Proposition 89			00.00 10/09
	Opinion
	Submitted as: "The California Clean Money and Fair Elections Act of 2006"
	Proposition 89 is an attempt by certain political players to capture, subsidize, and control the election process in California.  At 56 pages, it is the longest of the 13 initiatives on the ballot.  And no wonder; it's not easy to redefine and regulate a process that has taken thousands of years to develop.
	The first step, of course, has to be financing.  This is accomplished, as several other measures on the ballot do, by demonizing some particular group in order to justify taking a special tax from them.  By means of this dirty process, the rest of us can get a free ride to the better world of "Clean Money".  This time, the supposed villains are "corporations" and "banks", which the initiative's backers have tried and found guilty of throwing their financial weight into politics.  For some reason, other players, such as the California Teachers' Association, the SEIU, and the California Nurses' Association, unions all, are not taxed at all to support 89, even though they also pay significant amounts to advertise their political position.
	The next step is to establish strict requirements, at several levels, in order to qualify to receive a portion of the money expropriated by the tax (for details of the whole process, see our Summary).  Oddly enough, candidates for the Republican and Democratic parties will always pass the first level of qualification; third party and independent candidates seldom will.  Likewise, when the expropriated money is divided up, the Republican and Democrat candidates get a certain specified amount, depending upon the office they are running for; those few third party and independent candidates fortunate enough to qualify get at most 50% or 25% or none of that, because...well, just because.
	Entry into this process is literally bought, by gathering a minimum number of "qualifying contributions."  These are $5 donations, maximum one to each contributor, made on behalf of a given candidate, certifying that the contributor really wants that person to run.  This "election before the election" neatly limits the field to known career politicians, avoiding the amateur and untidy "dark horse" phenomenon, where a hat gets thrown into the ring and the candidate sells his ideas and gathers support during the campaign itself.
	To avoid fraud, receipts for all of these qualifying contributions (QCs) need to be gathered up and sent to the Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC) for verification.  The lowest QC threshold is 750, for an Assembly District.  Given two major Party candidates in each of the 80 Assembly districts, that means 120,000 pieces of paper the FPPC must receive, manage, and verify.  Add to that another 120,000 receipts required to verify state Senate candidates, as well as the lesser quantities needed to verify the statewide candidates, and you understand why the Initiative gives $3 million of the expropriated money to the FPPC for administrative expenses.
	A new term is added to everyone's political vocabulary:  an "excess expenditure".  89 imposes certain spending limits upon candidates who participate by taking any of the expropriated money.  If a  non-participating candidate makes an expenditure in excess of that limit, that now becomes a bad thing, an "excess expenditure", and participating candidates get their slice of the political dole increased to match.  To help this along, the definition of "expenditure" is also expanded, to include the cost of ANY media statement, regardless of who pays for it, that urges a specific election outcome.  "Expenditure" of course does not cover the value of large numbers of volunteers, such as the unions put on the streets every election, going door to door, giving literature to those who "request" it, and expressly excludes the contents of newsletters which might be published by organizations, such as unions and corporations, for the benefit of their "members".
	Since participating candidates, in return for their "fair share" of the expropriated money, have agreed to hobble their political expenditure and expression, it now becomes fair (at least in the minds of the writers of this initiative) to limit everyone else's as well, and new caps of all sorts are imposed on contributions, expenditures, and expression, even for those candidates who are NOT taking any of the Prop 89 money.  Violation of any of these limits becomes a misdemeanor offense, and possible cause for forfeiting an election.
	Which, in a nutshell is why we oppose this Measure.  It severely limits access to the election process and makes the FPPC the final decider of who may be elected.  The glory of the political system in the United States has been that anyone, given enough support, can rise, gain the ear of the public, battle the status quo, and take power from the incumbents.  If we give authority to those already in power, allowing them to control access to the system, as this Measure does, those battles will be lost before they are begun.
	Vote No on 89.
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