What California’s Prop 16 says about the state of California’s democracy
Energy expert Peter Asmus is among the many who have concluded that Prop 16 is bad and contrary to our interests. He also cites it as example of the of direct democracy gone awry.
LA Times columnist Michael Hiltzik agrees, writing that the state’s iniative process has become “a plaything of powerful interests using deception and misdirection to line their pockets.”
I’ve read a tiny bit of history by Kevin Starr, and it’s convinced me that the reformers in the early 20th century had good intentions. Despite being a dyed-in-the wool liberal today, if I’d been alive 100 years ago, I just might have been an anti-monopolist Republican.
Starr’s Inventing the Dream is great reading, accessible to a non-historian. Also, you would never guess from its title, but historian Robert Kelley’s 1998 Battling the Inland Sea is a surprisingly engaging account of how state water policy questions were shaped by party politics and the “big ideas” of the time.
Progressive Era reforms–the initiative, referendum, and recall–designed to wrest control from monopolists and railroad barons, have not fared well in the age of mass media. PG&E is spending millions in ratepayer money to reinforce a virtual monopoly. Paradoxically, the initiative process is serving those interests it was originally designed to protect us against.
Add to the mix our conservative Supreme Court’s notion of “corporate personhood” and unlimited campaign spending by corporations, and we have a system that no longer serves the interests “we the people.”