Nǐ hǎo, jiāzhōu!

Hello, California!

We are the Golden State’s two giant pandas, the first to enter the United States in two decades. And while it’s only been a few months since we departed southwest China for the San Diego Zoo, we’ve already met the governor, celebrities, TV broadcasters who love puns (“Panda-monium”), and thousands of everyday people, some of whom pay $115 to enter the zoo in the early morning and walk around with us for an hour. We now feel so at home in California that we’re wondering how we might take on the responsibilities of citizenship. For example, we hear so many of the people visiting us talking about your November elections.

So, why don’t you let us vote in them, too?

In asking this, we want to reassure you that we are reluctant to get political. Why take sides when we’re more popular than the Padres? (We never strike out, and we’re cuter than Jackson Merrill). The two of us are laidback types; zookeepers describe Yun, a 5-year-old male, as “mild-mannered, gentle and lovable,” and Xin, a 4-year-old female, as a “gentle and witty introvert with a sweet round face and big ears.”

And like so many of our fellow Californians, we ignore the news. We prefer to spend our time sunbathing, sleeping, and consuming as much grass as we can get our paws on. To clarify, our grass of choice is bamboo—the zoo grows eight species of it because we are picky.

We also must walk a fine line as “envoys of friendship,” in the words of the Chinese government, which loans us out to overseas zoos for $1 million a year. That means we and our fellow panda migrants—including old Sichuan friends who will soon head to the National Zoo in D.C. and perhaps the San Francisco Zoo—are really diplomats. And we represent a difficult client state that bullies its neighbors and inspires retaliatory tariffs and hateful rhetoric from a former-and-perhaps-future American president whose team uses the term “panda hugger” as a pejorative. (Pro tip: even if you love China, it’s best not to hug us—we are real animals, not stuffed bears.)

There are other reasons we might be wise to stay out of the political arena. For one thing, we are non-humans now living in a country that ranks low in the global Animal Protection Index. For another, we are newcomers to an America so deeply infected by xenophobia that a majority of voters support mass deportation of immigrants and their families. (Before JD Vance starts spreading lies about what we eat, let’s be clear—we are herbivores.)

Yet, despite all the ways in which we count as outsiders, we pandas, by our very presence, offer Americans a chance to understand your real challenges.

Try looking at things from our perspective. After all, we, like you, are a vulnerable species trying to survive on an increasingly inhospitable planet (there are fewer than 3,000 giant pandas in the world). We are also living proof that—in this age of moral relativism and lie-based politics—some very important things remain black and white.

Like the fact that true democracy requires the representation and participation of all living things.

Including us.

Sure, your human media is full of phony accusations that foreigners are voting in this year’s elections. They aren’t, but why shouldn’t they be able to? It’s increasingly common around the world for jurisdictions to open up local elections to non-citizens. San Francisco has done so for school board contests, for instance.

If we could vote in San Diego elections, we might cast a ballot for anyone who could stop the constant noise of jets flying low over us here in Balboa Park, as they prepare to land at the airport. Our participation also might raise the question of why we live rent-free in the expanded Panda Ridge complex while the city tears down encampments of the unhoused and allows the loss of hundreds of shelter beds.

Your national constitution has no prohibition against non-citizens voting—states, like yours decide. Unfortunately, California, while claiming to be a democracy defender, has decided to disenfranchise one in six of its adults based on citizenship, even though such people pay taxes, abide by the laws, serve in the military, and raise children who are citizens. California could enfranchise 6 million people by letting non-citizen residents vote.

It also could bring people together across national boundaries and create a framework for global political solutions if it reached agreements of “reciprocal voting” to allow Californians and residents of other states and countries to vote in each other’s elections.

Such a reciprocal system would demonstrate human interdependence. But interdependence on this planet encompasses all living things. Humans are less than 1% of the world’s biomass but have 100% of the world’s democratic rights. Plants are more than 80% of the biomass and are unrepresented, even though humans couldn’t live without them.

Providing representation to us animals and plants is not a new idea. There are efforts around the world to imagine democratic systems for various beings, including the Multispecies Constitution Project at the L.A.-based Berggruen Institute, where this column’s usual author is a fellow.

That project asks questions like: “What sorts of institutions could speak with—rather than for—the trees, the birds, the microbes, and the diverse humans of this planet?” The idea is that by incorporating the intelligence, experiences, values, and interests of other living things into governance, you humans will save ecosystems—and maybe yourselves. Intriguingly, some non-human creatures, like whales, are beginning to converse with you.

If the two of us could talk with you directly, instead of through the imagination of a human journalist, we might chat about the struggles of starting a family in California. We are a couple facing expectations to breed. And yes, San Diego is a great place to mate, and not just for all the sun-kissed humans in the beach-themed bars.

In fact, Yun’s grandparents lived at the zoo in the 2000s and had five cubs together here, including his mother Zhen Zhen. It seems unlikely that we’ll be that fertile. And we can’t know how long we’ll get to stay here, given the conflict between our birth country and our new home country.

But for now, we are Californians. Shouldn’t we have the same rights and responsibilities as all of you?

The post Why California Should Let Pandas Vote appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Lock up your tents, California!

Toss out your old camping gear!

Hide your pillows and blankets where the cops will never find them!

Because the people who run California have finally seen clearly that the greatest scourge in today’s Golden State is not climate change and not crime, not COVID and not corruption, not the rising cost of living nor grinding poverty.

No, what most threatens our way of life is people who camp.

And so, in this the year 2024, the great state of California has gone to war against campers and their encampments.

This war effort is unlike anything seen here in generations. The wheels of 21st-century California government move painfully slowly. It takes state and local agencies days to respond to a police call, a minimum of six months to permit a coffee shop, five years to add a carpool lane on a highway, and three decades (and counting) to construct a promised high-speed rail line.

But the war on encampments is proceeding with a shocking speed, a real blitzkrieg. This summer Gov. Gavin Newsom, known more for issuing plans than following through on them, didn’t merely order state agencies to take down encampments on land they control. He donned gloves and work clothes to throw away the tents and trash of the unhoused himself.

Newsom also issued guidance on removing encampments to cities and counties. Local governments usually do their best to ignore state orders, but not this time. Cities from Arcata to Vista have ripped down encampments with alacrity and vigor. CalMatters counted at least 14 cities, from San Francisco to Long Beach, that have either passed new laws to prohibit camping or updated old ones; at least four cities revived camping bans they previously didn’t enforce.

San Diego, a leader in the anti-encampment war, has made “No Camping” signs as ubiquitous as fish tacos and shut down the massive “island” encampment—surrounded by water—under the I-5 freeway. Meanwhile, once-progressive paradise Santa Monica toughened its anti-camping ordinance, too. Possession of cannabis may be legal, but possession of pillows and blankets can get you locked up. (Don’t let the grown-ups see your blankie, kids!)

One great thing about the anti-encampment war is that it’s unifying, an example of the enduring power of bipartisan consensus. Sure, California’s exclusively Democratic leaders have fought bitterly against the U.S. Supreme Court when it strips away gun laws or the rights of women or immigrants. But in this war, the Golden State’s top progressive leaders are making common cause with the six conservative justices and their recent decision to allow cities to prohibit people from sleeping on the streets.

As Republicans and Democrats join forces in favor of this righteous war, a few apologists for the status quo remain. Some dead-end liberals are prone to quoting the 1894 novel Red Lily, by the Frenchman Anatole France: “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”

But France is easily dismissed these days. He was a practitioner of irony—which has been outlawed across this formerly self-aware country—and of critical and independent journalism—which is being killed off by the bipartisan consensus that we shouldn’t have to listen to uncomfortable truths that offend our partisan biases.

Now, you might think California’s intellectuals would challenge the encampment bans. Instead, our state’s scholars are leading their own anti-encampment campaign.

The University of California and California State University systems have announced strict new bans against encampments anywhere on their campuses or properties. Their goal is to prevent a recurrence of the protests of the previous academic year that produced antisemitism, Islamophobia, and violence—including when some universities called in the police to bust up the encampments.

In announcing this oh-so-principled policy, the universities are not just saying that opposition to the scourge of encampments is more important than the First Amendment. They are also eliminating a potential on-campus housing solution—tents—when thousands of their students are unhoused.

But ignore the lonely critics out there. The logic of the universities, and the state and its cities, and the nation’s highest court, is inarguable:

Californians shouldn’t have to sleep outside.

The only way to make sure we don’t have to sleep outside is to arrest or relocate those of us who sleep outside.

And such enforcement will solve the problem because someone else, under intolerable pressure, will step in and provide shelter to those displaced by encampment crackdowns.

Who is that someone? The state points to local governments, which have money and authority to build housing. The local governments point back to the state, which could change laws that make it too easy for opponents to block housing for the unhoused.

Don’t worry. I’m sure they’ll sort it out soon. Please don’t lose any sleep over it.

The post California’s Greatest Scourge? Camping appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

When I think of my Uncle Jim, I often remember him as Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Jim Mathews, who died earlier this summer at age 77, loved to perform in community theater productions near his home in San Mateo. He sang in many shows and took on many roles, but his signature was playing the former president in the musical Annie, that classic Depression story about an orphan girl taken in by a rich capitalist, Daddy Warbucks.

Late in the show, Annie and Daddy Warbucks go to the White House, where FDR is considering a new program of social supports for struggling Americans. “I want to feed them and house them and pay them. Not much, but enough to send home to their parents,” Jim, as the president, would declare.

Through the song “Tomorrow,” Annie convinces FDR to go forward with this New Deal. Then, in the best moment of Jim’s performance, he would rise and start a solo.

When I’m stuck with a day

That’s gray, and lonely.

 I just stick out my chin and grin, and say…

Then he’d pause, turn to the audience and add, “Now sing with me! Republicans too!”

I share this memory with you now because so many of us are stuck in gray days. There’s an epidemic of loneliness, even here in friendly, bright California. The world’s awfulness often stops us in our tracks.

Jim had more than his share of gray days. He was injured at birth, and his parents (my grandparents) were told he never would walk (he did, with a pronounced prancing style, after a lot of therapy). He never married or had children (though his niece and two nephews, including me, treasured him as a quasi-parental figure). He never achieved any particular renown (though I’m trying with this column).

Far too often in the Golden State, and especially in Silicon Valley, where Jim spent almost all his life, the conventional wisdom is that you need a big and well-known technology, with venture funding and a giant brain, to shape the future. Jim’s example puts the lie to that thinking. He had a wonderful life, in a Frank-Capraesque way. Because he understood that life and technology, a subject he made a career teaching, are built out of small things. So are better tomorrows.

James Mathews was born in 1946 in Long Beach, one of Southern California’s bigger cities. His parents—a civilian U.S. Navy employee and a teacher—moved him to San Mateo when he was in elementary school.

San Mateo is a smaller city, of 100,000, but whenever I visited him there—which was often—he made the place seem grand. Wherever you went with him became enchanted. The little train and the big trees in Central Park. The playgrounds and fields at Hillsdale High and Laurel Elementary. The little branch libraries. His beloved College Heights Church, a highly democratic and informal place where almost every member of the congregation, adult and child, would talk during the service.

The church sat atop a windswept hill, with bay views so glorious that I sometimes wondered: Who needs heaven?

Jim’s magic was that he paid attention to little things. “Don’t step on those—they’re California poppies,” he once advised. “Those are the state flower!” And he engaged with everyone, even people who were scary. At Hillsdale High, Jim was no jock, and the 25-year-old football coach had intimidating intensity.  But instead of backing away, Jim volunteered to be the team manager and learned lasting lessons about teamwork from that coach, the future Super Bowl winner Dick Vermeil.

If you thought like Jim, everything seemed like an opportunity. Jim, who graduated from San Francisco State, eventually got a low-profile job at the College of San Mateo, a community college. Over 21 years, he and his colleagues found ways to add the best new computers and technology, ultimately creating a dynamic media lab. From there, he went to Baywood Elementary, where he created not one but two tech labs. He designed them to teach not just students, but teachers and parents. Jim insisted that students fix the computers themselves.

“Grandpa Geek,” they called him.

Technology, Jim would say, was not this big force to be feared or celebrated. Technology was really just a lot of little things, and the fun was to be had in tinkering, and figuring out how to use them together.

Speaking of fun, the most fun I ever had in my life was when Uncle Jim would visit Southern California and take my brother and me to Disneyland. I’d gone to Disneyland with other relatives, but it was boring—you’d wait in long lines for the biggest rides. But Jim took us to everything and emphasized the little treasures: the Enchanted Tiki Room, the rock formations on Tom Sawyer Island, the real-world potential of the automated People Mover in Tomorrowland, which he considered the best land. (He was right about the People Mover—they are installing a new one at LAX now.)

The little things that mattered most to Jim were charity. He looked for ways to help. He donated to the people at the door. And to the people who called on the phone. I once asked Jim if he was a soft touch. His answer: What’s wrong with being a soft touch?

Jim didn’t like it when people tried to take care of him, but he loved to help take care of other people.

Eight years ago, Jim, feeling a bit lonely after retiring and moving back into his deceased parents’ home, heard at church about a woman and her two young sons who were unhoused and needed a place to stay. He invited them to move in with him. They stayed for five years. He didn’t see it as an act of generosity. He was benefiting from this “house sharing,” from the companionship and help of his roommates.

Once, when I had dinner with all of them, Jim said he felt like a fool—for not having shared his home with people in similar circumstances many years earlier.

But Jim didn’t dwell on regrets. He was determined not to get bogged down with today’s problems. Because a new opportunity to help someone else will always present itself. And soon. Maybe even tomorrow, which is only a day away.

The post My Late Uncle Jim’s Life of Tomorrows appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

If Dickens were to rise from the grave tomorrow, I bet he’d head straight to the East Bay.

Because we are watching a tale of two Oaklands.

One Oakland is advancing on this country’s greatest political prize. The other Oakland is circling the urban drain. The two Oaklands demonstrate just how little space there is between top and bottom, between power and powerlessness.

Read the headlines, and in Oakland it is the best of times, the epoch of belief, the late summer of light.

A proud daughter of Oakland has emerged unexpectedly as a close contender in the race for president.

She has made history, in California and everywhere. She’s the first Democrat from the Golden State to win the party’s nomination, the first Black woman, the first Indian American woman, even the first major party presidential nominee to have worked at McDonald’s.

And if she can win—hold your breath—she’d be the first Northern Californian ever elected president. Oh, yes, and the first woman president too.

Oakland would be on top—of government, of American politics, of the free world. And that wouldn’t be its only conquest. Oakland is a democratic innovator, adopting a novel way of funding campaigns and allowing 16- and 17-year-olds to vote for school board.  “O-Town” has also become a cultural capital, a citadel of Black excellence to rival Harlem or Chicago’s South Side. Hollywood luminaries Zendaya, Black Panther director Ryan Coogler, two-time Oscar winner Mahershala Ali, all hail, proudly, from Oakland.

And yet, if you go to Oakland today, it is the worst of times, the epoch of foolishness, the season of darkness and despair.

Oakland and its government have hit rock bottom.

Downtown is dead. East Oakland’s streets are a mess of trash, busted cars, and broken glass. Homelessness, that never-ending California pandemic, is rising faster in Oakland than just about anywhere else.

And while violent crime falls across most of the rest of America, it increases in Oakland. Property crimes are commonplace. Last year, one car was stolen for every 30 Oakland residents, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

The police department, in constant turmoil, lacks the leadership and personnel to do much about it. Cops all but ignore robberies and burglaries.

The city budget is in crisis. Political leadership is paralyzed, with Mayor Sheng Thao consumed by a corruption investigation that included an FBI raid. Thao maintains her innocence but in November faces a recall vote, brought before the raid, because of crime and other governance failures.

There’s also a recall against Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price, who runs the office where Kamala Harris started her own career as a prosecutor. Price is a parody of a progressive prosecutor, lashing out at critics and journalists and offering rationalizations for not pursuing offenders. Her former spokeswoman, now a whistleblower, claims that Price ignored laws on public records and disclosure.

With law enforcement on the sidelines during a public safety crisis, the state has tried to fill the void. The state took over Oakland’s schools in the first decade of the century; today, the city is a protectorate in matters of policing. Gov. Gavin Newsom has sent in the California Highway Patrol to try to get a handle on car thefts and other property crimes, making arrests where Oakland police have failed to act. The governor also dispatched California National Guard prosecutors to handle Oakland cases.

The population is declining, as housing prices stay high even as conditions deteriorate. Businesses are fleeing, including businesses that never flee. In-N-Out permanently closed its restaurant in Oakland—the first such closure in company history—because of robberies of customers and staff. Denny’s closed its one restaurant in Oakland, too, citing similar safety concerns. Kaiser Permanente warned employees to stop leaving their Oakland offices to eat lunch. All three of Oakland’s major pro sports teams—basketball’s Golden State Warriors, football’s Raiders, and now baseball’s A’s—have left the city in the past five years.

“I’ve been in Oakland 58 years. I’ve never seen anything like this before,” Ken Chambers, a West Oakland pastor, told the San Francisco Chronicle.

In Oakland residents you’ll find despair and resignation, mixed with a hope that the city’s tough people and resilient communities will climb out of this hole. You’ll also find conspiracy-mongering—a sense that Oakland is being targeted by larger forces that would discredit its progressive politicians and policies.

There’s some truth behind this conspiracy. It’s not fair for Trumpians to point to Oakland’s failures to discredit Harris, who left town decades ago. But it is fair to criticize her for not doing more for her hometown now. Harris’ meager campaign policy proposals offer some benefits for children and small businesses, but nothing to empower cities to fix their governments and finances.

What Harris offers Oakland is the promise of symbolic triumph, of a bit of representation. Those are nice, but will they make the cops come when you call?

In borrowing Oakland’s reputation for toughness and the underdog credibility it provides—she doesn’t much mention Berkeley, where she lived as a child—Harris is giving the American mainstream the sort of story it cherishes. We love to celebrate winners who escape rough places, but we don’t much care about supporting such places, and changing the systems that make living there so hard.

Instead, we try to take heart from the hard places and hard times we left behind.

In his book Wandering Stars, the indigenous author and Oaklander Tommy Orange writes, “You get a light behind you when what feels like the worst that can happen to you happens to you. It never goes away. It lives behind you. It’s there whenever you need it. The light shoots through, bright and wide and says: At least I’m not there. Back there when we thought the lights went out forever. At least this is not that.”

The post It’s the Best and Worst of Times in Oakland appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

At the very center of state government, you’ll find a hole in the ground demonstrating that the people who make California laws can’t live by them. 

That hole is, for now, the Capitol Annex Project. The project is supposed to replace a 72-year-old office wing of the Capitol building—the “annex” where the governor and legislators kept their offices—with a 21st-century building. The new annex would connect to the 19th-century main Capitol building.

Like much of California, the previous annex needed renovation—plumbing, sprinklers for fires. Décor was drab. Rooms were cramped. Governors complained about the lack of space for ceremonies and big staff meetings (Arnold Schwarzenegger complained the bathrooms were so small he couldn’t pull down his pants in them). Lawmakers wanted additional space for hearing rooms and to allow policy committees and their staffs could be inside the Capitol complex.

A renovation, with expansion, might have met those needs. But in 2018, the state legislature and Gov. Jerry Brown decided to tempt fate, by tearing down the annex and building an expensive new building for themselves. 

Six years later, the old annex is gone, but nothing has risen in its place. And there is as yet no completion date for the new building.

If you ask people in and around the Capitol why they can’t build themselves a new home,  you’ll hear much speculation. It was the pandemic. It was all the extra time it took to tear down the annex with great care, so as not to damage the historic Capitol building. 

But no one really knows because of unusual secrecy surrounding the project. The project website has gone years without updates. State employees involved in the Capitol Annex can’t talk because they were required to sign a confidentiality statement, called Amendment D. The project’s leaders have excluded the Historic State Capitol Commission, which is supposed to oversee the annex and Capitol Park, from planning. Environmentalists, who object to the removal of trees from Capitol Park to accommodate the annex, are also frozen out.

As a result of secrecy and delays, no one really knows what it will cost. The initial price was supposed to be $445 million. By 2019, that number had increased to $755 million. More recent estimates, gleaned from sources outside the project, put it at over $1.2 billion.

No single entity or person is really in charge. A project MOU that I obtained puts the state Department of General Service in charge of some facets of the project, and the legislature’s Joint Rules Committee in charge of others, with the two different entities sharing decision-making on still other facets. The project also has leaned on a Utah consultant to State Capitol projects.

But if you ask people at the Capitol who is really running things, most will tell you that the project’s greatest champion—former Assemblymember Ken Cooley—is the real decision-maker, even though he left office two years ago. (Cooley told me that he believes strongly in the project—“I believe it will serve the public very well, and It will serve public policy very well”—but that he is not running it.)

The publicly available details of the annex project do not inspire confidence. The design is ahistorical, making it incompatible with the classical Capitol building. It also could be dangerous. The all-glass façade “offers no protection from gunfire and allows terrorists to see where the CHP is taking the public or the Legislators,” wrote Dick Cowan, a former chair of the Historic State Capitol Commission, who resigned from that post in 2020 to protest the annex project.

But what’s most galling about the project is the way that state government has sought to exempt itself and the project from the rules that govern building in California. 

In 2022, as opponents were making progress in a court challenge to the annex project for violating historic preservation laws, the legislature slipped a last-minute trailer bill into the budget to exempt the project from having to consult the state’s historic preservation officer. The judge hearing the legal challenges to the annex declared that this legislative maneuver “gutted” the case “like a fish.”

This year, the legislature acted again after an appeals court found that the annex project violated CEQA, the California Environmental Quality Act. 

Interest groups have long abused CEQA to block housing, renewable energy, and other construction in the state. But for decades, the legislature has defended the law and mostly opposed efforts to reform it. When it came to their own annex, however, state lawmakers brazenly bent the rules.

Their tool was, again, a budget trailer bill that specifically exempted the annex from CEQA’s provisions, and from public scrutiny and judicial review. Gov. Newsom signed the bill, which included $700 million in funding for the project, earlier this summer. 

Save Our Capitol!, an unincorporated group opposing the project (and funded by a local preservation who has remained anonymous), declared: “Politicians are not above the law, and they should not be permitted to simply undo environmental protections that inconvenience their pet projects.” 

Despite the exemptions, construction so far has been limited. In recent weeks, there does seem to have been some concrete foundation work. Privately, state officials tell me the annex will eventually be built.

I wonder if retreat might be the wiser option. In tough budget times, many other state infrastructure programs could make better use of the $1 billion-plus dedicated to a new annex. And the Capitol does not require an annex. Lawmakers have been working in nearby office space since 2021. They can stay there, or find other offices among the empty commercial buildings of the Sacramento area. One project supporter suggests reducing the budget back to the original $445 million and pursuing a more modest building at that price.

Whatever the fate of the annex, state officials should at least show that they’ve learned a lesson from their own faltering project—and give everyday Californians relief from the very laws and regulations that state government itself can’t abide by.

The post California Officials Can’t Build By Their Own Rules appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Maybe I’ve been watching too many old movies.

Or maybe the body snatchers are back.

We’ve seen them twice before in my home state of California. Both invasions—of pod aliens, who secretly arrive from outer space to make our bodies their own—may have been interstellar, but they showed up first as attacks on local communities, forcing local governments to handle the response.

Neither our institutions nor our officials were up to the challenges back then. Today, with the body snatchers back, and not just in the Golden State, local governments seem less prepared than ever to fight back and defend themselves against these insidious enemies and the existential threat they pose to human survival.

The first invasion came in 1956, in Santa Mira, California—though you won’t find the city on any map—and no one was ready. Yes, several townspeople noticed that their relatives and friends, who looked and sounded the same, no longer seemed to be quite themselves. Only a local health official, Dr. Miles J. Bennell, investigated. But by the time he figured out what was up, there were no humans left in town to believe him. The pod people had taken over their bodies. He fled.

Then, in 1978, the body snatchers arrived in San Francisco. Only a San Francisco County health inspector, Matt Bennell (no obvious relation to the Santa Mira doctor), recognized the problem. But he and the local health bureaucracy couldn’t keep up with the pod people. In just a few days, the aliens, demonstrating an otherworldly commitment to using the Bay Area’s famously disjointed transit system, replaced virtually all the humans across the region.

Now, at this point I must confess that not everyone believes these body snatchers were real. Many people maintain they were just the villains in two different classic horror films, both named Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

And perhaps the body snatchers were just cinematic.

Or perhaps that’s what the pod people want us to believe.

Regardless, cultural pundits have seized on possible larger meanings of the body snatcher invasions, and how they reflected the political and cultural fears of their respective eras.

Critics suggested the 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers was about how McCarthyism had seized our minds, transforming many Americans into paranoid, red-hating anti-communists. “I’ve been gone for five years. I feel like a stranger in my own country,” says one Santa Mira resident who suspects that their neighbors are no longer the people he once knew.

The 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, set in gritty San Francisco, was said to be about the alienation created by that decade’s violence, urban chaos, pollution, and the loss of social trust. Adding to the anxiety of the era, the film appeared in theaters just three weeks after the assassinations of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk.

“It’s like there’s some kind of hallucinatory flu going around,” says a San Francisco psychiatrist, who looks a lot like Leonard Nimoy. The health inspector Bennell, the spitting image of Donald Sutherland, says, “I know I feel like I’ve been poisoned today.”

While watching these two films during the scarily hot and fear-filled summer of 2024, I found them timely, relevant—and real.

Today, our neighbors and friends don’t seem quite themselves. It’s as if they have been taken over by loneliness. It’s as if their once-open minds have been seized by conspiracies or political extremism.

Is the unusual heat of this summer the reason why so many people don’t move like they usually do? Or have the pod people taken over their bodies? Are the people we encounter online real humans, or digital replicants, created by AI? And are those really conservative Supreme Court justices who keep taking away our rights over our own lives and bodies, or just pod people in black robes?

The pod people don’t want us to ask these questions. “Don’t be trapped by old concepts, Matthew,” says one pod person to the health inspector in the 1978 film. “You’re evolving into a new life form.”

But the power of body snatchers stories is more than metaphorical. These movies are also straightforward stories of local officials just trying to do their jobs against overwhelming odds. And that’s the really scary thing: our local governments are nowhere near strong enough to protect us from planetary threats—be they climate change, disease, or even pod people from outer space.

The trend lines on local power aren’t good. The second time the body snatchers showed up, in 1978, was also the year that voters passed Proposition 13, taking taxing power from California’s local governments. Today, those governments, after flailing through the pandemic, are even weaker. Local health departments have been gutted, and our municipalities are unable to solve, or even much reduce, persistent homelessness.

In the final scene of the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the health inspector Bennell walks toward the San Francisco City Hall, that domed symbol of self-government. The audience thinks he might be going to help the few humans who have hidden themselves in the city. But it turns out that the health inspector’s own body has already been snatched, and the Bay Area’s remaining humans must survive on their own.

The post Who Will Defend Us From the Body Snatchers? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

During a Santa Clara City Council meeting last year, Councilmember Kevin Park gestured to a local business owner in the audience and started reading aloud from the illustrated book All My Friends Are Dead, about a dinosaur who’s still around, even though the other dinosaurs are extinct.

But Park altered the text to read “All My Friends Are Termed Out.” The message was menacing. The business owner was deeply engaged with the city and once had many allies on the council. But Park was reminding this man that Park and the current council majority disliked him and that his political allies had left, or would soon leave, the council. Park’s implied threat: Who would protect the business owner moving forward?

Conflict is all too common at city council meetings in California and elsewhere. The council in our state’s largest city, Los Angeles, was so discredited by federal corruption investigations and a racist tape that your columnist suggested that it be disbanded. But it may be hard to top Santa Clara’s council for its rudeness and incompetence.

That, at least, is the conclusion of an extraordinary public document on the council, produced in June by the Santa Clara County Civil Grand Jury, which includes an account of Park’s dramatic reading. In California, such grand juries of regular citizens convene for a year to investigate local government. The Santa Clara grand jury’s report, titled “Irreconcilable Differences,” offers dozens of examples of just how nasty things can get in our city halls.

This report, based on more than 40 interviews and reviews of four years of council meetings, finds that “several Councilmembers have turned public meetings into spectacles by displaying abusive and belittling behavior from the dais towards members of the public; by political grandstanding, pontificating, and digressing from City business; by exhibiting a serious misunderstanding of parliamentary procedures; and by performing outlandish antics, such as reading from a satirical cartoon book.”

Much of this nasty political football is the product of actual football. The San Francisco 49ers relocated to a new home stadium in Santa Clara in 2014. Hopes were high that the team would boost the finances and spirits of this city of approximately 129,000.

Instead, the 49ers, while winning on the field, have been the local franchise from hell, angering many city residents and officials. The stadium is an uninspiring and undistinguished venue. The team’s promises that the building would be paid for privately proved untrue; the project required a new hotel tax and a public entity to take on about $600 million in construction loans. There have also been disputes about traffic, a local soccer field that the 49ers used for parking, and the team’s financial disclosures to the city.

The 49ers responded to fierce local criticism first with litigation, then by spending millions to unseat councilmembers who didn’t toe the line. The 49ers came to control a council majority that is known locally as the “49er Five.” But the team’s power in City Hall has poisoned relationships between the council and community members, city staff, and the mayor, who remains a critic of the team.

The new grand jury report is only the latest documentation of the awful dynamic. Two years previously, the Santa Clara County Civil Grand Jury released a report, “Unsportsmanlike Conduct,” criticizing the council’s “lack of transparency, unethical behavior, and a lack of fiduciary responsibility regarding the Stadium.” Back then, the jury identified “repeated instances of councilmembers behaving acrimoniously and disrespectfully toward each other, City staff and the public… causing severe dysfunction in the City governance.”

Typically, when a county grand jury issues a report about a city, a city council will respond substantively, accepting some criticism and pushing back on others. But the Santa Clara City Council rejected the findings in their entirety and attacked the 2022 grand jury in conspiratorial tones. They ignored constructive suggestions, like creating a strong ethics committee to oversee the council (there is an ethics committee now, but the report says it is toothless).

One pro-49ers councilmember, Anthony Becker, reportedly leaked the grand jury report to the 49ers before its release. In 2023, Becker was indicted for the leak and lying about it; the case is still pending.

Since then, the council’s behavior has gotten worse, the 2024 grand jury report found. Arguments about small things are never-ending; on one occasion, the council spent two hours arguing over whether the mayor could send a note on city letterhead. The new grand jury report claims that the council can’t follow the most basic rules of order. They ignore the gavel when the mayor tries to quiet councilmembers and move on with the agenda.

The report questions whether councilmembers actually know the basics of governance or public meetings—or ignore them. Councilmember Park regularly speaks about items not on the agenda and interrupts votes by speaking after the closing of discussion. Councilmember Becker, who has remained in office even as he is prosecuted, makes motions before agenda items have been discussed or deliberated. And Councilmember Raj Chahal abstains from votes without legal basis, the report says

The councilmembers spend so much time fighting and snickering that they seem confused about the actual business. In an August 2022 meeting depicted by the grand jury, city staff presented councilmembers with four options for replacing a collapsed concrete wall that had been damaged by city trees. Staff had spent a year meeting with residents to come up with the plans. But the council, even after hours of briefing and discussion, was too confused to choose an option. With no path forward, the city manager and city attorney at the time instructed residents to file a claim against the city; the eventual settlement cost more than options negotiated by city staff.

Polls show the public has soured on the council and the city. And with good reason. While Santa Clara’s budget goes into deficit and its infrastructure languishes (the city is decades behind on capital improvements and a swim center was closed for safety reasons), the council is consumed by argument. A favorite tactic of the 49er Five, and their critics, is to investigate each other by filing Public Records Act requests, seeking records of their opponents’ conversations and communications. In this paper war, the city has received as many as 90 public record requests in one day, the grand jury found.

Councilmembers hurled unfounded accusations at the police chief and his family, then asked voters to change the position, currently elected, to a council-appointed post. Last year, voters rejected the change, choosing the chief over the council.

The grand jury blames the constant council conflict for long and exhausting meetings that extend well past midnight, low morale among city employees, and the discouragement of volunteerism and public participation among the general public. Its reports recommend that councilmembers attend trainings and establish an independent ethics commission.

Some councilmembers have suggested the grand jury findings are political, or aimed at the 49ers. But the council has said it will respond to the report by September 10.

Will they change their behavior? Don’t hold your breath. Indeed, the most damning of the new report’s findings is its recitation of all the residents who have asked the council to examine its own behavior and work to rebuild trust.

The council ignores these requests, the grand jury report found.

“Under current rules,” says the report, “Councilmembers have the sole authority to examine and police their behavior, a task they have proven themselves unwilling to do.”

The post Is This the Most Dysfunctional City Council in California? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

No man is happy but by comparison.

– Thomas Shadwell, poet laureate, United Kingdom (1689-1692)

If you want to better understand the true nature of a proposal, consider a counterproposal.

Looking at two competing proposals forces you to reckon with the different details of each idea.

Which is why every proposition on the California ballot should have a counterproposal listed next to it.

I raise this idea now because of a nasty fight in the State Capitol that made headlines earlier this summer. The fight was over a November ballot initiative and a possible counter to it from the legislature.

The initiative is a proposed repeal of the 2014 criminal justice reform measure known as Prop 47, which reduced penalties for crimes. This new initiative, now labeled Prop 36 on the November ballot, would increase penalties for certain drug crimes and thefts, as well as for criminal activities involving fentanyl. Prosecutors, county sheriffs, Republicans, major retailers, and the mayor of San Francisco are among its backers.

State Democratic leaders opposed the measure as a return to failed tough-on-crime policies. But they also knew that profound concerns about retail thefts and fentanyl meant the measure might well pass.

So, they sought to sabotage the initiative, by offering both an alternative ballot measure and a package of 14 bills that would achieve some of the goals of the initiative. The tactic backfired, causing a political firestorm instead.

The details of the controversy are complicated, so here’s the short version. Democrats included popular provisions in their bills that would be canceled if the law enforcement-backed measure were approved by voters and took effect. These provisions seemed designed not just to undermine the competing initiative but to add to voter confusion. The Democrats also gave their countermeasure some advantages, like a better ballot position.

This gamesmanship undercut the Democrats. Party leaders were criticized for appearing less interested in working toward an effective compromise to curb fentanyl and retail theft, and more interested in getting rid of a tougher-on-crime initiative that might boost turnout among Republicans in November.

In the end, with Democrats facing accusations of “election interference” from the media and Republicans, Gov. Gavin Newsom dropped the countermeasure.

Which was too bad. Voters would have benefited from a clear choice.

The controversy exposed a basic problem with California’s direct democracy. There is no fair, established, and voter-centered process for putting countermeasures on the ballot.

But it would be easy to put one in place.

Some countries with direct democracy have just such an established process for encouraging counterproposals. Switzerland, which has a ballot initiative system that inspired the establishment of California’s system 113 years ago, has the best.

The process is straightforward. When citizens or initiative groups have enough signatures to qualify an initiative, the legislative body gets to examine the initiative and negotiate with sponsors on a compromise that would obviate the need for the measure.

California established a similar process in 2014. It includes a 30-day period for public comments, and legislative hearings on measures once initiative sponsors have gathered 25 percent of the signatures necessary for ballot qualification. This has created new space for compromise between initiative proponents and state lawmakers.  The proponents can now amend their initiatives, or even remove them from the ballot, if they reach an agreement with the legislature and governor.

If those negotiations fail, as they often do, the proponents go forward with their initiative. In response, the legislature can use its power to put its own measure—a countermeasure—on the ballot.

The difference between Switzerland and California is that California has no clear rules that govern these countermeasures. As a result, California countermeasures can be presented on ballots in ways that are haphazard or unfair (with the legislative measure having a more favorable title or position on the ballot, for instance). The measures aren’t linked together on the ballot, which confuses voters. (Have you recently been confounded by two measures on different parts of your ballot seemingly aimed at reforming dialysis clinics, or combating homelessness?)

The Swiss have a standard process for countermeasures that is fair. Each countermeasure is clearly labeled as such, and placed on the ballot right next to the initiative to which it responds. If California adopted this process, countermeasures would be labeled with the same proposition number as the initiative (the initiative might be 24A, and the countermeasure 24B), and with language that made clear that the measures were competing proposals on the same subject.

No gamesmanship.

In a Swiss-style process, California voters would have three questions to answer on each initiative. Yes or no on the initiative. Yes or no on the countermeasure. And then a third choice: if both of these measures pass, which one do you want to go into effect?

The benefits of such a three-part question would be obvious. Voters would have more clarity about their choices—and more power, regardless of whether their preferred outcome wins or loses. Even voters who oppose both the initiative and the countermeasure would be able to register a preference for the one they object to least. Ultimately, voting results would more closely match voter preferences.

I’ve spent considerable time observing Swiss votes on initiatives and referenda, and there’s another advantage to this three-question system. It produces better, more informative campaigns.

Right now, we California voters consider each initiative separately in the vacuum. We learn few details of the measures. Instead, we often vote based on our feelings about an issue, or by following the endorsements in a partisan voter guide.

A Swiss-style comparative campaign—where voters must choose between an initiative and counterproposal—forces voters, and the media, to delve into the details of the two measures. Because the natural question to ask of competing measures is: What is the difference between them? Answering that question requires looking at the actual language and policy detail.

Californians won’t have that option this November. Instead, their choices will be one measure, Prop 36, that proposes harder-line solutions to drug and theft problems—or maintaining the status quo.

The proposed Democratic bills and countermeasure, now abandoned, weren’t much better. But a transparent process would have allowed legislators to draft a better countermeasure, knowing it would go on the ballot right next to the initiative. Or to negotiate in better faith with the initiative sponsors.

Either way, a clear and fair process would have produced more choices for voters, and likely better public policy.

So, let’s give the people a counterproposal now.

The post California’s Ballot Measures Don’t Need to Be a Hot Mess appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The Verdugo Wash is a small flood control channel that takes rainwater from the foothills above Glendale to the L.A. River, and 30 miles out to the Pacific Ocean.

When you visit the wash, as I recently did, you can see the massive chasm between rhetoric and reality in California water.

Since 2017, the Crescenta Valley Water District has been pursuing the sort of project that anyone who is anyone in California water says they want.

Crescenta Valley, which serves 35,000 people in mostly unincorporated neighborhoods between Glendale and La Cañada-Flintridge, wants to capture ocean-bound rainwater from the Verdugo Wash and use it to recharge local groundwater supplies. Verdugo Wash doesn’t carry a lot of water, but capturing it would provide one-sixth of the total water supply for the small district.

Stormwater capture and groundwater recharge are two pillars of the new State Water Plan, released with great fanfare this spring by Gov. Gavin Newsom. The California Department of Water Resources has championed local projects like Crescenta Valley’s through its “Go Golden” initiative. And Los Angeles County, where you’ll find Verdugo Wash, has a new Water Plan that emphasizes local collaborations on “sustainable water resources.”

The state, county, and neighboring local governments have been supporters and collaborators in the Verdugo Wash project.

Unfortunately, there’s one holdout: the city of Los Angeles.

Yes, L.A. talks big about launching its own stormwater capture projects, and has set a goal of achieving “zero wasted water” by 2050, as part of its own “Green New Deal.”

But, in the Verdugo Wash case, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power—and our ancient system of water rights—stands in the way.

LADWP maintains, citing a mid-1970s court decision, that all rain that runs into the L.A. River belongs to L.A., including the stormwater that ends up in Verdugo Wash.

LADWP could let Crescenta Valley Water District capture some of that water and have its project. LADWP itself lets it run out to sea.

But instead of doing the right thing—and backing up rhetoric with action—LADWP is blocking the small project, because it fears the precedent of giving up any rainwater. In the process, LADWP repeats its notorious history of appropriating the water of other places and people.

Maintaining that it owns the Verdugo Wash water, LADWP insists that Crescenta Valley, a smaller agency with limited resources, must replace any stormwater it captures by purchasing water for LADWP from other sources. In email correspondence with the Crescenta Valley Weekly newspaper, DWP suggested that Crescenta Valley buy the water from the Metropolitan Water District, which supplements the supplies of water agencies around Southern California.

That means Crescenta Valley would effectively be taking water from the Colorado River, which is drying up under pressure from Western states, to replace water it merely seeks to recycle from its own Verdugo Wash.

This isn’t the only way that LADWP doesn’t live up to its words. LADWP’s promised “self-sufficiency” has it seeking to quadruple the amount of water it draws from the Owens Valley in the Eastern Sierras. That move has drawn protests from environmentalists across the state.

“It’s the there-it-is-take-it mentality,” says the Crescenta Valley Water District staffer Patrick Atwater. That’s a reference to the famously short speech given by William Mulholland, the civil engineer behind L.A.’s water infrastructure, at the 1913 opening of the Los Angeles Aqueduct.

Atwater, whom I’ve known for years because of his work in improving California water data, met me at a section of Verdugo Wash where much of the infrastructure would be built, at Crescenta Valley Community Regional Park, to discuss the $3.3 million project.

Crescenta Valley wants to capture more stormwater and restore its groundwater supply, which had been reduced by droughts. The project is an efficient, environmental way to do both.

The project would set up two flexible barriers on the wash, one near the dog park and the other near a baseball field. The dams could be inflated when it’s raining to capture some of the flow (the rest would still go to the river and the ocean).

Much of the cost of the project would come from building new pipe to take the captured stormwater to the district’s groundwater production wells about a mile away. Every gallon of water collected would be a gallon of water that didn’t have to come from the Colorado River or another stressed water source. Capturing stormwater is cheaper than buying imported water, which is becoming more expensive. Crescenta Valley spends approximately $3 million on imported water a year; next year’s budget devotes $3.8 million to imports.

“It’s obvious that this is what the future of water should look like,” says James Lee, general manager of Crescenta Valley Water District. “It’s what everyone is telling us to do.”

Lee says the technology is not novel. If it wasn’t being blocked by L.A. water rights, permitting should happen quickly. But the project is unlikely to be built until water policy in Los Angeles, and in California, catches up with reality.

The post A Water Rights Storm Is Brewing in the Foothills Above Glendale appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Don’t worry, America.

We got this.

By “we,” I mean California.

By “this,” I mean this presidential election.

And by “got,” I mean that we are sending you the best possible candidate to weather whatever the next three-plus months hold.

Now let’s be honest about Kamala Harris. We’re not giving you our most charismatic public speaker. Harris’ sentences are sometimes as awkward as Joe Biden’s. She has a bad habit of fusing her talking points into word salads.

We’re not giving you our most disciplined politician. She’ll crack a joke when she shouldn’t or make a mistake in a meeting or at the border that requires political clean-up.

What we are giving you is our most enduring political escape artist. We are giving you someone who can emerge improbably triumphant from losing situations.

But, most of all, we are giving you someone who will take more crap than anyone possibly could, and never quit.

The best way to understand Kamala Harris, if you care to understand the person who (non-Trumpian God willing) will be our next president, is through a classic movie quote, courtesy of a prominent San Francisco political consultant named Eric Jaye.

The movie is The Shawshank Redemption, released in 1994 and based on a Stephen King novella that owes a debt to the French writer Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, a classic story about a prison break and unexpected revenge.

Years ago, Jaye suggested Kamala Harris was the California equivalent of the movie’s main character, Andy Dufresne, a falsely convicted banker who escapes Shawshank Prison through a 500-yard-long sewage pipe.

“Andy Dufresne,” Jaye said, quoting Morgan Freeman’s character in the movie, “who crawled through a river of shit and came out clean on the other side.”

Because Americans don’t know Harris this way, they are underestimating her. Just like they underestimate California.

Contrary to the stereotypes, 21st-century California is not soft or easy. It’s a crowded, crazily competitive place where everything is a struggle. It’s next to impossible to get into the school you want, or get a job that pays enough, or find an affordable place to live.

The real California made Harris tough. It helps that she grew up in a tough place and time—the madness of the late 1960s and early 1970s in Berkeley and in Oakland, which might be California’s toughest city. Her parents were scholars—not the toughest of professions—but they were immigrants, from India and Jamaica, who experienced tough adjustments to American life. And after their divorce, when Harris was still very young, she and her sister were raised almost entirely by their mother.

As a mixed-race kid, Harris struggled to fit in, at a newly integrated elementary school, and at both a Hindu temple and the 23rd Avenue Church of God. In her early teens, she was relocated to a foreign city, Montreal. She attended law school not in the leafy Ivy League like that supposed working-class hero JD Vance but at the UC Hastings, in the middle of San Francisco’s toughest neighborhood, the Tenderloin. And she worked as a prosecutor in Alameda County and then San Francisco, on the sorts of cases—sex crimes and child abuse—that can harden people.

She launched her political career in the hyper-competitive political culture of San Francisco, which forged many of our state’s toughest pols—Willie Brown, Nancy Pelosi, Phil and John Burton. Her first election, for San Francisco district attorney, was one she should have lost, because it was the trickiest challenge in politics—beating an incumbent who was also her boss. Somehow, she escaped with victory in a three-way race when she’d started in third.

Then Harris, still little known, ran statewide, for California attorney general—against a popular Los Angeles Republican named Steve Cooley who had the state’s law enforcement community behind him. On election night, she appeared to have lost. But when all the votes were counted three weeks later, she had squeaked through.

When a U.S. Senate seat opened in 2016, Harris was hardly the most popular Democrat in the state. But she jumped into the race early and managed to scare off other contenders and win the seat over another Democrat.

Harris’ 2020 presidential campaign was a disaster. She started strong in debates but didn’t make it to the Iowa caucuses, alienating both progressives and moderates. But even after that embarrassing campaign, she found a way through, convincing Biden to make her vice president.

Media and public reviews of her vice presidency have been dicey. She had too much staff turnover. Biden gave her impossible issues to manage, mainly immigration. For the first three years, her approval ratings and polling were lower than the president’s. She was cited as the reason he couldn’t retire after one term. But all those things turned. Her performance improved. And now Biden has bowed out and endorsed her for president because she looks like the stronger candidate.

She doesn’t have the nomination yet of course. She may have to go through a contested convention. And if she earns the nod, she’ll face a former president who is ready to attack.

Democrats are worried. Because Donald Trump is a constant font of lies and accusations. His strategy, as the now-imprisoned Trump advisor Steve Bannon has famously said, “is to flood the zone with shit.”

But this time, his opponent is Kamala Harris. She survived all the BS of San Francisco and California and national politics. She’s heard every disgusting sexist insult. She sloughed off slurs against two different races.

She’s about to be submerged in it all again. Because American politics is a river of you-know-what.

Which is why this is her moment.

Who is better equipped to navigate us through all the crap, and to the cleaner other side, than Kamala Devi Harris?

The post California Has Got This, America appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.