The question came up again as one of our most accomplished state legislators, Assemblymember Lorena Gonzalez of San Diego, recently resigned her seat to take a leadership role at the California Labor Federation, a powerful alliance of unions representing millions of workers.

Gonzalez, best known for legislation regulating the gig economy and protecting warehouse workers, was reported to have many different reasons for leaving, from the redistricting of the part of San Diego County she’s represented since 2013 to her personal battle with cancer. But here’s another rationale for the switch: She will almost certainly have more power to shape the future of California as a labor movement leader than as a state lawmaker.

Gonzalez’s resignation should focus more of our attention on a chronic condition in California: much of our governing power lies outside the government. Over generations, California has constructed a strange and complicated system that limits the power of the public officials we elect. Interest groups, corporations and the wealthy have filled the void, writing much legislation themselves, and sponsoring ballot measures that impose formulas to determine spending and taxation.

Our representatives are left with little discretion and less control over state dollars than we imagine. That’s why, when politicians create a new program, they often must seek donations from companies, philanthropies, or individuals. Governor Newsom has secured more than $200 million in such donations, or “behested payments,” to support everything from COVID relief to state commissions on climate change and aging.

This state of affairs can be frustrating for the most creative and public-spirited minds in public office, who earnestly seek to use their offices to get things done. Even worse, public officials are increasingly the target of threats and harassment from people angered by social media posts or conspiracy theories. Add to this mix the relatively lower pay of their jobs, and is it any wonder that some our most accomplished public servants are open to better offers?

It’s not just the legislative branch’s rotating cast of term-limited members and their ambitious aides dreaming of consultancies, either. For me, the most noteworthy resignation came last fall, when California Supreme Court justice Mariano-Florentino “Tino” Cuellar announced his departure.

Why would anyone leave the security of a seat on a court seen as second in influence only to the U.S. Supreme Court? Cuellar was thriving in the job, and has said he enjoyed the work. But the justice, a 49-year-old legal and international affairs scholar who was on the Stanford faculty before his 2015 appointment, accepted an offer to become president of a leading international think tank, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The post offers not just higher pay than state service, but the possibility of making a greater impact. A state supreme court is limited to the cases and California issues that come before it. At Carnegie, Cuellar can work to address a tsunami of global challenges crashing down on all of humanity—from climate change to economic inequality, and from mass migration to technological disruption. And he doesn’t even have to leave California to do it. Carnegie is opening a Silicon Valley office.

Unfortunately, the most skilled politicians in some of our neediest places no longer hold public office. Take the San Joaquin Valley, where two former mayors and huge political talents, Ashley Swearengin of Fresno and Michael Tubbs of Stockton, seem unlikely to return to elected seats.

Swearengin did so well in her two terms as mayor of Fresno—including solving a major budget deficit and decreasing unemployment—that she might be the only Republican in California with a real chance of winning statewide office. But she has declined to run. Gavin Newsom, noting her record and skills, publicly expressed relief when she decided not to seek the governorship in 2018.

Swearengin has opted for philanthropy instead. She leads the Central Valley Community Foundation, the largest philanthropy in the region. There, she spearheads one of the smartest community investment efforts in the state, Fresno DRIVE (Developing the Region’s Inclusive and Vibrant Economy), and has helped put together an innovative participatory budgeting process to let Fresno residents determine how to spend climate change funds. She also serves as co-chair of the California Forward Leadership Council, which works to improve the state’s regional economies and governance.

Put all those roles together, and Swearengin looks like a public official without public office—the unofficial governor of the undeclared state of San Joaquin Valley, which has more people than the state of Oregon.

While Swearengin left Fresno city hall after two terms, Tubbs, elected to the city council at 22 and to the mayor’s job at 26, was voted out in Stockton after one term. But Tubbs’ record in office was so strong—with big improvements in city finances and a novel basic income program that has attracted global attention—that Governor Newsom hired him as an advisor and Macmillan gave him a book contract.

Tubbs has a powerful personal story—poor kid from Stockton, with a single mother and incarcerated father, graduates from Stanford—and would be a strong contender for any number of elected positions. But Tubbs seems more interested in building a new social movement—an effort to end poverty in California—than in returning to elected office.

In this, Tubbs is nodding to the new California conventional wisdom that social movements are more impactful than politicians. “The only thing that really moves public policy into being is power,” USC sociologist Manuel Pastor, author of the book State of Resistance, has said. “And power, in fact, comes from social movements.”

The demands of holding and winning public office became a distraction from actual public service, is how Tubbs describes it in his new memoir, The Deeper the Roots. “I was often too busy with reality to worry about politics,” he writes.

“I enjoyed my eight years in local politics,” Tubbs told a journalist while doing publicity for the book. “But I’m enjoying even more not being an officeholder.”

Such comments may seem self-serving. But as tempting as it is to rail against public officials as a class—as Californians are prone to do—we ought to remember that the excellent public servants have other, better options than taking our abuse.

It’s a problem when politics become too dull or demoralizing for politicians. California and its governments can’t succeed if our most talented leaders conclude that serving in public office is not the best way to serve the public.

The post Is Public Office the Best Place to Do Public Service? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Street vending can no longer be dismissed by policymakers and privileged residents as an underground economy, or an aberration, or a burden to the nation’s second-largest city. Street vending is, economically and geographically, at the heart of the Los Angeles experience and economy. But the state, county, and city have yet to figure out how to govern this fact of L.A. life, to the detriment of the 50,000 micro-entrepreneurs involved in street vending.

Some of them sell merchandise, such as clothing and cell phone accessories. Others—an estimated 10,000—sell food, like fresh fruit, bacon-wrapped hot dogs, tamales, and ice cream. These sellers are deeply interconnected and interdependent with the city’s formal economy: They purchase supplies from other businesses and spend their income elsewhere, providing tax revenues for local, state, and federal government. Street vending, and its related small purchases, sustain 5,234 jobs in Los Angeles, according to that Economic Roundtable report.

These impacts have been 150 years in the making. In Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America, journalist Gustavo Arellano, citing a 19th-century Los Angeles Herald article, traced tamaleros selling tamales from wagons as far back as the 1870s. And in Los Angeles Street Food: A History From Tamaleros to Taco Trucks, food writer Farley Elliott documented the city’s initial attempts to regulate street vending, which not only included Mexicans, but also Chinese vendors: “By the 1890s, there were city government-sanctioned attempts to either severely limit or curb these tamaleros altogether, by restricting either their movement or their window for being able to sell,” he writes. These initial enforcement efforts failed due to the popularity of street food, a pattern that continues today.

By the 1980s, LAPD officers were ticketing and conducting regular sweeps of day laborers and street vendors to deny both groups access to public sidewalks and street corners. Immigrants’ rights advocates worked with street vendor leaders to push back against this harassment—and to try to legalize street vending.

Their organizing efforts led to a city ordinance in 1994 that instituted a two-year pilot program with street vending districts in eight designated areas throughout the city. Only one district was ever created—in the MacArthur Park neighborhood—and in many ways, the geographic limits proved to be a failure. Street vending is a competitive business, and vendors outside of the designated areas undercut those in the program who had higher overhead. Street vending remained illegal, and the L.A. City Council failed to take up this issue again for another 25 years. This inaction resulted in the further criminalization of street vendors, who faced a constant—but unevenly enforced—threat of fines, tickets, and confiscation of their equipment and goods.

In 2008, LAPD enforced a major crackdown on Boyle Heights street vendors, leading a group of community leaders connected with East LA Community Corporation (ELACC) to organize resistance. They brought together a coalition of community, legal, immigrants’ rights, and food justice organizations to fight back against the draconian and anti-immigrant attacks.

In 2010, this coalition held its first vendor community forum, followed by town hall meetings with thousands of vendors throughout Los Angeles. Two years later, street vendors worked with this group and others to launch the Los Angeles Street Vendors Campaign (LASVC) to pursue the legalization of their business. In 2018—after nearly a decade of organizing, popular education, participatory policymaking, advocacy, protests, and major mobilization—they secured major policy victories.

The biggest of those: state legislation decriminalizing and legalizing street vending throughout California. This law also eliminated previous charges and convictions for street vending, and provided immediate protection to tens of thousands of immigrant entrepreneurs and workers in the informal economy.

At the same time, the legislation provided a foundation for local reform. California cities were forced to remove their criminal bans, and most established first-ever permitting programs for legal street vending, including Los Angeles. In November 2018, L.A. City Council formally rescinded the criminal ban on street vending and adopted a set of rules and regulations for legal vending on sidewalks and in parks, requiring vendors to obtain a city permit in 2020.

These groundbreaking policy wins are only the beginning. The LASVC is now working to reform state and county retail food regulations that keep many food vendors mired in the informal economy.

Prior to applying for a permit from the city of Los Angeles, a food vendor must first secure a “county health permit” from the L.A. County Department of Public Health (DPH). The Community Economic Development Clinic at the UCLA School of Law recently analyzed this permitting process and found it to be riddled with barriers.

The combined costs for permits, inspection fees, commissary leases, and code-compliant equipment can total tens of thousands of dollars. There are no standardized cart design blueprints or operating procedures that vendors can utilize to procure a code-compliant cart from a manufacturer. Commissaries—facilities used for food preparation and equipment cleaning and storage—are scarce, and DPH does not permit the use of underutilized kitchens in restaurants, schools, and places of worship.

The largest barriers, however, stem from equipment design standards developed with food trucks, not smaller scale carts, in mind. In one example, following state and DPH requirements would yield a 700-pound taco cart larger than most sidewalks; another example would require a hot dog vendor to have refrigerated space to store 6,000 hot dogs. The state requires most carts to include a three-compartment sink, adding considerable weight, size, and cost. While the state offers some flexibility—allowing use of auxiliary sink units in lieu of integrating sinks on the primary unit—DPH has not yet embraced this option for low-income street vendors in Los Angeles.

The state retail food code also creates barriers, including prohibiting the slicing of whole fruits at a vending cart and keeping most pre-cooked meats hot-to-order. This has led to a de facto ban on the legalization of two iconic L.A. cart vendors: fresh fruit and tacos.

Rather than eliminating the police crackdowns of previous decades, in some ways the new rules have given law enforcement another means of intimidation and criminalization. Police officers, code enforcement, or health officers from the county and city (often armed) enforce these impossible rules, resulting in expensive tickets, fines, and property confiscation. This hurts vendors, excluding them from the formal economy, and consumers—who want to safely enjoy L.A.’s renowned street food.

This ongoing battle illustrates the paradoxical dimensions of local governance. Our laws and regulations exclude many of the same people who make public spaces safe, lively, and inclusive. Government leaders say they want permanent businesses and temporary ones, but make existence difficult for both.

These paradoxes can be resolved, and the state and county can develop legislation that balances economic opportunity and public health. Los Angeles, too, needs innovative strategies to support vendors—including improving working conditions and providing entrepreneurial opportunities—to fully integrate them into life and business here. Ultimately, recognizing the significance of the informal vending economy will create better, healthier lives for the tens of thousands of low-income individuals (most of whom are immigrants with roots in Mexico, Central and South America) and families who work on the streets of L.A. And the entire region will reap—and eat—the benefits.

The post How Los Angeles Can Govern Street Vending With the Respect It Deserves appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Would it be a population of about 30,000? By that definition, two of the three local leaders on the panel—former West Sacramento mayor Christopher Cabaldon and Coachella councilmember Megan Beaman Jacinto—live in communities of approximately 50,000, and would not qualify.

Gonzales city manager René Mendez, whose Central Coast town has a population of just 9,000, said that more important than a number is the necessity of fostering “connections and intimacy” among the people who live there. Though he’d be hard-pressed to consider a community of 30,000 a small town, he said, a town or city with a population the size of West Sacramento and Coachella can still feel intimate—and thus, by that definition, be a “small town.”

Jacinto and Cabaldon agreed that the “small town” designation is relative, noting that it depends where you are. Hewing closer to Mendez’s definition, Cabaldon said that you know you’re in a small town if a fellow resident comes to a city council meeting and you know them not from the organization that they’re representing but because of a different relationship—through something like school or church or the neighborhood.

Marcum, the moderator, quoted Aristotle, who considered a place the right size if “the citizens should know each other and know what kind of people they are.” Turning to Mendez, she asked, “Does Gonzales meet that criteria?”

Unequivocally, “yes,” Mendez replied. The city even refers to its way of doing things as “the Gonzales way,” which he clarified, “doesn’t mean you always agree, just that you’re together, and you’re able to work through some issues.” That comes with downsides, too. For instance, Mendez was working to unveil a new multifamily housing project. A week before its unveiling, the community came out against it—with friends, relatives, and teachers all reaching out directly with unanticipated concerns. “It was a very uncomfortable conversation, but we worked through it,” he said, one that was discussed with emotion everywhere from the liquor store to the barber shop to the post office.

Cabaldon noted that West Sacramento—which nearly doubled in size over his two decades in office—wants “to be a small-town vibe with big-city amenities.” The challenge he found was that “the interconnectedness that we feel isn’t always completely real.” It can be easy to go to certain places and meetings and think you’ll see everyone, but then you miss communities within the community. “I wasn’t really running into recent immigrants from Laos, folks from the Ukrainian community,” he recalled.

This is the similar to one of the challenges facing Coachella, which is currently about 97 percent Latino. The city has doubled in population over the past 15 years and continues to grow, which makes for challenging city planning, said Jacinto. “There is a way of thinking in Coachella—that I share to some extent—which is, as we develop Coachella into the future, we want to ensure that it’s preserving spaces and culture and history for the people that live there now,” she said. “At the same time, about 70 percent of our city is undeveloped, so to speak, agricultural land that’s really ripe for development.” This land could mean opportunities—or challenges that push residents out. Neighbors hold different possible futures for the city in many directions, from the wealthier, larger cities of Indian Wells, Rancho Mirage, and Palm Springs to the working-class neighborhoods of incorporated communities in the more rural eastern Coachella Valley. “We have to be really careful in balancing [our] thoughts and dreams,” said Jacinto.

Turning to Cabaldon, Marcum asked, “Did [West Sacramento] want to be Sacramento, or did it always say, we want to keep an identity as a separate thing that we are?”

Both, said Cabaldon—residents wanted amenities and improvements, but they also didn’t want change. “Very few small towns want to grow just to grow,” he said. Regarding neighboring Sacramento, he noted that anyone who wanted to move there could, but as a politician, he got to have the best of both worlds. “I can draft behind the big cities when it matters and focus on maintaining and building out a small-town place,” he said. If you want to do something, even about a problem as big as climate change, you can open your office door and yell to your colleagues and make a plan. Which isn’t to say small towns are perfect. He joked that you could also have a situation where, say, there are four city councilmembers total—and one hates another because he stole his high school prom date. (When asked if this was a true story, Cabaldon laughed and said he was not referring to the current city council.)

“You don’t have to go through a lot of hoops to get something done,” Mendez joined in, speaking to a plus of small-town governance. “The key is to have partnerships.” In Gonzales, the youth council galvanized the community to figure out how to help young people facing mental health issues during the pandemic. Acting on the recommendations of these local teenagers, he said, the city council and school board came together to create a wraparound mental health approach and fund a social worker to support young people in crisis.

On the other end of the spectrum, small communities are often under-resourced and underrepresented in government. “Can you talk about how small is maybe too small and what the challenges there are?” asked Marcum.

In addition to working within Coachella, Jacinto advocates for unincorporated communities in the eastern rural Coachella Valley. These places, which exist primarily because farmworkers couldn’t find affordable housing elsewhere, lack basic resources like clean drinking water and septic systems. They’ve been forced to innovate, developing some of the state’s first point-of-use community water filtration systems and new regulations for mobile home utilities.

Small size necessitates and often facilitates innovation, the panelists agreed. Gonzales recently made universal broadband free to all its residents, and West Sacramento instituted universal preschool 18 years ago and has made free college tuition possible for every high school senior.

“In a smaller town you can imagine actually solving a problem,” said Cabaldon. “In a bigger city, it’s, ‘Let’s adopt a 25-year plan to do X.’” Small-town leaders know they can’t leave anyone behind, he joked, because you might run into that person at a soccer game next weekend.

Marcum then turned the discussion over to audience questions, submitted via a live YouTube chat.

One person wanted to know: How can you create a cultural center for a town?

Mendez said it’s about watching where your community gathers and what places they revolve around. “It’s observing your community, listening, and then you try to activate around that,” he said. In Gonzales, for example, they passed a sales tax to fund a new community center near the school—because it was identified as a place where people were already going.

Another viewer asked: What was the most innovative thing the panelists had seen come out of a small town?

Jacinto said that Coachella was “the first city in the nation to ban private prisons” and also the only place that instituted “hazard hero pay for farmworkers” in the pandemic—an extra $4 an hour for four months.

Viewers also wanted to know how to keep and attract young people to small towns. Creating extension campuses of larger higher educational institutions, said Mendez and Cabaldon, has been helpful.

Listening to the panelists discuss the reasons why people want to come or return to small towns, Marcum noted near the end of the discussion that it felt like the panelists were covering the things that make life good. Summing it up, she said: “You need basic necessities, you need opportunity that makes your children come home, you need fun, you need a place to live, and you need a place where everybody meets.”

The post Small Towns Can Create Big Change appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In search of solutions to the problem and its root causes, Zócalo, United Way, and the Committee for Greater Los Angeles convened policy makers, advocates, and experts to ask “What Will It Take to End Homelessness in L.A.?”

The evening’s moderator, KCRW housing and homelessness reporter Anna Scott, began the conversation by asking panelist Shawn Pleasants to share his own journey experiencing homelessness in Los Angeles.

“It’s a complex narrative, but so is life,” said Pleasants. “It’s something I didn’t imagine could possibly happen to me.”

A graduate of Yale University who had worked on Wall Street, he ended up unhoused after his mother died and his business failed. Living on the street, he dealt with addiction and had to find food, water, and basic resources, such as the bathroom, each day, as well as a safe place to stay. “It’s a very exhausting existence to have,” he said, “one that keeps you from looking forward or have any hope.” Multiple attempts to get housed failed for various reasons—including a caseworker’s arrest for fraud. “The promise of me finding a way out, working with a particular caseworker or an agency, and suddenly be dropped into nothingness, it’s very disappointing and it’s very disruptive,” he said.

Ultimately, it was one of his Yale classmates, Kim Hershman, who was able to provide Pleasants with the support he needed. Today, he said, he has been housed for one year, is 584 days sober, and is working to help others conquer the issues he faced.

“What would have been more helpful to you from professionals that you did interact with up to that point?” Scott asked.

First, said Pleasants, Hershman asked him what he needed. And second, he emphasized, she came to see him regularly and they formed a relationship based on trust, which made him decide to ultimately accept her offer of help.

Turning to Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) Commission Ad Hoc Committee on Governance Reform chair Sarah Dusseault, Scott asked how LAHSA can make street outreach more effective.

Dusseault, whose brother is unhoused, said she is working “on making sure lived expertise is at the forefront of both design and execution. … It is real easy to design a program that on paper looks amazing,” she continued, “but if we don’t have that real-life experience at the forefront in the design process, it can easily not be as effective as it could be.”

Scott asked the rest of the panel what holes they see in the system for people who need mental health and addiction treatment services.

UCLA California Policy Lab executive director Janey Rountree said that her team looked at everyone enrolled in street outreach services for a year, and then linked that data to clinical mental health diagnoses and substance use disorder diagnoses. They found that 30 percent of street outreach participants have either a serious mental illness or a substance use disorder and about 10 percent have both.

“If you’re really meeting people where they are, you’re going to hear about a lot of different kinds of needs, and for that outreach to be credible, you’ve got to follow through,” said Rountree. The challenge to such follow-through is that street outreach workers “don’t have the full spectrum of resources that are needed,” the most pressing of which regards the housing gap.

Fifty years ago, Rountree said, California stopped building housing to keep pace with population growth; as a result, housing costs skyrocketed while the average income has stagnated. “When you get to spending more than 30 percent of a person’s income on housing, you can expect to see homelessness in your community, and in Los Angeles we’re over 50 percent,” said Rountree.

While securing permanent housing is the ultimate goal, the shortage of high-quality interim housing—particularly for people who are suffering from substance use disorders—is especially critical, said Rountree. But the financing isn’t there, particularly for such housing that includes care for people suffering from serious mental illness.

“We need to raise the bar,” Pleasants said. “[Caseworkers] shouldn’t be able to take on another person until they have solved the problems of the people that they have in under their care,” he added. “It’s not just passing them on to another worker with another agency. There’s a myriad of different fragmented systems that are very siloed.”

The goal, he said, should be to get people off the street as quickly as possible, and there needs to be clearer pathways to do that. “If a veteran has a problem, they go to the Veterans [Affairs]; they know what to do,” he said. “Well, if someone’s homeless, what do you do? And nobody seems to know.”

Scott asked Enterprise Community Partners vice president Jimar Wilson, who works in affordable housing, what he sees as the biggest barriers to creating new affordable housing in L.A.

Wilson said a multitude of solutions are needed to solve the gap between wages and housing prices. “There is no one solution, but high cost, and barriers to that gap of what people need to stay in housing is something that we need to address,” he said.

Innovative ideas to solve these problems are out there, Dusseault pointed out. But the issue is scale. Los Angeles County, she said, is currently short half a million affordable rental homes. “We just need to put up a whiteboard and figure out a plan to get there,” she said. One hopeful example she cited was the Vignes Street housing project, which was built in less than six months and will provide 232 units of permanent and interim housing at a cost of about $200,000 per bed.

Pleasants added that there is a lot of untapped potential in the city—citing, for example, the many units in receivership without tenants. “I’m sure those landlords who own those buildings would love to have the city put someone in at any cost to keep them afloat,” he said.

The issue is enacting policy. Frustrated at recommendations LAHSA has made but cannot execute, Pleasants continued, “We need to find a way to get all of this wonderful thought and all this wonderful potential here into actual action.”

Scott asked United Way of Greater Los Angeles Homelessness Initiatives director Carter Hewgley what can be done about L.A.’s lack of governance around homelessness.

“We’ve got to get focused and organized on a shared goal, and drive progress across all of our power structures, toward the same common agenda,” said Hewgley. “I don’t know that we’re ever going to live in a Los Angeles where one entity has the authority to end poverty and reverse the housing crisis, but I am eager to get to a point where … the best of those ideas to rise to the top and resolve them.”

What about change now, asked Scott: “Are there just basic concrete things that the city and the county could do to work better together?”

Hewgley said the region’s COVID-19 response made him optimistic. “A crisis like a pandemic reminds you that you can coordinate. You know you can bring it together and have a unified vision,” he said. “We need to treat homelessness the same way.” Our societal failures, he said, whether it’s healthcare, housing, or systemic racism, “all comes and manifests in homelessness, and so I think we’ve got to have that kind of unified effort that we had during the pandemic … on getting people safely inside and getting them housed.”

Tackling homelessness will require systemic change, the panelists agreed. “One of the things we’ve got to acknowledge at the federal level is that housing is a human right. Healthcare is a human right. And we’ve got to start putting our money where our rights are. And delivering those rights at scale is something that I think the whole country would benefit from,” said Hewgley. “Too many people have been waiting too long who deserve nothing less than that.”

Turing to audience questions flooding into the virtual chat room, Scott asked the panelists to discuss what they think is holding Los Angeles back from adopting a right to housing, and how helpful it would be to have such a right.

“I absolutely believe in a right to housing, and I think that concept of housing as infrastructure has been part of what has been holding us back,” said Dusseault. “There needs to be a real understanding of how we got here in order to get out of this, and the real understanding is that we’ve had tons of federal subsidies for all sorts of things—for mortgages for homeowners and other things that the federal government’s subsidized—but we have completely starved our public housing, and that has had a real impact. We’ve starved our access to mental health care and our access to basic health care.”

Following up on that question, Scott asked the panelists: Are there any other cities that have successfully made a big dent in this issue?

Hewgley argued that L.A., in fact, is where we should turn for answers. “We are probably doing some of the most innovative stuff in the country,” he said. “We’re just not doing it at scale.” Instead, he said, it’s a pilot project in a single district. For example, he noted, there are several pilot projects happening right now where social workers trained in de-escalation and connecting people to services are responding to crises instead of armed police. But the problem is providing the resources to scale up such programs. “We probably have the best examples of great practices here in this jurisdiction,” he said. “[But] our bold ideas are not always matched with bold money and bold scale.”

Another audience member had a question for Pleasants about street outreach: What should the approach be if an unhoused person refuses care or services?

A case worker, said Pleasants, is walking into someone’s life at a random moment. “They may have just gotten robbed, they may not have eaten for a while,” he said. “You really don’t know what issues they are going through, and unless someone takes a trauma-informed approach, you’re not going make headway.”

Sometimes, it’s a matter of coming back at a better time. “You’ve got to build trust, you have to build a relationship,” he said.

A final questioner wanted to know if homelessness is something that L.A. can manage, or even end.

“I think we’re in an extremely unique moment where we already have the federal government’s interest,” said Dusseault. “The federal government made some huge mistakes in the Great Depression. We made some huge mistakes in the Great Recession, where the drive for recovery was inequitable and created some of the mistakes that are ending up in homelessness now.” Governance reform and maximizing the impact of that federal help are key right now, she added.

“As we’ve talked about today, we’ve seen what we can do in our response to COVID-19. Within a matter of months, we housed thousands and thousands of people,” said Dusseault. That took collective action across sectors. “I really do think we can do this, but it’s going to take a completely different approach.”

The post A Complex Homelessness Crisis Requires a Complex Response appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Instead, internet governance is a contest for power between the most powerful tech companies, who put their shareholders first and want the internet to be a free-for-all, and national governments, which prioritize the political interests of their own officials.

In this contest, both sides create the pretense of democracy. Facebook, based in Menlo Park, has created its own “independent oversight” board of global experts, though it’s unelected, and chosen by Facebook. The European Union touts its tougher regulation of privacy and the internet—but those regulators are also unelected, and impose their rules on people far from Europe.

Which is why the internet needs a democratic government that operates beyond the reach of tech companies or national government. Such a system must be both local—to allow people to govern the internet where they live—and transnational, just like the internet itself.

There is as yet no clearly articulated vision of such a government, but there are many constituent pieces that could be mixed together.

A Europe-based network of human rights organizations has developed a Charter of Digital Rights—Article 4, for example: “Every person has the right to freedom of speech and expression in the digital world”—that could be part of the constitution of an internet government. The NetMundial Initiative, developed in recent years with a strong push from the World Economic Forum and a previous Brazilian government, offers ideas for international governance of the internet built around a council that mixes rotating and permanent members.

There are lessons to be learned from ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), a somewhat democratic non-profit that, from a Los Angeles base, successfully governed a narrow part of the internet—the domain name system—with participation from more than 110 countries from 1998 to 2016.

An effective internet government must be collective—because the internet’s power, and commercial value, lie not in any individual user or data, but in the aggregation of users and data. In a must-read essay in Noema magazine (which is published by the California-based Berggruen Institute), Matt Prewitt, president of the RadicalxChange Foundation, suggested structuring Internet governance not around individual data rights, but rather around a series of “data coalitions”—online unions that would give communities of users democratic authority.

“Data cannot be owned, but must be governed,” Prewitt wrote. “Data must be the subject of shared democratic decisions rather than individual, unilateral ones. This presents particular challenges for liberal legal orders that have typically centered on individual rights.”

In a similar vein, I’d suggest that the internet’s democratic government combine multiple forms of democratic governance.

The center of such a government should be a citizens’ assembly—a tool used around the world by countries and communities to get democratic verdicts that are independent of elites. This citizens’ assembly would consist of 1,000 people who, together, would be representative by age, gender, and national origin of the global community of internet users. They would not be elected individually, but rather chosen via randomized processes that use sortition (or drawing lots).

The assembly would be supplemented by an online platform that allowed people to report problems, make suggestions, or even petition for proposals that could be voted upon by Internet users everywhere, in a global referendum. The models for such a platform include Rousseau, the controversial online environment through which Italy’s Five Star Movement governed itself for a time, and Decide Madrid, the online participatory framework that has spread from the Spanish capital to more than 100 cities worldwide.

National governments and tech companies would try desperately to influence this government, but they would not be in charge of it. And each citizens’ assembly would dissolve after two or three years—making it harder for the powerful to lobby it.

While the government would live online, it should have a real-world headquarters in the 18th-century Swiss philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau’s hometown of Geneva.

If such a government endured and succeeded, it could join the ranks of international organizations like the World Health Organization or the International Red Cross. It also could offer a model for international democratic governance to address off-line global problems, from public health to climate change.

The post The Internet Needs Its Own Democratic Government appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The incident itself was ugly enough, but the subsequent debate proved just as bad. Many Ventura residents expressed disgust with the city’s inability to deal with people they regarded as vagrants, while many others expressed disgust that their friends and neighbors could dehumanize homeless people as part of the debate.

In the middle of this nasty fight sat seven people doing their best to make Ventura a better place to live: the members of the Ventura City Council. Sitting on the dais in the council chambers in the city’s historic 105-year-old city hall was not a comfortable place to be. Governing at the local level in California is always fraught with peril because people often have contradictory moral visions about what their city government should do—a fact that is obvious in most city council chambers every week. “We’re mad as hell. We’re not going to take anymore,” one resident told the councilmembers in a room packed full of angry folks.

The Ventura homelessness debate may yet work out—there’s a growing consensus to move forward with a new shelter—but the sense of being under fire will continue for local elected officials. It is inescapable: You’re elected by the small minority of residents who bother to vote in local elections. You devote yourself to a 24/7 job that pays a few thousand dollars a year. You try to do the right thing. But whatever you do, lots of your longtime friends and neighbors will be angry with you—and will express that anger to you in deeply personal terms in the supermarket, at parks and schools and churches, and even in parking lots.

I used to be a member of the Ventura City Council, and four of my former colleagues still serve there. They had to weather the recent controversy over the homeless. In my view, there’s no question that serving as a local elected official in California has gotten a lot harder over the past decade or two.

Just like our national conversation, our local debates have gotten harsher and uglier. Increasingly, we have seen deep divisions not only over local issues but also over national issues that manifest themselves locally, such as the recent debate about providing sanctuary for undocumented immigrants.

And, mirroring what’s happening at the national level, the ability to get things done locally has gotten much more difficult. Local politics is getting more ideological and the divisions in every city are getting starker. I called my recent book—an account of my time on the Ventura City Council—Talk City because sometimes it seemed to me like that’s all we ever did. And over time I felt we drifted away from productive talk that moved us toward action and instead spent more time talking past each other without taking any action.

Partly, this inability to get things done is the result of the growing disconnect between the expectations of our voters and their willingness to pay for those expectations. In California, that is a disconnect that goes back 40 years to the passage of Proposition 13.

On the one hand, people expect our city to do everything. Ventura is an old-fashioned “full service” city, which must provide police, fire, parks, water, sewer and more. Very often the city is the only local institution with the scale and revenue to initiate any large-scale undertaking.

On the other hand, most people don’t vote in local elections; turnout in off-year local elections typically runs between 25 percent and 35 percent. The voters are deeply skeptical of the city government’s competence; and during my terms they regularly voted down tax increases and tied the city’s hands on policy decisions via other ballot initiatives.

At a May 7, 2018 meeting at Ventura City Hall, supporters of more programs for homeless citizens held blue placards while those asking for more police enforcement held orange ones. Photo courtesy of Tim Nafziger.

Sometimes we couldn’t even agree on what to call our city. The official name is “San Buenaventura,” named for our mission, which was in turn named for St. Bonaventure, the 13th-century Catholic saint. (St. Bonaventure was a Franciscan, as was St. Junipero Serra, father of the California mission system.) That name had been shortened to “Ventura” in the 19th century, supposedly because the full name was too long to fit on the railroad schedules. Yet we never quite decided what to call ourselves—even our wayfinding signs said Ventura in some locations and San Buenaventura in others. In the middle of a heated debate on this topic one night, one of our longtime city councilmembers said, “We should use San Buenaventura on all of our signs so everybody knows they’re in Ventura.”

Luck of the draw made me mayor of Ventura during the depths of the last recession. I was the guy who closed a library and a fire station. We couldn’t meet expectations, and that, frankly, is when local politics got uglier than it had been before.

During the recession, I had conversations with constituents almost every day who told me that we shouldn’t cut their library service/fire station/park/senior citizen program. When I would ask them what we should cut instead, their typical reaction was: “I don’t know. That’s your job.”

In my experience, I am sorry to say, I now see the beginnings of the coarse, cynical, and occasionally cruel way that even ordinary people approach politics today.

One early manifestation of this was the Tea Party, which emerged in 2009 just when I began my stint as mayor. As the city contemplated a ban on single-use plastic bags, I was inundated by emails from members of the then-new Tea Party—some longtime friends, some out-of-towners I did not know—claiming that we were going to strip our residents of a precious freedom. A disagreement on policy is one thing, but one correspondent declared—in the subject line of his email—“Give me plastic bags or give me death!”

Not long afterward, the Tea Party and some other similarly minded folks came out in force to oppose our decision to install paid parking in some parts of downtown Ventura. I viewed this move as a market-oriented solution to a serious problem: Too many people parked on Main Street, while not enough people parked in the parking lots a half-block away. But the Tea Party folks viewed it as an unconstitutional exercise in double taxation. John and Ken—conservative shock-jock radio hosts in Southern California—spent an hour excoriating “the stupid city of Ventura and their dumbass mayor Bill Fulton.”

The budget situation is better now and my former colleagues have been able to do some good things as a result. But the tinge of meanness has remained, just as it has at the national level. John and Ken were back in Ventura broadcasting from the Promenade after the recent homeless/murder incident.

Those are the kinds of experiences that make you wonder why anybody would run for office. Indeed, whenever anybody asks me whether I think they should run for their local city council, the first thing I always ask is, “Are you crazy enough to do it?”

It’s not surprising under these circumstances that not many good people want to run for office in California these days—and I’m not sure there are many systemic changes that could improve the situation. A recent state law that will switch many local elections from odd to even years will at least increase turnout—which may help people feel more invested in their elected officials. Better pay might help, so that people don’t have to retire or go bankrupt to serve. But maybe the most important thing is simply to help people see political and civic life in their town as a shared effort that includes not just the elected officials but everybody else as well.

As mayor I used to attend a different church service every Sunday, and at one social hour after a service I was approached by a man in his 30s wearing all black with several tattoos. He was accompanied by his wife and daughter, both of whom were dressed in all black with heavy dark makeup.

“Mayor Fulton,” he said, “I just wanted to say we love what you’re doing. We are so excited about where Ventura is going.”

I thanked him in a perfunctory way, and he added: “We were wondering—how can the Goth community get more involved?”

I’m not sure we ever got the Goth community deeply involved in Ventura’s political life. But that’s where the hope lies: When ordinary people from various backgrounds are inspired to step out of their own world and into the wider world of civic involvement.

The post The National Partisan Nastiness Is Now Poisoning Local Politics appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Neutrality might be the answer.

I was born and raised in one neutral country, Switzerland. As an adult, I moved to and became a citizen of another neutral country, Sweden. I have experienced what it means to live in societies developed on peaceful and stable ground.

In 2017 my first home country, Switzerland, celebrated the 500th anniversary of its last military action abroad. In Sweden, more than 200 years have passed since the Swedish army was engaged in foreign war (at that time, an occupation of neighboring Norway).

In both my home countries, neutrality has thus stood the test of time and reinforced the democratic nature of the governments. Which is why neutrality deserves more attention, especially in small and vulnerable democracies around the world.

The planet is already moving in that direction. The primary international tactic for most countries is no longer archaic military violence, but engagement in smart public diplomacy based on international law.

A more diplomatic and law-based world fits the notion of neutrality, which means that a country does not join any military alliance or engage with other countries as a belligerent.

Historically there have been as many forms of neutrality as there have been countries to declare it. And yes, there have been some cases, as in Austria after World War II, when a country was obliged by foreign powers to become a neutral state.

In the Swiss case, the concept of neutrality goes back to the Second Peace Treaty of Paris in 1815, which allowed Switzerland to become a self-governing territory. But at that time, Switzerland was just a loose network of independent states. It took another 33 years—and, in fact, a civil war between the various states of the country—to establish the current federal, democratic state by referendum in 1848.

That state was explicitly neutral. And this direct engagement of Swiss citizens in state affairs—via votes in referendums and citizen’s initiatives— has served to enforce neutrality. When people get to make decisions, they often choose peace, stability—and neutrality.

The Swiss have, however, retained an army. Indeed, for many decades, it was said that Switzerland was an army. This reflected a triumphant megalomania in the country after it had kept itself out of two disastrous world wars that consumed its neighbors. But later in the 20th century, Switzerland reduced what had been one of the biggest and most expensive armies—a “protection force for neutrality”—in the world.

Neutrality is not static. It requires constant development and fine-tuning. The Swiss have long debated and changed exactly how their neutrality works. But the debate is always open; the Swiss consensus is that neutrality is a security issue, and security issues should not be left to a small circle within government or parliament, at least in a democracy.

One very long debate involved Swiss membership in the United Nations. Supporters of neutrality for decades argued that such a membership, which could imply participation in military operations abroad, would not be compatible with being a neutral country. In 1986, two-thirds of Swiss voters said no to UN membership. But voters narrowly approved the same measure in 2002, making Switzerland the first country to join the global organization by referendum.

My other home country has made a similar connection between democracy and neutrality. Sweden has debated whether to join NATO—as some politicians from national right-wing parties are demanding—but that would require a popular vote.

Sweden’s neutrality dates back to the Napoleonic wars, when the Nordic kingdom lost more than one-third of its territory. Since 1812, Sweden has not initiated any armed combats and has declared itself a non-aligned and neutral country. In contrast to Switzerland, this policy has never been enshrined in international treaties and Sweden has always understood its neutrality to be proactive, which has allowed it to be involved in peacekeeping efforts around the world. It also has joined the European Union and forged agreements (though not membership) with NATO.

The Swiss and Swedish examples show the different options and limits of neutrality. The stricter Swiss neutrality limits the international options of the country, but its stand is more credible than Sweden’s more pragmatic approach. At the same time, Sweden can react more flexibly to changing security challenges.

Taking these risks and benefits into consideration, when I think about the links between peace, stability, democracy and neutrality, I wonder about the power that neutrality might hold for a place under threat, like Taiwan.

Taiwan is a country of 23 million, adjacent to a larger nation of 1.3 billion, which maintains the right to invade its smaller neighbor whenever it chooses. What kind of protection does such a place need?

Taiwan has built up its military forces and weaponry, and it has made alliances with the United States and as many other countries as it can. The goal has been to counter the threat with defense.

But the Chinese threats continue—indeed, they have recently increased. So the more important piece of security might involve the example Taiwan presents to the world.

Taiwan democratized three decades ago, and it has sought to make its democracy more participatory over the years. I have visited some 15 times to observe elections and referendums, and work to enhance the country’s system of direct democracy, which is now considered a global model.

Using that democracy to embrace neutrality formally has been discussed, and the idea has a couple of virtues. First, it would reinforce Taiwan’s democracy by setting a policy in line with the views of its people, and making it clear that no government could simply go to war.

It also might provide real security, and broadcast to the world that Taiwan is devoted to peace. Again, Switzerland and Sweden are good illustrations of how such a proactive policy of democracy and non-aggression can deter invasion (Switzerland’s ability to stay out of the world wars being the prime example), while also creating a globally recognized brand for the country. If China invaded an officially neutral Taiwan, it would be threatening and attacking an open, democratic, and peaceful country—a difficult position for its autocratic government to defend.

Of course, there is no single or simple solution for the complicated security situation in East Asia. But a Taiwanese move to neutrality would project self-confidence, and a message that should impress the world. It also would allow Taiwan to focus more on its internal development, including making greater advances in its democracy. The country’s cities, in particular, are seeking more sovereignty and control from a national government that has long centralized power, in part by arguing that a strong national authority is needed for security reasons.

Neutrality, in combination with democracy, is not a guarantee of a country’s eternal life. But history suggests it is better insurance than the most sophisticated weapons systems.

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Answering these questions might begin with the Spanish conquest of the New World in the 16th century—a moment that changed empires forever, because the Spanish empire became global then in a way that was not possible earlier.

Although Alexander the Great constructed a vast Eurasian empire, and the Roman Empire regarded itself as ecumenical, neither of them incorporated the enormous variety of peoples and cultures to be found in Spain’s empire. And that variety was also characteristic of the other overseas European empires—the Portuguese, Dutch, French, and British—that would follow it. This presented the rulers of these global empires with novel problems—most pointedly, the problem of managing diversity.

Differences among the subject peoples of these new global empires called for new ways of thinking about empire. Initially, European rulers were very conscious of following in the tradition of previous empires, which are among the most enduring political forms in human history. In particular, the longevity and achievements of the Roman Empire made it an exemplary empire for most of the European empires (including the Ottoman).

The continuities with the past were evident in how the European empires preserved the idea of universality. Though the existence of other empires was usually recognized, all empires tended to think of themselves—like the Roman Empire—as unique and universal, carrying a special truth about the world that they felt entitled and even obliged to carry to the whole of humanity. Usually this sense of special truth took the form of belief in the imperial mission, and it was often expressed in religious terms. Thus, the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs saw themselves as the vehicle for Roman Catholicism throughout the world. The Russians justified their empire for its spread of Orthodoxy; the Dutch and British saw themselves as the champions of Protestantism; the Ottomans were the carriers of Islam.

In later years, as secularism became more pronounced in Europe, the imperial mission was conceived in less religious terms—and instead as the “civilizing mission” of the European powers, through which they spread the ideals and practices of Western civilization. Often this was coupled with the idea of imperial citizenship—the incorporation of all the subjects of the empire into a common citizenship, which they shared with the ruling people.

The ideas of universality, the civilizing mission, and common citizenship were all taken from Rome. But the modern European empires, especially the overseas ones, were also conscious that the peoples over whom they ruled possessed very different traditions and cultures from Western ones, as well as from each other. And so, though convinced generally of the superiority of European civilization, they proceeded with caution.

In the interests of order and efficiency, the promotion of the imperial mission was tempered by a recognition of the need to respect the traditions of the subject peoples. Often empires took the lead in preserving and conserving local cultures, studying the local languages, propping up indigenous institutions, and excavating and restoring often lost or decayed historical sites. This work of conservation and recovery was often done in the spirit of scholarship and intellectual inquiry. But it also had a more strategic purpose: managing diversity in far-flung empires where attempts to impose cultural uniformity might create resentment and resistance.

Such considerations also affected how the ruling peoples of empires responded to nationalism, which from the time of the French Revolution onward became a powerful force—first in Europe and then increasingly in the rest of the world (not least through the global reach of the European empires). Nationalism, which demanded that state boundaries coincide with national ones, was a threat to empires, which were almost by definition multinational and multiethnic. What made the threat all the greater was that empires themselves had often been responsible for the spread of nationalism, not only through their cultural policies of conservation, but also via educational systems that had led to the creation of a class of indigenous, westernized intellectuals who demanded a place in imperial rule—if not outright independence for their nations.

Ultimately, what brought down the empires was not nationalism. Their fall was mostly the result of two World Wars, which were fought mainly among the empires. Indeed, empires could use nationalism for their own purposes; some were particularly adept at exploiting the divisions and conflicts between the many nations that composed the empire. The Habsburg Empire, for example—from 1867 the “Austro-Hungarian” Empire—contained Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Poles, and Ukrainians who often saw each other as threats, and looked to the Habsburgs to preserve the peace and provide orderly administration. Muslims and Hindus in India long looked to the British Empire as a protective agency, inhibiting communal rivalries.

While managing the nationalism of the subject peoples was one thing, imperial rulers also had to be equally alert to the nationalism of the ruling peoples themselves, and to rein that in where necessary. Allowing the nationalism of the ruling people to express itself too strongly would have been a profound irritant to the other peoples in the empire, and a dangerous provocation. The ruling people—English, French, Austrians, Russians—got their sense of themselves through their imperial, not their national, identities.

One effect of empire, therefore, was a critical suppression of the national identity of the ruling peoples—a diminishment of a sense of themselves as a distinct nation. So long as the empires survived, this was not a problem for the ruling peoples, engaged as they were in the enterprise of imperial rule, and content with the identity and the spoils that this gave them (despite the high costs of empire). Once the empires had gone, though, imperial peoples were faced with a profound question of who they were, of how to find the national identity that they had previously ignored or suppressed.

Empires now seem to have gone, at least in a formal sense, and no one claims to be re-establishing an empire. Empire itself has become a dirty word; and if anyone practices it—Americans or Russians, as many have suggested—they call it something else.

But the nation-state, empire’s successor, has proved to be an awkward and in many ways unsuccessful form for dealing with the problems thrown up by multiculturalism and globalization. Its principle of “one people, one state” has turned out not to be (as 19th-century theorists hoped) a recipe for peaceful coexistence in a world of equal nations; but as a prescription for an unending cycle of violence, bred by the existence of national minorities in most states.

In such a condition—which we find ourselves in today—empires may have much to teach us about the management of difference and diversity, and of the recognition of principles that go beyond the limited vision of nationalism and the nation-state. Yes, it’s true that empires have had their day. But when they were the norm they covered the earth and they lasted for hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years. At the very least their study is likely to prove highly instructive.

The post Were Empires Better Than Nation-States at Managing Diversity? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

California could use a concert hall like Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie.

The signature structure of 21st century Germany sits atop an old pier above a dramatic bend in the Elbe River. Its creative design features performance space for the philharmonic, a dramatically curved escalator, and a dozen different public spaces for people to gather and enjoy spectacular city views.

But what California needs more than this stunning new piece of architecture is the scandal that built it. Originally planned in 2007 as a 186 million Euro project, financed with 77 million Euros from taxpayers, the Elbphilharmonie was so dogged by delays and overspending that its final price tag approached 1 billion Euros, with taxpayers paying 789 million.

The good news: The concert hall, as a fiscal embarrassment, inspired a furious public reaction that in turn produced one of the world’s most advanced government transparency laws.

And that law, unlike the hall, can be transported to California, where our transparency rules mostly produce frustration.

In California, the onus—and much of the expense—of getting access to government papers and people is put on citizens, who have little leverage to force governments to comply. Our open records laws often force citizens to identify records and bear the burden and expense of requesting documents, fighting for access, and obtaining copies. And because of deep mistrust between California’s people and our governments, our open meetings laws involve putting restrictions on the power and discretion of our government representatives—we dictate when they can meet, when they can talk to each other, when they can email one another.

As a result, California’s law, by limiting the power both of citizens and their government officials, actually empower wealthy players outside government, especially developers and unions, because they are not limited by the same restrictions as government officials.

Hamburg’s transparency law works differently because it empowers everybody, both citizens and government officials. The law sets a default of openness by requiring government officials to make their documents—contracts, memos, deliberations—viewable on the internet, almost as soon as they produce them. Citizens in Hamburg—or anyone really, anywhere in the world— can access records simply by going online and searching through an online portal.

I learned about Hamburg transparency on a recent visit to the port city, where I was the guest of local journalist Angelika Gardiner and farmer Manfred Brandt, who let me sleep in his barn. I’d gotten to know the two of them in recent years while serving as co-president of the Global Forum on Modern Direct Democracy, a network of journalists, scholars, activists, and election around the world.

For those who work in the Rathaus, the seat of Hamburg’s state government, transparency is automatic and immediate. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Twenty years ago, Gardiner, Brandt, and other citizens began using direct democracy to reshape the constitution of Hamburg, which is both a city and one of Germany’s 16 states, giving it a special double status. They wanted to bring transparency to Hamburg government, which used opaque public-private contracts for many building projects. Germany’s federal freedom of information law, which like California laws put the onus on citizens to identify and seek records, wasn’t very effective.

Elbphilharmonie’s cost problems offered an opening. In 2011, using photos of the construction site with the slogan “Transparency Creates Trust,” several groups—from Transparency International to the Chaos Computer Club to Brandt and Gardiner’s More Democracy—drafted a ballot initiative to establish a transparency law. Their idea was to create an information register online where the government would have to publish all its documents; citizens could then search it anonymously, free of charge.

Modeling the sort of government they sought, they used a public Wiki to develop their ballot initiative for transparency. A retired supreme court judge helped complete a legally sound draft on an unpaid voluntary basis. Such an open drafting process is uncommon in California’s more corporate initiative process, which is dominated by wealthy individuals, massive interest groups, and professional political firms.

The initiative was a sensation. After the groups gathered 15,000 signatures to put their measure on the ballot, the Hamburg parliament, bowing to the inevitable, adopted their proposal before a public vote could be held. The law went into effect five years ago this month, in October 2012.

It took until 2014 to get everything online, but the Transparenzportal is now a treasure trove—contracts, reports, plans, grant awards, proposed resolutions, spatial data, permits, even payments and benefits for senior officials are available for your perusal.

The law guarantees “immediate” access, which usually means documents must be published within a week of their creation. About 60 percent of the documents involve permits and decisions around buildings of some sort. In the last two years, the portal has been accessed nearly 23 million times.

The transparency has not been total. Smaller contracts (those less than 100,000 Euros) aren’t always published online. An expansive exemption for personal privacy requires redaction of some information that would seem relevant—at least to this cynical Californian—for holding local officials accountable. And some companies that do business with Hamburg have fought disclosure, arguing that the aggressive transparency forces them unnecessarily to disclose trade secrets.

But an evaluation of the law, required after five years, concluded that things are working as intended. Among the most intriguing findings: Hamburg’s government officials, who once worried about transparency’s costs, are now some of its biggest fans. Indeed, while citizens do use the law (and large majorities in surveys say the transparency has enhanced political participation), some of the most aggressive users of the transparency are Hamburg officials trying to figure out what people in other departments are doing. In this way, the transparency law may be most effective as a force for efficiency within the government, breaking down bureaucratic silos. The links hand now knows what the recht hand is doing.

That’s the lesson of Hamburg: With ordinary people so consumed with their own work and lives, the best check on government abuses and corruption are city officials themselves.

On a visit to the Rathaus, I asked Andreas Dressel, who leads the governing Social Democrats in the Hamburg parliament, how the transparency law might be adapted for a California city. “The best thing to do is to translate it into English—and put it right directly into your law,” he said proudly, and added, while noting the Trump administration’s chaos, “You need it not just in California but for the entire United States.”

Dressel may have been exaggerating, but the merits of a switch to Hamburg-style transparency are apparent. A law that makes disclosure an automatic online default should be more effective than California’s records and meetings laws, which are all but designed to create conflict between public demands for access and government desire for secrecy.

Such transparency would jumpstart the nascent open data movement, which has seen the state and some cities put up data sets so that tech-savvy citizens can help solve government problems. And it’s not hard to see how a transparency law might make government responses to crises faster and more effective.

In San Diego, officials in different city and county departments failed to communicate effectively for months earlier this year as a deadly hepatitis epidemic spread, according to the nonprofit Voice of San Diego. If officials could have seen their separate work and information online, it’s quite possible that a fuller response—which included a declaration of emergency—might have come earlier and saved lives. So far 17 people have died.

Of course, such transparency would be opposed by government contractors, public employee unions, and the local governments over which they exert too much control. But it is for situations like this that we have direct democracy in California. And in Hamburg.

The post The Delicious Transparency of the Hamburgers appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Oui. But it’s not the end of the world.

Indeed, apocalyptic French philosophy may finally provide clarity for those of us long puzzled by that great California mystery: What is the meaning of Jerry Brown?

In recent years, our governor’s statements have taken an end-of-days turn, Jerry channeling Jeremiah. The governor has warned of nuclear holocaust, wildfires consuming the entire state, the demise of Silicon Valley if his water plans aren’t adopted, and the apocalypse if we don’t curb carbon emissions. Last month, the governor went to Palo Alto for the latest of unveiling of the Doomsday Clock, a timekeeper for the annihilation of mankind. (It’s just three minutes to midnight, humans.)

Where is he getting all this angst? Here’s one answer: Brown is a longtime friend of the French techno-philosopher Jean-Pierre Dupuy, who practices what is called “enlightened doomsaying” from academic perches at Stanford and Paris’ École Polytechnique.

Dupuy’s long-running conversations with Brown have become more high-profile lately, with Dupuy joining him at events in Paris during December’s climate change talks.

I am neither French nor a philosopher. And I’m no fan of Brown, whose governorship I’ve criticized as too small and cautious, given the size of California’s challenges. But before Christmas, I started reading everything I could find that Dupuy has published in English. And I’m very glad I did.

Dupuy’s work not only provides reassurance that there is a coherent philosophy behind our governor’s ramblings. The work itself is irresistibly thought-provoking, connecting history, science, religion, economics, and art in an open (and sometimes bitterly funny) spirit little seen in scholarship. I’d go so far as to recommend that Californians—as citizens of a global hub for both apocalyptic and utopian thinking—read his most accessible book, The Mark of the Sacred. It should be required for anyone who works in or around state government.

Here is my best attempt to summarize Dupuy’s argument: Humanity is doomed to destroy itself because we have lost our sense of the sacred. We no longer recognize the way our sacred origins—not just faith and religion, but other rituals and traditions that remind us how many things are beyond human control—shape us and all our modes of thought, even reason and science.

This hubris creates two problems. First, we no longer understand our own limits, and recklessly reshape the world without anticipating the consequences of our own inventions. Second, without sufficient respect for the sacred, we can’t convert our knowledge about the threats to our existence—from nuclear weapons to climate change—into the visceral belief necessary to galvanize humanity to save itself.

“It is my profound belief that humanity is on a suicidal course, headed straight for catastrophe,” Dupuy writes. “I speak of catastrophe in the singular, not to designate a single event, but a whole system of disruptions, discontinuities, and basic structural changes that are the consequence of exceeding critical thresholds.”

Dupuy’s solution: a new metaphysics called “enlightened doomsaying.” We must try to imagine ourselves in the unthinkable future, to peer into the black hole of nonexistence so that we might understand our limits and sacred origins. “To believe in fate is to prevent it from happening,” he writes.

That may sound awfully French, but he grounds his philosophy in a classic California story: Alfred Hitchcock’s film Vertigo, a tale of humans falling all over Northern California, from the Golden Gate Bridge to Mission San Juan Bautista. Dupuy calls the film “the womb from which I am issued,” and sees humanity’s rush into Armageddon in the fictions within that movie’s fictions, particularly Jimmy Stewart’s attempts to impose a false reality on Kim Novak’s character.

So now—at the risk of repeating Jimmy Stewart’s mistake—I am compelled to read Dupuy onto Governor Brown.

Brown’s famous skepticism of great plans and new programs makes sense if you believe, as Dupuy argues, that man has become blind to the consequences of his own belief in progress. Brown’s focus on avoiding catastrophes—the strategy linking his budget rainy day fund to his prioritization of climate change—reflects Dupuy’s “prophet-of-doom” calls to focus on postponing the apocalypse.

Brown, like Dupuy, holds deep respect for the sacred—he quotes from various religious traditions and invokes his time in Jesuit seminary, without embracing any particular religion. And just as Dupuy mourns the “loss of difference between levels that characterize hierarchy,” Brown has sought to reestablish hierarchy, removing himself from many daily debates, relying on powerful elder wise men to pursue policies from water to high-speed rail, while keeping an unusually small staff.

Some of Brown’s most puzzling statements—his criticism of “desire” and consumerism—echo Dupuy. The French philosopher argues that as we lose our sense of the sacred, we fill the void with our own desires—and that creates envy that leads to conflict. Here’s Brown, speaking at the Doomsday Clock: “California is so full of low-priority needs. In fact, I have to tell you something about needs, because needs are the whole issue. What I have found is, and I have developed a hierarchy: First we get a desire; and then the desire is transmogrified into a need; and then we get a law; and then we get a right; and then we get a lawsuit.”

Of course, Dupuy, as philosopher, poses questions you’ll never hear on the stump in Stockton: Has Christianity preserved the sacred—or obliterated it by replacing so many traditional religions and rituals? What are the virtues of scapegoating? And which would be worse: the annihilation of the human race, or the eco-totalitarianism that might be instituted to prevent said annihilation?

There are obvious objections to Brown, and to Dupuy. There is a dissonance between the care with which governor and philosopher advise respect for the unknown and the certainty with which they predict Armageddon. I find it unsettling to be governed by someone so focused on the apocalypse. (Of course, my anxiety may be the reaction doomsayers want.) Reading Dupuy, I felt relief that Brown, for all his virtues, will never be president and have access to the nuclear launch codes.

But we also should be comforted that our governor’s aphorisms and warnings lean so heavily on such deep thinking. Dupuy suggests in his writings that we think in the “future perfect” tense—as in, by tomorrow, the apocalypse will have happened. From there, we work backward, as if the end of our existence were already fated, to find the limits that might save us.

To govern is to choose, and to prepare for the future. And while there are certainly happier ways to confront the dangers ahead, there may not be a smarter one.

The post California Needs to Embrace the Apocalypse appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.