GRAY BRECHIN
Brechin is the author of Farewell, Promised Land: Waking From the California Dream. He said today: “As the state’s public services and infrastructure have precipitously deteriorated, an ever-angrier electorate has sought sound-bite answers orchestrated by invisible public relations firms.”
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RUTH WILSON GILMORE
Gilmore is a professor of geography and African American studies at the University of California at Berkeley. She said today: “The recall is smoke-and-mirrors: No matter who emerges victorious, federalism and the Golden State’s incoherent responses to it — term limits, structurally inadequate tax bases, skewed budget priorities — will continue to shape our future. A couple of recent studies show that poverty held steady during the 1990s boom, deepening in the millennial bust. The economic geography of the ‘other California’ is connected by prisons which are monuments to the fatal coupling of failed municipal entrepreneurialism (prisons do not fix depressed rural towns) and the bankrupt rhetoric of danger (prisons do not fix abandoned urban places).”
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DAVID E. KAUN
Kaun, a professor of economics at the University of California at Santa Cruz, said today: “Gray Davis is charged with creating an unmatched economic disaster. According to the performer [Arnold Schwarzenegger], California leads the nation in its tax rates and job losses. These charges are patently false.”
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MARTI McCARTHY
Sister McCarthy is director of education for Jericho, a statewide interfaith public policy organization. She said today: “Jericho is opposed to the recall basically because it ‘offends’ the democratic election process. It is also taking needed revenue and focus away from more important concerns — like health care, affordable housing and children’s services, to name a few.”
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DAVID BACON
Bacon, a longtime labor journalist and photographer, is author of the forthcoming book The Children of NAFTA. He said today: “California unions have become the backbone of the anti-recall campaign, not so much out of love for Gray Davis but from bitter memories of former Gov. Pete Wilson, now co-chairing Arnold Schwarzenegger’s campaign. Davis, in return, has made important moves to solidify a union and civil rights base…”
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ERIC MANN
Mann, a longtime activist for labor and civil rights, is the director of the Labor/Community Strategy Center in Los Angeles. He said today: “Gray Davis is a robotic, cynical man, the perpetual candidate-as-fundraising-get-elected machine. More innocent people are in California prisons than at any time in history, more low-income people in prison for offenses that border on trivial. He supports legalized state murder, opposes paroling people who have served more than their time. … I wish he was never elected, but we cannot tolerate another right-wing coup to replace him. This is a fight to protect what is left of constitutional government.”
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NORMAN SOLOMON
Solomon, executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, wrote in a San Francisco Chronicle article on Sunday that key organizers who have spearheaded the recall “are marketing a type of well-heeled populism with a nativist odor.” His article, “California’s Populist Revival,” is posted at: www.commondreams.org/views03/0928-02.htm
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167