The Biggest Cali Ballot Ever

Phil Angelides (D)

Endorsed Vote: Yes

Please, please, please don’t buy the Governator's hype! He’s pretending to be a Democrat to get reelected, but don’t forget his sketchy right-wing power grab in last year's special election, not to mention his reliably frequent racist, anti-immigrant off-the-cuff comments. Phil Angelides is the anti-Arnold. While Arnold has protected his rich corporate donors, Angelides has a strong history of standing up for children, teachers, and workers. He's the only major candidate with the guts to call for corporations and wealthy citizens to pay their fair share to rebuild California's education and social services. And he wants to balance that out by lowering taxes for the middle class and small businesses.

Debra Bowen (D)

Endorsed Vote: Yes

Debra Bowen is a State Senator who has been a leader in technology issues. She was the first Senator with a webpage, and wrote a bill to make legislative info available online. She's headed investigations into Diebold and it's her goal to kick their sketchy machines out of California and replace them with secure, open-source voting machines. Amen!

John Garamendi (D)

Endorsed Vote: Yes

Garamendi has been around the block (the state Assembly and Senate, ran for Governor, worked in the Clinton White House, two-term Insurance Commissioner, etc), but he's been a good (if not great) Insurance Commissioner, and he's taken strong stands on climate crisis and education. Another reason to vote for him: he's running against Tom McClintock, the most popular non-movie star Republican in California. Except McClintock doesn't pretend to be a moderate: He's anti-choice, anti-immigrant, anti-everything-we-care-about. If Garamendi doesn't beat him, we're going to have to fight off his run for Governor in 2010.

Michael Wyman (G)

Endorsed Vote: Yes

Michael Wyman is an attorney with a long history of progressive activism. He's everything that we dream of in an Attorney General: he wants to abolish the death penalty, reform Three Strikes, prosecute corporate crime, defend the environment, and much more.

We'd like to vote for the old Jerry Brown who was a bad ass progressive Governor, but Mayor Borwn sucks. He's consistently sided with real estate developers who are gentrifying Oakland, he's been unresponsive to community groups, he's been non-committal on gay marriage, and he's responded to Oakland's crisis of violence with regressive measures like zero-tolerance and curfews.

Mehul Thakker (G)

Endorsed Vote: Yes

Mehul is an investment advisor focusing on socially responsible investing, with loads of experience in progressive finance. He's a champion of electoral reform, universal healthcare, and public ownership of clean energy resources.

The Democrat, Bill Lockyer, has been a pretty good Attorney General, and he's got loads of political experience in the state Assembly and Senate. But he has no finance experience and he's only running for Treasurer because he's termed-out and needs a new job. We need a progressive treasurer who knows what he's doing. Vote for Thakker.

John Chiang (D)

Endorsed Vote: Yes

John Chiang is a serious tax policy wonk. He's worked for the IRS, and he serves on the Board of Equalization, so he knows all the crazy details about how California's tax system works. He's never held office before, but he's worked for Democrats like Barbara Boxer, Gray Davis, and Don Perata. We wish he would show a little more fire for creating a fair tax structure that doesn't rely on bonds to pay for everything. But Chiang is a hell of a lot better than his wingnut Republican opponent who basically hates government and immigrants.

Larry Cafiero (G)

Endorsed Vote: Yes

Unforutantely we're not super stoked about any of these candidates. Larry Cafiero says all the right things: he supports single-payer health care, consumer advocacy, and public driver’s insurance. But he doesn't have much pracitcal or political experience. The Democrat, Cruz Bustamante (D) was the California campaign chair for Lieberman in ’04! And his website is all about his personal weight loss with nothing about insurance! Vote for Cafiero.

Todd Chretian (G)

Endorsed Vote: Yes

Todd Chretian has been deeply involved in the recent immigrant rights movement. His top priorities are ending the war, abolishing the Patriot Act, and building schools not jails. Even if he wasn't a great guy, we'd probably vote for him anyway, because we're sick of Diane Feinstein's act. She supports flag burning amendment, pro death penalty, voted for war in Iraq. She recently offered a bland bill on greenhouse gases. And on the Judiciary Committee she's been inconsistant in fighting the Bush Administration's power grabs. Vote for Chretien.

Endorsed Vote: Yes

1C is a $2.85 billion bond to support housing programs. a lot of the state's funding for low-income housing is about to expire. 1C helps put roofs over low- and middle-income Californians through down-payment assistance, multi-family housing construction, building housing and shelters for farm workers, the homeless, transitional folks, and foster youth, with a goal of reducing sprawl and increasing access to public transit.

The only legitimate reason to vote against it is that a lot of the money addresses middle class needs more than low-income people. That said, it’s still supported by everyone from Gavin Newsom to the Coalition on Homelessness (only the Republican Party opposes it), and will benefit low-income Californians a great deal. Finally, a bond we can feel good about. Hell yeah.

Endorsed Vote: Yes

1D is a $10.4 billion bond for K-12 and higher education facilities, focusing on earthquake retrofitting, building classrooms, and updating old technology. It's supported by teachers, the PTA, the Community College Board, and businesses too.

Endorsed Vote: Yes

1E is a $4.1 billion bond to repair the levees and flood control systems in the Central Valley. The Central Valley levees protect 400,000 people, and they also transport water to 23 million Californians--that's 2/3rds of the state! California has earthquakes. A 6.5 quake could flood all those people, cut off fresh drinking water to 2/3rds of California, and cause up to $40 billion in damages. Remember Katrina? We need to take care of our levees.

Endorsed Vote: Yes

84 is a $5.4 billion bond for a slew of programs to: improve quality of safe drinking water, flood control, strengthen levees, evaluate climate change impacts on water systems, conserve wildlife and parks. Why you’d oppose it: expanding dams is sketchy, the Shasta damn in particular, which infringes upon Native American communities. And some of the funds require matching local funds--meaning highly impacted rural Asian and Latino communities may be left out. And, some of the state coastal conservation is intended to protect military facilities. But if we don't take care of our water system now, it'll be the most vulnerable Californians who will be hurt down the line.

Endorsed Vote: Yes

86 would raise the tax on cigarettes $2.60 a pack. The tobacco is trying to confuse us on what that money would do, so forget their commercials and remember this: it would provide health coverage for 800,000 uninsured kids! It also throws some money at emergency health services and smoking prevention programs. Raising the cost of cigarettes is proven to reduce the number of kids who become smokers, which reduces the number of adults who will die from smoking, the amount of money we have to pay for their health care. We don't like how this is a regressive tax on smokers. We'd rather see the tax hit the tobacco companies, but smoking is nasty and Prop 86 will reduce teen smoking and provide health insurance for children.

Endorsed Vote: Yes

87 creates a tax on oil companies who extract oil in California. Currently we're the only major oil-producing region without such a tax. What's up with that? The tax would generate $4 billion for alternative clean energy technologies that will fight climate crisis, reduce our dependence on foreign oil, and create tens of thousands of new jobs. 87 also prevents oil companies from passing the tax on to consumers. The oil companies will tell you that they'll pump less oil because of the tax, but that's ridiculous. They made $78 billion in profits last year! They can afford to pitch in $2-$5 a barrel to help save the Earth. HELL YEAH!

Endorsed Vote: Yes

89 is a silver bullet to get dirty money out of CA elections, and get people from our communities into office. Prop 89 gives candidates for statewide office public money to fund their campaigns, so they can compete with millionaire movie stars. To receive public financing, candidates have to follow clean election regulations like demonstrating broad community support, staying within campaign spending limits, and participating in at least three debates (Ahnold barely agreed to do one debate, he’d rather stick to commercials and photo-ops.) The icing on the Prop 89 cake? The money comes from a 0.2% tax on banks and corporations--not California residents. Bring on accountable elected officials who represent our communities; let's get the rich stupid white men outta office. HELL YEAH!