Commentary

Media is declining nationally, but unique pressures have made California into America’s laboratory for a dangerous experiment about what happens to the public interest when policy is made without public awareness or accountability. In just the last three weeks, four major announcements about California media indicate a troubling downward spiral is accelerating.

Attorney General Xavier Becerra is imploring the U.S. Supreme Court to validate laws in California and other states requiring public employees who are not union members to nevertheless pay “agency fees” to unions. Such fees, Becerra said in a brief filed last week, fairly distribute costs of negotiating contracts with the state, school districts and […]

Four-plus decades ago, the Legislature and Jerry Brown, then in the first stages of his two-part governorship, decreed that public employees had the right to join unions and bargain for salaries and other working conditions. The argument for extending collective bargaining rights to state and local government workers, including teachers, was that they should have […]

California’s education dilemma can be stated rather simply, to wit: The state has 6 million kids in its K-12 public school system, 60 percent of them are classified as either poor or English-learners and as a group they trail badly in educational accomplishment. The state’s political leaders and education officials acknowledge what they call the […]

For years, Gov. Jerry Brown has preached a secular version of a religious principle called “subsidiarity,” asserting that local officials should have flexibility to act without micromanagement from Sacramento. In practice, he’s not always adhered to the principle, but has been particularly stubborn about applying it to the state’s six-million-student public education system, rejecting demands […]

To intertwine cliches, Gov. Jerry Brown let the cat out of the bag last week and acknowledged that he’s concerned about killing the golden geese. Those geese are the few thousand Californians with the highest incomes whose taxes allow Brown and other California politicians to spend tens of billions of dollars a year and the […]

Notwithstanding the maxim about not speaking ill of the dead, sometimes it’s necessary, as historians often do, to complete the record and teach a lesson about human behavior. That brings us to two major figures in the California Legislature three decades ago, both since deceased, John Vasconcellos and Lou Papan. Both were Democratic legislators from […]

The verdict is in and California stands convicted of gross negligence in the construction and maintenance of the nation’s highest dam, Oroville. The dam on the Feather River came very close to failing last year, forcing the evacuation of a quarter-million people living downstream. Heavy outflows revealed structural flaws in the dam’s concrete spillway and […]

Roy Bell, who was Jerry Brown’s first budget director 43 years ago, called it a “dog-and-pony show” and it’s one of the Capitol’s longest-running rituals. Each January, usually on the 10th, journalists who cover the Capitol file into a first-floor room dedicated to news conferences and settle into fiberglass swivel chairs that would command high […]

Billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer and former Republican Congressman Doug Ose are polar opposites politically, but have jointly altered dynamics of this year’s California elections. Late last week, Ose, who represented a suburban Sacramento district for several terms, declared that he will run for governor. “Simply put, I’m running to rebuild the California dream.” Ose told […]