Mendocino County Today: Friday, Oct. 5, 2018

• CEO Raises
• Rex Quote
• Speeding Trucks
• Blocksburg Bust
• Arson Suspect
• Bridge Stories
• Foodshed Events
• Sanctuary Donations
• Government Piracy
• Sirens Please
• Snapcrap
• Little Dog
• Tax Exemptions
• Yesterday's Catch
• Hippie Chat
• Whitewash
• Choosing Slovik
• Amazon Drones
• Giant Peach
• Donor Class
• Appy Road
• Hyena Time
• Democracy Perfected
• Election Blues

CEO SALARY INCREASE REDUX

by Mark Scaramella

BEFORE WE MOVE ON from the large salary and benefits increase the Board of Supervisors gave to CEO Carmel Angelo on Tuesday, the record should reflect the lame attempts the Board made to justify her four-year automatic pay raise to $225,000 per year plus generous benefits.

Human Resources Director Heidi Dunham said her office had conducted a “benchmark study with comparable counties and determined that the CEO is currently 20% out of market.” Ms. Dunham “looked at other contracts for other CEOs and CAOs and looked at their benefits in El Dorado, Lake, Napa, Nevada, Sonoma, Yolo and Sutter Counties.” Of course the inclusion of wealthier counties like Napa and Sonoma in the study skews the results in favor of Ms. Angelo.

Ms. Dunham also revealed that the entire presentation was pre-packaged and pre-arranged “per negotiations with the Chair (Lame Duck Supervisor Dan Hamburg) and the CEO.”

So, of course Ms. Angelo was driving her own pay raise bus with the assistance of her own staff and complicity from Board Chair Hamburg who will be gone at the end of this year.

Why did this come up now? CEO Angelo has somehow been scraping along with her $180k salary and big benefit package for the last few years. Did Ms. Angelo just wake up one morning recently and call Supervisor Hamburg? “Dan… I’ve been thinking that it’s about time I had a raise. I haven’t had one in a while, you know, and you owe me.” Or does our all knowing CEO know something that the Board and the rest of us don’t?

Supervisor John McCowen said, “Although it is a lot of money [sic] it actually is justified. Carmel Angelo was hired by the Board in March of 2010 at $30,000 less than her immediate predecessor.”

Angelo’s immediate predecessor was the grossly OVER-paid Tom Mitchell who spent about two years doing essentially nothing before resigning when faced with the likelihood that his contract would not be extended. So that comparison doesn’t wash. Angelo came in voluntarily at that time, agreeing with the $150k pay because the County was facing a budget crisis in the wake of the Great Recession. So now it’s payback time.

McCowen continued: “After nearly five years as she was granted an increase to what her predecessor had been making five years before. Now after eight and a half years, if we do approve this today and I frankly expect we will, after eight and a half years she will for the first time make more than what she made when — than her predecessor made on his last day on the job. It's not merely in this case that we are evaluating what the pay is in relation to other jurisdictions, but I'm willing to say that Carmel Angelo has brought significant economic advantages to the county. Just a couple of the recent things — I believe Carmel Angelo along with Supervisor [Carre] Brown was instrumental in securing funding to rebuild the water system in Redwood Valley. Without Carmel Angelo's personal relationships with our state legislative leaders and our state administration officials I don't think we would have gotten that funding. I also don't think we would have gotten the Cal-OES, who did not create the problem, to step up and take responsibility for remediating the over-excavation that I think nearly 100 individuals benefited from. Cal-OES taking that on. Again that would not have happened without Carmel Angelo’s determination and her relationships which he has developed with our legislative and state administrative leaders. Those are just a couple of recent examples. She works really hard at her job. I believe she is very effective at it. If it were only about the money Carmel Angelo would have been gone a long time ago. I do feel like this raise although very significant is frankly a bit of catch-up for in some ways being insulted by being hired at 17% less than her immediate predecessor. And a bit of catch-up for kind of being frozen for many years.”

WE’RE SUPPOSED TO BELIEVE, without any evidence, that without CEO Angelo and her oh-so valuable “personal relationships” with unnamed state officials, the remediation of very avoidable over-excavation of dozens of burned out home sites would not have occurred? And therefore a big raise is in order? Couldn’t Angelo have at least supplied the Board with a script with a few better reasons than that?

McCowen: “I don't think there's anyone else working for the county that is in a position that today for the first time after eight and a half years finally pays more than what they're predecessor got. So we do hear you [County employees] and again I intend to see and I'm sure the board agreed with me that we will want to hear from HR about what the roadblocks are, what does it take to expedite the completion of the compensation study. And another thing I want to say, there's been some incomplete communication. Compensation study does not automatically result in salary increases. The compensation study provides information. The board unilaterally — what has been out of sync, the first time in my memory, the board has unilaterally chosen to use the compensation study to raise certain positions. Typically the compensation study is just information that then becomes the basis for negotiations. But unfortunately I think an expectation developed that the compensation study would automatically result in a raise. So therefore we really want that study to be done now. It may result in a raise if that is what the board directs. The other avenue would be through salary negotiation. I do think it's unfortunate that the labor-management committee has not been meeting on a regular basis is my understanding. Ideally maybe that would have continued so that there would be a better working relationship and better communication. So you know I think we have some lessons learned from this as well.”

THAT “LABOR-MANAGEMENT” FAILURE can be laid directly at the feet of the now-well-paid CEO Carmel Angelo who no longer has any motivation to fix it.

Lame Duck Supervisor Georgeanne Croskey: “I have not been a part of the historical pay for the CEO coming in much later. But I want to say that we are very lucky to have Ms. Angelo as our CEO. Just evidenced by her recent awards. And her tireless efforts over the last year and a half in really putting this county first. It would cost us a lot more than the numbers we have here on paper to replace her with a CEO of similar caliber. It's nice to receive the awards from CSAC and RCRC but I do think some monetary compensation at some point goes a long way to show our appreciation for her hard work and her dedication to this county.”

Lame Duck Supervisor Dan Hamburg: “I concur with my colleagues. I was not here when Carmel was first hired. But the fact that she was hired at significantly below the salary level that she later achieved of $180,000, $30,000 beneath the salary of her predecessor. So as one of my colleagues said, indeed we are playing catch up and when you look at her ability with other counties and cities, Carmel is actually a bargain. If we were to lose her and she went out on the open market she would -- I don't believe she would have any trouble exceeding the salary that we are going to be voting on today. I agree that we are very lucky to have Carmel Angelo working with the county. She is well worth the salary that we are proposing to pay her.

Lame Duck Croskey tried again: “One last comment. I want to make the statement that in no way does us looking at increasing the CEO salary take away from our desire to increase salaries across the board for all employees. I think that is what we as a board would like to do, see an increase in salary, increase in compensation for all the employees. It is a balance. It's hard to do. I think that increasing manager salaries does not in any way take away from us wanting that it be good morale in the county. And I have worked under plenty of substandard supervisors -- not meaning county supervisors, but bosses of mine -- and I think that you need to be able to pay your management well enough to keep that morale up as well so I do think these are important raises for all of our managers as well.”

McCowen wanted another try too: “I think we are all very aware that every justification except for significantly underpaying her to start with, but other than that every justification that we are stating here applies equally to all of our employees. So we do understand that. But the challenge, as supervisor Gjerde said, when we consider raises not just for a handful of people but for hundreds of people we have to be able to figure out how are we going to be able to pay for it on a sustainable basis. No one ever wants to see a repeat of having to take back compensation that has once been offered. So again, I -- I hope that nothing that we say here, um, in support of the CEO increase takes away from, from the knowledge that we understand what your [the employees] situation is and we do want to -- we would love to give everyone a significant raise today. But again, how do we pay for it? I'm not doing a very good job saying this as I thought I was going to say. So thank you.”

ALTHOUGH MCCOWEN mentioned that “we have to be able to figure out how are we going to be able to pay for [raises] on a sustainable basis,” no one even attempted to put the CEO’s newly increased salary and benefits into a budget context.

NOT ONCE were any particular County operational achievements mentioned. The closest McCowen got was that CEO Angelo had a role in getting some Cal-OES reimbursements (which 1: is her job anyway, and 2: probably would have happened anyway), and that she got some water infrastructure funding for Redwood Valley which is nice, especially for the wine industry in Redwood Valley, but not for the County itself.

NO ONE mentioned any specific achievements (other than “achieving” $180k) relating to County operations — no goals met, no improvements made. In one glaring example, Ms. Angelo let Juvenile Hall go for a year at more than three times what other counties pay before Lake County called up and said they didn’t want to pay Mendo’s high daily rates anymore — allowing an ad-hoc Supes committee work on the problem, a little. Instead of offering an real reasons, the Supes simply said that in their opinion CEO Angelo was historically underpaid.

SO INDEED, WHY NOW? We’re pretty sure that answer will become clear when next year’s budget is presented — suspiciously, there have been no budget reports lately even though they were promised in August. There hasn’t even been a regular issuances of those info-free CEO reports with each Board meeting. Are they hiding the extent of the looming budget problem until after they push through all these big management raises? At which time the Board will have to apologize to their “hundreds” of line workers whose raises will become problematic when the budget problem is revealed? By then, CEO Angelo’s raise — along with all the other top officials — raise will have been wired for four automatic yearly increases, no matter what the budget looks like.

IN SPITE OF several specific promises over recent months, there are a number of things that CEO and Board members have raised or requested that the CEO has obviously failed to address or deliver on (some of which we have enumerated here previously).

https://www.theava.com/archives/88140

REMEMBER, this year’s budget was artificially “balanced” by assuming a ridiculously low level of Sheriff’s department overtime and an arbitrary 10% vacancy rate, neither of which are being tracked or monitored — in fact the County is still hiring and recruiting as usual for the same number of people as before the vacancy declaration, including for the high-deficit, failed pot permit program — so the budget will present a significant problem for next year’s Board. And patrol and jail staff overtime continues apace.

ADD TO THAT the pointed observation by pot advocate Ron Harris last Tuesday — echoing a widespread public perception — that the collapse of the pot economy is having significant ripple effects on businesses all over the County. Harris urged the Supes and the CEO to examine and quantify that impact and adjust the next year or two’s revenue forecasts with that in mind. The response from the CEO and the Board: The usual blank stares.

A READER WRITES:

In this week's Advocate and Beacon about the October 1st Mendocino Coast District Hospital candidates forum, editor Chris Calder made a serious error in attributing the quote, "We need a new CEO, and I don’t say that lightly,” to Amy McColley when Rex Gressett actually made the statement.

Ms. McColley, in answering a question about how MCDH Board members should deal with the CEO, had just finished her answer about how to hold CEOs accountable when the same question went to Rex. His first words were the aforementioned quote.

Readers and voters expect careful attention to detail from our news sources. This error should be corrected immediately online, along with apologies to both Ms. McColley and Mr. Gressett. Next week's coast paper's should contain a front page correction and apology to these two candidates, not a retraction tucked in the corner of an inside page of the Advocate and Beacon.

GENTLEMAN GEORGE HOLLISTER of Comptche clarifies our recent speculation about speeding log trucks. "The driver is paid by the hour. The truck owner is paid by the load. If the driver is also the owner, then he is getting paid by the load as owner and driver. If trucks are going over the speed limit, call the truck company, or the CHP."

BIG HUMCO POT BUST

On October 3, 2018, deputies with the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office Drug Enforcement Unit (DEU) served one search warrant to investigate illegal cannabis cultivation in the Blocksburg area. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife, the California State Water Board and the Humboldt County Planning and Building Department assisted in the service of the warrant.

The parcel investigated, located on the 36000 block of Alderpoint Road, did not possess the required county permit and state license to cultivate cannabis commercially.

During the service of the warrant, deputies eradicated approximately 2,139 growing cannabis plants.

Assisting agencies found the following violations:

• One water diversion violation (up to $8,000 fine per day, per violation)
• One stream alteration violation (up to $8,000 fine per day, per violation)
• One sediment pollution violation (up to $20,000 fine per day, per violation)
• One fuel pollution violation (up to $20,000 fine per day, per violation)
• One depositing trash in or near a waterway violation (up to $20,000 fine per day, per violation)
• Dredging/Filling without a permit violations ($5,000-$10,000 fine per day, per violation)
• Improper storage and removal of solid waste violations (up to $25,000 fine per day, per violation)
• Commercial cannabis ordinance violations (up to $10,000 fine per day)
• Streamside management violations

No arrests were made during the service of the warrant. Additional violations with civil fines are expected to be filed by the assisting agencies.

Anyone with information about this case or related criminal activity is encouraged to call the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office at (707) 445-7251 or the Sheriff’s Office Crime Tip line at (707) 268-2539.

(Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office)

PIERCY ARSON SUSPECT

The suspect, 18-year-old Charles Levi Kirk is 5’10”, 175 pounds.

He was arrested Wednesday @ 1:30 pm in Willits by the CalFire Mendocino County Ranger Unit and booked at the Mendocino County Jail @ 2:48 pm and charged with two felony charges:

• Arson of structure or Forest Land
• Caused by use of a device designed to accelerate the fire or delay ignition

His bail was set at $150,000 and he had his booking photo taken Thursday @ 1:24 am. He is still behind bars as of Thursday 9:00 am.

LINKS TO 3 KZYX ALBION BRIDGE INTERVIEWS

http://www.kzyx.org/term/albion-bridge-stewards#stream/0

(Anne Marie Weibel)

FOODSHED EVENTS

First Friday Dinner at Yorkville Market

The Yorkville Market is hosting their First Friday Dinner, 10/5 celebrating Oktoberfest. We will be serving Roundsman’s Sausage, German Potato Salad, homemade Sauerkraut, and German Chocolate Cake for dessert.

Happy Hour begins at 5:30, Dinner served at 6:00ish. $28 per person includes appetizer, main and dessert.

* * *

Not So Simple Living Fair Meeting

It's Not So Simple....

That's why We Need Your Help!

The Not So Simple Living Fair organizing committee is looking for members and volunteers!

We will be having a visioning meeting to plan the future of this beloved community event and we invite you to join us.

Sunday, October 14, 2018 2:00pm

Mendo Dragon: 18079 Lambert Lane, Boonville

It's a potluck! Please bring a dish to share.

If you've ever wanted to participate, the time is now!

The Not-So-Simple Living Fair is a weekend of hands-on workshops and demonstrations celebrating rural living and homesteading skills.

* * *

Canning/Fermentation Workshop

Have been checking out local producers to see what we will be canning and fermenting for our last workshop. Pears and apples are on top of the fruit list..I just got a half box of Bartlett pears to test out two new recipes for me.. This Monday there were still some more Roma tomatoes which pulls me toward making Caponata which is a wonderful Italian/Eggplant tomato sauce., Am considering different soup recipes and also a possible surprise which I will write more about when I see what is possible.. We will explore a Norwegian way of making apple juice which also makes possible applesauce. The end of the year fruits allow for interesting salsas and condiments.

So mark October 14th on your calendar. The workshop is held at the Caspar Community Center from 10:30 am to 2:30 pm. You need to bring a good knife, cutting board, apron and something to share with the group for lunch. (Usual best part of the group experience.) Cost is $30. If you have any questions contact Marty Johnson at 964-6164.

REQUESTING ITEMS FOR A CLIENT

Hello,

I am reaching out to the community to see if anyone has some household items they are no longer using. If you are planning on donating, I urge you to please donate them to Project Sanctuary, for a client in need. You can give us a call and we will arrange a pickup or you can drop them off at Project Sanctuary located at 461 N Franklin St Fort Bragg. The phone number is 707-961-1507, ask for Alexandra.

-Floor lamp

-Bookshelves or shelving units

-Coffee table-Vacuum

-Area rugs

-Dining table (rectangular & small)

-Washer and/or dryer

-Living rooms chair/chairs

Thank you, Alexandra Corzano

MONKEY WRENCHER AND CAR BOMB SCAMMER DEMANDS LAW AND ORDER

(Probably the single most hypocritical Letter To The Editor in the history of Northcoast publications)

The deterioration of Southern Humboldt County, California and the 3000 person Garberville/Redway area in particular, can be outlined as follows. Since I moved here 32 years ago, we have lost 100% of our bookstores, half of our auto mechanics, 90% of our local doctors, half of our veterinarians, most of our local nurses, half of our restaurants, 75% of our motels for tourists, 66% of our small engine repair shops, all of our evening/night access to the Redway post office boxes, our only movie theater, our Grange Hall, our entire Veterans Hall which also served as our local courthouse (next one is 62 miles north), half of our vegetable garden supply stores, half of our safety from being murdered or robbed along with about half of our sheriffs, half our thrift shops, the ability to leave one’s home and car unlocked, our ice cream parlor, much of the darkness of our night sky, the solvency of our community center which verges on bankruptcy, all of the security and peace of mind of our remote homesteads due code enforcement, and somewhere between 40 to 80% of our sales in whatever stores remain. I’m sure I’ve left a whole lot out. While there is still much to recommend our area such as our beautiful mountain elementary schools, the majestic redwoods and the Pacific Ocean, I must point out that virtually no arm of government is addressing any of this except in that all arms of government are vigorously and deliberately making it worse (well maybe not the library). In other words, rather than having a government that works for the people, we have one that works against us. The tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees and fines leveled against people for drinking their own water, living in their own self-built homes, or driving their dirt roads amount to this: piracy, racketeering, and extortion. An elder or anyone for that matter can not pay fees and fines more than their homes are worth, let alone do the years work the county demands of them to be done in just a few short weeks. Governments engaging in piracy is an old tradition. Governments (and the bureaucrats who run them) preying on their own people is as old as history. But I say this: water and shelter are human rights. And I suspect this: whether it’s by ballot measure, voting them out, or good old fashion pitchforks and torches, the people of Humboldt County are on the verge of striking back.

Darryl Cherney, Redway

* * *

ON-LINE COMMENT NAILS IT:

My, that was my laugh for the day. Darryl Cherney, who spent the early part of his life as a “forest defender,” who abused any and all government officials, whose sole claim to fame is receiving taxpayer dollars in a settlement over a very sketchy damages claim, is whining that what he and his hath wrought is not what they wanted. NOW it’s the government’s fault for not intervening. Oh, really, I needed something amusing…

SIRENS, WE NEED SIRENS!

Editor,

My wife and I, and presumably everyone else in the neighborhood, heard an air-raid siren at 10 a.m. Tuesday. We immediately looked outside to see what was happening. Tornado maybe?

After we lost our house in Fountaingrove to the Tubbs fire, we moved to Evanston, Illinois. The siren was the monthly test of the natural disaster alert system. Had there been such a system in Santa Rosa on Oct. 8, we might have been alerted of the fire coming our way at midnight, giving us time to collect family photos and papers that are now lost to us and our family forever. Instead, we had to flee with the fire a block away and bearing down on us.

Sirens should be a simple solution to creating a natural disaster alert system.

Stephen Test

Evanston, Illinois

IT'S COME TO THIS: Sean Miller, 24, of San Francisco has invented the Snapcrap app for city residents to take pictures of human feces in their neighborhood streets to forward for immediate clean-up to municipal officials. Miller says it's “the fastest way to request street cleaning in SF. It’s kind of funny, obviously,” Miller told The Sacramento Bee, “but it’s also a health crisis, and it’s disgusting seeing that stuff.” Users are asked to snap a quick picture of poop they spot on the streets and then submit the photo to a local government helpline with a pre-written message requesting a clean-up. Mayor London Breed previously said a dedicated “Poop Patrol” is being set up in order to handle the roughly 65 calls a day reporting fouled city sites.

LITTLE DOG SAYS, “I'm going way out on a limb, pardon the weary metaphor, to say, Fire Season is over this year. Stand down, everybody!”

GOVERNOR BROWN has signed a law authorizing Davis Unified School District to exempt teachers and other school employees from paying a parcel tax it would submit to voters for approval.

Parcel taxes are levies on private property not tied to value. School districts and other local governments can impose them with two-thirds voter approval.

The official rationale for the exemption, as Senate Bill 958’s author, Sen. Bill Dodd, a Napa Democrat, puts it: “This bill would provide an additional incentive for public educators and school staff to live in the community in which they work, despite the severe shortage of affordable housing.”

The more likely reason is that exempting school employees who live in the district from paying new taxes would make them — and their unions — more likely to support the campaigns to get them approved by voters. It’s a classic slippery slope, as critics of the measure pointed out in legislative hearings.

Now that Davis school employees have a tax exemption, workers for other local government agencies will certainly demand similar treatment when their employers seek tax hikes. We are creating an entirely new class of citizens who can campaign for and vote on taxes that will benefit them, but they will not have to pay.

That’s a potentially huge, game-altering change of political rules.

(Dan Walters, columnist for CALmatters, a public interest journalism venture.)

CATCH OF THE DAY, October 4, 2018

ABIMAEL CASTILLO, Ukiah. Domestic battery.

DEBORAH CLOUD, Ukiah. DUI-alcohol&drugs.

MICHAEL HAMMOND, Fort Bragg. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, failure to appear, probation revocation.

CHARLES KIRK, Piercy. Arson of structure or forestland, caused by a device designed to accelerate the fire or delay ignition.

SOPHIA PICENO, Talmage. Disobeying court order.

CHRISTINE SEIGLER, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, probation revocation.

HOLLY TERWILLIGER, Ukiah. Embezzlement, petty theft, shoplifting.

DAVID YADON, Kelseyville/Willits. Failure to appear, probation revocation.

GEORGINA YATES, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, failure to appear.

BETSY CAWN WRITES:

Buckley, Kerouac, Sanders and Yablonsky discuss Hippies, 1968

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaBnIzY3R00

THEY’RE NOT SHOOTING ME for deserting the United States Army, thousands of guys have done that. They just need to make an example out of somebody and I’m it because I’m an ex-con. I used to steal things when I was a kid, and that’s what they are shooting me for. They’re shooting me for the bread and chewing gum I stole when I was 12 years old.

—Private Eddie Slovik, the only US service member of World War 2 to be executed for desertion

JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH OPENS FRIDAY!

Gloriana Musical Theatre presents James and the Giant Peach, Directed by Nicole Atkinson and Carla Leach. Running October 5-21 at Eagles Hall in Fort Bragg

Featuring music and lyrics by the Tony-nominated songwriters Justin Paul and Benj Pasek and book by Timothy Allen McDonald, James and the Giant Peach is based on the beloved book by Roald Dahl and tells the story of a young orphaned child who finds a loving family in a most peculiar way. Sent by his mean, conniving aunts to chop down their old fruit tree, James discovers a magic potion which results in a tremendous peach occupied by some not-so-normal characters. From the center of the gigantic fruit, James and the unlikely crew launch a journey of enormous proportions. Together they discover that while we are all born into a family, we then go on to create a family of our own. “[James and the Giant Peach] is a little sweet, a little sour, a little edgy and sure to pique a child’s imagination” … “The Seattle Times Running at Eagles Hall from October 5 through 21 with performances at 7:30 p.m on Fridays and Saturdays and Sunday matinees beginning at 3 p.m.

Admission is $22 for the general public, $20 for Seniors and $12 for youth (17 and under). Tickets available now at Gloriana.org and Harvest Market.

Be sure to join us for our Gala performance! On Sunday, October 7th following the performance celebrate with the cast and crew and enjoy delicious pizza from D'Aurelios, drinks, dessert and more! Tickets are $25 for general, $23 for Seniors and $15 for youth (17 and under). For more information, visit Gloriana.org.

‘THEY COUNT ON YOU NOT KNOWING’:

Socialists Blow the Whistle on Democratic Party Donor Class

by Steve Early

Wealthy Bay Area investor David Crane is a leading promoter of the neo-liberal agenda within the California Democratic Party. A former advisor to Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Crane is a widely-published critic of state and local tax initiatives, publicly-funded health care, public education, public employees and their pensions. He raises lots of money for “courageous” candidates willing to put “citizen interests” ahead of such “special interest” causes.

According to Crane, Left Coast governance suffers from voters paying insufficient “attention to the legislators who run their state.” In a TED talk delivered in Palo Alto, where Crane lectures at Stanford, the multi-millionaire chided members of his well-heeled audience for being unable to identify their representatives in Sacramento or being unfamiliar with their “voting behavior.” Crane delivers his message, in casual tech industry attire, but his talk is ominously entitled: “They Count On You Not Knowing.”

To elect more candidates who will “govern with independence from special interests,” Crane started a fund-raising machine called Govern for California, with $250,000 of his own “seed money.” His co-founders six years ago were SF billionaire Ron Conway, and Gregory Penner, a venture capitalist and current board chair of Walmart, who is married to Carrie Walton, granddaughter of the firm’s founder (making them one of the richest couples in the country).

According to its website, Govern for California is now a network of more than 250 like-minded “political philanthropists.” Others have described the group, less sympathetically, as a charter school fan club, replete with “donors who have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars supporting right-wing candidates and policies here in California and other states. (See: https://48hills.org/)

The donor class hubris reflected in Crane’s preferred organizational branding will be familiar to any reader of Anand Giridharadas’s brilliant new book, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. In that author’s insider expose of what he calls “Marketworld” philanthropy, the wealthy are less “interested in making politics work better” than “insisting on their proprietary power to give the world what it needs.”

An Obama-Backed Candidate

At the moment, David Crane is very insistent that my own California Assembly District 15 needs to be represented by a former White House staffer named Buffy Wicks. With the help of nearly $500,000 in primary spending by Govern for California, Wicks placed first in a field of 10 Democrats and one token Republican in June. She is enthusiastically backed by former President Obama, US Senator Kamala Harris, US Congressman Ro Khanna, our soon-to-be governor Gavin Newsom, and two prominent Democratic mayors, Libby Schaaf from Oakland and London Breed from San Francisco.

In the Assembly District (AD) 15 run-off this fall, Wicks faces stiff, if under-funded, competition from Jovanka Beckles, a two-term Richmond city council member. Beckles is a leading East Bay critic of big money in politics who belongs to DSA and the Our Revolution-affiliated Richmond Progressive Alliance. (For more on Beckles, see: https://jacobinmag.com/)

Fortunately for the cause of voter education in AD 15 over the next five weeks, East Bay DSA has taken Crane’s warning–“they count on you not knowing”–very seriously. But not quite the way he intended. Last month, a group of DSA volunteers unveiled buffywicks.money, a whistle-blowing website designed, in part, to debunk Wicks’ repeated claim that she doesn’t take “corporate money.” In creative, humorous, and suitably outraged fashion, this model intervention in local electoral politics puts a human face on the “high dollar” donors, industry associations, and “independent expenditure” groups financing her run for office (to the tune of $1,450, 783 so far).

Buffywicks.money is worth replicating elsewhere because the corporate Democrat in question is hardly sui generis. In an article entitled ‘The Baton Got Dropped’: Obama Alums Rush to Finish What He Started,” Politico recently reported that Wicks is part of broader wave of Obama-inspired candidates now running for non-federal office in order to “usher in the progressive era that was promised.”

Ride-Sharing Help

In Wicks’ case, two well-known White House colleagues have been particularly helpful in passing “the baton” to her. One of her initial fund-raisers was David Plouffe, who became a Senior Vice President at Uber after his Obama Administration service and now directs the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a “change-the-world” foundation in the Winner Take All mode. More recently, Valerie Jarrett, another top White House advisor to Obama, personally campaigned for Wicks in AD 15. Jarrett recently joined the board of Lyft, which further explains why so many Wicks’ donors hold management jobs at ride sharing firms now fighting to overturn a state court ruling favorable to drivers. (See https://www.jovanka.org/)

In buffywicks.money, we discover that Wicks’ donor base is much broader than the gig economy—both in terms of direct donors (limited, by state law, to giving $8,800 each) and her independent spenders, like Govern for California. The latter have post-Citizens United permission to spend as much as they want, just as long as they don’t coordinate with their favored candidate’s own campaign.

A savvy organizer and proven coalition builder, Wicks has been able to unite other tech titans (among them billionaire Craig Newmark of Craigslist fame), investment bankers, landlords, real estate developers, corporate lawyers, consultants, and lobbyists, not to mention California’s influential statewide associations of doctors and dentists—all under one big tent!

*Tench and Simone Coxe are, for example, one power couple now drawing East Bay socialist scrutiny and scorn on buffywicks. money. Tench hails from “Sutter Hill ventures, one of the oldest venture capital firms in Silicon Valley,” and, before that, the gone but not forgotten Lehman Brothers. Simone has “entered the tech start up world with Equestrian Connect, a service to register your horse online for horse shows.” Previous beneficiaries of their spare change have included Mitt Romney, Republican House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, and the Republican National Committee (RNC). But now Buffy has caught their fancy too—along with climate change denying Republicans like McCarthy?

*John and Regina Scully love Buffy too (although not quite as much as campaigns against taxes on the wealthy to provide better funding for California schools, a cause they spent half a million on unsuccessfully two years ago.) As boss of a Mill Valley, CA. investment firm, 69-year old John manages $10 billion worth of assets, generating enough disposable income to spend $400,000 on a model train set in the basement of his vacation home in East Hampton, Long Island. Both Scullys serve on the board of Success Academy, whose co-founder just spent heavily on the pro-charter school incumbent and just defeated Julia Salazar in her NY state senate race.

*Reid Hoffman, with a net worth of about $4.7 billion, has also maxed out for Buffy, after co-founding Linkedin and serving as an early executive at PayPal. Hoffman “penned a neo-liberal self help book called The Start Up of You that encourages workers to embrace the precarity of the job market and consider themselves an entrepreneurial business-of- one”—a blue-print for Wick’s own post-White House career trajectory?

*Scott Kepner. As East Bay DSA discovered, this real estate investor and Republican donor poured $125,000 into the pockets of the RNC nine Republican hopefuls two years ago, including Paul Ryan, Tom Cotton, Pat Toomey, and Jeb Bush. This year, Kepner is betting on Buffy–perhaps because she doesn’t support Proposition 10, a ballot measure that would allow cities like Richmond, Berkeley, Oakland, and San Francisco to expand their tenant protections. California landlords, the real estate industry, and big Wall Street firms are all spending millions to defeat Prop 10.

*Ron Conway is described by DSA as “a notoriously unpleasant billionaire” and San Francisco’s answer to the Koch Brothers (because of “the heavy handed way he uses his extreme wealth to subvert democracy”). He’s been on the wrong side of local political skirmishing over tenant protection and city hall treatment of homeless people. (Buffy’s main political consulting firm, 50+1, is also working, on behalf of the SF Chamber of Commerce, to defeat a local business tax increase designed to fund more housing for the homeless.) Adding to his indirect support via Govern for California, Conway wrote personal checks to Buffy totaling $8,800.

*Christopher Garland “maxed out” for Wicks as well, in his role as a powerful Silicon Valley player, renowned for “connecting wealthy tech donors to politicians looking for money and direction.” Garland has been both a political advisor to Facebook billionaire Sean Parker and chief of staff for Gavin Newsom, our current lieutenant governor. Newsom has raised $45 million, from wealthy donors and special interest groups, for his campaign to succeed Jerry Brown as governor. Garland probably helped arrange a recent joint campaign event between Wicks and Newsom, who’ve both gotten financial support from the California Medical Association.At their Berkeley love-in, Newsom, a putative supporter of single payer health care, embraced Wicks, who doesn’t support SB 562, the single payer bill promoted by the California Nurses Association, an early Newsom endorser. If Newsom was serious about passing SB 562, in some future form, wouldn’t he want an additional reliable Assembly vote in favor of it? Apparently not.

A Model Initiative

As DSA’s website researchers and writers note, “Buffy herself is not really the problem in this race; the problem is the corrosive and antidemocratic effects this obscene amount of money has on our local politics.” Eliminating or even reducing its election impact will not be easy in California or anywhere else. But East Bay DSA vice-chair Frances Reade believes that “dot.moneying” those responsible for trying to buy elections can be a helpful first step, when combined with other volunteer activity like the voter registration, door knocking, phone banking, and house-partying that scores of DSA members have done for Beckles.

“If you have some free time and are nosy, it’s very easy,” Reade says. She and her fellow DSA volunteers accessed campaign finance reports filed with the state, googled the names of key Wicks’ donors and Super-PAC supporters, and surveyed past reporting on their industry backgrounds and political connections.(One discovery they made was how much “fawning press coverage Democratic mega donors routinely get,” at the same time they are “pouring money into races all across the country” on behalf of charter school advocates.) The resulting donor profiles on have already drawn thousands of visitors to buffywicks.money. And, according to Reade, they are “spending a lot of time scrolling through the site.”

“In a real democracy, “she says, “the wealthy should not be able to buy elections or legislation. A California assembly member should be accountable to voters like me and my neighbors, not to the political agenda of billionaires from here and other states.”

(Steve Early has been active in the labor movement since 1972. He was an organizer and international representative for the Communications Workers of American between 1980 and 2007. He is the author of four books, most recently Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money and The Remaking of An American City from Beacon Press. He can be reached at Lsupport@aol.com. Courtesy, Counterpunch.org)

ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

Kavanaugh apparently threw ice at a guy in a bar in New Haven in 1985. No injuries, no arrests, no casualties.

But it was important enough to make the news cycle today.

The Day of the Hyena is truly upon us.

THOSE CRYIN’ IN MY BEER, CAN’T DECIDE WHICH WAY, GOOD OLD MID-TERM ELECTION BLUES

I got the mid-term election blues, Coke’s runnin’ against Pepsi,

Like tryin’t ta decide between a case of diabetes or epilepsy,

 

I got the mid-term election blues, ain’t nobody runnin’ I’d ever choose,

So either which way it goes, the cola’s all win, and I’m gonna lose.

 

Yeah, Baby

 

I got them mid-term election blues, Pepsi’s runnin’ against Coke

And Dr. Pepper’s so low in the polls, it’s like some kinda cola joke.

 

They say we got ourselves a democracy here,

but I'm beginnin' to wonder who’s kiddin' who

 

Ain’t nobody runnnin’ for office I’d ever choose,

and that’s why I got them mid-term election blues.

 

Yeah, Baby, that’s right

I got them mid-term election blues,

 

Yeah and I got ‘em bad,

‘Cause the Coke (Koch) party's gonna win,

 

And the Pepsi generation’s gotta lose.

— Bruce McEwen