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Californication

"A golden dream by the sea" is how Arnold Schwarzenegger described California, when he was inaugurated as the state's governor six years ago. Cruise down highway 280 from San Francisco, then up over the wooded Santa Cruz mountains to the Pacific coast, with red-tailed hawks soaring across a perfect blue sky, and it still looks like a dream. But underneath, there is this nightmare.

The state that once boasted the best public schools, colleges and highways in America now has some of the worst. Its healthcare is ranked lowest of all the 50 states by the Commonwealth Fund, a respected thinktank; its prisons are overflowing; the energy-guzzling way it meets its water needs takes a staggering 19% of the state's now expensive electricity; it has six of the 10 worst cities in the US for air pollution; its public finances are a disaster. Year after year, its legislature has failed to agree a budget. Its deficits make Italy look like a paragon of fiscal prudence. And this summer, it generated incredulous headlines around the world when the state started issuing IOUs. The government of one of the most richly endowed territories on earth, home to Hollywood and Silicon Valley, a crucible of innovation and the eighth largest economy in the world, was broke.

Why has California got into such a mess? Some analysts say: "Too much democracy!" In California's eccentric version of direct democracy, all kinds of extravagant public spending are mandated by so-called initiatives, proposed by anyone who can gather enough signatures, and passed by a simple majority of those who bother to vote on them, while the state's revenue-gathering possibilities are curbed by the same method. The most famous example was Proposition 13, passed in 1978, which drastically capped property taxes while making California the only state in the union that requires a two-thirds majority in the legislature not just to pass a budget but also to increase taxes.

So extensive is this "ballot-box budgeting " that legislators estimate they control only some 7% to 17% of the state's spending. Troy Senik, author of a new book on the woes of the golden state, says Californians have been living with the delusion that they could be taxed like libertarians and subsidised like socialists.

Yet it's not fair to blame all this on government of the people by the people. Rather, California shows how such experiments in direct democracy can be perverted – and how the road to hell is paved with good intentions. For this framework of initiatives and referendums was established by self-styled progressives in the early 20th century to curb the power of the railway bosses and bring power to the people. A hundred years later, it is today's more diverse special-interest groups – not just billionaires and businesses but also powerful public service unions, especially those representing teachers and prison guards – who play the system to feather their own nests or further their own fads. They hire hands to collect signatures on their chosen initiative, and use advertising muscle to whip in the votes.

The supposedly representative side of California's democracy doesn't work well, either. Electoral districts have been so shamelessly gerrymandered that most voters, most of the time, have no choice. In 2004, for example, 153 state or federal seats were up for election: not one went to another party. As a result, the real political competition occurs in Democrat and Republican primaries, producing politicians whose future depends on pandering to the ideological extremes of their own parties. No wonder it proves impossible to get the bipartisan two-thirds majority needed to pass a budget.

The initiatives have also added to and changed California's constitution, which is now said to be the third longest in the world – outdone only by India and Alabama. If the American constitutional tradition is distinguished by checks and balances, California has a tangle of checks and balances worthy of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. It has also created a bureaucratic nightmare of multiple, overlapping and conflicting agencies and competencies. California has been the state where no agency ever dies, and truly a golden dream for special-interest groups. Until, that is, the gold ran out.

Perhaps California's deepest problem is that it has been so superabundantly endowed with both natural and human resources, so blessed by the huge contracts that the second world war and the cold war brought to its industries, so fortunate in the inflow of brilliant innovators, dynamic entrepreneurs and industrious workers from Hitler's Germany, rainy Britain, Vietnam, India, China, Mexico and everywhere else, who have moved here, wooed by its matchless charms and opportunities. A poorer place could not have sustained such an idiotic system for so long.

Imagine a bicycle with brakes permanently biting, gears that make it more difficult, rather than easier, to go uphill and the front wheel permanently askew – and it gets worse every time you take it to the repair shop. Only a giant could keep such a bicycle moving forwards. For more than 30 years, California has done just that. Now even this most dynamic of human societies can't keep the crazy bike on the road. So they need to do a proper repair – or, better still, make a new bike.

That is what Californians are now mobilising to do. A group called California Forward proposes piecemeal repairs; another, though called Repair California, aims to build a whole new bike. In the next fortnight, Repair California is due to announce the proposed wording of two initiatives: one to change the state's constitution to allow the people to call a constitutional convention, the other to have the people actually call that convention. According to its own polling, 71% of Californians support the idea. Once the attorney general has formally agreed the wording, it will have until next April to get 1.6 million signatures – which it aims to do by Obama-style volunteer organising.

If all went according to plan, these proposals would be endorsed by the people at the same time as the next gubernatorial election, in November 2010, the convention would be held in 2011, and the people of California could approve a gleaming new mountain bike of a constitution in November 2012 – which, in case you hadn't noticed, is when president Barack Obama will be bidding for his second term.

And there's the larger story. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin liked to quote the saying "The Jews are just like everyone else – only more so." Well, Californians are just like other Americans – only more so. Of course, some of California's specific difficulties are unique, and most states are better run. But in many ways the golden state's sickness is an extreme, hypertrophied version of the politico-economic problems of the whole United States in the early 21st century. The deeper structure is the same: an accumulation over many decades of systemic burdens – in healthcare, for example – which the country could once carry by a combination of economic dynamism and the advantages of its preeminent place in the international system, but no longer can; a multiplication of checks and balances that makes it extremely difficult to reform. The odds may be against the reformers, but everyone who believes the world needs an open, dynamic America must hope they will succeed.

by Timothy Garton Ash

Patrick Swayze (RIP)

Roberto Bolaño

A (late but) Deserved Apology

Gordon Brown has said he is sorry for the "appalling" way World War II code-breaker Alan Turing was treated for being gay.

A petition on the No 10 website had called for a posthumous government apology to the computer pioneer.

In 1952 Turing was prosecuted for gross indecency after admitting a sexual relationship with a man. Two years later he killed himself.

The campaign was the idea of computer scientist John Graham-Cumming.

He was seeking an apology for the way the mathematician was treated after his conviction. He also wrote to the Queen to ask for Turing to be awarded a posthumous knighthood.

The campaign was backed by author Ian McEwan, scientist Richard Dawkins and gay-rights campaigner Peter Tatchell. The petition posted on the Downing Street website attracted thousands of signatures.

Mr Brown, writing in the Telegraph newspaper, said: "While Mr Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can't put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him."

National legacy

He said Mr Turing deserved recognition for his contribution to humankind.

In the statement he said: "So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan's work I am very proud to say: we're sorry, you deserved so much better."

A niece of Mr Turing, Inagh Payne, said that at the time she had no idea about his contribution to the war effort because he kept his work "hush-hush".

She was also unaware of his sexuality and his prosecution as the family "kept mum about that sort of thing". She said she was "very grateful" for the apology. "We realise now that he was gay and we think he was treated abominably," she said.

Welcoming Mr Brown's move, Peter Tatchell of gay rights group Outrage! said a similar apology was also due to the estimated 100,000 British men who suffered similar treatment.

"Singling out Turing just because he is famous is wrong," he said.

Alan Turing was given experimental chemical castration as a "treatment" and his security privileges were removed, meaning he could not continue to work for the UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).

He is most famous for his code-breaking work at Bletchley Park during WWII, helping to create the Bombe that cracked messages enciphered with the German Enigma machines.

However, he also made significant contributions to the emerging fields of artificial intelligence and computing.

In 1936 he established the conceptual and philosophical basis for the rise of computers in a seminal paper called On Computable Numbers and in 1950 he devised a test to measure the intelligence of a machine. Today it is known as the Turing Test.

After the war he worked at many institutions including the University of Manchester, where he worked on the Manchester Mark 1, one of the first recognisable modern computers.

There is a memorial statue of him in Manchester's Sackville Gardens which was unveiled in 2001.

Say the "K" word please!

A Turkish university will for the first time teach the Kurdish language, which was banned throughout the country until 1991, Turkish officials say.

Postgraduate studies in Kurdish will begin at Artuklu University, in the southeastern province of Mardin (Kurdistan, FYI).

The language will be offered alongside Farsi, Arabic and Syriac, at a new "Living Languages in Turkey" institute.

Expanding Kurdish language rights is part of a government drive to end years of conflict with armed Kurdish rebels.

In January, Turkey's public broadcaster launched a 24-hour Kurdish-language television channel.

As many as one in five people in Turkey are ethnically Kurdish, most of them living in the country's south-east (BBC means Kurdistan but they don´t mention it in order not to upset Turkey).

The head of Turkey's higher education board, Yusuf Ziya Ozcan, announced the new language course on Thursday, saying the goal would be to train academics to teach the minority languages.

The EU has urged Turkey to do more to improve Kurdish cultural rights, among a package of reforms demanded by the EU as conditions for joining the 27-nation bloc.

Turkey's EU accession talks opened in October 2005, but progress has been slow.

(from the BBC website)

Juan Almeida Bosque (RIP)

An Impressive Reading

Title: Fidel Castro, My Life. With Ignacio Ramonet.
Original Title: Fidel Castro, Biografia A Dos Voces.
Translated By: Andrew Hurley.
Published By: Penguin.
Number of pages: 724.

Summer Holidays

4 Sep: A Chicken Song Is Due Today...

When The Mouse Ate The Spider

The Murdochs v BBC

Credit where it's due: the free-market right is nothing if not brave. Fainter-hearted souls would have spotted the imminent first anniversary of the collapse of Lehman brothers that started the global financial crisis and decided that now was not the moment to trumpet the case for unfettered private enterprise, free of meddling regulation. But the evangelists for turbo-charged capitalism are made of sterner stuff. With the American conservative assault on Britain's "Nazi" and "Orwellian" National Health Service still fresh in the memory, a leading US free marketeer has trained his sights on another British institution: the BBC.

He is James Murdoch whose weekend MacTaggart lecture was a 39-minute plea for comprehensive deregulation, warning of the dangers of state interference in the "natural diversity" of the media industry. Of the recent history of deregulation, with its catastrophic consequences for the world's economy, there was not a mention.

Nor did he detain his audience at the Edinburgh television festival, sponsored by the Guardian, with a declaration of his own interest in the subject. He spoke as if he were a mere policy wonk, rather than the heir to a broadcasting empire that would make billions if he had his way and the BBC were cut down to size. This was like a fox arguing that the henhouse doors be thrown wide open – not for his own sake, you understand, but for the good of society.

So Murdoch showed some brass neck. But he made some sharp points, too. He is probably right that Ofcom is bloated, poking its nose too often into areas where it's not needed. Right, too, to note that the old distinction between the press (where no rules on impartiality apply) and the broadcasters (obliged to be neutral) makes less sense when the two are rapidly converging, forming "an all-media market" where, say, the Guardian and the BBC both run websites that include text, audio and video. These days, we're a bit like a broadcaster and they're a bit like a newspaper, and the rules probably ought to reflect that. (Though if that means dropping the impartiality obligation on the TV networks there are two words to give us pause: Fox News.)

Of course, a Murdoch attacking the BBC is not news. But these are perilous times for the organisation. Buffeted by a series of scandals and set to face a Conservative government headed by a man whose sole job outside politics was as PR man for a private TV company, the BBC should feel vulnerable. David Cameron has warned that we're entering a new age of austerity, and that will surely include the BBC and its licence fee. James Murdoch, bent on continuing the war Rupert started, might succeed where his father failed. Which is why his argument has to be tackled head on.

First, his case is undermined by the fact that, while everyone has their pet grumbles, most Britons feel a strong attachment to the BBC. Those Republican attacks on the NHS ran into a solid wall of British affection for the service, and a similar fate awaits any attempt to argue that the great malaise in our national life is the BBC. Most Britons continue to use it and trust it: one survey last year put the BBC at the top of a list of trusted institutions, ahead of the NHS, the church and the military.

Or take the view from abroad. The BBC is one of the few British exports to be universally recognised as world class. That's why BBC programmes from The Blue Planet to the Dickens adaptations are snapped up around the globe. They may not be watching Bleak House in Burma or Iran, but they are relying on BBC News for an independent, truthful view of the world. Spend a day absorbing public television and radio in the US. They do their best, but the begging bowl of fundraising appeals intrudes regularly. You have to listen to National Public Radio's Morning Edition to realise quite what we have in the Today programme. It's not just slicker and better resourced. It actually does a civic job, invigilating those who hold elected power, following an agenda set not by a profit-seeking corporation but by the journalists themselves. Speech radio of the kind served up 24 hours a day on the BBC barely exists as a form outside Britain. (Full disclosure: I present The Long View, an occasional series on BBC Radio 4.) It adds up to an output not achieved anywhere else, by any other funding model. To get rid of it, even to shrink it into the "far, far smaller" BBC James Murdoch yearns for, would be an act of cultural vandalism. We'd only appreciate what we had once it was gone.

For the very thing that so appals Murdoch is what makes the BBC precious. As with the NHS, it ensures that part of our national life is organised according to principles other than profit and loss. We are not customers of the NHS, nor of the BBC. Our relationship with it is measured in a less tangible, but ultimately more valuable, currency than pounds and pence. Murdoch cannot understand that. The final sentence of his speech declared: "The only reliable, durable and perpetual guarantor of independence is profit."

These are perennial arguments for the BBC, but that does not mean nothing should change. Murdoch was heard respectfully in Edinburgh partly because the BBC has allowed its critics too many grounds for opposition and partly because other media companies, threatened with extinction by declining advertising revenues, eye jealously a BBC beast which only seems to get bigger, forever insulated from those pressures.

So the BBC should not wait for a Cameron administration to act. It should move first, blunting its critics' strongest lines of attack. The bosses could reduce costs instantly, and visibly, by paying themselves far less. There is no reason why the director general, Mark Thompson, should be paid £816,000, as he was last year. He can't claim that that is the market rate, since the BBC does not operate like any other company in the market. His salary should be pegged to the rest of the public sector. If Gordon Brown can get by on £185,000, so should Thompson.

Next, the BBC can rein in its ceaseless expansion. It had every right to move online, but it surely cannot justify buying up the Lonely Planet travel guides. Again, its unique privilege is that it does not have to operate according to market logic. Which means it does not have to behave like a rapacious media giant.

Then it could do something really bold, fulfilling its public service remit by providing something the market is failing to provide. Local newspapers are dying or dead. Yet towns and cities across Britain need to know what is happening in their councils, town halls and police forces. The BBC has an army of reporters and offices across the land, unmatched by any other news organisation. Why doesn't it set aside a few millions to cover those unreported communities – then put the results into the public realm, "open source" style. Commercial radio stations could pick up audio of the council leader; a local paper could run a BBC-originated report from the court. If people are worried about state-run media let the BBC share the money with, say, the Press Association.

The BBC ought to do this, before even its friends come to resent its gargantuan size and scale. But this cannot be a matter solely for media folk. This is a cultural jewel, one we dare not take for granted.

by Jonathan Freedland

1 Sep 39: Germany invades Poland