California Voices

The late Glenn Frey’s song about the international drug trade, “Smuggler’s Blues,” contains a phrase that resonates in politics as well: “It’s the lure of easy money, it’s got a very strong appeal.” Politicians are habitually lured by easy money, which is defined as money they can spend without directly taxing their constituents, but somebody […]

Tesla delivered the first of its new and much less expensive battery-powered cars last week, betting that it can move beyond producing a relative few luxury vehicles and become a mass producer. Tesla founder Elon Musk drove a Model 3, whose prices begin at $35,000, onto a stage at Tesla’s Fremont factory to kick off […]

The multi-front political and legal war over the direction of California’s immense public school system has a new front. The state Board of Education – and inferentially, Gov. Jerry Brown and the education establishment – want to take a minimalist approach to complying with the new federal education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act. Civil […]

Four decades ago, writer Cyra McFadden perfectly captured the aura of self-absorbed entitlement that envelops Marin County, on the north side of the Golden Gate Bridge. Her 1976 satirical novel, “The Serial: A Year in the Life of Marin County,” was, columnist George Will wrote at the time, “a Baedeker guide to a desolate region, […]

The political deal that led to reauthorization of California’s cap-and-trade program to reduce carbon emissions has many pieces, but one of the strangest is Assembly Constitutional Amendment 1. To win support from Assembly Republican leader Chad Mayes and presumably several other Republicans, Gov. Jerry Brown and his fellow Democrats agreed to place the measure, authored […]

Slowly – but surely – we are learning that the near-catastrophic failure of Oroville Dam’s main spillway wasn’t truly caused by weather, even though the state claims that in seeking federal aid for repairs. Rather, it resulted from poor engineering and construction when the nation’s highest dam was rising more than a half-century ago as […]

Having checked gas taxes and cap-and-trade off their 2017 agenda, California political leaders will turn to the state’s housing crisis after a month-long midsummer vacation. It’s high time, because California is building barely enough new housing to handle current population growth and making no dent in a years-long backlog. Between 2003 and 2014, California built […]

The progressive era of California government a century ago spawned many innovative reforms, among them a “grand compromise” between the state’s workers and their employers. Under “workers’ compensation,” enacted in 1914, workers would give up their right to sue employers for injuries and in return, employers would be obligated to pay for medical care and […]

Belatedly – and only after they had lost control of Congress to Republicans – the national Democratic Party grasped the impact of how state legislatures redraw congressional districts after each decennial census. A consortium of Republican and conservative interest groups had methodically set out to capture state legislatures and governorships in anticipation of redistricting after […]

Gov. Jerry Brown traveled two not always parallel paths to win legislative approval for extending California’s cap-and-trade approach to shrinking its carbon emission footprint. Publicly, he depicted it as a moral imperative because carbon-caused climate change, he says, poses an existential threat to humankind. Last week, he described an apocalyptic future of massive social dislocation, […]