• Governor – No Endorsement
• Lieutenant Governor – Hon. Janice Hahn
• Secretary of State – Hon. Debra Bowen
• Attorney General – Hon. Kamala Harris
• State Controller – Hon. John Chiang
• Insurance Commissioner – Hon. Dave Jones
• State Treasurer – Hon. Bill Lockyer
• State Superintendent of Public Instruction – No Endorsement
• State Board of Equalization – Hon. Betty Yee
• United States Senate – Hon. Barbara Boxer

Cal Dems will vote for these candidates at the California Young Democrats’ endorsement meeting on February 27 (if applicable) and promote them during campus GOTV efforts.

• AB 656 would place a 9.9% “severance” fee on oil companies, which drill in our lands and profit from our resources. Currently, California is the only oil-producing state without such a fee. AB 656 would raise $1 billion, all of which would be reserved for higher education.

• The California Democracy Act would end minority rule in the state legislature by removing the two-thirds requirement for budgets and taxes. It would allow the majority to govern in accordance with democratic principles, and end the current gridlock in Sacramento.

• The military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) policy currently mandates the discharge of openly gay service members. DADT is both a national security problem and a moral problem. Under it, the military has expelled thousands of capable soldiers during wartime. Moreover, DADT condones homophobia and denigrates service members who risk their lives for their county.

• The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), already passed by the Senate, would bring meaningful and long-overdue reform to our health care system. It would move our nation closer to universal coverage, insuring 31 million Americans and reducing up to 45,000 unnecessary deaths per year. It would also institute consumer protections, and shield Americans from abusive practices like rescission, discrimination based on pre-existing conditions, and annual or lifetime caps. PPACA would both expand coverage and lower costs, while actually reducing the deficit by more than a trillion dollars.

All four proposals have been added to Cal Berkeley Democrats’ platform. Cal Dems will work to support them over the coming months and beyond.

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The Cal Berkeley Democrats is the official arm of the Democratic Party at UC Berkeley.

On December 7, Cal Dems Robbie Bruens and Nik Dixit spoke at a health care forum hosted by the Fem Dems at Mills College. Thanks to the Fem Dems for arranging the fantastic event!

Photos are below, and videos can be found here.

Jeremy Pilaar: “Kill The Health Care Bill! Start Over!” – Howard Dean

Robbie Bruens: Yeah, because if we start over now we’re not going to end up waiting another decade or two. Killing a bill does not mean we will get bolder reform in the future. It means we will get less bold reform in the future. History tells this story from Truman through Obama. Only Democrats are this good at adopting Republican talking points when the going gets tough.

Nik Dixit: The way I see it:

A) This is still a great bill. Insurance regulations and subsidies are a huge win, and they will cover 30+ million people. Moreover, they establish the principle that government is responsible for ensuring coverage.

B) We can improve this bill later. Medicare and Social Securities each began as limited programs, but as they developed constituencies they became much more broad.

C) If we fail, we’re not going to get another chance for decades. When Truman/Nixon/Clinton failed, it was literally decades before anyone tried again (16 years in Clinton’s case). If this happens, literally hundreds of thousands of people will die in the interim.

It’s not a perfect bill, but it’s a good bill, and a bill that can be improved. We have the first real chance to do this in half a century, and we would be fools to toss it aside.

Jeremy Pilaar: I know this bill still has a lot of good in it, but do either of you feel like we’ve crossed a line somewhere on the amount of acceptable concessions we’ve been giving to get 60 votes? The political strategist in me says “yes, duh”, but the citizen in me is screaming “wtf happened?”. With this president and this strong a democratic presence in congress, it feels highly disappointing that we were unable to get any sort of public option (even a trigger) as part of the bill. I feel like the public option was in and of itself a fairly big concession and a low starting point from which to build forward, and was willing to accept its removal and replacement with the medicare buy-in, but now I feel like the bill carries just as many advantages (if not more) for insurance companies as it does for consumers. Their profits are now not only locked in, but increased as a result of the pool of new customers now waiting at the door with public money in hand. I know that there will be some degree of strict new oversight, but the lack of any public option whatsoever sets up absolutely no alternative to the status quo that has so desperately failed up until this point and gives us no reason to think will change all that dramatically considering the power the insurance lobbies have in Washington. I guess it’s the Canadian and French in me speaking (vive la révolution!), but I would have liked to see at least some form of public health service...

Nik Dixit: Yeah, it’s a win for insurance companies. However, I don’t particularly care about insurance companies, I care about the average person. At the end of the day, the average person stands to gain a lot, too.

Robbie Bruens: A couple of things to note about what has been said here. First, the bill expands Medicaid coverage considerably. Hopefully we’ll get the House expansion, which is even bigger than the Senate expansion. There’s also some major improvements to Medicare. So even though we might not get a new public health service, we’re going to get better public health services out of the programs that already exist. And the other thing is that this bill establishes the principle that the federal government has the responsibility to ensure that health care is available for everyone. You could view it as the creation of a new implicit public health program…and once this principle is established it will never go away. Then we can be free to tinker around the margins as far as public/private and profit/nonprofit etc.

And as far as the insurance companies go, yes it is a win for them to not have to compete with a Medicare buy-in or any sort of public option. But there are two complexities to this story.

First, the insurance companies wouldn’t have had much trouble with a opt-out public option that has no ability to use Medicare’s bargaining power advantage (this is the version of the public option Reid had thought could get through the Senate with 60 votes until Lieberfuck and Brainless Nelson threw fits). What this says to me is that it would be better to get a public option that’s integrated into Medicare (and thus has a bargaining advantage) through a reconciliation vote (only need 50 Senators) next year or in 2011, rather than a weak public option with 60 votes this year. Because a weak public option could actually hurt the case for public health care in the long run.

Second, I do not see insurance companies as stronger after this bill passes regardless of what happens to the public option. They are essentially on life support, because they serve no useful purpose except to enable to excess profits of Pharma, the device manufacturers and the private hospitals and doctor’s groups. This is the most frustrating thing about the progressive backlash against Lieberman. The health insurance companies couldn’t beat a public option on their own. It’s the other parts of the medical-industrial complex that really stand to benefit and they are the true killers of the public option.

Which bring me to a final point. What this process has revealed is the continuing need for lobbying reform and campaign finance reform, but almost more importantly, reform of the United States Senate. The filibuster has evolved into minority rule, and if we want to prevent the federal government from following California into the gutter, we need to help Senator Tom Harkin who is trying to change Senate procedure so they can actually function properly.

Nate Silver addresses criticism from the left and makes another great argument for health care reform. His elevator pitch:

Ben Nelson and Blanche Lincoln are probably willing to sign off on $900 billion in public subsidies so that poor and sick people can have better access to health care. Is there really no way we can make this work for us?

Another noteworthy passage:

But that money isn’t really going to poor people — it’s going to Cigna! Then there’s an argument I have much less sympathy for: that the $900 billion is not ultimately going to disadvantaged people, but rather to insurance companies. Some of the money, indeed, will turn into insurance company profits. But how much? Probably not very much: most likely about $30 billion of the $900 billion, or about 3.3 percent, which is the average profit margin in the insurance industry. The insurance industry is actually not very profitable — it may be inefficient, but it is not especially profitable. The vast majority of that $900 billion goes to improve health outcomes for poor and sick people.

The whole thing’s worth a read, if you have the time.

Robbie discussed his work with Organizing for America, and the moral case for health care reform. Nik discussed the policy and politics behind the legislation in Congress. Watch excerpts of their presentations:

Paul Krugman has a column which makes the same points I did, only more eloquently. I strongly recommend you read it:

The result would be a huge increase in the availability and affordability of health insurance, with more than 30 million Americans gaining coverage, and premiums for lower-income and lower-middle-income Americans falling dramatically. That’s an immense change from where we were just a few years ago: remember, not long ago the Bush administration and its allies in Congress successfully blocked even a modest expansion of health care for children.

Bear in mind also the lessons of history: social insurance programs tend to start out highly imperfect and incomplete, but get better and more comprehensive as the years go by. Thus Social Security originally had huge gaps in coverage — and a majority of African-Americans, in particular, fell through those gaps. But it was improved over time, and it’s now the bedrock of retirement stability for the vast majority of Americans.

On the consequences of failure:

Again, history suggests the answer. Whereas flawed social insurance programs have tended to get better over time, the story of health reform suggests that rejecting an imperfect deal in the hope of eventually getting something better is a recipe for getting nothing at all. Not to put too fine a point on it, America would be in much better shape today if Democrats had cut a deal on health care with Richard Nixon, or if Bill Clinton had cut a deal with moderate Republicans back when they still existed.

Keep in mind, this is the same Paul Krugman who railed against the stimulus bill, which economists agree has been working well. While compromise is painful, it’s much better than nothing.

Since Joe Lieberman killed the public option, many liberals, from Howard Dean to Keith Olbermann to Markos Moulitsas, have called on Democrats to shelve health care reform. They argue that without a public option reform is worthless, and Democrats should wait to pass “real” reform at a later date.

Such a view, while understandable, is immensely shortsighted. Even without a public option, health care reform would do tremendous good and is still worth passing.

First, the bills before Congress still contain consumer protections and subsidies which would help tens of millions of Americans. They would ban insurance companies from engaging in a host of abusive practices, including recession and discrimination based on pre-existing conditions. They would also provide subsidies to those making under 400% of the poverty level ($88,200 for a family of four), which would dramatically expand coverage.

The Congressional Budget Office predicts that the net result would be coverage for 31 million Americans, a huge improvement from the status quo. This would reduce the 45,000 deaths per year which occur due to holes in our insurance system, as well as the bankruptcies and financial troubles caused by the status quo.

Just as importantly, it would establish the principle that government is responsible for ensuring the health of its citizens. Whereas health is now a private affair, post-reform government would have a legitimate role to play. Put simply, in both practical and symbolic terms, health care reform would be the most important piece of social legislation since the Great Society. To quote Nate Silver,

how many other opportunities will exist to provide in excess of $100 billion per year in public subsidies to poor and sick people?

Second, even if health care reform is inadequate, it can be improved later. As it gains a constituency and political muscle, it can be expanded in the future.

This is more than a remote possibility; in fact, it is exactly what happened with Social Security. As enacted, it was a small, limited program for older Americans. However, later changes increased benefits, broadened eligibility, included disability, created SSI, and automated cost of living increases. Whereas only 222,000 Americans received benefits in 1940, 44 million receive them now.

The same can happen with health care reform. As long as it establishes a foothold, it can develop a constituency. Then, incremental changes can strengthen existing components and add new ones.

Finally, if health care reform fails, we are unlikely to get another chance in the near future. Politically speaking, as the incumbent party in a midterm election, Democrats are likely to lose seats in 2010. Historically, too, failure at health care reform has meant decades of dithering.

For example, after Clinton’s attempt, our country waited sixteen years before anyone even tried again. Conventional wisdom held that health reform was politically toxic, and its electoral toll too high. If reform were to fail, it would send the same message that obstacles are insurmountable. Health care would again become a “third rail”, and, as it did after Clinton, it would slip into the background for another generation.

The costs of waiting are simply too high. Tens of thousands of people are dying now, and it would be decades before we got another chance.

Health care reform is still worth passing: it would insure 30 million Americans, it can be expanded later, and failure will only beget more failure in the future.

Progressives have been fighting to pass health reform since Truman. For the first time in half a century, we have a genuine chance. We would be fools to toss it aside.

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Also consider:  failure would depress our base, embolden Republicans, and sink the rest of President Obama’s agenda. He’s staked his presidency on health care, and abandoning it would jettison financial reform, immigration overhaul, and energy legislation for years.

Chancellor Birgenau and Dean Poullard,

I write to you as a dear, concerned friend of one of the students arrested this morning and as an ally of the movement that got him there in the first place, and a participant in the Open University, who just happened to not attend last night. I am in shock that the week of nonviolent studying and events has been ended like this. I am appalled that University of California Police Officers were told to arrest dozens of students and some community members while they were essentially sleeping from a campus building around 5 A.M. in the morning on a Friday. I feel betrayed and I have lost all trust in the system that I thought had some courtesy. I was there on Monday night through Tuesday morning and the few officers left to keep guard were essentially cordial and congenial. They would come in and tell us they were leaving for the night, for example, and that another officer was going to come replace them.

As you know, the first scheduled finals are tomorrow morning at 8 A.M. I highly doubt that these students will be able to make that session, and even if so, I can’t imagine how they can be in any state to study for the rest of their final examinations after a traumatic experience such as this. This is already getting national news coverage and luckily there were some university faculty and AFSCME members there as the students were taken away.

I ask at minimum that the U.C. Berkeley students involved be given academic amnesty in this situation.

This is appalling. We are a premier academic institution with a history of activism and civic involvement. This is absolutely not the way that a week of the nonviolent use of a campus building should end. It is certainly a horribly-ineffective P.R. move. What can public opinion be about university police arresting students from a campus building before dawn on a weekday? This is not September 24th, it is not November 18th, 19th, or 20th. This institution needs a real evaluation of its priorities and of the values it espouses. I have an immense amount of love for my campus and community. I have an immense amount of spirit as well – I have rushed the field and taken pictures with Chancellor Birgenau and your wife Mary-Catherine at Memorial and Stanford Stadium. I have gushed about how amazing this place is. I have dedicated my time and energy to convince admitted high school students to choose Cal, and I wear my Blue & Gold with pride.

But that was yesterday. Today, I am a heartbroken undergraduate who feels betrayed by a university she once loved and now can only view with disdain. In my year-and-a-half as a Berkeley student, I have admired the beauty of our campus on a nearly daily basis. Its beautiful foliage, buildings, and pathways have captivated me. However, none of that will ever appear the same to me. I assure you that even years from now, as an alumna walking through our campus, I will never be able to appreciate its beauty the way I did on Day 1 or Day 100, because I can never forget being awoken early on a Friday morning right before final exams, by a text message from a friend who tells me he is on a police bus, arrested. I can never forget shooting out of bed, not knowing what I can do, frantically trying to get to campus but hearing that that bus is already on its way to a jail.  Calling news organizations only to be met with answering machines and voice-mail boxes, wishing I could scream across the phone line, and having to send out emails instead.

Today, my university has left me helpless and scared.

With the utmost sincerity,

Pegah Zardoost
University of California, Berkeley | Class of 2012
Pre-Law, Intended – Classical Civilizations
Leadership Alumni Award Scholar
Membership Director, Cal Berkeley Democrats
pegah.zardoost@gmail.com
(951) 531-4224

Part One:

Part Two:

Thanks to the Fem Dems for hosting the great event!