{"id":338048,"date":"2010-02-19T03:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-02-19T08:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sacbee.com\/opinion\/story\/2548295.html#mi_rss=Opinion"},"modified":"2010-02-19T03:00:00","modified_gmt":"2010-02-19T08:00:00","slug":"viewpoints-reform-cant-come-from-ceos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/338048","title":{"rendered":"Viewpoints: Reform can’t come from CEOs"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\n\tJeff Lustig<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There’s a downturn in the protest market. <\/p>\n

Repair California, the San Francisco organization that’s led the campaign for a constitutional convention, has shuttered operations. <\/p>\n

“It’s time for Californians to take back their state,” its leaders once declared to a state that couldn’t improve its schools, repair its roads or balance its books. It was time, they said, for “a people’s convention,” the last having been in 1879, when the state had 860,000 people.<\/p>\n

“Popular movement.” “Revolt.” “Nullify the government.” Such were the phrases that accompanied their call. “Success is tantalizingly close,” reported John Grubb, campaign director for what he described as this “die-hard group of Californians” in a fundraising letter last week. <\/p>\n

Though this image suggested a bunkered band of rebels, Repair California was an arm of the Bay Area Council, an association of CEOs from major corporations and government entities like Bank of America, Chevron, United Airlines, Google, McKinsey and the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. An unlikely vanguard for a people’s struggle. <\/p>\n

But Repair California seemed to have it all – a handsome Web site, well-turned op-ed pieces, highly publicized conferences and widespread town meetings. In 2009, it held those meetings throughout the state. In mid-October, it announced receipt of a $2 million gift for the convention effort.<\/p>\n

In late October it filed two initiatives for the November 2010 ballot – the first to empower the public to call a convention, the second to actually convene what it called “A Limited Constitutional Convention.” <\/p>\n

A month later, Clint Reilly, the high-end political consultant, came on board as chief strategist for the effort. But shortly after sending the fundraising letter noted above, the organization abruptly pulled the plug, citing the need to meet payroll and a shortfall of $3 million for signatures for its two initiatives. <\/p>\n

It was a surprising end for a protest movement, and the die-hard group expired fairly easily, after all. I’m a veteran of a few political movements – the free speech movement, the civil rights and anti-war movements. And I’ve read about the state’s populist, Progressive and labor movements. But I never heard of a movement that suspended operations because of cash-flow problems or the need to pay signature-gatherers. Penury came with the territory. Volunteer labor was the norm. <\/p>\n

Leaders of Repair California said they were being blackballed by Sacramento signature-gathering firms. Such firms have a stake in unrestrained initiatives, which a constitutional convention might have tried to corral.<\/p>\n

That may or may not have been a hurdle. But a show-stopper?<\/p>\n

The real problem, one suspects, was with the BAC’s second initiative, a measure so complex that it rivaled the constitution it was trying to reform. The proposal tried to set what could and could not be debated at the far-off convention. But it also designed a Rube Goldberg process for picking delegates. <\/p>\n

The current constitution is a model of economy here, taking one sentence to say delegates should be elected from equal-size districts. The BAC’s plan spent eight single-spaced pages detailing a process in which half the roughly 500 delegates would be randomly selected, as we pick juries, and the other half picked by committees of local county and city officials supplemented by lotteries. Plus provisions for including Indian tribal delegates and excluding people with recent political experience. <\/p>\n

Notably missing was any provision for California citizens to elect their own representatives. No wonder they had trouble collecting signatures. The people picked by such a method would not have been anyone’s “delegates” at all. The planners had confused a constitutional convention with a focus group and a reality TV show. <\/p>\n

Tom Paine noted that a constitution, fundamentally, “is not the act of a government, but of a people constituting a government.” That being the case, the people have to be involved directly and not by random proxy. <\/p>\n

The Bay Area Council is to be commended for taking the lead in the call for a new constitution. We have outgrown the old one. And the BAC was right to conclude that if the problems are systemic, the solution needs to be systemic. But one suspects that the neglect of popular involvement that marked their delegate-selection plan also marked their capital-intensive and virtual movement. <\/p>\n

There will be new calls for a constitutional convention. California governance is becoming more dysfunctional, and the victims of its failures are multiplying by the day. Californians can use the time until a real convention proposal emerges to good effect. They can use it to build the popular movements needed for a real convention, as in 1879, and to educate themselves better about state politics than they have done for key initiative votes over the last 30 years. <\/p>\n

A real “people’s convention” has to be built from the ground up, not from the ether down.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jeff Lustig There’s a downturn in the protest market. Repair California, the San Francisco organization that’s led the campaign for a constitutional convention, has shuttered operations. “It’s time for Californians to take back their state,” its leaders once declared to a state that couldn’t improve its schools, repair its roads or balance its books. It […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4325,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-338048","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338048","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4325"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=338048"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338048\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=338048"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=338048"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=338048"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}