Meg for Meg

22 years of Republican Governors- had enough?

Whitman's plans for California schools

 

Go Figure - Whitman’s Plan For Education Doesn’t Add Up…

CTA’s new TV ad calls out gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman’s plan that could cut another $7 billion from our schools. The question to her is how will she cut $15 billion from the state budget without taking nearly half or more from our schools. Whitman should know that education accounts for nearly half the state budget and in the last round of state budget reductions, public education took 53% of the cuts.

 

Background:

·        View Economist see flaws in Whitman’s policy proposals

·        View Education and California’s Budget

·        View Preparing for the Next Round of Budget Adjustments: How Education Might Fare

How You Can Help:

Contact Whitman and ask her to explain how she plans on cutting $15 billion from the state budget without cutting schools and colleges.

·        Call her at 408.400.3887

·        Email her at Communications@MegWhitman.com

·        Engage her on Twitter

·        Respond on her Facebook page and her Talk to Meg Website.

CTA

 

Comcast pulls CTA ad on Whitman

This ad has been pulled by Comcast. The Whitman campaign objected.

The California Teachers Association added the word "could" to its TV ad slamming Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, prompting the cable carrier Comcast to resume broadcasting it
.

Meg Whitman-puts the A in Absantee

Whitman V. Brown. The California Economy

Reviving California's economy: Meg Whitman versus Jerry Brown

Both have put forth plans to address the state's loss of industrial manufacturing. Neither goes far enough.

Harold Meyerson

For all their differences, Meg Whitman and Jerry Brown agree on one thing: California needs an industrial policy.

For half a century, aerospace was California's dominant economic engine. But then the end of the Cold War led to a radical contraction of the aerospace industry. Since then, the state has subsisted on bubbles, and it has wilted each time they popped. Neither the dot-com industry nor housing — the two chief sources of economic activity in this state for the past 15 years — offered the kind of sustainable and broadly shared prosperity that Californians took for granted in the years between 1940 and 1990. The high-tech companies that have flourished in this state over the past 20 years have created great wealth, but with much of their manufacturing done offshore, that wealth has not been shared with California production workers.

Both Whitman and Brown understand that loss of manufacturing is a key factor in the state's economic decline, and they have put forth economic plans to address it. But neither of their strategies does enough to restore the state to its onetime industrial preeminence.

Whitman seeks to remedy the problem through classic Republican policies: reducing taxes and regulations on businesses. Some of her targeted tax cuts make sense, like increasing the R&D tax credit and creating a tax credit for factory equipment. But the massive cuts she proposes to state services will only further the decline of California's aging infrastructure and harm a public education system that badly needs improvement.

Brown also favors tax reductions for factory equipment, and outlines other incentives to boost manufacturing. He also commits himself to major infrastructure upgrades, and he singles out the clean-energy sector as the industry the state should do most to help. Unlike Whitman's plan, his clean-energy program has a demand as well as a supply side: By mandating that 33% of the state's electricity come from renewable sources, his plan would create a larger market for the industry it seeks to boost.

Brown's ideas are good as far as they go, but they don't go far enough in one key particular: identifying the revenue sources for the improvement of our infrastructure and the rebirth of our manufacturing. History here may provide a guide.

Contrary to libertarian myth, California's economic ascent was largely funded and devised by its governments. To obtain the water that enabled the state to grow during the early 20th century, California historian Kevin Starr wrote, "Los Angeles, and, to a lesser extent, San Francisco, functioned more like entrepreneurial corporations … than passive municipalities concerned narrowly with public safety and the delivery of local governmental services." In the years following World War II, government spending on defense was the primary fuel for California's growth. And it was investments by Pat Brown, California's greatest governor, in the state's universities, roads and water systems that made the state's economy the marvel of the world for much of the second half of the 20th century.

How can the state, in its sadly depleted condition, make that kind of investment now? One possibility might be a state infrastructure bank of the type proposed on a national level by Connecticut Democratic Rep. Rosa L. DeLauro. As DeLauro has sketched it out, such a bank, by committing $25 billion in public funds, could generate close to $600 billion in public-private funds going to build or improve rails, roads, bridges, airports and the like. Another possibility could be a state innovations bank, which could fund some of the clean-energy activities that Brown has proposed, and could help innovative new companies scale up to mass production here rather than go abroad. Former Intel CEO Andy Grove has identified this stateside scaling-up issue as crucial to America's economic future. If California has any of the ingenuity and gumption it used to have, surely the state can play a role in helping innovative companies thrive here.

During Jerry Brown's first term as governor, a number of California economists argued for establishing a state bank, but the idea never took off. California needs one now a lot more than it did in 1975. Brown's current ideas are, on balance, better than Whitman's when it comes to rebuilding the state's economy, but they too will fall short without a plausible source of funding. The question will be whether Californians can summon the will, as they did throughout much of their history, to create the policies and commit the funds to reconstruct their state.

Harold Meyerson is editor at large of the American Prospect and a columnist for the Washington Post. He is doing a six-week guest columnist stint on our Op-Ed page on Tuesdays.

Los Angeles Times

Candidate from Goldman Sachs wins Republican primary in California

 billionaire CEO Meg Whitman won California’s Republican gubernatorial primary “after months of obscene campaign spending,” says Art Pulaski, executive secretary-treasurer of the California Federation of Labor.

In the race for Sacramento against Attorney General Jerry Brown (D), Whitman will now “use her seemingly unlimited fortune to try to stage a hostile takeover of our state.”

She’s made clear that, if elected, she plans to bring a Wall Street agenda to California. What that means for working families is more massive tax giveaways for corporations and the wealthy and wholesale cuts to education, public safety and programs that our state’s most vulnerable rely upon.

Pulaski says the contrast between the candidates “couldn’t be starker.”

Jerry Brown shares the Main Street values that built this state’s economy into a global powerhouse and expanded our middle class. Brown has a spent a lifetime fighting for working families. He presided over the creation of nearly 2 million jobs as governor. He fought the exploitation of workers by large corporations as attorney general.

Read Pulaski’s full statement here.

Whitman has a spending problem

On June 3 in Roseville, California, candidate Meg Whitman told an audience that California does not have a revenue problem, it has a spending problem.  This is a common rant among Republicans.

Well lets see, in the last two years California’s  k-12 schools have received over a  $16 billion  cut back in  state funding.   California presently ranks  44th  of the states in per pupil spending and last among the states in class size.   This year  the Governor proposes to reduce  k-12 spending by another  $2.4 Billion. Taxpayers are getting precisely what they are not paying for – a Mississippi class education system.

National Assessment of Education Progress [NAEP]:

• California is tied for 47th among states in fourth-grade reading. (NAEP, 2008-09)

• California is tied for 46th in eighth-grade math. (NAEP, 2008-09)

• California’s economically disadvantaged students rank 49th in fourth-grade

reading. (NAEP, 2008-09)

Finance;

• California spends $2,131 less per pupil than the national average, ranking the State  44th in the country. (National Education Association [NEA], 2008-09)

• California spends less per pupil than each of the largest 10 states in the nation –

almost $6,000 less per pupil than New York. (NEA, 2008-09)

This is the state of the California education, and Meg Whitman proposes to cut more.  That is what she means when she says California does not have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem.

Whitman: The Candidate from Goldman Sachs

By Robert Cruickshank.

Carla Marinucci and Lance Williams have a long and in-depth article today on Meg Whitman's connections to reviled investment banking house Goldman Sachs, which has played a leading role in the European debt crisis and is accused ofbeing at the center of asset bubbles and their subsequent crashes.  (Goldman Sachs was charged with fraud on Friday in the U.S. )

The article goes into depth on both Whitman's time on the Goldman Sachs board in 2001-02, relations between eBay and Goldman Sachs, and Goldman Sachs' role in state bond issuances. An excerpt:

From 1998 to 2002, while she was CEO of eBay, Whitman helped steer millions of dollars of her company's investment banking business to Goldman, court records show." This is the candidate who Republicans think should be in charge of the California budget? 

Read more at the link above. 

From the California Progress Report. 

The Governor Candidate from Goldman Sachs-California

By Robert Cruickshank

From: California Progress Report

Carla Marinucci and Lance Williams have a long and in-depth article today on Meg Whitman's connections to reviled investment banking house Goldman Sachs, which has played aleading role in the European debt crisis and is accused ofbeing at the center of asset bubbles and their subsequent crashes.

The article goes into depth on both Whitman's time on the Goldman Sachs board in 2001-02, relations between eBay and Goldman Sachs, and Goldman Sachs' role in state bond issuances. An excerpt:

From 1998 to 2002, while she was CEO of eBay, Whitman helped steer millions of dollars of her company's investment banking business to Goldman, court records show.

Read more at the link above.