A Republican Could Never Win In The Oakland-Berkeley-Richmond District, So They Recruited And Financed A Corporate Democrat, Self-Styled Buffy The Bernie Slayer

23% of registered voters in California's 15th Assembly district declined to state a party preference. 66% are Democrats. 6% are Republicans. Most of the district is Berkeley, Richmond and Oakland, along with smaller communities like Albany, Emeryville, Piedmont, El Cerrito, Hercules, Pinole, San Pablo, El Sobrante and Kensington. Trump managed to pull 7% of the vote there. The demographic make-up is a great mix:

• White- 39.4%
• Latino- 21.7%
• Asian- 19.9%
• Black- 16.3%

This year the primary for the open seat (incumbent Tony Thurmond is a candidate for State Superintendent of Schools) included 11 Democrats and a Republican. The Republican came in 6th with 5.9% of the vote, eliminating him from the general election and guaranteeing that it would be a Democrat vs Democrat race. That top two from the primary are a corporate big money Clinton type, Buffy Wicks, and grassroots progressive Berniecrat Jovanka Beckles.

Blue America concentrates on congressional races, but every year we look for exceptional men and women running for state legislative seats, candidates we think are potential superstars of the future. This cycle there are just 14-- and one of them is Jovanka Beckles. A few days ago Lee Fang and Leighton Woodhouse published a piece in The Intercept about the race: A Billionaire-Backed Democrat Is Facing Off Against A Democratic Socialist In Berkeley. And It's Getting Rough. "The battles within the Democratic Party," they wrote, "have played out in high-profile races this year, largely featuring well-heeled establishment figures with years of elected experience challenged by left-wing outsiders running with the support of a national grassroots movement. Amidst this fight, there has been a strenuous effort from party centrists to drain the question of any ideological content."

They explained that "Jovanka Beckles, the candidate endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America and Sen. Bernie Sanders who has the governing experience and the support of leading local elected officials" is up against "Buffy Wicks, who has never held office before [and] is running as a business-backed Democratic operative pushing to disrupt a seat long-held by the progressive left. In the June primary, backed by a groundswell of money, largely from tech executives and Washington, D.C. politicos, Wicks took the most votes." At a recent forum audience members peppered Wicks-- formerly a a senior advisor to Rahm Emanuel’s campaign for Chicago mayor-- with questions about "why she isn’t working towards single payer health care and why she opposes the contentious Proposition 10 ballot measure to enable more rent control in California. For several educators in the crowd, they wanted to know how she could square her recent public criticism of charter schools with the fact that pro-charter groups were spending big money [hundreds of thousands of dollars] on her behalf." She ran Hillary Clinton's California primary campaign and her office featured a notorious "Buffy the Bernie Slayer" poster.

Beckles has served since 2011 on the Richmond city council, fighting a larger than life battle against the oil giant Chevron, which owns the 117-year-old refinery that has long cast its shadow over local politics.

The campaign has piqued national interest as wealthy donors have inundated the election with independent expenditures casting Beckles as an angry extremist unwilling to support a practical solution to the housing crisis.

The race is another sign of the economic and cultural changes that have utterly transformed the Bay Area in recent years as a result of the long technology boom-- changes that are uprooting the traditional, radical political culture of the region, pitting a longstanding leftist power base against an ascendent brand of technocratic, corporate-friendly Democrats.

...The extent to which influential Democrats [led by corrupt slime ball Gavin Newsom] and corporate donors have rallied around Wicks is an indication of how much the election has become a bellwether in the ongoing battle to define the heart and soul of the party.

“If a democratic socialist can knock off an establishment Democrat, you’ll have a slew of Berniecrats challenging mainstream candidates,” warned former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, now a highly paid consultant, in his regular column for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Those establishment Democrats and their allies have closed ranks around Wicks to a degree almost unheard of in a local race like the one in Assembly District 15.

For a relatively small California legislative seat being fought over by two Democrats, huge amounts of money are being spent, largely to elect Wicks. Independent expenditure groups have spent $1,191,389 on pro-Wicks efforts this year and another $244,160 in negative messages against Beckles. On the other side, a labor union-backed independent expenditure group has spent $391,831 in support of Beckles and $7,412 in opposition to Wicks.

In terms of direct donations, the contrast is similarly stark. Beckles has raised $386,887, which pales in comparison to the $1.3 million raised by Wicks.

The East Bay chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America launched a research-driven website highlighting the donors to Wicks and her attendant IEs, noting that many of the donors include right-wing billionaires and consultants for special interests. William Oberdorf, a major Republican donor, has given $150,000 to one group backing Wicks. Ron Conway, an early investor in Twitter and other name-brand tech companies, who has used his wealth to help moderate Democrats defeat a slate of progressives in San Francisco, has also given to Wicks.

The fundraising advantage has given Wicks an ability to hire a professional campaign operation, with modern polling, advertising, and an innovative get-out-the-vote operation that utilizes texting to encourage supporters to remind their friends and colleagues to go to the polls. The Berkeley Democratic Club, one of the local groups endorsing Wicks, received $6,000 from her campaign last week to send its endorsement slate mailer to city residents.

...Govern for California, one of the groups backing Wicks, is financed in part by one of the heirs of the Walmart fortune, an irony that somewhat blunts her campaign story of once doing battle with the retail giant.

One of the other groups, formed last month, is the “Coalition for East Bay Health Care Access, Affordable Housing and Quality Public Schools, supporting Buffy Wicks for Assembly 2018.” The group is principally funded by the two powerful healthcare lobby groups, the California Medical Association and the California Dental Association; as well as by EdVoice, a charter school PAC.

Chevron, the longtime nemesis of the district’s environmental and economic justice movements and of Jovanka Beckles in particular, also appears to favor Buffy Wicks. Local lobbyist Eric Zell, who has worked for years to influence local government on behalf of Chevron, recently sent an email to his contact list urging them to vote for her. In a sign of how malleable the term “progressive” has become in the Bay Area’s current political culture, the word was used in the email six times. “In the East Bay, we are united behind a progressive agenda,” the email from the oil lobbyist proclaims.

But it is the lawyers that registered and administer the Wicks IE that may raise eyebrows even more than its donors.

The group is run by attorneys from Bell, McAndrews & Hiltachk, a notoriously right-wing law firm that serves lobbyists and the Republican Party. The firm provided consulting work for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, as well as many of the most conservative California Republicans, including Darrell Issa and Dana Rohrabacher.

Ashlee Titus, the partner whose name appears on the IE’s filing, is a board member of the California chapter of the Republican National Lawyers Association and the president of the Sacramento Federalist Society. Her name appears on an October 3 letter advocating the swift confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. (Titus did not respond to a request for comment.)

...In opinion columns and in social media, supporters of the Wicks campaign have portrayed Beckles as an unstable radical, someone who can’t be trusted to effectively represent the district... Campaign fliers have swamped the mailboxes of district residents, claiming that Beckles has missed votes on the city council, played video games on her phone during council votes, and ignored the housing crisis... In one recent mailer, Beckles is quoted stating that, “We don’t suffer from a housing shortage crisis.” But the quote is cropped, leaving out her following statement, “We are suffering from a housing affordability crisis.”

...The barrage of attacks is nothing new for Beckles. She has fought for years as part of a grassroots effort called the Richmond Progressive Alliance to reshape the political reality in her community, which has long been dominated by politicians loyal to the interests of Chevron.

Since 2003, the RPA, as it is known, has worked to push back against Chevron influence in Richmond. They have fought Chevron’s efforts to skirt local taxes, called attention to flaring from the refinery, and demanded greater fines for the routine pollution that has sickened local residents.

That activism has sparked years of increasingly bitter political fights. In 2014 alone, the oil giant poured more than $2.9 million into an account used to smear RPA supporters, including Beckles, a shocking sum to influence a working class municipal race. A campaign consultant was hired to launch a blog mocking Beckles, falsely accusing her of dining excessively on city taxpayer money and not showing up to meetings. Chevron even hired a public relations expert to launch an entire news publication, the Richmond Standard, complete with bona fide coverage of local events, as a portal to advance political attacks on RPA politicians including Beckles.

Incredibly, the RPA has largely prevailed, despite some setbacks. The coalition, including Beckles, has won reforms in city policing and a $15 minimum wage, among other policy changes. Chevron-backed candidates have repeatedly lost close elections to RPA’s slate. Many of the RPA-backed ideas were eventually defeated, such as a radical proposal to use eminent domain to save homes from foreclosure and an effort to combat obesity through a soda tax.

The current legislative race has recast many of the old charges hurled at RPA candidates like Beckles: Too out of touch, too extreme. In past years, the establishment Democratic Party in Richmond used the wider network of party figures to tip the scales, with California Treasurer Phil Angelides and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), among others, working to help the Chevron-backed moderates campaign against the insurgent RPA.

The same strategy appears clear in the current race for Assembly District 15. Wicks has touted an impressive list of supporters. Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), [corporate whore] Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom; and even Obama himself have endorsed Wicks. Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) has personally donated to her campaign, and former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords (D-AZ) attended her launch party (Wicks’ husband is a former Giffords aide).

...In many ways, the race also reflects the fast moving shift of national-level Democratic operatives who have beaten the path from the campaign trail, to the Beltway, to the booming Bay Area after serving in the Obama administration.

Wicks’s fellow travelers include, most famously, Obama’s former campaign manager, David Plouffe, who took a lobbying job with Uber in San Francisco in 2014 and is now at the for-profit foundation of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. It also includes former assistant press secretary and National Security Spokesman Tommy Vietor, who moved to San Francisco to speech write for startup CEOs; former Obama Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer, who joined GoFundMe; and former White House advisor Tom Reynolds, who was hired by Facebook, among many others. Plouffe, Vietor, Pfeiffer, and Reynolds are all Wicks donors.

“The generation of Obama staffers, their ideology was always kind of loosely defined in these non-ideological, aspirational ideals,” said Shant Mesrobian, who worked on the Obama campaign’s digital team in 2008 and who lives in San Francisco.

“When you define your politics so broadly about ‘doing big things,’ non-ideologically like that, it’s easy to see why you can make this transition to Silicon Valley, the Mecca of ‘doing big things.’ When you don’t define your politics by specific things like fighting inequality, corruption, things you can be held accountable to, at the end of the day you can justify anything.”

But supporters of Beckles hope to make voters aware that the vast amounts of money represent a wider power struggle in politics.

“The fact that Buffy Wicks is getting so much money from groups such as Govern For California’s IE, which represents the charter industry, this is all like new corporate money that’s coming in that attempts to change the face of the Bay Area, driving out people of color, working class people,” said Keith Brown, from the Oakland Education Association. “This wave is creating communities such as what we see in Oakland and Richmond between the haves and the have-nots.”

Monday's endorsement of Jovanka by Bernie and the rally he and Congresswoman Barbara Lee held with Jovanka, helped. "While in Berkeley," he wrote, "I had the chance to meet with Jovanka Beckles, and I was impressed by her commitment to progressive values. In the state Assembly, she will fight for Medicare for all, a living wage for all California workers, environmental justice and criminal justice reform. I'm proud to support Jovanka Beckles in the 15th Assembly district." The following day the SIEU released a new tracking poll by EMC Research showing Jovanka ahead by 4 points-- 42% to 38%. The poll shows that Beckles is leading among women voters 47-35%, with independent voters 46-33% and with voters of color 49-36%.

Banksters Let Their Politicians Know It's Time To Wrap Up This Occupy Stuff

Who wouldn't find a touch of irony in that fact that Obama's UN Ambassador, Susan Rice, crowed that "We will stand up for people who seek to assert their basic human rights" as the Obama Administration stood by while a gang of police thugs attacked and brutalized the OccupyOakland encampment? And, oddly, that was at the same time police were harassing American citizens exercising their constitutional rights of free assembly in Atlanta, Baltimore, Orlando, Clarksville, San Diego and several other cities. Looks like a breakdown in law and order again. Matt Taibbi:

Cain said he believed that the protesters are driven by envy of the rich.

"I find the one thing [the protesters] have in common revolves around the human emotions of envy and entitlement," he said. "What you have is more than what I have, and I'm not happy with my situation."

Cain seems like a nice enough guy, but I nearly blew my stack when I heard this. When you take into consideration all the theft and fraud and market manipulation and other evil shit Wall Street bankers have been guilty of in the last ten-fifteen years, you have to have balls like church bells to trot out a propaganda line that says the protesters are just jealous of their hard-earned money.

Think about it: there have always been rich and poor people in America, so if this is about jealousy, why the protests now? The idea that masses of people suddenly discovered a deep-seated animus/envy toward the rich-- after keeping it strategically hidden for decades-- is crazy.

Where was all that class hatred in the Reagan years, when openly dumping on the poor became fashionable? Where was it in the last two decades, when unions disappeared and CEO pay relative to median incomes started to triple and quadruple?

The answer is, it was never there. If anything, just the opposite has been true. Americans for the most part love the rich, even the obnoxious rich. And in recent years, the harder things got, the more we've obsessed over the wealth dream. As unemployment skyrocketed, people tuned in in droves to gawk at Evrémonde-heiresses like Paris Hilton, or watch bullies like Donald Trump fire people on TV.

Moreover, the worse the economy got, the more being a millionaire or a billionaire somehow became a qualification for high office, as people flocked to voting booths to support politicians with names like Bloomberg and Rockefeller and Corzine, names that to voters symbolized success and expertise at a time when few people seemed to have answers. At last count, there were 245 millionaires in congress, including 66 in the Senate.

And we hate the rich? Come on. Success is the national religion, and almost everyone is a believer. Americans love winners. But that's just the problem. These guys on Wall Street are not winning-- they're cheating. And as much as we love the self-made success story, we hate the cheater that much more.

In this country, we cheer for people who hit their own home runs-- not shortcut-chasing juicers like Bonds and McGwire, Blankfein and Dimon.

That's why it's so obnoxious when people say the protesters are just sore losers who are jealous of these smart guys in suits who beat them at the game of life. This isn't disappointment at having lost. It's anger because those other guys didn't really win. And people now want the score overturned.

All weekend I was thinking about this “jealousy” question, and I just kept coming back to all the different ways the game is rigged. People aren't jealous and they don’t want privileges. They just want a level playing field, and they want Wall Street to give up its cheat codes, things like:


FREE MONEY. Ordinary people have to borrow their money at market rates. Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon get billions of dollars for free, from the Federal Reserve. They borrow at zero and lend the same money back to the government at two or three percent, a valuable public service otherwise known as "standing in the middle and taking a gigantic cut when the government decides to lend money to itself."

Or the banks borrow billions at zero and lend mortgages to us at four percent, or credit cards at twenty or twenty-five percent. This is essentially an official government license to be rich, handed out at the expense of prudent ordinary citizens, who now no longer receive much interest on their CDs or other saved income. It is virtually impossible to not make money in banking when you have unlimited access to free money, especially when the government keeps buying its own cash back from you at market rates.

Your average chimpanzee couldn't fuck up that business plan, which makes it all the more incredible that most of the too-big-to-fail banks are nonetheless still functionally insolvent, and dependent upon bailouts and phony accounting to stay above water. Where do the protesters go to sign up for their interest-free billion-dollar loans?

CREDIT AMNESTY. If you or I miss a $7 payment on a Gap card or, heaven forbid, a mortgage payment, you can forget about the great computer in the sky ever overlooking your mistake. But serial financial fuckups like Citigroup and Bank of America overextended themselves by the hundreds of billions and pumped trillions of dollars of deadly leverage into the system-- and got rewarded with things like the Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program, an FDIC plan that allowed irresponsible banks to borrow against the government's credit rating.

This is equivalent to a trust fund teenager who trashes six consecutive off-campus apartments and gets rewarded by having Daddy co-sign his next lease. The banks needed programs like TLGP because without them, the market rightly would have started charging more to lend to these idiots. Apparently, though, we can’t trust the free market when it comes to Bank of America, Goldman, Sachs, Citigroup, etc.

In a larger sense, the TBTF banks all have the implicit guarantee of the federal government, so investors know it's relatively safe to lend to them -- which means it's now cheaper for them to borrow money than it is for, say, a responsible regional bank that didn't jack its debt-to-equity levels above 35-1 before the crash and didn't dabble in toxic mortgages. In other words, the TBTF banks got better credit for being less responsible. Click on freecreditscore.com to see if you got the same deal.

STUPIDITY INSURANCE. Defenders of the banks like to talk a lot about how we shouldn't feel sorry for people who've been foreclosed upon, because it's they're own fault for borrowing more than they can pay back, buying more house than they can afford, etc. And critics of OWS have assailed protesters for complaining about things like foreclosure by claiming these folks want “something for nothing.”

This is ironic because, as one of the Rolling Stone editors put it last week, “something for nothing is Wall Street’s official policy." In fact, getting bailed out for bad investment decisions has been de rigeur on Wall Street not just since 2008, but for decades.

Time after time, when big banks screw up and make irresponsible bets that blow up in their faces, they've scored bailouts. It doesn't matter whether it was the Mexican currency bailout of 1994 (when the state bailed out speculators who gambled on the peso) or the IMF/World Bank bailout of Russia in 1998 (a bailout of speculators in the "emerging markets") or the Long-Term Capital Management Bailout of the same year (in which the rescue of investors in a harebrained hedge-fund trading scheme was deemed a matter of international urgency by the Federal Reserve), Wall Street has long grown accustomed to getting bailed out for its mistakes.

The 2008 crash, of course, birthed a whole generation of new bailout schemes. Banks placed billions in bets with AIG and should have lost their shirts when the firm went under-- AIG went under, after all, in large part because of all the huge mortgage bets the banks laid with the firm-- but instead got the state to pony up $180 billion or so to rescue the banks from their own bad decisions.

This sort of thing seems to happen every time the banks do something dumb with their money. Just recently, the French and Belgian authorities cooked up a massive bailout of the French bank Dexia, whose biggest trading partners included, surprise, surprise, Goldman, Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Here's how the New York Times explained the bailout:

To limit damage from Dexia’s collapse, the bailout fashioned by the French and Belgian governments may make these banks and other creditors whole — that is, paid in full for potentially tens of billions of euros they are owed. This would enable Dexia’s creditors and trading partners to avoid losses they might otherwise suffer...

When was the last time the government stepped into help you "avoid losses you might otherwise suffer?" But that's the reality we live in. When Joe Homeowner bought too much house, essentially betting that home prices would go up, and losing his bet when they dropped, he was an irresponsible putz who shouldn’t whine about being put on the street.

But when banks bet billions on a firm like AIG that was heavily invested in mortgages, they were making the same bet that Joe Homeowner made, leaving themselves hugely exposed to a sudden drop in home prices. But instead of being asked to "suck it in and cope" when that bet failed, the banks instead went straight to Washington for a bailout-- and got it.

UNGRADUATED TAXES. I've already gone off on this more than once, but it bears repeating. Bankers on Wall Street pay lower tax rates than most car mechanics. When Warren Buffet released his tax information, we learned that with taxable income of $39 million, he paid $6.9 million in taxes last year, a tax rate of about 17.4%.

Most of Buffet’s income, it seems, was taxed as either "carried interest" (i.e. hedge-fund income) or long-term capital gains, both of which carry 15% tax rates, half of what many of the Zucotti park protesters will pay.

As for the banks, as companies, we've all heard the stories. Goldman, Sachs in 2008-- this was the same year the bank reported $2.9 billion in profits, and paid out over $10 billion in compensation-- paid just $14 million in taxes, a 1% tax rate.

Bank of America last year paid not a single dollar in taxes-- in fact, it received a "tax credit" of $1 billion. There are a slew of troubled companies that will not be paying taxes for years, including Citigroup and CIT.

When GM bought the finance company AmeriCredit, it was able to marry its long-term losses to AmeriCredit's revenue stream, creating a tax windfall worth as much as $5 billion. So even though AmeriCredit is expected to post earnings of $8-$12 billion in the next decade or so, it likely won't pay any taxes during that time, because its revenue will be offset by GM's losses.

Thank God our government decided to pledge $50 billion of your tax dollars to a rescue of General Motors! You just paid for one of the world's biggest tax breaks.

And last but not least, there is:

GET OUT OF JAIL FREE. One thing we can still be proud of is that America hasn't yet managed to achieve the highest incarceration rate in history-- that honor still goes to the Soviets in the Stalin/Gulag era. But we do still have about 2.3 million people in jail in America.

Virtually all 2.3 million of those prisoners come from "the 99%." Here is the number of bankers who have gone to jail for crimes related to the financial crisis: 0.

Millions of people have been foreclosed upon in the last three years. In most all of those foreclosures, a regional law enforcement office-- typically a sheriff's office-- was awarded fees by the court as part of the foreclosure settlement, settlements which of course were often rubber-stamped by a judge despite mountains of perjurious robosigned evidence.

That means that every single time a bank kicked someone out of his home, a local police department got a cut. Local sheriff's offices also get cuts of almost all credit card judgments, and other bank settlements. If you're wondering how it is that so many regional police departments have the money for fancy new vehicles and SWAT teams and other accoutrements, this is one of your answers.

What this amounts to is the banks having, as allies, a massive armed police force who are always on call, ready to help them evict homeowners and safeguard the repossession of property. But just see what happens when you try to call the police to prevent an improper foreclosure. Then, suddenly, the police will not get involved. It will be a "civil matter" and they won't intervene.

The point being: if you miss a few home payments, you have a very high likelihood of colliding with a police officer in the near future. But if you defraud a pair of European banks out of a billion dollars-- that's a billion, with a b-- you will never be arrested, never see a policeman, never see the inside of a jail cell.

Your settlement will be worked out not with armed police, but with regulators in suits who used to work for your company or one like it. And you'll have, defending you, a former head of that regulator's agency. In the end, a fine will be paid to the government, but it won't come out of your pocket personally; it will be paid by your company's shareholders. And there will be no admission of criminal wrongdoing.

The Abacus case, in which Goldman helped a hedge fund guy named John Paulson beat a pair of European banks for a billion dollars, tells you everything you need to know about the difference between our two criminal justice systems. The settlement was $550 million-- just over half of the damage.

Can anyone imagine a common thief being caught by police and sentenced to pay back half of what he took? Just one low-ranking individual in that case was charged (case pending), and no individual had to reach into his pocket to help cover the fine. The settlement Goldman paid to the government was about 1/24th of what Goldman received from the government just in the AIG bailout. And that was the toughest "punishment" the government dished out to a bank in the wake of 2008.

The point being: we have a massive police force in America that outside of lower Manhattan prosecutes crime and imprisons citizens with record-setting, factory-level efficiency, eclipsing the incarceration rates of most of history's more notorious police states and communist countries.

But the bankers on Wall Street don't live in that heavily-policed country. There are maybe 1000 SEC agents policing that sector of the economy, plus a handful of FBI agents. There are nearly that many police officers stationed around the polite crowd at Zucotti park.

These inequities are what drive the OWS protests. People don't want handouts. It's not a class uprising and they don't want civil war-- they want just the opposite. They want everyone to live in the same country, and live by the same rules. It's amazing that some people think that that's asking a lot.

Coincidentally, Glenn Greenwald's new book, Liberty And Justice For Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful has just been released. I haven't read it yet. But Mark Karlin interviewed him for Truthout and I don't think Greenwald and Taibbi will find much to disagree about. "[W]hat is happening with the Occupy Wall Street protests," Greenwald told Karlin, "is as perfect an illustration of the book's argument as anything I could have imagined. The book's central theme is that law is no longer what it was intended to be-- a set of rules equally binding everyone to ensure that outcome inequalities are at least legitimate-- and instead has become the opposite: a tool used by the politically and financially powerful to entrench their own power and control the society. That's how and why the law now destroys equality and protects the powerful.

"What we see with the protests demonstrates exactly how that works. The police force-- the instrument of law enforcement-- is being used to protect powerful criminals who have suffered no consequences for their crimes. It is simultaneously used to coerce and punish the powerless: those who are protesting and who have done nothing wrong, yet are subjected to an array of punishment ranging from arrest to pepper spray and other forms of abuse.

That's what the two-tiered justice system is: elites are immunized for egregious crimes while ordinary Americans are subjected to merciless punishment for trivial transgressions."

No, not a brand new message. One can never watch this too many times: