GELFAND’S WORLD - It’s a week and a day until the elections are decided, and a few observations are in order.
Let me start with the ballot measures. I suspect that this year signifies the moment that voters have entirely lost interest in the process. I’ve been watching a lot of television ads (free broadcast tv, not cable) and I’ve seen a couple of hundred ads in the aggregate. Most are endless repeats of the same few ads. I note propositions 3, 38, 40, and maybe 45 (not sure about the last one).
And of all these ads, not one has told me what the proposition would actually do.
Oh, they make claims about how children’s health or eduction will be preserved, or how taxpayers will not pay a cent more, or that disease will be fought. What they don’t provide is any real information about which state law is modified and in what way. As a colleague pointed out, the ballot pamphlets sent out by the government consist of yards and yards of fine print which most people don’t read.
The proponents tell us half-truths while avoiding the most important truths, a cynical and dishonest approach. I wouldn’t be surprised if voters go down the ballot voting No or just skipping a lot of the propositions. (If I have some time, I will look up a few of the propositions before election day. In the meanwhile, you have Jack Humphreville’s list, published here in CityWatch.)
What we are seeing here is a process by which professional political consultants get together with their clients and warn them against telling the truth. For example, every time we agree to sell state bonds, we are adding future taxes. It can’t be any other way. So, Prop 38 is a tax measure, even though it is being sold as a way to buy meritorious medical research. The ugly truth is that California has been doing this sort of thing (compare the previous measure that provided for stem cell research) in eras when the federal government suddenly puts the brakes on research funding. The more rational solution to cuts in research funding is to elect a president and congress that will return us to the traditional process by which the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation have adequate budgets and use honest, rational methods for choosing where the funding goes. That era could be a mere two years away.
I have two thoughts about the mayor’s race. The first thought involves the question of homelessness and how every candidate is on the wrong track politically. The second thought is that a new mayor has a generational chance to reform and repair the way this city does its budgeting and financing.
Karen Bass ran for mayor with the promise that we would finally do something tangible about homelessness. Her base premise is that getting people indoors is the first and foremost necessity. Everything else seems to come second. I suspect that this approach is flawed for two reasons: It does not satisfy what the voters really want, and it also fails to satisfy what many of the homeless themselves want.
Let’s start with what the voters want. I suspect that most of us harbor feelings of humanity and wish the best for those who are living outdoors. But for most of us, it’s not our central focus – we have problems of our own – and to be blunt – we don’t know those people in the tents. We would like them to be somewhere else than on the freeway overpass we are driving under or camped in the tunnel we are driving through. As one of my colleagues suggested several years ago, the voters would like the homeless to be invisible.
At the same time, most of us probably would like to see the miseries of being stuck on the streets relieved. But this is where the homeless themselves come in. Many of them, when asked if they would like help or psychiatric assistance, just say No. Sometimes they will say Yes after repeated inquiries, and even then, they don’t always make a complete transition to normalcy. (This does not mean it can’t happen, but that it is not a universal phenomenon.)
I strongly suspect that the majority of voters have lost patience over the homelessness issue, and they recognize that it is not the only serious issue that the city of Los Angeles faces. They would like to see the mayor concentrating on other issues such as needed repairs and road maintenance, because these issues affect all of us. I suspect that the less the challenger says about this issue, the more votes she will get.
Here is the second thought. It will be unpopular among a certain number of voters but would be extremely popular among a different group. A few days after the election, the newly chosen mayor (whichever it is) should point out that the city is stuck in a financial rut, and there is one obvious way out of it – a moratorium on salary increases for at least this mayor’s first term.
It would be a good way towards getting reelected to a second term.
Why is this both obvious and useful? As I mentioned in a previous column, the process by which the City Council and the mayor raise city employee salaries by an average of 5% a year is what we mathematically trained folks refer to as exponential growth. Unless revenues rise at an equal or higher exponential rate, the salary growth will always overrun the revenue stream.
And that’s what we have been experiencing. Nobody in city government admits to this fact, but ask yourself the following question: Why was the reservoir above the Pacific Palisades uncovered and unfilled and why were all those broken fire trucks left un-repaired? The simple answer is that the money wasn’t there. The more complicated answer is that the money wasn’t there because the City Council had already paid it as higher salaries.
The problem is that City Council members are beholden to the municipal employee unions because they get a lot of electoral support from them. Only a mayor – offering a bold start to a broken city government – has the ability to make this change.\
Addendum: The right-wing propaganda universe
I was a bit surprised the other day when I became aware of a MAGA supporter explaining that he didn’t want the United States to become like France – this in terms of the recent rioting and the burning of a city hall in a French city. It’s a strange thought. America also has riots, but they are caused by quite different factors and – just like French riots – run their course and stop. So why this recent obsession with the U.S. suddenly duplicating French customs?
The answer lies in the system by which the American right wingers do propaganda. A column in the blog Lawyers Guns & Money explains. Fox has been running hours and hours of discussion about the French protests and riots, trying to compare Democrats with the overseas rioters. Every now and then, particularly before an election, the right wing machine will pick one thing and beat it to death. Why rioting in France? Presumably they didn’t have anything better to flog. After all, it’s not the Democrats who started the war against Iran or are kissing Putin’s butt.
Horse Races and statistics and all that:
Most pollsters and professional political consultants are conceding control of the House of Representatives to the Democrats as of the November elections. The Senate is a different story, since it takes a comparably larger switch for the Republicans to lose control. Here is a description of ten major races that will collectively determine the outcome.
The results of the Democrats gaining control of one or both houses of congress are another story. They range from Trump’s promise to veto everything to possible Supreme Court retirements while the lame duck Republican senate continues to function. If Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas want to retire, they may have a two-month window in which to do so. It may depend on a few thousand votes in Texas and a couple of midwestern states.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at amrep535@sbcglobal.net)
