read it and it makes a strong case for voting NO, not yes for Prop. 27.
PDLA, please respond.
Ed
http://blogs.laweekly.com/informer/2010/10/gerrymander_20_and_27_californ.php
California Propositions 20 and 27: A Peek At The Gerrymandering Soul Of
Congressman Howard Berman's Filthy Rich Handmaiden, Haim Saban
By Hillel Aron
LA Weekly, Tue., Oct. 19 2010
Mastering the Politburo
Haim Saban is different than you and me: he's the 287th richest man in the
world, worth $3.3 billion.
The Egyptian Jew, who looks an Ian McShane/Silvio Berlusconi cross, created
The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. And he's the biggest giver to Proposition
27, the measure to keep California gerrymandered to within an inch of its
life and protect those delicate incumbents.
As the New Yorker details, Saban is cozy with the Democratic Party and the
Clintons (not the Obamas). He's "a one-issue guy, and my issue is Israel."
He says things like: "You tell that fucking guy to stay out of my face! I
was driving a fucking tank in the Israeli Army ... when he was watching
'Scooby-Doo'!"
But what do California's fixed elections, so grotesque that they've inspired
comparisons to the Politburo, have to do with Israel?
And why did Saban, who in 2010 is rabidly for gerrymandering, give $200,000
in 2008 to Prop. 11, which California voters approved to end gerrymandering?
Dan Morain of the Sacramento Bee writes:
Saban would not discuss his donations, referring questions to a spokesman,
who said in an e-mail that Saban concluded that Proposition 11 "hasn't
worked out as intended" and didn't want to extend the concept of a citizens'
commission to congressional boundaries, as envisioned by Munger and his new
initiative.
But wait. Prop. 11 is only in the baby stages of being implemented. The
citizens who will sit on the commission to redraw legislative districts in
California -- a power that state legislators fought hard not to let the
citizens have -- haven't even been selected yet.
Morain notes that Saban's fat $2 million donation to overturn the brand-new
law, "isn't what it seems."
Morain is a bit too kind.
Saban was against gerrymandering before he was for it. Why the flip-flop?
Perhaps it does all lead to Israel. It may be that Saban is protecting
Howard Berman, the California congressman and chairman of the House
Committee on Foreign Affairs, who's a staunch Israel supporter.
Via Politico
Berman's district is shaped nothing like his head
Citizens on the Prop. 11 commission, who will have communities of interest
in mind when they draw up voting districts, won't give damn about preserving
the strange "Man in Scarf Wearing a Pilgrim Hat" shape of Berman's 28th
District of California.
If Proposition 20 is approved November 2 instead of Proposition 27 -- truly
a Haim Saban nightmare -- it would give citizens the power to draw up not
just California state legislative districts, but Congressional districts
too.
Unlike pols, citizens would respect true boundaries like neighborhood
borders and the Hollywood Hills.
Berman could very easily find that the mostly San Fernando Valley district
he thinks of as "his" no longer contains enough of "his" voters.
Remember, the 20th Congressional District was specially drawn, using
computer programs to stack it with people who vote for Berman, to make sure
Berman gets elected time after time.
That's gerrymandering.
Saban gave Berman $4,800 - half for the primary, half for the general
election - the max.
So maybe the billionaire is trying to make sure his personal politician gets
reelected into perpetuity.
Or maybe Saban is cozying up to Nancy Pelosi, in an attempt to buy as much
influence as $2 million can. Pelosi is way, way into gerrymandering, as are
almost all of the top-most political incumbents in the U.S. Congress.
For further reading on the gerrymandering schemes in California, please
check out:
-- California's Proposition 20 and 27: Gerrymandering and Election-Fixing
and Why You Should Give a Rip
-- 'Gerrymanding' Documentary is Going to Inflict Damage on Proposition 27.
Too Bad for Fat Cats Who Want to Fix Elections
***
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/25/opinion/25krugman.html?th&emc=th
Falling Into the Chasm
By Paul Krugman
NY Times Op-Ed: October 25, 2010
This is what happens when you need to leap over an economic chasm - but
either can't or won't jump far enough, so that you only get part of the way
across.
If Democrats do as badly as expected in next week's elections, pundits will
rush to interpret the results as a referendum on ideology. President Obama
moved too far to the left, most will say, even though his actual program - a
health care plan very similar to past Republican proposals, a fiscal
stimulus that consisted mainly of tax cuts, help for the unemployed and aid
to hard-pressed states - was more conservative than his election platform.
A few commentators will point out, with much more justice, that Mr. Obama
never made a full-throated case for progressive policies, that he
consistently stepped on his own message, that he was so worried about making
bankers nervous that he ended up ceding populist anger to the right.
But the truth is that if the economic situation were better - if
unemployment had fallen substantially over the past year - we wouldn't be
having this discussion. We would, instead, be talking about modest
Democratic losses, no more than is usual in midterm elections.
The real story of this election, then, is that of an economic policy that
failed to deliver. Why? Because it was greatly inadequate to the task.
When Mr. Obama took office, he inherited an economy in dire straits - more
dire, it seems, than he or his top economic advisers realized. They knew
that America was in the midst of a severe financial crisis. But they don't
seem to have taken on board the lesson of history, which is that major
financial crises are normally followed by a protracted period of very high
unemployment.
If you look back now at the economic forecast originally used to justify the
Obama economic plan, what's striking is that forecast's optimism about the
economy's ability to heal itself. Even without their plan, Obama economists
predicted, the unemployment rate would peak at 9 percent, then fall rapidly.
Fiscal stimulus was needed only to mitigate the worst - as an "insurance
package against catastrophic failure," as Lawrence Summers, later the
administration's top economist, reportedly said in a memo to the
president-elect.
But economies that have experienced a severe financial crisis generally
don't
heal quickly. From the Panic of 1893, to the Swedish crisis of 1992, to
Japan's lost decade, financial crises have consistently been followed by
long periods of economic distress. And that has been true even when, as in
the case of Sweden, the government moved quickly and decisively to fix the
banking system.
To avoid this fate, America needed a much stronger program than what it
actually got - a modest rise in federal spending that was barely enough to
offset cutbacks at the state and local level. This isn't 20-20 hindsight:
the inadequacy of the stimulus was obvious from the beginning.
Could the administration have gotten a bigger stimulus through Congress?
Even if it couldn't, would it have been better off making the case for a
bigger plan, rather than pretending that what it got was just right? We'll
never know.
What we do know is that the inadequacy of the stimulus has been a political
catastrophe. Yes, things are better than they would have been without the
American Recovery and Reinvestment Act: the unemployment rate would probably
be close to 12 percent right now if the administration hadn't passed its
plan. But voters respond to facts, not counterfactuals, and the perception
is that the administration's policies have failed.
The tragedy here is that if voters do turn on Democrats, they will in effect
be voting to make things even worse.
The resurgent Republicans have learned nothing from the economic crisis,
except that doing everything they can to undermine Mr. Obama is a winning
political strategy. Tax cuts and deregulation are still the alpha and omega
of their economic vision.
And if they take one or both houses of Congress, complete policy paralysis -
which will mean, among other things, a cutoff of desperately needed aid to
the unemployed and a freeze on further help for state and local
governments - is a given. The only question is whether we'll have political
chaos as well, with Republicans' shutting down the government at some point
over the next two years. And the odds are that we will.
Is there any hope for a better outcome? Maybe, just maybe, voters will have
second thoughts about handing power back to the people who got us into this
mess, and a weaker-than-expected Republican showing at the polls will give
Mr. Obama a second chance to turn the economy around.
But right now it looks as if the too-cautious attempt to jump across that
economic chasm has fallen short - and we're about to hit rock bottom.
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