron Ebell, the director of energy and global-warming policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Already, consumption has decreased by 9.4 percent under O’Malley’s tenure, according to the Maryland Energy Administration.

‘The purpose of [such green policies] is to make people poorer so they can’t use as much energy,’ Ebell says. ‘They are making life very difficult for the lower-middle-class and working-class people and creating a greater divide between rich and poor, and despite the rhetoric that we need to reduce inequality, it’s really designed to do the opposite.'”

“Maryland’s poorest families could breathe easier if they were allowed to use cheaper energy sources.

“The Maryland Budget & Tax Policy Institute has highlighted a ‘home energy affordability gap,’ noting that energy is considered affordable when it costs less than 7 percent of household income. But in Maryland, people at 50 percent of the federal poverty level or below devote about 40 percent of their income to energy consumption, says Richard Doran, program director of the Fuel Fund of Maryland. …

“Right now, Doran says, at least 500,000 state residents are struggling to pay their utility bills. And Children’s HealthWatch, which provides nonpartisan policy analysis, reported in 2011 that 15 percent of Baltimore residents had been threatened with a shutoff and that an additional 18 percent were heating their homes with a cooking stove, had experienced a shutoff, or lived in an unheated home.”

This is the coming reality, California: already-impoverished people being further impoverished by AB 32.

The party of the poor isn’t really about the poor. It’s about the needs and whims of its slice of the middle class, in this case the green religionists.

This is part 2 of a series on the ALRB. Part 1 is here.

Genevieve Shiroma, chair of California’s Agricultural Labor Relations Board, which oversees the relationship between farms and farm workers, grew up the daughter of a farm worker in San Joaquin County.

Staying close to her farm roots, according to AllGov California she earned her “associate of arts degree in math and science from San Joaquin Delta College in 1974.” After which she trekked only 70 miles away and in 1978 earned her bachelor of science degree in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of California, Davis, one of the state’s premier agricultural schools. She then joined CARB “as an air quality engineer. She worked there for 21 years, eventually becoming chief of the Air Quality Measures Branch.”

It was a natural step for her to chair the board itself, a post Gov. Gray Davis appointed her to in 1999. That position expired in 2005. In 2006, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger appointed her as a regular board member. And in 2011, Gov. Jerry Brown again appointed her as chair, making her the longest-serving current member of the ALRB.

ALRB

The five-member board was created in 1975 to implement the Agricultural Labor Relations Act, which Brown signed into law that year. The board’s authority is divided between the five board members and a General Counsel, all appointed by the governor. The ALRA stipulates: 

“It is hereby stated to be the policy of the State of California to encourage and protect the right of agricultural employees to full freedom of association, self-organization, and designation of representatives of their own choosing, to negotiate the terms and conditions of their employment, and to be free from the interference, restraint, or coercion of employers of labor….”

According to its website, the ALRB is:

1. “[R]esponsible for the prevention of those practices which the Act declares to be impediments to the free exercise of employee rights…”

2. “[R]esponsible for conducting elections to determine whether a majority of the employees of an agricultural employer wishes to be represented by a labor organization, whether they wish to continue to be represented by that labor organization, a rival labor organization or no labor organization at all.”

SMUD

In 1998, voters first elected Shiroma to the board of the Sacramento Municipal Utilities District, where she currently is vice president. The board elected her its president in 2002, 2006 and 2010. Currently she serves as its vice president.

Someone in a political position not surprisingly gets involved in politics. In local Sacramento politics, even more than in California, the Democratic Party dominates. She is a sponsor of the Harry S. Truman Democratic Club.

In 2006, as president of the board Shiroma led the battle for Measure L, which would have allowed the public utility to annex some of Pacific Gas & Electric’s private property in Yolo County. It lost, 61 percent to 39 percent.

Electric Utility Week reported on Nov. 13, 2006:

“SMUD’s initiative on the November 7 ballot would have allowed the muni to annex about 70,000 PG&E customers in Yolo County in Northern California. PG&E spent more than $10 million to defeat the annexation, while the pro-annexation campaign spent about $1 million.”

The pro-annexation campaign was called SMUD Customers Say YES to Low Rates, and was led by Shiroma and other SMUD board members. The Sacramento Bee reported on Jan. 2, 2006:

“The group has hired political consultant Richie Ross, Shiroma said Friday.”

Ross is one of the most influential strategists in Sacramento. A strike organizer for United Farm Workers longtime President Cesar Chavez, Ross now is a registered lobbyist for the UFW, whose cases go before the ALRB.

(The Electric Utility Week and Bee articles no longer are online, but copies of them are in this document.)

Looking into the ALRB

One case involving the UFW now before the board concerns the farm employees of Gerawan Farming, one of the Central Valley’s largest growers of peaches, plums, nectarines and grapes. As I have reported in a series of articles, the workers have been fighting off unionization by the UFW.

Briefly, the Gerawan Farming workers have spent months protesting the UFW takeover attempt. The UFW has maintained that a unionization vote by the workers more than 20 years ago still is binding, and the workers must begin paying union dues.

The farm workers, led by farm worker Silvia Lopez, have insisted that the union has done nothing at all for more than two decades. Lopez personally led a petition drive for a decertification vote.

In response, the ALRB charged the company, Gerawan Farming, with circulating the petition among its employees. However, Lopez and other employees insist that they, not Gerawan, circulated the petitions. Based in part on the publicity from my articles, the ALRB conceded and granted the farm workers the right to vote on the union contract.

Considering Shiroma’s background and the controversies before the ALRB, I emailed her some questions. She graciously replied.

Q & A

Here is my inquiry to Shiroma, with the verbatim questions and answers:

“I am submitting the following questions and will follow up with a phone call.

“This Los Angeles Times article (below) mentions that Fresno area farming owner Dan Gerawan filed a complaint against the Board for members having accepted outside income when the law prohibits ALRB board members from receiving outside income.

“http://articles.latimes.com/2004/nov/11/local/me-boards11/2

“Though the primary target of the complaint appeared to be Board Member Daniel Zingale, the article mentions that you were also receiving outside income.

“The LATimes said: ‘Gerawan said he has his own attorney general’s opinion affirming the constitutionality of a ban on board members working at outside jobs. He is using that opinion in pursuing his case against Zingale. Zingale is not the only Agricultural Labor Relations Board member with outside employment. Bustamante works as a public relations consultant, and Shiroma is an elected member of the Sacramento Municipal Utilities District.’

“I have these questions:

Q 1: “Were you in fact receiving income outside of your ALRB position at that time? If so, please describe the type and amount of income.
”

Shiroma: “No, I have not and do not receive outside income since first being appointed to the Board in 1999.”

Q 2: “If so, did you stop receiving that income? ”

Shiroma: “See response to 1. above.”

Q 3: “And, if so, did you stop receiving that income subsequent to Dan Gerawan’s complaint?
”

Shiroma: “See response to 1. above.”

Q 4: “Finally, do you feel that Gerawan’s complaint, and its impact on ALRB board members, could in any way prejudice a member about matters related to Gerawan or its employees?

Shiroma: “No.”

Q 5: “Also, in these Board minutes

http://www.alrb.ca.gov/content/pdfs/meetings/minutes/2005/minutes050405.pdf

you and current board member Cathryn Rivera-Hernande voted to allow up to $50,000 to be spent for the legal defense of Board Member Zingale for having accepted outside income, in violation of state law (which both he, the Attorney General, and the governor admitted he was doing).

“In hindsight, as the Chairwoman of ALRB, then and currently, do you feel this was a proper expenditure of public funds?”

Shiroma: “Yes. Government Code 995 provides that, upon the request of an employee or former employee, a public entity shall(emphasis added) provide for the defense of any civil action or proceeding brought against him, in his official or individual capacity or both, on account of an act or omission in the scope of his employment as an employee of the public entity.”

Q 6: “Shouldn’t Zingale have paid for this himself?”

Shiroma: “See above.”

Q 7: “Finally, given that Dan Gerawan indirectly caused this expenditure approved by you and Board Member Rivera-Hernandez, do you still feel that the ALRB of Directors can act without bias in matters related to Gerawan?”

Shiroma: “Yes.”

————-

Update: Shiroma’s positions on AB 32 and Proposition 23 are reported here.

“Obama, for instance, has called for hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to be safe and carefully monitored, but has never pushed for federal restrictions on it.”

You follow?

Obama. Never. Pushed. For. Federal. Restrictions. On. Fracking.

But the Sac Bee’s Tom Knudson won a Pulitzer, so let’s defer to him if he doesn’t think the view of the greenest president of all time is relevant to his opus on California and fracking.

Hey, Tom: How do you sleep at night? Pravda would be proud of you.

Far less green posturing, alarmism in Keystone State

But back to the National Journal article, which discusses the potential for a split among Democrats nationally over fracking. This passage makes we wish we could trade California’s dominant political class for Pennsylvania’s:

“At first glance, Pennsylvania’s Democratic gubernatorial primary next year looks like a prime opportunity for the party to swing left on natural gas. Fracking is a major issue in the state’s politics. Primaries are driven by the party’s base, which is friendly to environmental causes. And many of those voters live in or near Philadelphia, the one region of the state that hasn’t benefited economically from the natural-gas boom. On top of all that, two of the candidates, John Hanger and Katie McGinty, are former heads of the Pennsylvania Environmental Protection Department.

“But operatives connected to many of the campaigns predict the campaigns won’t veer left on natural gas. The politics of opposing fracking are complicated, even within the Democratic Party, they say, because most Democrats believe it brings jobs that are worth the environmental risk. ‘The flip side to appeasing the environmental lobby is that you open yourself up to getting roasted on killing jobs in Pennsylvania,’ said one Democrat working one of the campaigns.

“The front-runner in the race, Rep. Allyson Schwartz, has already publicly opposed the state party’s moratorium resolution. Few expect other contenders for the nomination, including Hanger, McGinty, State Treasurer Rob McCord, or businessman Tom Wolf, to take a stand in sharp opposition to the industry. The Democratic contenders will talk a lot about being sure to regulate the industry and levying larger taxes on it, said Chris Borick, a professor and pollster at Muhlenberg, but they won’t go further.”

High unemployment in CA = vast misery

That’s what Democrats who believe job creation is a good thing sound and act like.  But as I wrote Monday, the contrast with California’s Democrats could not be more pronounced:

“Nearly one in five adults in California who wants to work full time can’t find such a job. The state’s unemployment rate has been among the highest in the nation for four years. And just Friday, a new report said it had gone up to 8.7 percent in July, going against the broader U.S. trend.

“Why don’t these grim facts create a sense of urgency in Sacramento? Don’t Brown, Steinberg and Pérez understand how much human misery is reflected in these numbers? How this vast joblessness is very much linked to the fact that California has the highest poverty rate of any state?

“The Golden State’s unemployed do not deserve this cruel indifference. In the capitals of other megastates, there is a bipartisan desire to create jobs. In Albany, many Democrats seek to help New York’s banking, finance, manufacturing and garment companies. In Austin, many Democrats work to boost Texas’ energy, aeronautics, cattle and farming interests. In Tallahassee, many Democrats look to assist Florida’s tourism, international export and agriculture industries.”

And in Harrisburg, many Democrats back fracking, knowing it’s doing great things for Pennsylvania’s economy.

In California, alas, we’ve got very different priorities.

“Democrats are passionate only about preserving union jobs and creating subsidized jobs in ‘green’ industries.

“Why? How can a party that is supposed to be devoted to helping the downtrodden be so indifferent to the millions of Californians who want and need jobs? It’s mystifying — and sad.”

Such is the Democratic Party in California. It controls every statewide office. It enjoys supermajorities in both houses of the Legislature. Last November, it passed tax increases. It’s ruling the roost.

It’s also a troubled family. The L.A. Times reported on an Immigration Town Hall meeting held July 27 by Rep. Karen Bass, D-Los Angeles. She knows the state well because she formerly was the speaker of the California Assembly.

Bass attacked Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives, even the immigration reformers among them:

“There is the crude and there is the sophisticated. At the end of the day, I think both opinions are pretty much the same in terms of the disrespectful viewpoint of immigrants.”

Immigration split

But as the Times reported, many of her fellow Democrats at the Immigration Town Hall also were not enamored of the amnesty she favors, which is in the bill passed by the U.S. Senate:

“Several spoke out against a pathway to legalization, saying it would reward those who broke the law by entering the country illegally. Others pointed to the economy and unemployment and argued that the job prospects of Americans — particularly African Americans — would be harmed.

“Keith Hardiner, 57, said he is the descendant of slaves.

” ‘They were separated from their families, but we had to fight and struggle,’ said the Silver Lake resident. ‘And now I feel like we are being set back and the country is being kind of stolen from us.'”

There’s an irony there. A growing economy can support high wages for both current residents and new immigrants. But a slowly growing economy with long-term unemployment — what we have now because of both Democratic and Republican high-tax, big bureaucracy policies — turns people against one another. Competition for shrinking positions is fierce.

We can expect to see more such fissures in the Democratic Party. For example, one day Silicon Valley billionaires are going to get sick of the Democratic politicians they usually support siphoning off hundreds of billions for the bureaucracies and lobbyists in Sacramento — all for roads that keep crumbling, schools that don’t teach and pensions for those no longer even working in government.

And as I noted earlier, top CA Dem Nancy Peloisi is backing the NSA Stasi-Security Supertate that hijacks Silicon Valley’s latest inventions to snoop and oppress. When are the Twitter and other cyber-geniuses living in San Francisco, almost all Democrats, going to bolt from her controls and boot her from office?

By Chris Reed

Los Angeles Unified is an ongoing, never-ending monument to the core premise of California education: Let’s make life easy for veteran adult employees.

Its United Teachers Los Angeles-dominated school board has for years enforced policies designed to let more experienced teachers escape the hassle of having to teach in poor neighborhoods with struggling students whose parents don’t speak English. This has led to ACLU lawsuits and some changes, but the status quo is pretty entrenched.

A new story offers a fresh example of this. Who teaches struggling English learners in many poor neighborhoods in LAUSD?

Interns.

“Los Angeles Unified School District has a very different worry about intern teachers: They come, they get trained, they move on to schools in better neighborhoods or high-paying districts, leaving students with one intern after another.

“’Those students unfortunately are experiencing a churning year after year of interns,’ Janet Davis, director of a Los Angeles Unified School District committee that provides access to professional development classes, told the Commission. ‘We had a strand of kids who actually had an entire elementary experience with only intern teachers. And those students suffered.’”

Social justice, anyone?

When will rank-and-file Democrats who believe that their party is about helping the downtrodden wise up about the CTA (UTLA is a CTA affiliate)? When will they wise up about what the California Democratic Party uses its power to achieve?

Never, evidently.

California desperately needs a competitive second party to challenge the mega-majority Democrats. Too bad the main alternative is the Republicans.

The GOP’s inbred attitude was shown yesterday when state Senate Republicans — the handful of them — elected Bob Huff of Diamond Bar their leader.

Republicans always say they favor free markets and property rights. But last year he led GOP attempts to keep anti-property rights redevelopment alive. Under redevelopment, the government uses eminent domain to grab private property and give it to wealthy developers. Gov. Jerry Brown and the Legislature killed it last year to grab the $1.7 billion the state was spending on it for other purposes, such as schools and public safety.

My colleague Steven Greenhut wrote of Huff, “In fact, one of the GOP’s leaders, Sen. Bob Huff of Diamond Bar, received the League of California Cities’ Legislator of the Year award for his efforts to save redevelopment agencies. His wife, by the way, works for a developer who is one of the state’s biggest redevelopment beneficiaries. This is the type of thing that makes me want to join the unbathed wretches occupying city parks.”

The GOP’s attitude on redevelopment, and Huff’s selection as Senate leader, also torpedoes their efforts to recruit Latinos, who generally vote 70 percent Democrat. Republicans obviously should be targeting Latino small-business owners who suffer from high taxes and over-regulation imposed by the Democratic majority.

But it’s Jose’s Muffler Shop and Maria’s Taco Stand that are most likely to be seized by eminent domain, with inadequate compensation paid to Jose and Maria, and given to wealthy Anglo developers. As with all waves of immigrants who have come to this country, commonly Latinos start out with small businesses. Then the more successful of them expand and they become more wealthy.

A good example for Latinos is Arte Moreno, who started out small in advertising, but now owns the Anaheim Angels. His crucial days were when he started out.

Arnold Schwarzenegger set back the California Republican Party by a decade. Meg Whitman set it back a second decade.

Choosing Huff as Senate leader sets the party back a third decade.

Republicans again should become a competitive force in Golden State politics ’round about 2042.

— Jan. 5, 2012