Jerry Brown

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“Marijuana Cultivation Is The Biggest Drought-Related Crime We’re Facing Right Now”

October 21, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

While it’s not as serious a suck on California’s water supply as swimming pools, illegal marijuana farming is part of the problem. From Pilita Clark in the Financial Times:

“Jerry Brown, California’s governor, declared a state of emergency in January after the driest year on record in 2013, but as the annual wet season beckons, the prospect of a complete drought recovery this winter is highly unlikely, government officials say.

‘Marijuana cultivation is the biggest drought-related crime we’re facing right now,’ says Lt Nores as he pokes at a heap of plastic piping the growers used to divert water from a dried-up creek near the plantation.

But California’s drought is exposing a series of problems in the US’s most populous state that are a reminder of an adage popularised by Michael Kinsley, the columnist: the scandal is often not what is illegal but what is legal.

Growing competition

The theft of 80m gallons of water a day by heavily armed marijuana cartels is undoubtedly a serious concern, not least when the entire state is affected by drought and 58 per cent is categorised as being in ‘exceptional drought,’ as defined by the government-funded US Drought Monitor.

However, this is a tiny fraction of the water used legally every day in a state that, like so many other parts of the world, has a swelling population driving rising competition for more heavily regulated supplies that have long been taken for granted and may face added risks as the climate changes.”

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“What Is Good, And Bad, About America Is Better, And Worse, In Its Most Populous State”

May 23, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

From James Fallows’ new Atlantic article about Gov. Jerry Brown 2.0, a passage about how California is America writ large, better and worse than ever:

“As for the problems Brown and his state are wrestling with, they are America’s problems—but worse. Here we leave the governor for a moment to consider the environment he is working in, which is both emblematic of and surprisingly different from America as a whole.

You can go too far with the idea that California shows how all of America will look a few years from now. The state’s population is already more heavily Hispanic than the U.S. population might ever be: Hispanics, at nearly 40 percent, are about to overtake California’s ‘non-Hispanic white’ percentage to become the largest ethnic group in the state. (Nationwide, Hispanics are about 17 percent of the population.) Relative to the country as a whole, Asians also make up a larger share of California’s population—­roughly 15 percent of the state, versus about 8 percent of the country—while blacks and whites represent smaller shares. (California is about 40 percent white and 6 percent black, versus 63 percent and 12 percent, respectively, for the United States.) Largely because of these demographic shifts, the Republican Party, which a generation ago relied on California as the largest element of its Sunbelt base, now barely bothers to mount statewide races except those self-financed by political-novice millionaires like Meg Whitman, who lost badly to Brown in 2010, and Carly Fiorina, who lost badly to Barbara Boxer for the U.S. Senate that same year. In 2012, Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney by 3 million votes in California—and by only 2 million more in the other 49 states combined. In both houses of the state legislature the Democrats have, for now, a two-thirds ‘supermajority’ that allows them to prevail even against California’s version of the filibuster. ‘The Republicans appear to have no power,’ Jerry Brown told me. ‘Some of them are nice people, but they aren’t needed for any votes [in the legislature], and they don’t participate.’

In other ways tangible and subjective, California is an outlier. Its median income is much higher than America’s—but so is its unemployment rate. Its prison system is large and fantastically expensive. Two of its sizable cities (Stockton and San Bernardino) have filed for bankruptcy. And it has myriad other problems. Still, California is usefully representative of the country in one very important way. What is good, and bad, about America is better, and worse, in its most populous state.”

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“The Era Of Hamstrung Government Seems To Be Coming To An End”

April 1, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Paul Krugman is looking at California as a microcosm for America–as it often is–wondering whether moderate liberal rule with the freedom to make decisions will be a federal-level bellwether. Though it’s unlikely President Obama will ever know governance without obstruction. An excerpt:

“California isn’t a state in which liberals have run wild; it’s a state where a liberal majority has been effectively hamstrung by a fanatical conservative minority that, thanks to supermajority rules, has been able to block effective policy-making.

And that’s where things get really interesting — because the era of hamstrung government seems to be coming to an end. Over the years, California’s Republicans moved right as the state moved left, yet retained political relevance thanks to their blocking power. But at this point the state’s G.O.P. has fallen below critical mass, losing even its power to obstruct — and this has left Mr. Brown free to push an agenda of tax hikes and infrastructure spending that sounds remarkably like the kind of thing California used to do before the rise of the radical right.

And if this agenda is successful, it will have national implications. After all, California’s political story — in which a radicalized G.O.P. fell increasingly out of touch with an increasingly diverse and socially liberal electorate, and eventually found itself marginalized — is arguably playing out with a lag on the national scene too.

So is California still the place where the future happens first? Stay tuned.”

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“Most Governors Don’t Last That Long”

November 2, 2012 in Politics, Videos | Permalink

“The Far-Out Candidate Who Puzzles Almost Everyone.”

Jerry Brown, during his his hippie-ish “Governor Moonbeam” days in 1981, chatting with Merv Griffin. Of course, he’s also the current California Governor. I have never understood exactly where Brown is coming from, what his core is, and I doubt he could articulate it very well, either. But that amorphousness hasn’t prevented him achieving successful governance.

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“He Focused On The Nature Of Technology And Modern Institutions And Their Capacity For Destroying Common Sense”

July 25, 2011 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Ivan Illich was a radical priest, who, during the ’60s and ’70s, was embraced by liberals and conservatives alike, each group able to read their ideology into his sharp critiques of institutional education. Illich didn’t always seem to know what he wanted by way of an alternative, but he knew what he didn’t like. Apart from rigidly structured education, Illich also had his doubts about technology, concerned that we would interpret the world around us first and foremost through tools. In that sense, he was certainly prescient. Largely forgotten by the time of his death in 2002, Illich was eulogized by longtime friend Jerry Brown, former and future California Governor, in the Whole Earth Catalog. An excerpt:

“In the Seventies, facing sharp criticism from the Vatican, Illich withdrew from the active priesthood and refrained from speaking ever again as a Catholic theologian. Instead, he focused on the nature of technology and modern institutions and their capacity for destroying common sense and the proper scale for human activity. Illich identified the ‘ethos of non-satiety’ as ‘at the root of physical depredation, social polarization, and psychological passivity.’ Instead of welfare economics and environmental management, Illich emphasized friendship and self-limitation.”

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