Innovative California Progressives Help Return State to Sanity With Effective Organizing

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/innovative-california-progressives-help-return-state-sanity-effective-organizing



Progressives who want a path to a political future where an emerging electorate is bypassing the budget battles now afflicting Congress and where decades of damage wrought by right-wingers is slowly being repaired, should look to California. There, a historic coalition of local organizers and labor unions have been remaking the landscape since 2010 by engaging “overlooked” voters.

For much of the past decade, California had terrible state budget deficits, a legislature held hostage by rules allowing a minority of anti-tax Republicans to cut $25 billion from education and human services, even as it became the first state where its communities of color, which were politically marginalized, gradually outnumbered white residents.

But in 2009, as yearly spending cuts began mounting, a coalition of progressives with deep roots in local organizing and labor unions in working-class communities set out to change the political status quo. In 2010, they helped to repeal the super-majority rule giving the GOP its power in the legislature’s budget fights. Last November, they were the linchpin in a statewide vote raising $6 billion a year in taxes for schools for seven years. The 2012 election also defeated an anti-union ballot measure and closed a corporate loophole capturing another billion in tax revenues.

At the heart of this rising progressive tide is a new kind of California voter, one perpetually overlooked by the state's political mainstream, including Democrats, according to Anthony Thigpenn. The longtime Los Angeles-based organizer heads California Calls, a statewide coalition of local groups that found, inspired and turned out half-a-million "infrequent" and "unlikely" voters in 2012, providing the margin of victory for Prop. 30, which raises taxes on incomes over $250,000 and sales tax by .25 percent.

[Starry Messenger]

1. k&r