Abracapocus about "Hybrid Democracy" by Public Policy Institute of California

In the cartoon Bugs Bunny in Transalvania, the character Bugs Bunny invented the term abracapocus, which is a hybrid of the words abracadabra and hocus pocus, when he battled a vampire and it turned into a bat with a vampire's head (as in Presto Chango! Abracapocus! Hocuscadabra!).

Mark Baldassare and Cherly Kraft of the Public Policy Institute (PPI) of California, a so-called "independent, objective, and non-partisan" public opinion polling outfit, are out in the Los Angeles Times with an abracapocus-like column calling for the replacement of ballot propositions in California with what they call "hybrid democracy." See here: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/sunday/commentary/la-op-baldassare14oct14,1,2200928.story

Hybrid democracy is where referendums would qualify for the ballot only when and if both houses of the state legislature and perhaps even the governor can reach a bipartisan consensus before forwarding it to the voters for their consent.

One cannot grasp the political world unless one understands it as a confidence game in which public opinion polling organizations play a vital role. Public opinion poll alchemists like PPI which are locked up by predatory corporate princes who need gold, and need it quickly, must continually produce favorable "scientific" findings to support their masters.

The largely-concealed function of PPI is to engineer public consent for more public spending for infrastructure for the general benefit of large corporations and land developers that fund its operations and control its board. Not surprisngly, the sophisticated public opinion surveys that come out of PPI almost invariably find that there is public support for more public funding for every form of public infrastructure for water, energy, roads, dams, dikes, and so on ad infinitum. In other words, the function of PPI is to manufacture a political bandwagon effect before ballot initiatives get to the ballot box. The bandwagon effect is "the observation that people often do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same" (Wikipedia).

Baldassare and Kraft's spin is on ballot initiatives is that they have mostly failed in California. They make no mention of the catastrophe that would have befallen its citizens if Proposition 13 had been overruled by the courts as Proposition 187 was by the courts.

"What works best is 'hybrid democracy' -- the legislature and the voters working together. The truth is that voters don't like to be asked to decide complicated public policy issues that legislators can't settle. For instance, Schwarzenegger went around the legislature in 2005 to qualify his reform initiatives, and all of them failed. But when elected leaders can reach a bipartisan consensus on these kinds of issues before placing them on the ballot, voters tend to follow their lead. For instance, in 2004 and 2006, the Legislature and the governmor reached bipartisan agreement in placing the fiscal-recovery and public works bonds on the ballot, and the voters passed them.

It's not always possible to reach bipartisan consensus. Some issues are still going to stymie the legislature. But where possible, the lesson to legislators should be clear: Work the issues through wherever possible before putting them to the voters. Healthcare reform and new water-delivery systems will probably end up on the ballot in one form or another, so lawmakers and the affected interests have every incenvite to find common ground on the legislature before it gets there.'

What Baldassare and Kraft fail to mention is that ballot propositions eliminate what is called "political log rolling," or in other words political compromise. Political log rolling is the "exchanging of political favors, especially the trading of influence or votes among legislators to achieve passage of projects that are of interest to one another." Put differently, if you help push one end of a seemingly unmovable heavy log and I push the other end, we can both win what we want. Log-rolling can be a win-win deal for everyone but the poor log or the metaphorical poor taxpayer.

Baldassare and Kraft shed no light on the big political confidence game currently going on between the courts, the legislature, and the governor with regard to health care and a new-water delivery system to circumvent the Sacramento Delta to protect a small population of smelt fish that are purportedly endangered. The courts are holding the water from the Delta as a hostage so that the Democratic majority in the legislature and a politically ambitious Republican governor can shake down the hold-out minority Republicans in the legislature for a health care package the voters are likely to be leery about. This arm-twisting exercise is meant to gain a compromise before any propositions hit the ballot box.

The farmers want a new reservoir to replace what they might be losing from the Delta and from having to mitigate ground salinity conditions as a result of decades of farming. Strangely undisclosed in all this political maneuvering, disguised as an environmental policy battle, is the cost of new sources of water. Below is a table to help taxpayers understand what is at stake from eliminating cheap water from the California Aqueduct and shifting to expensive new water sources.

Water source Price per acre foot (acre foot is an acre of land with one foot of water) New Sites Reservoir $370 to $555 (without treatment or delivery) San Diego County agricultural water transfers $296 Westlands Water District, Central Valley, purchases from Federal Bureau of Reclamation $33 MWD of So. Calif. California Aqueduct through Delta $20 MWD Colorado River Aqueduct $0.25

Souire: Governor's pitch for new dams faces resistance in Legislature by Michael Gardner, COPLEY NEWS SERVICE October 8, 2007

Under the so-called "hybrid democracy" deal pending in the legislature and the Governor's office, it appears that the cheap $20 per acre foot water may go away and could be replaced with water at 18 to 27 times the cost. On top of this add 4% on top of the gross payroll for small businesses in order to fund expanded health care that may drive private medical insurers out of the state.

Hybrid government such as Baldassare and Kraft advocate may turn into a bat with a vampire's head timed just for the upcoming Halloween.

Since, under the hybrid democracy proposal, no referendum question can be placed on the ballot unless approved by a bipartisan consensus of the legislature, this is nothing more than a very poorly disguised proposal to lock away the one mechanism California citizens have to to settle important public issues (like capping property taxes and forbidding racial preferences) that legislators are unwilling or unable to resolve and/or to reverse PC-driven laws.

Once the people begin to see the full impact of the latest round of pro-homosexual legislation (just signed into law by RINO Governor Schwarzenegger), the ballot initiative is going to become an important tool in reversing them - in fact, the ballot initiative and recall are the only tools that might possibly break the stranglehold liberals have on California.

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