SALON

California

Wednesday, Jun 23, 1999 4:00 PM UTC

Jerry Brown shakes up Oakland's black political establishment

The hard-charging mayor challenges an entrenched bureaucracy -- and a racial spoils system.

By

All the drama, dysfunction and potential for redemption in black urban politics today could be seen in Oakland this spring, when a coalition of black ministers and community leaders took to the streets to block Mayor Jerry Brown’s attempts to clean house. Brown and his allies were gunning for two Oakland officials — the city’s first black police chief and its Chinese-American school superintendent, an ally of the school district’s majority-black administration — and a group of black leaders calling themselves the Community and Clergy Coalition rose up to try to stop them.

In March, the coalition brought more than 100 people to march on City Hall, and then over to Brown’s bay-front warehouse, which houses his “We the People” organization. They chanted “We’re the people!” and attacked his early decisions. Some criticized Brown’s proposal to draw 10,000 new residents to downtown Oakland, which he called his “elegant density” plan, because they fear the newcomers will be whites with money, who will flock from around the Bay Area to enjoy Oakland’s better weather, lower housing costs and proximity to San Francisco. A few black leaders began to compare the liberal former California governor with New York’s Republican Mayor Rudy Giuliani. “I don’t think he cares much about diversity,” former Mayor Elihu Harris, who is black, told the San Francisco Chronicle after Brown’s State of the City address in April. It looked like an outbreak of ugly racial politics was going to paralyze Brown’s attempts at reform.

But two months later, the storm is over. Brown ousted the two officials — and at least three others — and lived to talk about it. But he doesn’t want to talk about it, insisting the controversy is ancient history now. We’re sitting in his small City Hall office, which is strangely anonymous five months into his tenure — no photos or plaques or even art on the walls — and Brown is uncharacteristically tight-lipped. “Nobody’s talking about that anymore. The Chronicle’s not covering it. The [Oakland] Tribune’s not writing about it.” Just because the media isn’t covering something, I remind him, doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant. “OK, maybe they’re talking about it in some of the black churches,” he admits. “But tell me who else is talking.”

When I repeat Harris’ comment about “diversity,” I touch a nerve, and suddenly Brown can’t help himself. He’s talking, all right, an angry, staccato stream-of-consciousness rant.

“Let’s talk about diversity. Every city department head but one is black — is that diversity? People can say anything they want.” He points to my cup of water on his desk. “They can say there’s two cups on the desk, but that’s demonstrably not true. Facts are facts.” I nod, and he moves on to the issue of crime, which he’s made his own. “Reducing crime is saving minority lives. Let’s look at the city’s murder victims last year. Almost all of them were black.

“Oakland government was not working,” Brown continues. “We had process paralysis. The insider group needed to be shaken up — the friends getting jobs for friends. People voted for change, and that’s what they’re getting.”

The irony of Brown’s early battles with Oakland’s black leaders is that when he ran for mayor last year, Brown became “the black candidate,” despite the presence of seven real-live African-Americans in the race. Much of the city’s black leadership, and a plurality of its black voters, seemed prepared to elect this white man mayor, judging that his track record on issues of concern to African-Americans, not to mention his Oakland-boosting celebrity, more than made up for his lack of melanin. Brown got 59 percent of the vote in the crowded field, and carried every Oakland precinct, including black strongholds, except for a couple in a Latino rival’s City Council district. And after his June election, Brown put a city charter change initiative on the city ballot, giving the traditionally weak mayor more power. In a clear mandate for Brown, the measure won 75 percent of the vote.

Then suddenly, just a few months into his tenure, Brown seemed to be in trouble with the black community. The cause: His quest to oust both Chief Joseph Samuels, who he alleged paid insufficient attention to bringing down Oakland’s declining but still high crime rate, and Superintendent Carole Quan, who he argued put school district bureaucrats before the interests of school children. Certain black leaders were also angry that Brown, backed by Oakland’s take-no-prisoners city manager, Robert Bobb, was threatening the tenure of seven other department heads and another 60 middle managers who had been put on notice to improve their performance or find new jobs. “Bobb was hired to clean house and bust up the hegemony of African-Americans at City Hall,” charges Leo Bazile, a former city councilman, two-time mayoral candidate and leader of the Community and Clergy Coalition. “He and Brown teamed up.”

But Brown’s cool response to the crisis — “Nobody’s talking about that anymore” — may be more than just spin. Oakland’s new mayor has won every battle he’s picked to date, and there have been more than a few. Not all the conflicts have had a racial element: He recently fought the powerful California Teachers Association and won, beating back a bill that would have forced unions on teachers in charter schools, one of Brown’s pet populist issues. But most of his battles have had a racial element — and yet the racial tumult he inspired early on has subsided, at least for now. Brown’s most bitter black opponents, the head of the local NAACP and the city’s largest black church, didn’t return repeated phone calls asking for their comments about Brown. And his chief black opponent in the mayor’s race, urban planning scholar and education reformer Ed Blakely, just agreed to head Brown’s new Mayor’s Commission on Education.

“Jerry’s white, but he’s refreshing. If I were mayor I wouldn’t have fired the police chief — or if I did, I’d have done it a different way,” Blakely says. “But you have to admit: That got every bureaucrat’s attention. They’re on notice that things are going to change.”

And opponent Leo Bazile grudgingly agrees. “If you want the mule to change, you’ve got to get the mule’s attention. And he’s done that. Let’s just see what he does next.”

At the time of the noisiest protests against Brown’s school maneuvers, I happened to be reading Tamar Jacoby’s “Somebody Else’s House: America’s Unfinished Struggle for Integration,” her one-sided, irritating but occasionally irrefutable indictment of the way liberals sold out to black militants to ruin the cities. And even as an Oakland booster, I found it unnerving: Here was Jacoby, writing about the 1960s, when black activists stormed school boards to attack white bureaucracies that were not educating their kids. Now, in Oakland, black leaders were turning out to defend black bureaucracies that were not educating their kids.

To understand that bizarre role reversal, you have to understand that Oakland is sacred ground in black political history. It’s the birthplace of the Black Panther Party, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and the nation’s War on Poverty. Its first black mayor, Lionel Wilson, rode to power in 1978 in the Panthers’ political wake, and though he governed as a centrist, his administration was a time of black ascendancy in City Hall and beyond. Black administrators took the helms of most city agencies, and moved into key posts in the school system, too. The city got a reputation for backwardness and bureaucracy that was part racism, part reality, and its troubles were deepened by the industrial exodus that hurt all blue-collar cities — and decimated the black working class — in the 1970s and ’80s. Although black control of City Hall and the school district helped enlarge the city’s black middle class, it did little for other groups, and in fact poverty climbed throughout the 1970s and ’80s.

There were, of course, periodic attempts to reform the city’s bureaucracies and revive its economy, but they were often derided as the product of white backlash. Yet nowhere was reform more desperately needed than in Oakland’s public schools. Test scores have long been among the lowest of any district in the state — especially among black students — and the incidence of corruption was arguably among the highest. The district reached bottom in 1989, when a grand jury indicted a roster of administrators and employees for corruption. Then-Assemblyman (and mayoral candidate) Elihu Harris carried a bill to put the district into state receivership, the superintendent resigned and the School Board couldn’t hire anyone to replace him, as promising candidates refused to come to work in Oakland.

But even at its nadir, the district had its black defenders. I worked in Oakland then, for a fledgling school reform initiative, and though the reform effort was black-led, there were longtime black activists who badmouthed it as a tool of the white business community — though the white business community was, sadly, little involved in any effort to improve Oakland schools, including ours. The discrediting campaign didn’t work: Although the school reform effort stalled short of its goals, a groundswell of support from black parents, as well as whites, Asians and Latinos, kept the gossip about its alleged white business ties from destroying the effort. But to this day, attempts at school reform are viewed suspiciously, as though they might be part of a plot by the white elite to take Oakland back from black leadership and make it safe for white business.

And yet, over time, a constituency for reform has developed, among every race in Oakland, and it has spread beyond the schools. You might be reading about change and controversy and painful urban reform in Oakland, at least occasionally, even if Jerry Brown weren’t its celebrity mayor, thanks to the City Council’s selection of Robert Bobb as the new city manager. The tough-talking reformer moved out from Richmond, Va., promising to shake up City Hall. Bobb is black — notwithstanding the perception he was brought in “to bust up African-American hegemony” — and that has probably helped insulate Brown a little from charges of racism.

At first, Brown and Bobb seemed an unlikely couple: Brown, a cosmopolitan, big-picture guy (aka Gov. Moonbeam), could have easily clashed with Bobb, a detail-oriented social conservative from a small Southern city. But instead they joined forces, and turned out to have a lot in common in their crusade to bring accountability to Oakland government. They both sweat the small stuff: Bobb is known for phoning city employees at random, and chiding those who don’t properly identify themselves (repeat offenders get sent to training classes); Brown circles spelling and grammatical mistakes in department heads’ letters and sends them back.

With the backing of the nation’s most famous mayor, the pace of change in Oakland accelerated dramatically. Quickly, Brown and Bobb moved into an area where city leaders have little formal control: the schools. “If you want to improve life in the city, you’re going to very quickly get to the issue of the schools,” says George Musgrove, the deputy city manager Bobb brought with him from Richmond, who next month will become acting superintendent of Oakland schools. But that’s getting ahead of the story. “People expect their mayor to have some control over the schools,” Musgrove explains. “You’ll be held accountable if you don’t improve them.”

So Musgrove, Bobb and Brown began looking at why decades of efforts to reform Oakland schools have produced reams of reports and recommendations, but little in the way of improved student achievement. Much of the criticism focused on Superintendent Carole Quan. Though she got high marks for good intentions, and some fledgling attempts at reform, she received failing grades when it came to making the tough choices — cutting the bloated central administration and firing or reassigning low-performing principals and teachers — that real change requires, at least partly because she’d been with the district more than 30 years. “It’s hard for an insider like Carole to make rapid change in the district — too many issues have people’s faces on them,” said one African-American education advocate, who liked Quan but thought she had to go.

Meanwhile, local state Sen. Don Perata, a white Oakland power broker (whom black conspiracy theorists see as the mastermind of the long-rumored plan to take Oakland back from black people), saw Brown’s political popularity, and floated a bill in the Legislature to have the state take over Oakland’s failing schools and install the new mayor as trustee in order to force the departure of Quan. And that’s when the Community and Clergy Coalition got involved — just in time to weigh in on Brown’s plan to oust Police Chief Samuels, too.

Community and Clergy Coalition leader Bazile says openly what some black leaders will only say privately: that black politicians in Oakland, who’ve tried to make sure top jobs go to blacks, have gotten rapped simply for doing what their predecessors did before them. “The Irish did it, the Jews did it, and it’s only when African-Americans took over City Hall that you had liberals clamoring for ‘good government,’” he says. That ignores the history of good government reform efforts going back to Tammany Hall, of course. But it is true that blacks inherited the cities when the coffers began to empty — as the tax base declined, the middle class fled and black cronyism was more obvious, and harder to defend, than white cronyism had been.

When I argue that black kids in Oakland schools have been hurt the most by the notion that the dysfunctional school system is a jobs program, Bazile retorts: “Schools have always been a jobs program, run by the group in power. Again, it’s historical, but people only want reform when it’s African-Americans in charge.” Add Don Perata to the list of Brown-backers who wanted to take over the schools, Bazile says, and the black community was duty-bound to fight back. Jerry Brown was starting to look like white mayors in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York who’ve moved to strengthen their control over the schools — and in the case of Chicago’s Mayor Richard Daley, have won, and watched the schools improve under their control.

“You had Perata wanting to turn the schools over to the state,” says Bazile. “So we said: Why get the state involved?” Some of the city’s black leaders were also upset that Brown was trying to oust Samuels and Quan without properly consulting them. “He made the leaders look like paper tigers, and they are paper tigers today,” Bazile says with a chuckle. “But it was obligatory for us to circle the wagons around them.”

But this time, their arguments didn’t carry the day. In the end, Quan tearfully resigned, averting a state takeover, and George Musgrove was named acting superintendent, a sign that Brown had won the power struggle. But the mayor isn’t through. Now he wants to change the city’s charter again, to allow him to appoint a majority of the School Board. He’s appointed an education commission, chaired by Ed Blakely, to “study” possible charter reforms, including the notion of a mayor-appointed School Board majority. And if Blakely and Brown didn’t see eye to eye on every issue during the mayor’s race, they’re soul mates when it comes to education reform in Oakland.

“Jerry and I have one key thing in common, and that’s that we’re both over 60, and the future is now for us,” says Blakely, whose involvement in Oakland school reform goes back 15 years and at least five superintendents. “We can’t listen to excuses anymore. I know people in the district have a lot of fear, and their fears are legitimate in this case. We’re going to settle for no less than a complete transformation of the schools.” Blakely won’t commit himself to Brown’s plan to let the mayor appoint the School board majority, but says, “There will be changes in governance, I’m sure. The mayor will have a role.” The commission promises to finish its work within three months.

School reform advocates are mostly positive about Brown’s efforts to date. “Jerry’s right: Change needs to happen faster,” says Junious Williams, executive director of the Urban Strategies Council, which has spearheaded several past school-reform initiatives. “Too much process is bad strategy, and we’ve certainly studied the schools to death. But I worry about whether he actually understands how hard it is to change schools, raise test scores. Does he know how to change a whole district?”

“Nobody should underestimate the intelligence and connections of Jerry Brown,” retorts Musgrove, his choice to lead the school district. “He knows the best minds of everybody in the country personally. He is an amazing person. Oakland is process crazy, and Jerry knows: You’ve gotta move. Now.”

Back in his City Hall office, Jerry Brown is visibly excited by the dizzying pace of change in Oakland. “This is all much more interesting, much more engaging, than I remembered,” he tells me. And critics — myself included — who said he wouldn’t have the patience for the details of the job turned out to be wrong. He’s got yesterday’s crime statistics at his fingertips and rattles them off to me. “No murders — homicide’s down 41 percent over the same period of last year. Still a lot of car theft, though.”

He wants to show me the city’s new computerized crime-tracking equipment, but it’s slow to boot up and we both lose patience. But while we’re waiting, I ask about a rumor that he tried to recruit former New York Police Commissioner William Bratton to be Oakland’s chief (a staple of the paranoia that Brown is turning into the Giuliani of the West). He scoffs. “No, but we brought him out here to talk to us. And he taught us a lot. You know the first thing he told us? You have to reduce police brutality.” Giuliani fired Bratton, Brown points out, because they differed over community policing. He leaves unstated the implication that his critics’ fears of Bratton shows their ignorance.

When I ask him how he’s going to share the wealth with the city’s still-large poverty population and bring jobs to the unemployed, he gets defensive. “Unemployment is only 5 or 6 percent in Oakland now. Jobs are going begging,” he tells me. I respond that unemployment is much higher in black West and East Oakland, and the city’s welfare population has dropped, but only half as much as San Francisco’s. “That’s interesting,” he says. “I’ve never seen that statistic. I’d like to know more about that.” But soon he’s defensive again.

“You’re coming at me from the left,” he complains. I disagree, telling him I’ve thought in recent years he’d moved to my left — he was the one with his radio show on rabble-rousing Pacifica station KPFA, I remind him, the one who ran for president in 1996 ranting against corporate power.

He softens, but doesn’t quite smile. “Well, you want me to be talking about the things I talked about on KPFA: global trade, technology, class stratification. I can’t affect any of that. All I can do is make Oakland a better place to live. And the attraction of capital, making the neighborhoods safe and friendly and improving the schools will do that. It will take us to much higher ground.”

A little bit mollified, he returns unbidden to the racial complaints that dogged his early months in office. “There are many consequences to poverty and racial division. That’s all real. I don’t mean to say it isn’t real. The resistance is still there. But I think people are ready to ask not ‘Who is the police chief?’ and ‘What race is he?’ but ‘What is he doing?’”

And he may be right. (It also helped that the police chief Brown selected, Richard Word, is black, and popular with the East Oakland neighborhood where he was commander, and that blacks still hold almost every department-head post in the city.) Brown still has his black critics. “The word on the street is that Brown is surrounded by some elitist-wannabes who are isolating him from blacks and browns,” says author Ishmael Reed, who supported Brown’s candidacy and wrote and recited a poem at his inauguration. “I hope that ‘elegant density’ doesn’t mean black and Hispanic removal.”

But it may be that most of the black community is ready for Brown’s brand of change. “We’ve been through 20 years of addressing the most hideous discrimination of the past by using the same methods the oppressor used to govern: cronyism, favoritism, corruption, the attitude of ‘They got their piece, and I’m gonna get mine,’” says Musgrove, who is black. “A movement of good government for cities has swept the country, and all good mayors — African-American, white, Latino — are governing that way.”

Maybe surprisingly, Bazile agrees. “I think black hegemony is not our concern anymore,” he says. “We have talented individuals, and if they lose their job in Oakland, they’ll find jobs elsewhere. The concern now has to be how many children will be left behind and become prison fodder. We want results, and the color of a person doesn’t make any difference anymore.

“I ran against him, but maybe Jerry Brown is the perfect person for Oakland right now. Other mayors would bring a flashlight to our problems, and Jerry brings a spotlight. He’s certainly got the mule’s attention.”

Joan Walsh

Joan Walsh is Salon's editor at large. More Joan Walsh.

Wednesday, Apr 18, 2012 7:27 PM UTC

California’s college mess

How not to compete in the global economy: The richest state in the U.S. can't afford to educate its students

By Jerry Brown (Credit: Reuters/Lucy Nicholson)

If increasing access to quality higher education is as crucial to U.S. economic growth as everybody seems to think it is, then two news item from California this week deliver a simple, straightforward message: We’re screwed.

1) Ace education reporter Nanette Asimov reported on Tuesday in the San Francisco Chronicle that the California State University system is withholding around $90 million in cash grants previously allocated to graduate students in the CSU system.

Graduate students across the 23-campus system began receiving financial aid notices this week and were astonished to see that the State University Grant that takes care of tuition for low-income students was missing. In its place was the offer of a federal loan at 6.8 percent interest.

2) Also on Tuesday, University of California officials announced a sharp increase in out-of-state student admissions to the U.C. system:

More than 23 percent of all those incoming freshmen will be out-of-state and international students who pay nearly three times more than California residents to attend UC…. The figures mark a big jump from last fall, when 18 percent of admissions were from out of state. And it’s almost double the percentage of foreign and non-California residents who were admitted in fall 2009.

The common link to these two data points: California’s increasing inability to fund its public university system. The CSU system has already weathered a 33 percent cut in its overall state funding — $1 billion — over the last four years, and faces another $200 million cut if Gov. Jerry Brown fails to convince voters to pass a state initiative authorizing a tax hike this November.

The UC system is in similar straits. Once upon a time, California gave every student who qualified for the UC system a completely free ride. Now the state pays only 11 percent of UC tuition costs. As a result, for in-state students, tuition has tripled over the last 20 years, to $13,200. But out-of-state students pay three times as much as that, a fact that has made them more and more attractive to admissions departments.

California’s troubles paying for higher education can be traced all the way back to the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978, which made it extraordinarily difficult for the state to raise taxes. But California’s s woes are by no means unique. In 2011, state funding for higher education dropped by $6 billion, or 8 percent nationwide. And with the federal government caught in the same vice grip — an intransigent refusal to raise taxes for any purpose whatsoever — there’s little help that can be expected from Washington. In fact, the same graduate students who are getting their unpleasant mail from CSU this week are due for another unhappy surprise on July 1, when interest rates on their federal student loans bump up, a result of one of the cost-cutting deals that was part of the debt ceiling agreement one year ago.

All these numbers add up to another simple, straightforward truth: Quality higher education is increasingly available only to those who can afford it. So income inequality becomes educational inequality, and the stratification of American society into haves and have-nots continues apace. If we’re looking for strategies on how to prosper in an ever more competitive global economy, this isn’t it.

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Andrew Leonard

Andrew Leonard is a staff writer at Salon. On Twitter, @koxinga21. More Andrew Leonard.

Monday, Apr 9, 2012 12:00 PM UTC

California’s unregulated fracking problem

Drilling has long gone unregulated in this earthquake-prone state. And now Gov. Brown may be trying to hush it up

By , Alternet A gas flare burns at a fracking site in rural Bradford County, Pennsylvania January 9, 2012 (Credit: Reuters/Les Stone)
This originally appeared on

Thanks to the smoking gun of Josh Fox’s sobering documentary “Gasland,” hydraulic fracturing has finally entered our renewable news cycle. Yet despite poisoning groundwater, freeing methane and literally creating earthquakes back east, fracking has a visibility problem in California.

AlterNetThe situation became less clear after a recent investigative report from D.C.-based nonprofit Environmental Working Group explained that California has experienced 60 unregulated years of widespread fracking, whose technical methods and geographical locations in the seismically active state exist outside of the public purview. It got darker after Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration wiped the state government’s Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources (DOGGR) website of fracking fact-sheets and documents. Good luck finding anything about fracking on the governor’s official site either.

“Since our report came out, the Brown administration hasn’t been happy with it,” Bill Allayaud, EWG‘s California director of government affairs, told AlterNet by phone. “They said we quoted their meetings but left out important quotes. But I don’t know what we left out, or how we could shine a better light on the situation. We’ve been trying to work with them now for over a year.”

There has also been a great disappearing act. According to Allayaud, gone is the issue’s main page, an account of fracking in other states, as well as what he calls an “inaccurate and misleading factsheet about fracking in California.” Gone also is a copy of a letter sent by the state in response to questions from Senator Fran Pavley (D-Santa Monica), chair of the Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Water, whose rebuffed inquiries about the extent of California fracking inspired assembly bill 591 (AB 591), currently at the center of a tug-of-war between the interested citizenry and an industry that seems desperate to avoid transparency.

Punch the term “fracking” into DOGGR’s search today and you’ll receive a white screen with the perhaps accidentally ironic query “Did you mean: cracking” in response. That’s probably funny to even most Californians, whose fault-laced state is due for its next catastrophic earthquake, but it doesn’t inspire confidence that DOGGR is taking fracking seriously.

“No word on that, sorry,” DOGGR spokesman Don Drysdale told AlterNet via email when asked for clarification on the division’s online document scrub, or whether they will be replaced or upgraded. Drysdale also explained that DOGGR doesn’t have regulations requiring that operators report when, where and how they use hydraulic fracturing to stimulate production. He also said that information from DOGGR regarding fracked wells in the San Joaquin-Sacramento River delta gas fields near shallow groundwater is “not available, and that “we do not have records” of offshore fracking operations in the Long Beach-Santa Barbara drilling area.

“However, the City of Long Beach has its own oil and gas department and may have some information,” he added. “We recently began to request that operators voluntarily report their hydraulic fracturing operations (PDF) to FracFocus, a public Web site run by the Groundwater Protection Council and Interstate Oil & Gas Compact Commission.”

This Kafkaesque labyrinth doesn’t exactly inspire confidence that DOGGR “has regulations designed to ensure well integrity and to protect underground resources,” as Drysdale claimed to AlterNet. If it did, there’s a good chance that AB 591 wouldn’t exist in the first place. That law proposes to legislatively define the fracking technique and disclose its “chemical constituents,” recognize its “long history of its application within the state,” evaluate its impact on California’s natural resources and “geologic and seismic complexity,” disclose its sources and amounts of water used and relay any data on “recovery and disposal of any radiological components.” That a bottomless well’s worth of disclosure demands for a regulatory regime professing to do its job just fine, thanks.

It is also why “DOGGR was raked over the coals” in a March 28 budget hearing “that was more about fracking than anything else,” according to Allayaud, who attended. At that meeting, California Department of Conservation (DOC) director Mark Nechodom was rebuffed in his efforts to procure more funding and positions for DOGGR. That fact that he repeatedly assured Assembly members that DOGGR was regulating fracking but was unable or unwilling to disclose the location of any fracked wells or well-casing failures to those members might have had something to do with it. By meeting’s end, Nechodom promised to prepare fracking regulations, undertake a scientific inquiry into its practice, and conduct a series of listening sessions in the state.

Better late than never, but DOC and DOGGR still need to speed the plow. According to a report from the Center for Investigative Reporting’s Tia Ghose, both the Center for Biological Diversity and Sierra Club are suing the Bureau of Land Management to prevent fracking on federal lands (PDF) — 2,500 “environmentally sensitive” acres in Monterey and Fresno counties have already been leased. The BLM has suggested that it’s mostly grazing land that has been leased before but still remains undeveloped, and consoled worriers by explaining that the agency executes environmental reviews in the drilling permit process.

“Our case is proceeding in the district court on a normal schedule, but there hasn’t been any merits briefing or rulings yet,” Sierra Club attorney Nathan Matthews told AlterNet. “Nobody from the state has contacted us about this suit. The BLM Web site lists who purchased the leases, but presumably the land could be developed by someone else. Our claim demands that BLM assess these types of risks before proceeding to allow development.”

Like DOGGR before them, the BLM’s distaste for transparency on an issue as controversial as fracking is counterproductive, and could prove costly in the final analysis if the problems that continue to plague the practice back east migrate westward. But their profit-oriented perspective nevertheless comfortably aligns with the industry itself, which seems all too content to rely on hindsight rather than foresight when it comes to tragedies large and small.

“An original version of AB 591 we had last year asked the industry to map where it was fracking in California, and indicate any active seismic fault within five miles,” said Allayaud. The industry’s non-profit trade group Western States Petroleum Association “said it wanted thatout. When I asked why, the answer I got was, ‘Look, if we were causing earthquakes through drilling, injection wells or fracked wells, you would know it. Look how many geophysicists are running around the state looking at earthquakes.’”

That flippant industry response, taken together with those of the California agencies overseeing that very industry, has only galvanized regional opposition. Many more will inevitably follow AB 591 and the joint complaint against BLM if industry and government alike condescendingly assert that everything is under control to a citizenry told too many times to keep its nose out of its own affairs. The fight over AB 591 exists precisely because the industry won’t release its fracking data, from the location of its wells to the chemical makeup of its bedrock-fracturing injection cocktails, without rigorous enforcement.

To play fair, the EWG stripped the mapping requirements near active seismic faults. “We agreed to take it out because the industry is trying to be cooperative,” Allayaud told AlterNet. “They’re not opposing the bill.”

For his part, Allayaud isn’t too concerned about California’s fault-riddled seismology or inevitable earthquake catastrophes. So far, neither is the United States Geological Service, whose Web site search results on fracking are more extensive than Governor Brown and DOGGR’s blank pages. The USGS explains that California’s faults are better studied and understood than anywhere else in the nation, and that its populaces are also better prepared for earthquakes large and small. “Hydraulic fracturing has been taking place for many decades in California,” the USGS Earthquake Science Center’s Art McGarr told AlterNet, “mostly to stimulate oil and gas production in old fields.”

“In any event, there is little likelihood that any fracking operation could perturb a nearby active fault so as to trigger a major earthquake,” he added. “The stress changes associated with fracking are much too small and localized to interact with a fault capable of producing a significant earthquake. In other parts of the country where fracking has enabled gas production from tight shales, the fracking has not caused earthquakes of any consequence.”

To McGarr’s knowledge, there are no high-volume waste-water injection wells in California located within areas of high population density, and he guesses that will continue to be the case. But we’ll never know until the federal and state government is compelled by a plugged-in citizenry to force the industry’s hand, and disclosure. Until that happens, they will side with controversial corporations like Halliburton, which is leading the opposition against AB 591 by arguing that disclosing the chemical cocktails it uses to fracture wells would be a violation of trade secrets. And the last-gasp natural gas bubble that fracking enables will continue to create flammable groundwater and destabilized grounds. Once it becomes apparent that the green defense of fracking is negated by more methane, which is 25 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than CO2, then hydraulic fracturing’s disclosure game will be up.

In hindsight, it will look like a bunch of junkies who just didn’t know when to stop tapping fossil fuel’s disappearing veins.

“We need strong disclosure rules with narrow trade secret protections,” Matthews explained to AlterNet. “BLM will be announcing a proposed disclosure rule in the coming weeks, and the public will be able to submit comments on that.”

“The Brown administration still says there is no urgency to create regulations to deal with fracking,” said Allayaud. “Their focus is on getting permits for regular oil drilling out the door faster. We think they have the capability to do both, and I think AB 591 will push them in that direction, because they need to be pushed. I’ve never seen a state agency behave this way, and I’ve been working around them for 36 years.”

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Scott Thill is the editor of Morphizm.com. He has written on media, politics and music for Wired, the Huffington Post, LA Weekly and other publications. More Scott Thill.

Saturday, Feb 4, 2012 5:00 PM UTC

Swimming with the stars

A new photography exhibition examines the cultural significance of the Southern California swimming pool SLIDE SHOW

By Lawrence Schiller, "Marilyn Monroe," 1962.(Credit: Courtesy of Judith and Lawrence Schiller; Lawrence Schiller © Polaris Communications, Inc.)

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By turns playful, suggestive and bewitching, the photographs in a new show at the Palm Springs Art Museum propel us back through the decades, to a time when the glamour of choreographed capitalist displays had a singular hold over the American imagination.

These images, though diverse in many respects, all have one thing in common: the swimming pool. That, and their mid-to-late 20th-century Southern California backdrop.

The exhibition is part of  “Pacific Standard Time,” a multi-institutional project devoted telling the story “of the birth of the Los Angeles art scene and how it became a major new force in the art world,” sponsored by the Getty Research Institute. Over the phone, curator Daniell Cornell explained the place of the swimming pool in Southern California’s cultural history, and discussed the show’s principal themes — from architecture and suburban idealism to the cult of the Hollywood celebrity. Click through the following slide show for a sun-soaked trip back in time.

Had you considered doing a swimming-pool themed photography exhibition before “Pacific Standard Time”?

I’d been thinking for a long time, actually — ever since graduate school — about trying to do an exhibition that investigated a theoretical concept: the notion that a place is both a real, topographic entity and an ideological construct … It’s just an idea I’ve been wanting to explore. When the opportunity came to apply for a grant to do an exhibition as part of this larger project looking at art in Southern California, I realized that it was the perfect opportunity to begin to explore that idea.

When I started thinking about it … I realized that in many ways, in the post-war period, Southern California was the ideal of what the American dream was going to look like. At the center of that was the swimming pool, and suburban expansion, and the concept of everybody living in this place that didn’t have the danger of nature, but had all the benefits of the natural landscape. A place that was away from the city, but at the same time felt domesticated. I started thinking about the pool as the central icon of that both real and imaginary place. And it grew from there.

What do swimming pools say about Southern California in particular (that they don’t say, for instance, abut other parts of the country, such as the Midwest or New England)?

Well, in the immediate postwar period of the ’40s, ’50s and even ’60s, there weren’t that many swimming pools elsewhere. Maybe in Florida, which had a similar kind of expansion at that time. But Southern California was growing very rapidly in terms of suburbia in that period, and that expansion included houses that incorporated swimming pools. I grew up in the ’60s and ’70s in Seattle, and I envied Southern California — because in Seattle, in the summer, we would drag out our above-ground swimming pools and set them up and pretend that we lived the same kind of life that I imagined people in Southern California lived all the time. Thinking about kids my age in the ’70s growing up with swimming pools in their backyard and having this kind of experience as the norm for their life — that was a very seductive sensibility. I don’t think that that was unusual, when you look at how much Hollywood promoted itself and Southern California as an ideal for the country. You pretty much see it everywhere.

Two themes that seem immediately apparent in many of these images are architecture — that is, the houses or buildings we often see beside the pools — and sex.

The exhibition is divided into thematic groups. It does start with California architecture and design, because swimming pools were at the center of the way that mid-century architects here in Southern California were thinking about modern architecture. The pool created a very porous experience between indoor living and outdoor entertaining. These were houses literally built for entertaining, and the movement from the inside to the outside was part of how Southern California architecture was developed … The pool really allowed for fluid movement between those spaces. So architecture and design is certainly at the beginning of the way that you would want to think about pools, in the period from 1945 to 1982 in general, in Southern California.

In addition, this is a period in which … culture was creating an image for the Hollywood celebrity that was built around the pool. You see all of these images of Hollywood celebrities — supposedly just casual, unscripted moments. [But] none of those photographs are meant to do anything except promote the persona of the celebrity. They give you this impression that what you’re seeing is the “real” celebrity, when in fact you’re seeing the carefully narrated Hollywood persona that that celebrity is based on.

[Another section of the show focuses on] suburbia, and how much the private, backyard pool (as opposed to the public pool) was at the center of suburban life. There were some public pools in suburbia, but the ideal was a private, protected space; especially in the ’50s, it had very much to do with this notion that we Americans had a private experience — as opposed to the communal experience of the Soviet countries. When you look at what people circulated in terms of photographs, and even what they said about their own experience, it almost always revolved around things that they were doing in the backyard. If they were lucky enough, it revolved around a pool in the backyard. And as you say, because of the very nature of the fact that, when you’re around a pool, you’re wearing a swimsuit, it becomes an opportunity for the body to be on display.

[The final section of the exhibition is a conceptual one.] I wanted this show to be not just about these social topics, but also about what was happening in photography during the period. 1945 is a high modernist moment in photography, and the earliest photograph in the show is by Ruth Bernhard, who emigrated from Germany to escape the Nazis. She went first to New York and then to Southern California, and her images represent all of the things that you would expect in a high modernist photograph: … even though it’s representative, there’s a very abstract organization of the forms and the shapes in the image, because it’s done through high contrasts of light and dark.

As you move through the period, you get photography really blurring the boundary between popular culture and high culture, because photographs circulate in commercial advertising; they circulate in journalistic reporting; they exist in lifestyle magazines as well as in professional trade journals … all of those things in addition to showing up as fine art in museums.

Then, in the 1980s — that’s when photography goes big; that’s when Cindy Sherman’s photographs go up on the wall large, and Barbara Kruger’s imagery goes up big, and David Hockney first takes his smaller Polaroid images and montages them together into something large enough that it can go up on the wall and challenge painting as the dominant mode in contemporary art practice. You see this shift from a very high modernist fine art practice to color photography that we recognize as a part of postmodern contemporary art. That really literally happens from 1945 to 1982, so it spans the dates of this show. The conceptual section really shows you how photography used the pool, not as a subject, but as an opportunity to explore all kinds of developments in photography as an aesthetic mode itself.

The exhibition features several works by David Hockney — and several that were inspired by him (or even actually incorporate him [slide 10]). Can you talk a little about his art and influence?

[The Hockney photo in your slide show,] “John St. Clair Swimming,” [slide 9] is actually very small. It’s typical of a series of images he took; he used photography in the way that other artists might use a sketch or a prefatory painting: as a way to think about his compositions. That image of John St. Clair swimming became source material for a later famous painting by Hockney that is actually set in Italy. But that particular image [was taken in California].

When I decided to do this exhibition, I knew it had to have Hockney, because if you say “the swimming pool in Southern California,” the first thing that comes to almost everybody’s mind is Hockney. It’s ironic, though — I don’t think most people know that he only painted 15 paintings of swimming pools. They loom so large, because they circulated so widely through reproductions and in the popular imagination that people think he must have painted dozens of them. But he only did 15.

“Backyard Oasis: The Swimming Pool in Southern California Photography, 1945-1982″ is on display at the Palm Springs Art Museum in Palm Springs, Calif., through May 27, 2012.

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Emma Mustich is a Salon contributor. Follow her on Twitter: @emustich. More Emma Mustich.

Monday, Oct 17, 2011 8:39 PM UTC

Occupy Southern California

At least a half-dozen separate protest movements have sprung up between L.A. and San Diego

By San Diego Police clash with demonstrators at the Civic Center Plaza Friday, Oct. 14, 2011 in San Diego. (Credit: AP/Lenny Ignelzi)

California has long been a hotbed of political activism, so it’s no real surprise that residents across the state are expressing their solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street movement. In fact, in the relatively small tract of land between Los Angeles and San Diego, a number of groups have staged protests of their own. Here’s a roundup:

Occupy Los Angeles: A group of 10,000 to 15,000 protesters — not just Angelenos, but Californians from near and far — marched in dowtown L.A. on Saturday. According to the Los Angeles Times:

Despite the frustration and anger that many protesters expressed, the march took on a decidedly festive atmosphere. Families walked together, with mothers carrying babes in Snuggies and tattooed fathers toting toddlers on their shoulders. One woman twirled a Hula-Hoop around her middle as she walked. A man strummed a guitar. Several people pounded drums.

Occupy Long Beach: Though only a few dozen protesters reportedly came out for a Sunday protest, a few ran into trouble when they set up camp in the city’s Lincoln Park. From the Los Angeles Times:

Police said that the 35 to 40 demonstrators in Long Beach’s downtown Lincoln Park were peaceful Sunday and that most of them followed an order to move to the sidewalk when the park closed.

But as police searched tents in the park, they found a few had stayed behind. Those arrested and cited were among those who refused to leave, police said.

Occupy Orange County: A bastion of conservatism in a solidly blue state, Orange County hasn’t swung for a Democratic presidential candidate in decades. That doesn’t, however, mean that there isn’t some genuine frustration with the establishment. A group calling itself Occupy Orange County assembled in Irvine, Calif., on Saturday in solidarity with OWS, drawing a crowed of 1,000-plus demonstrators. Similar protests have popped up in Anaheim and Orange, with another planned for Santa Ana this upcoming Saturday, according to the Orange County Register:

Occupy Riverside: A group of some 200-to-300 protesters assembled at Riverside’s downtown mall area over the weekend. City officials have granted permits to camp out nearby, but also set a number of restrictions for conduct at the mall, which the city has reportedly spent “millions of dollars” renovating recently.

Per the Press-Enterprise:

Demonstrators waved signs with slogans such as “Banks got bailed out; We got sold out” and the now-familiar “We are the 99 percent,” and cheered when passing cars honked in support.

Occupy San Diego: The refusal of protesters to remove their tents near City Hall resulted in arrests and pepper-spraying on Friday. Since then, the atmosphere among the dozens of remaining at Occupy San Diego has been substantially more low-key.

According to  Sign On San Diego:

Demonstrators…adjusted to the mandate by police late last week prohibiting all but one tent in the Civic Center Plaza, a stark contrast to the movement’s tent city that formed during the first week of the protest.

Protest signs continued to dot the downtown plaza with messages such as “Separation of Corporation and State” and “End the Fed.”

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More Peter Finocchiaro.

Saturday, Oct 15, 2011 1:00 PM UTC

Obama’s crackdown on medical marijuana

The Justice Department shifts course and goes after California's lucrative pot industry

By Right: DEA agents remove marijuana plants from a dispensary in San Francisco (Credit: AP/Salon)

Back in July, I interviewed a drug policy expert about an apparent change in Justice Department policy that suggested a crackdown on medical marijuana — which is legal in many states but illegal under federal law — might be coming.

Now, with the announcement last week by California’s four U.S. attorneys that pot dispensaries will be targeted with harsh criminal sanctions, the shift feared by drug policy reform advocates appears to have come to pass. The rhetoric from candidate Barack Obama about not prioritizing medical marijuana cases now seems a distant memory.

To learn more about what’s happening in California, I spoke to Bob Egelko, a veteran reporter who covers courts for the San Francisco Chronicle and has been following the story.

Starting with the basics, what is the medical marijuana law in California and what does it allow for?

In 1996 the voters approved Proposition 215. It allows people to receive marijuana for medical purposes with their doctor’s approval — not prescription, but recommendation. It also allows them to grow it themselves or get it from a caregiver without being prosecuted under state law. It was the first law like that in the country, and there are now laws somewhat similar to it in 15 other states plus the District of Columbia.

Before this week, what has the federal response been to medical marijuana use in California?

There was opposition even before Proposition 215 passed. The Clinton administration made it clear that it opposed Prop. 215 and moved almost immediately to try, first of all, to punish doctors who recommended marijuana to their patients by removing their federal prescription licenses. That was rejected in court. The administration also moved to shut down some dispensaries for violating federal law. That reached the Supreme Court, which agreed with the administration and allowed closure of an Oakland marijuana collective. So the federal government has been pretty much hostile to the California law from the beginning, with the possible exception of the initial year or so of the Obama administration.

How big is the industry in the state?

It’s a very good-sized industry. A conservative estimate of its size is $1.5 billion per year. There are more than 1,000 dispensaries. There was a recent account suggesting that 400,000 Californians may be using medical marijuana. Of course there’s not always rigorous screening as to which use is medical and which is not. That depends on how rigorous doctors are.

So bring us up to the present — where has the Justice Department been on this?

In October 2009 the Obama DOJ announced it would not devote prosecutorial resources to people who were complying with their state’s medical marijuana laws, in California and elsewhere. This was very much in keeping with what Senator Obama said during the presidential campaign: that basically states could go their own way and he was not interested in interfering with them carrying out their own policies. This past June, the Justice Department issued a memorandum saying in effect, “We don’t want to be misunderstood here. What we really meant was, we’re not going to target individual patients and their caregivers. But we certainly are not going to let commercial dispensaries off the hook.” That was in keeping with what they have been doing: a lot of raids, continuing prosecutions of people who had been charged under the Bush policies, pressing for long sentences, and so on.

This past week, all four U.S. attorneys in California held a press conference in Sacramento to announce they would be going after dispensaries, which they regard as commercial entities. They said these entities were hiding profit-making machines under the cover of providing medical marijuana. The prosecutors said these dispensaries would be subject to civil and criminal forfeiture actions. Each of them announced that they had already notified landlords of various dispensaries that if they didn’t close them down the landlords themselves could be subject to prosecution.

Have there been other concrete steps taken yet?

Several of the prosecutors named charges they had brought against large-scale operators, with hundreds of pounds of marijuana confiscated. There have been warning letters sent out. Fewer of those have gone out in the San Francisco Bay Area, where the U.S. attorney says she is focusing on dispensaries that are near parks and schools and the like.

This is not the only action the federal government has taken. A couple of dispensaries have been hit with very large tax-enforcement actions recently. The IRS has said they will not be allowed to deduct business expenses or payroll, which essentially would bankrupt the dispensaries. There is a combination of anxiety and anger in the medical marijuana community.

The prosecutors made a lot of the distinction between for-profit and nonprofit dispensaries. Why does that matter?

When Jerry Brown, now the governor, was attorney general, he issued guidelines in 2008 that said only not-for-profit dispensaries could operate legally. Of course there is always a question of what is and is not for-profit. It doesn’t seem to be in dispute that most of these dispensaries have been operating with either the tacit approval or the formal blessing of the state and local government. A lot of them have permits, or the local police or district attorney haven’t gone after them.

I know the Justice Department has said this is not a change in policy. But is there a clear sense of why the DOJ is cracking down at this particular moment?

There’s a lot of speculation about election-year politics. But there’s always been a certain amount of tension between the U.S. attorneys and Main Justice. Even when policies are announced in Washington, they have to be implemented by these semi-autonomous U.S. attorneys, whose policies vary. Many of them don’t take too kindly to the notion that they’re to ignore violations of federal drug law just because the state sanctions it. There may be internal Justice Department politics at work. It could be that strategies change over time. No matter what the Justice Department says, this is certainly a change in philosophy. Previously they were talking about cutting the states a lot of slack. They’re not talking about that now.

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Justin Elliott

Justin Elliott is a reporter for ProPublica. You can follow him on Twitter @ElliottJustin More Justin Elliott.

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