2017’s Greatest Hits (and Misses)

Working Californians’ biggest hope during Trump Year One: Sacramento’s Democratic supermajorities:

With a Democrat as governor and a legislature controlled by true-blue supermajorities, it seemed only logical for Sacramento to spearhead the Trump resistance. State Senate President pro Tem Kevin de León (D-Los Angeles) and Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon (D-Paramount) said as much the day after Donald Trump’s 2016 election, vowing to “set an example for other states to follow.” Twelve months later, a modest raft of new laws aimed at blunting the brazen bigotry of Trump immigration policies — including Senate Bill 54, de León’s hard-won sanctuary state bill — and checking the administration’s planet-killing orgy of climate deregulation.

Working Californians’ biggest disillusionment during Trump year one: Sacramento’s Democratic supermajorities:

The political journey between good intentions and the statute book was twisted even by Sacramento standards in 2017. Of the 2,980 bills introduced by state lawmakers, roughly 35 were drafted as “Trump resistance” measures. But by the time the dozen-plus resistance bills made it to the governor’s desk, they tended to be anodyne wisps of their original forms. Senate Bill 6, San Diego Democrat Ben Hueso’s effort to create a legal defense fund for undocumented workers scooped up in ICE raids, became so toothless that Hueso retitled his “Due Process for All Act” as the “Expanding Due Process Act.” A no-brainer by state senators Mike McGuire (D-Healdsburg) and Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) designed to force Trump to release his tax returns before getting on the state’s 2020 ballot earned a Brown veto. Most controversially, perhaps, Rendon tabled SB 520, a sweeping Medicare for All-styled measure by state senators Ricardo Lara (D-Bell Gardens) and Toni Atkins (D-San Diego), before it even received a hearing.

2017’s wannest excuse for a sanctuary state act:

It once virtually banned all state and local law enforcement cooperation with ICE agents. But the bill signed into law by Jerry Brown, which had promised to be the sharpest state rebuke yet to Trump’s mass deportations, now looked strangely familiar. That’s because to get the governor’s signature, the California Values Act had to first pass muster with the powerful California Sheriffs’ Association. The compromise gives ICE full access to prisons and jails, allows police and sheriffs to share databases and to detain and transfer people to ICE if they have been convicted of any crime from a risibly broad list of 800 “hold offenses” recycled from 2014’s California Trust Act. Those include the very serious offenses of “intentionally processing a milk product that is required to be pasteurized without pasteurization, manufacturing a milk product in an unlicensed plant, providing milk product for manufacture or resale to an unlicensed person, or falsifying records required.”

2017’s most unsurprising (if most ignored) Rx for national and California Dems:

Just over 46 percent of California’s registered Democrats turned out for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 presidential primary. That’s nearly the same percentage that pre-election polling for the November vote indicated was motivated by anti-Hillary feelings — presumably disgust over four more years of the romance between Clinton-Obama “New Democrats” and Wall Street — rather than anything remotely pro-Trump. Unfortunately, that lesson was lost on state Democrats when they gathered in May and selected Los Angeles County Democratic chair Eric Bauman as state party leader — in spite of Bauman’s financial ties to Big Pharma. Progressive challenger Kimberly Ellis, who narrowly lost a vote plagued by irregularities, charged that a “clear conflict“ had developed among “those nestled in power.” That diagnosis was echoed in postmortems that urged the disentangling of Democrats — “ideologically and financially — from Wall Street, the military-industrial complex and other corporate interests that put profits ahead of public needs.”

California’s most badly bungled headline of 2017:

The news in November was all about the great Silicon Valley sigh of relief that blew down from Palo Alto like a laissez faire Santa Ana wind: California’s Department of Motor Vehicles had issued its long-delayed driverless vehicle testing regulations that would allow autonomous vehicles on California highways. A potential global market of at least $42 billion by 2025, panted the L.A. Times business pages. But for 3.1 million U.S. truckers (who represent represent two percent of total employment), there was little to cheer. In May, Goldman Sachs became the latest to predict that autonomous vehicle technology will disrupt trucking jobs — one of the last middle-class occupations that doesn’t require a high school diploma — into obsolescence at a rate of 25,000 a month, or 300,000 a year. A far more apropos headline would have been, “Just Say No.”

2017’s poster child for neoliberalism: Elon Musk. Again.

Everything that’s wrong with Silicon Valley’s virulently anti-communitarian, anti-regulatory ethos seems to eventually get uttered by California’s favorite South African-born billionaire bad boy, Elon Musk. And in 2017, Musk did not disappoint. In February, the entrepreneur announced the creation of a new tunnel boring company and its first for-profit venture — digging an express tunnel that will bypass L.A.’s legendarily impenetrable rush hour traffic by connecting Musk’s Bel-Air home with his Space X headquarters in Hawthorne. Those lucky enough to be Elon Musk could see their morning hour commute cut to six minutes. Lest there be any confusion about who the free market best serves, this month Musk tweeted his Marie Antoinette-esque distaste for public transit and its twin aims of affordability and accessibility.