California

Tuesday, Apr 3, 2001 4:10 AM UTC

Which way L.A.?

In a crowded field of contenders, a white guy and a Latino vie to be the 21st century's Tom Bradley, in the city's first post-ethnic mayor's race.

By Anthony York

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As California faces up to U.S. Census data that confirms what Los Angeles already knew — whites are no longer the state’s majority population, and the future belongs to Latinos — the big question about next week’s mayoral election might seem to be whether this city will elect its first Latino mayor in more than 100 years.

But focusing on race and ethnicity obscures the bigger issues at play as L.A. decides who will succeed its first Republican mayor in 30 years, Richard Riordan. Clear racial conclusions about the April 10 election are elusive: The “black” candidate — the one with the most African-American support — is a white guy, City Attorney James Hahn. The leading Latino is former Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa, but Villaraigosa’s Latino base is being eroded both by Hahn and Rep. Xavier Becerra. A recent Los Angeles Times poll found Hahn had as much Latino support as Villaraigosa — both at 19 percent to Becerra’s 30 percent. But while he may have more support among Latinos, Becerra has not been able to build the coalitions Villaraigosa and Hahn have.

The surprises continue: Although there is a woman in the race, California State Controller Kathleen Connell, the National Organization for Women is supporting Villaraigosa. And despite two Jews running for mayor, City Councilman Joel Wachs and developer Steve Soboroff, the Jewish Journal’s Marlene Marx recently wrote, “A good case could be made, and many in the Jewish community are making it, that Villaraigosa is the ‘Jewish candidate.’” Wachs turned himself into the only gay candidate with a surprise jump out of the closet in a television interview just before declaring his candidacy for mayor in 1999.

Villaraigosa’s supporters are touting him as the 21st century Tom Bradley, the iconic black mayor first elected in 1973, who spent 20 years in City Hall. But his struggle to secure his Latino base shows that Latinos are far less likely than blacks to elect one of their own. L.A.’s mayoral election may herald a new, post-race political future, in which the issue of racial identity and allegiance is so complex and cross-cutting, for every candidate, that it becomes a non-issue.

First and foremost, Villaraigosa, a former teachers’ union organizer, is the labor candidate. “This race is a tale of two cities,” says Martin Ludlow, political director of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor and a former Villaraigosa staffer. “People like to say it’s about race, but it’s not. It’s about class. For the national labor movement, there is not a more critical municipal election that the L.A. mayor’s race.”

If the election to succeed Riordan is in fact more about class than race, then it is also a referendum on the growing power of organized labor in this city. The question may be less whether Los Angeles is ready to elect a Latino mayor than whether it’s ready to elect one who is being propped up by organized labor to the tune of $1 million.

Republicans, of course, say no. “At some point, his opponents are going to ask the question: ‘Do you want a union hack as mayor of L.A.?’” says former Riordan political strategist Arnold Steinberg. There is a GOP candidate in the race, but the coalition of voters that backed Riordan is now split, between the Republican candidate Soboroff, Wachs and Connell. Many of Riordan’s top financial backers are also behind other candidates.

Good polling data for the race is at a premium. The race has proven difficult to measure in part because the voting universe is expected to be so small. The Times poll shows Hahn leading with 24 percent of the vote, and Villaraigosa and Soboroff tied for second with 12 percent. A recent poll by local television station KABC showed the labor favorite surging into a strong second place, close on Hahn’s heels. The top two vote getters will head into a June runoff if nobody gets 50 percent, which seems likely.

Villaraigosa’s campaign events enjoy an energy that’s been missing from the other campaigns. Some of it is provided by union members, who often turn Villaraigosa events into raucous rallies. But much of the energy comes from the candidate himself, who is Clintonesque in his ability to charm on the stump. At a recent South Los Angeles campaign event, Villaraigosa takes his wireless mike and strolls through the crowd, giving a barn-burner of a speech that has the crowd erupting in choruses “amens” and “that’s right” between thunderous rounds of applause.

“I’m going to restore trust in the LAPD,” he says. “We’re going to end this culture of us vs. them; of people who came in from Iowa, fell off a turnip truck and think they’re in the Marines. We’re going to make the police accountable to their communities.”

In a field of candidates sensitive to the whims of secessionists in both the San Fernando Valley and the South Bay, Villaraigosa is the head cheerleader for Los Angeles unity. “People want to connect with each other,” he says in an interview between campaign stops. “I understand there’s a lot of frustration that communities around this city feel with City Hall, and I want to create the opportunity to build a shared community. But they want to come together, and I want to be a conduit for that.”

Unfortunately for Villaraigosa, he also shares with Clinton a common history of philandering, which has cost him political allies in the past, and may cut into his voting base come Election Day, particularly among Latina women.

If elections were won on endorsements alone, it would be Villaraigosa in a landslide. In addition to the backing of the L.A. County Federation of Labor, Villaraigosa has received backing from Gov. Gray Davis, the Democratic Party, County Supervisor Gloria Molina and members of the business elite like Ralph’s Supermarket magnate Ron Berkle and Univision owner Jerrold Perenchio, to name a few.

But in this extremely fluid political climate, the front-runner for now is still Hahn, the scion of the city’s most famous political family. Hahn’s father, Kenny, represented the largely African-American neighborhoods of South Los Angeles on the County Board of Supervisors for four decades. Mere mention of the name Hahn is golden in the city’s black neighborhoods, and his 20 years as city attorney and controller have given him a name identification other candidates are still struggling to build.

The April 10 election could serve as a marker of the vast changes over the past eight years — some demographic, some political, some economic — that have created tectonic shifts in the city’s political landscape since 1993. That was the year Riordan, a Republican businessman who had never held elected office, became mayor of this solidly Democratic city.

In the eight years since Riordan was elected, a boom in high tech and entertainment jobs has replaced defense-driven industry as the city’s major economic engine. Meanwhile, the voice of local neighborhoods has grown louder as secessionist movements in the San Fernando Valley, Hollywood and the South Bay continue to gain momentum. Police conduct continues to be a key issue, but the dynamics are very different than they were eight years ago, in the wake of the Rodney King riots. In 1993, police misconduct was at the top of the list of issues for black voters. Now, the city has a black police chief, Bernard Parks. While several candidates are calling for Parks’ ouster, in the wake of the Rampart scandal and other abuses, Hahn, the candidate most ardently courting the black vote, is the chief’s staunchest defender.

There have also been significant increases in both Latino and Democratic voter registration, and organized labor has reemerged as a potent political force in the city. Indeed, this race is at least partly a referendum on the power of labor, and whether it truly has come back from the collapse of the city’s Democratic Party-labor coalition in 1993, which led to Riordan’s victory over former City Councilman Michael Woo.

Labor wants the election to be a referendum on its resurgence in L.A. A reinvigorated, politically savvy labor movement has been given partial credit for a number of recent Democratic victories in Los Angeles, including Rep. Adam Schiff’s victory over incumbent Jim Rogan last November. But some say labor’s power in the city has been overblown. “They’re extraordinarily powerful in the Latino areas of L.A.,” said Republican political strategist Allan Hoffenblum, who is backing Soboroff. “I doubt if they had much to do with Adam Schiff. That district went 55 percent for Gore/Nader,” he says. “Labor is powerful where the Latino vote is significant. Outside of that their power is money.”

Certainly in the Rogan race, demographic shifts had at least as much to do with the former impeachment manager’s defeat as did a push by big labor. And the unions suffered a humiliating defeat in a recent City Council race, when moderate Nick Pacheco defeated a labor-backed candidate in East Los Angeles in 1999, in an area which has been ground zero for the new labor push. So while labor has been willing to deliver hefty political contributions, precinct walkers and people to get out the vote on Election Day, this race stands as a true test of its political clout in Los Angeles.

Villaraigosa’s close ties to labor have alienated many moderates in the Latino community. Pacheco has endorsed Becerra’s mayoral bid, while centrist Democrat Alex Padilla is backing Hahn. So if Villaraigosa is truly trying to assemble a new “ethnic” coalition in Los Angeles like the old Tom Bradley coalition that dominated city politics for 20 years, he will have to reach wider than Bradley did.

The Bradley coalition was rooted in the civil rights movement of the ’50s and ’60s, made up of blacks and Westside liberals and Jews. During Bradley’s four terms as mayor, he consistently polled more than 90 percent of African-American voters, who accounted for 25 percent of the city’s voters. As black political power has receded, their percentage of the overall vote has fallen, down to 13 percent of the vote in 1997, and probably lower today. Latinos are expected to make up about 22 percent of all voters on April 10.

One of the central ironies in the race is that Villaraigosa probably wouldn’t have a prayer if it weren’t for federal welfare reform and former Republican Gov. Pete Wilson. Wilson’s 1994 reelection bid featured a strong anti-immigrant subtext, coupled with his endorsement of Proposition 187. The backlash led to a massive naturalization and voter registration push among Latinos, which spiked upward again after President Clinton signed welfare reform legislation in 1996 that prohibited many legal immigrants from receiving social benefits.

Overwhelmingly, those new Latino voters registered as Democrats. Other groups including labor unions and the Southwest Voter Foundation have also targeted those new voters, registering thousands of new Democrats in Los Angeles over the last six years, Ludlow said.

But as a group, Latinos have proven they are not as likely to vote for one of their own as blacks. When asked about the electoral equation that would carry Villaraigosa to the mayor’s office, Ludlow sketched out the targets in a hypothetical matchup with Hahn, and said Villaraigosa could not rely on the kind of support within the Latino community that Bradley received from blacks. “It’s going to take 70 percent of the Latino vote, 20-25 percent of the black vote, and 40 percent of everything else,” Ludlow said.

Ultimately, Villaraigosa’s political fate may depend on Xavier Becerra. The six-term congressman is currently running strongly in the Latino community with 30 percent of the vote, compared to Hahn and Villaraigosa’s 19 percent, according to the most recent L.A. Times poll. Most think that the bulk of the Becerra vote would go to Villaraigosa in a runoff, and vice-versa. That led some of the city’s Latino leaders, including County Supervisor Gloria Molina, to try to broker a deal where either Villaraigosa or Becerra would step aside. Former HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros reportedly also brokered such a meeting. One scenario had Villaraigosa dropping out of the race. In return, Becerra would give up his congressional seat for Villaraigosa next year. But Becerra wouldn’t bite.

“I’m not interested in cutting some backroom deal,” he says.

Becerra is something of a wonk. Knowledgeable and approachable, he has been depicted by the local media as a “Boy Scout.” His campaign stands in contrast to the bad-boy edge of Villaraigosa’s, but it also lacks the dynamism. On a hazy, muggy Sunday afternoon, hundreds of people are gathered at Ritchie Valens Recreation Center in Pacoima. Most are inside the rec center celebrating the late, local rocker’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but about 30 people have gathered outside to hear Becerra speak.

This is one of more than 60 gatherings that Becerra calls “neighborhood meetings” he has held across the city, reinforcing his campaign theme to put “neighborhoods first.”

Becerra suffered a major setback last week when Molina, a longtime political ally of Becerra’s, came out in support of Villaraigosa. “What [Villaraigosa] has been able to put together speaks mightily about his ability to bring this city together,” Molina told the L.A. Times.

As Villaraigosa picks up steam, Becerra’s support seems to be lagging. But Becerra warns he should not be written off. “I’ve been underestimated before, and I’ve always surprised people,” he says, pointing to his undefeated record in elections.

Villaraigosa is mostly acting as if this is a two-man race between him and Hahn. But a Hahn-Villaraigosa runoff is far from a done deal. Even though labor plans to spend up to $1 million for Villaraigosa, and the Democratic Party plans to chip in anywhere from $500,000 to $1 million, the race remains extremely fluid. In this city of more than 3 million people, political strategists estimate it will take only 125,000 votes to get into the runoff, so variables like turnout become key factors in determining a winner. “The higher the turnout is, the better it is for Antonio,” Ludlow says.

So for now, Hahn can still largely afford to be a political cipher. With his strong roots in the city’s black community, he is well positioned as the default candidate, for a variety of voters, depending on who joins him in the June runoff. In a Hahn-Villaraigosa race, Hahn becomes the de facto conservative, bringing a unique coalition of blacks and Republicans behind him. If it is Hahn-Soboroff, Hahn becomes the lefty running against a self-financed Republican businessman.

In its dual endorsement of Hahn and Villaraigosa, the Times questioned Hahn’s “fire in the belly,” and privately his opponents also raise questions about his desire to be mayor. But in the Bush era, being the nonchalant son of political legacy may not be such a bad thing.

On a Saturday morning, the gray-haired city attorney pops into his Crenshaw Boulevard office to meet with a small handful of supporters before walking precincts. His pep talk is sufficient, even if it’s not the “I Have a Dream” speech. Above all, Hahn just seems like a nice guy.

After a quick talk about “the people’s campaign” and “making this town work,” Hahn tells his precinct walkers to “be nice to everybody.”

Today, Hahn is going door-to-door in Lemeirt Park, a bastion of Los Angeles’ black middle class. This neighborhood is not what people normally think of when you mention South Central Los Angeles. The streets here are as wide as they are in Beverly Hills. The front lawns look like putting greens, and Range Rovers and BMWs sit in the long driveways.

This is Hahn’s base, and he owes much of that to his father. This becomes apparent as Hahn goes from house to house. “I knew your father. He was a great man,” says one woman. “And you look as nice in person as you do on TV.”

Hahn speaks competently about the issues he says are the most pressing: education, affordable housing, traffic, the LAPD. But there are times when he shows a real distaste for the tone of political campaigning. When asked about his front-runner status, and the bull’s-eye on his back that has come with it, Hahn just smiles and shakes his head.

“You know, I wish those polls had never come out,” he says. “Everyone was real nice to me before that.” But with the race entering its final days, and at least one spot in the runoff up for grabs, the attacks on Hahn and his record have begun. Soboroff, for instance, has taken swipes at Hahn for playing front-runner hide-and-go-seek by ducking candidate forums.

But there is little evidence that those attacks will stick. In a race with so many candidates, with such similar stands on most of the major issues, it is proving difficult for candidates to break out of the pack.

One of those candidates trying to break out is Steve Soboroff. In many ways, he is running as a Riordan clone. Though he has served as L.A. parks commissioner, he has never held elected office, he’s poured more than $250,000 of his own money into his campaign, and he is Republican. By most accounts, he’s running third, but he needs to siphon support from a crowded field of also-rans to have any hope of making it into the runoff.

At a recent candidates’ forum in West Hills, an affluent suburb in the northern San Fernando Valley, about 50 people trickle into Shomrei Torah Synagogue to hear from the folks who would be mayor, but only Wachs and Soboroff, both Jews, show up.

Soboroff is working the room. A small army of his campaign workers set up tables with Soboroff literature underneath signs for the temple’s upcoming “Reggae Passover.” He’s in full campaign mode. He’s donned a white satin yarmulke, his own, and is aggressively shaking hands and talking to anyone who will listen. “He seems businesslike, like Riordan,” says Ari Lappin, a resident of nearby Woodland Hills. “That’s good.”

But former Riordan political strategist Steinberg warns that Soboroff may have difficulty replicating Riordan’s 1993 victory.

“For one thing, in 1993, GOP registration was just under 26 percent in the city. It’s now under 21 percent,” says Steinberg. “In a race that may be decided by a few thousand votes, that 4 point shift is very significant.”

And many of Riordan’s backers have defected from Soboroff. Riordan, they say, was the right candidate at the right time for Los Angeles, but now the city must move on. As early as October 1998, Bill Wardlaw, a key Riordan financial donor and one of the most powerful men in Riordan’s City Hall, said, “The next mayor will not be a Republican businessman.” Wardlaw has since thrown his support behind Hahn. Other parts of Riordan’s financial team, including billionaires Eli Broad and Univision owner Jerrold Perenchio, are backing Villaraigosa.

Steinberg also says Soboroff has run a lackluster campaign thus far. “Soboroff’s principal challenge is that he has not coalesced a Republican base, which is absolutely essential to get into the runoff,” he said. “He did not make a significant effort to crystallize the base. He acted as if it was secure, and it’s not. The California Republican Party has been conducting an effort to salvage that failure. Whether or not they can still be successful is still problematic.”

And Soboroff has to contend with Joel Wachs to get that vote. Though Wachs is unlikely to make the June runoff, he is, as of now, Soboroff’s main competitor. Kathleen Connell is also running on a platform of fiscal conservatism, and may be drawing votes from both Wachs and Soboroff.

Wachs, who has represented the valley for 30 years on the City Council, is difficult to pin down politically. He has been a major booster for arts in the city, but made his reputation as a fiscal conservative. As the only openly gay candidate in the race, he has also assembled the most interesting coalition: His campaign consultant is Sue Burnside, a well-known gay political operative, while his media campaign is being run by Don Sipple, a Republican consultant who counts George W. Bush and John Ashcroft among his former clients.

With Connell, Soboroff and Wachs all vying for essentially the same vote, the three fiscal conservatives may well end up keeping each other out of the June runoff. The race is still very much up for grabs. “I think it’s very fluid,” said political strategist Allan Hoffenblum, who is supporting Soboroff. “The TV commercials are hitting heavily now on L.A. television. It’s going to boil down to what it always does — the candidate that does the best job in identifying their most likely supporters and motivating them on Election Day will get in the runoff.”

With Hahn a fairly sure bet to make the runoff, the question becomes whether one of the conservatives can break out of a crowded field, or Villaraigosa can build a coalition wide enough to propel him into Round 2.

Some say in this era of secession talk and increasing local control, Villaraigosa’s throwback message may simply be out of date. “It is frequently said that L.A. needs an old-fashioned leader to build coalitions across the city, someone who can unite the disparate parts of Los Angeles and resurrect a shared sense of cityhood,” Gregory Rodriguez wrote in a Feb. 18 Los Angeles Times article that, in some quarters, was read as a slap at Villaraigosa. “But L.A. is not greater than the sum of its parts. The disjuncture between one end of the city and the other is part of its greatness. Migrants may move to New York to become part of a civic enterprise, but the beauty of L.A. is that here one doesn’t feel obliged to be a part of anything.”

Villaraigosa’s backers are hoping that his disparate coalition will add up to more than the sum of its parts and that the city wants to recreate a new version of the coalition that elected Tom Bradley. That coalition helped L.A. gain a civic sense of itself as a community that had transcended race by facing it.

“We’re putting together an energy with this campaign that’s second to none,” Villaraigosa says. “This city is ready.”

Anthony York is Salon's Washington correspondent. More Anthony York.

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 Andrew Leonard

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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 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 Scott Thill, Alternet

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$California's unregulated fracking problem$ 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.

The 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 Emma Mustich

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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 Peter Finocchiaro

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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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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 Justin Elliott

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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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