"How does UC sell $1.3 billion in construction bonds immediately after declaring an 'extreme financial emergency,' slashing funds for teaching and research and cutting staff and faculty pay? By using your tuition as collateral," Meister wrote online at KeepCaliforniasPromise.org. "Higher tuition lets UC borrow more for construction even while it cuts instruction and research."  And this is only the beginning, he explained.

"UC's most recent (post-"emergency") construction bonds are just the beginning of a long-term (10-15 year) plan to borrow very much more against very much higher tuition in order to fund individual projects that no longer have to be approved by the state or paid for out of each project's own revenue."

When Arnold Schwarzenegger ran for election in the quickie recall election of 2003, he only made vague promises about balancing the budget-promises he has repeatedly failed to keep, instead employing a vast array of gimmicks that finally blew up when the latest recession hit.  But from the perspective of critics like Meister, that failure is actually a success for the real agenda of systemic privatization.

Former governor Gray Davis lost that special election largely because he was blamed for California's enormous deficit, but the early 2000s recession put 49 state budgets into deficit-all of them except Vermont.  California was the worst, to be sure.  And in the late 2000s recession it's the worst once again, for basically the same reasons, one of which is the profoundly anti-democratic nature of the state's financial process.

A recently-released report from the Pew Center on the States, "Beyond California: States in Fiscal Peril" identified ten other states that are particularly imperiled as well. "California's financial problems are in a league of their own," Pew noted, "But the same pressures that drove the Golden State toward fiscal disaster are wreaking havoc in a number of states, with potentially damaging consequences for the entire country."  Pew focused its attention on six factors, revenue change, budget gap, unemployment rate change, foreclosure rate, the need for a supermajority to raise taxes and/or pass budgets, and the GPP "money" grade from Pew's own Government Performance Project, which assesses how well states are managing their fiscal affairs.  The seven worst-ranked states in Pew's overall evaluation all had some form of supermajority requirement.  Only ten other states out of 43 also have supermajority requirements.  But California's requirements apply both to passing budgets and raising taxes (though, of course, not fees), and have long been viewed as among the nation's most draconian.

UC Berkeley linguistics professor George Lakoff has advanced an initiative proposal to change all that, probably the shortest initiative ever drafted.  Dubbed the "California Democracy Act," in its entirety it reads, "All legislative actions on revenue and budget must be determined by a majority vote."

Earlier this year, Sacramento politicians tried a more conventional approach-creating a special "non-partisan" commission, the "Commission on the 21st Century Economy" to craft a set of recommendations. But the results were immediately attacked from all sides.  The California Budget Project issued a particularly scathing analysis, "Fatally Flawed" which began by saying the proposals "Would reduce the growth of state tax revenues, leading to larger, not smaller, budget gaps," and "shift the cost of paying for state services from high- to low- and middle-income taxpayers."  Only 2.4 percent of tax cuts would go to those earning $75,000 a year or less, while 27.2 percent would go to those earning more than $1 million.

Stephen Levy, Executive Director of the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy, provided comments and testimony to the commission, but shared in the criticism, noting in particular that they only attempted to balance the budget at one point in time-utterly missing the point of solving long-term structural imbalances.  Levy also weighed in on the importance of investing in our future, and not simply equating tax cuts with creating a good economic environment. "There's just no question if we don't have good K-12 education or fullest access to higher education that's always been one of our competitive strengths, our great infrastructure, why would families or businesses want to come here?"

While many Democratic lawmakers are skeptical of Lakoff's proposal, citing past polling and failed initiatives of the past, Lakoff has long criticized liberals and Democrats for failing to frame their policies in clear, compelling, morally-grounded language, beginning with his 1996 book, Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know That Liberals Don't.  By now, Lakoff appears to have had enough of trying to teach politicians. With the state plunging ever-deeper into financial oblivion, he seems determined to show them how it should be done.