California Governor Research Articles

A Note on The Political Idea of "Latino" in American Life

A Note on The Political Idea of "Latino" in American Life Niccolo Caldararo and James Quesada The use of terms of race or ethnicity can be precise or general given the social context of conversation. In recent years, the use of the term "Latino" has exploded into a racial, political and ethnic category that covers such a vast number of contradictory traits and elements of group membership that it enrages some as much as it emboldens others. The passions unleashed by this term have been displayed in the media following recent demonstrations over possible new legislation over immigration. The contradictory elements of membership in the use of this term to individuals carries a number of dangers. For example, on January 24th of this year the L.A. Times carried an article (Maugh 2006) on melanoma and Latinos that was disturbing for a number of reasons. First the false idea that a group of people called "Latinos" have protection from the rays of the sun is strange in itself. It is equally upsetting to find that physicians who are supposed to be scientifically trained in human variation and genetics could harbor such a stereotype. The fact that the distribution of melanin in skin in different populations over the globe is not completely related to the intensity of solar radiation has been known for many years, and San Francisco scientist Nina Jablonski from our California Academy of Sciences has shown there are a number of reasons for [End Page 731] this (Jablonski 2000). Relethford (1997) and Robins (1991) demonstrated that skin coloration varies significantly throughout the Mediterranean and Central and South America. Just as Jablonski and Chaplin (2000) have shown how UV exposure varies over these areas, it is obvious that there is no one skin type present, no "Latino" coloration. Anthropologists have been trying for more than half a century to show that there is no scientific basis for dividing the human species into racial groups. People from Central and South America have no more protection from skin cancer than the people who live in areas surrounding the Mediterranean Sea. To find that doctors actually believe that they are protected is disappointing. These kinds of erroneous ideas might be more expected of popular commentators who don't know any better and traffic in generalizing about imagined ethnic propensities, such as Larry Krueger, a local San Francisco radio station personality from KNBR. Among other things, Krueger referred to the Giant baseball team as "Latin" players, who are, "brain-dead Caribbean hitters hacking at slop nightly" (Ortiz 2006). Indeed, California Governor Schwarzenegger joined the act when, speculating about the Cuban or Puerto Rican background of a Republican Assemblywoman, he remarked, "They are all very hot…they have the, you know, part of the black blood in them and part of the Latino blood in them that together makes it" (quoted in the Mercury News, 9/9/06)." In each case, however, we think these events require some discussion of the nature of the term "Latino." While the use of this term was derogatory in the KNBR case, the main concern should be the essentialism it displays in the media and publics' perception of public personalities, and more generally those members of our society whose family history is associated with Central and South America. Nor is such rank essentialism the purvey of popular discourse, as the esteemed political scientist, Dr. Samuel Huntington so eminently displays in his critique on the threat Latino culture poses to mainstream American culture (Huntington 2004) Recent attacks on immigrants from south of the border to Ohio have brought a wave of racial comments about "Mexicans" and "Latinos." It seems quite clear that the use of the term "Latino" is rather imprecise, but is defining a political stance. In the recent debate over the California Governor's comments regarding the "Minuteman" border patrol and his references on the News 62 billboard and its "Mexican" tone (Wildermuth and Martin 2005), the application of the term "Latino" and "Mexican" have been used interchangeably. In a New York Times article , Samuel G. Freedman (2004) quotes "Latino" parents who decry bilingual education, which they claimed "consigned their [End Page 732] children to a linguistic...

Rebounding from Corruption: Perceptions of Ethics Program Effectiveness in a Public Sector Organization

We examine the perceived importance of three organizational preconditions (awareness of formal ethics codes, decision-making techniques, and availability of resources) theorized to be critical for ethics program effectiveness. In addition, we examine the importance of ethical leadership and congruence between formal ethics codes and informal ethical norms in influencing employee perceptions. Participants (n=418) from a large southern California government agency completed a survey on the perceived effectiveness of the organization’s ethics program. Results suggest that employee perceptions of organizational preconditions, ethical leadership and informal ethical norms were related to perceptions of ethics program effectiveness. Based on these findings, organizations should evaluate the presence (or absence) of essential preconditions and take steps to ensure that leaders model espoused organizational values to foster perceptions of effective ethics programs.

Design and Prototype Development of Advanced Oxidation Black and Gray Water Treatment Systems

AbstractRegulations governing the discharge of sewage from ships have been in force since the early 1970's. In response, the marine industry has developed ever more complex systems and processes for managing these wastes. The first compliance method involved holding wastes until they could be legally discharged; as technology advanced, treatment systems were developed and installed to enable discharge within regulated waters. As the size and number of ships as increased with maturation of the ocean tourism business, more restrictive regulations have been enacted to minimize the impact on sensitive waters. The trend is toward increasing regulation of both sewage and graywater. The most recent action occurred on 12 October 2005 when the Governor of California signed into law Senate Bill 771 regulating most ship liquid discharges within state waters. This paper describes the development of an innovative advanced wastewater treatment technology, based on advanced oxidation, bearing in mind the lessons learned from systems developed by industry over the past thirty years.

The floods next time

The floods next time

Sunny Jim in the Boiling Cauldron: The Fatal First Year of the Rolph Administration

In late 1929 James Rolph, Jr., was nearing the end of an unprecedented fifth term as mayor of San Francisco. He was a flamboyant, charismatic man, whose genuine warmth had made him an icon in the Bay Area and one of the most admired politicians anywhere in the country. Still ambi tious, and with nothing left to prove in the city he had raised from the ashes of the Great Earth quake of 1906, Rolph made a fateful decision. He would give up what Will Rogers called his civic hereditary monarchy and enter the race for gov ernor of California. Running on a twenty-year record of municipal accomplishment, he would reach the summit and write the final chapter in a dazzling political career.

An Immigrant's Dream and the Audacity of Hope

Smith and Nimmo assert that contemporary political conventions orchestrate an important legitimation ritual. Asignificant part of this ritual is composed of speechmaking. The 2004 Democratic and Republican conventions had a few notable speech moments. Specifically, the speeches by Illinois State Senator Barack Obama and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger garnered attention for both them and their party leaders. Along with the excitement these two speakers generated, they shared a common narrative thread in their two speeches. The difference between the speeches, the authors argue, lies in how the speakers enacted different elements of the moralistic and materialistic forms of the American dream. In accordance with Honig, the authors argue that Obama and Schwarzenegger functioned in this iconic way to reenchant, rescue, and reinvigorate each party's sense of purity, innocence, and goodness.

Smaller is not always better: nanotechnology yields nanotoxicology

former california governor Jerry Brown advocated the mantra that “small is beautiful.” The paper by Shvedova et al., the current article in focus (Ref. [15][1], see p. L698 in this issue), suggests some less-attractive perspectives of this vision. Nanomaterials are receiving increasing attention

Testosterone dreams: Rejuvenation, aphrodisia, doping

Testosterone dreams: Rejuvenation, aphrodisia, doping

The Fight of the Decade

A t the inauguration of the United Nations (UN) World Environment Day 2005 Conference in San Francisco on 2 June, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger did an astonishing thing in his opening speech. Such occasions normally invite specimens of banal hospitality: “We welcome this distinguished

"Without anyone noticing at all": The (Silent) Minority Rights Revolution

John D. Skrentny. The Minority Rights Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. 496 pp. Notes and index. $35.00 (cloth); $18.95 (paper). For students and scholars accustomed to thinking of the years following the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act as a period of conservative reaction and white backlash, John David Skrentny's The Minority Rights Revolution offers an arresting counter-narrative. In Skrentny's account, the same decade (1965–1975) that witnessed the election and re-election of Ronald Reagan as governor of California and Richard Nixon as president; the urban violence of Watts, Detroit, and Newark; and the stiff resistance to school desegregation in New York, Boston, and Los Angeles also witnessed "a remarkable flowering of minority rights" (p. 133). Swiftly and without substantial lobbying or heated controversy, a bipartisan group of federal actors—members of Congress, presidential staffers, agency bureaucrats, and judges— passed laws, promulgated executive orders, issued bureaucratic rulings, and rendered court decisions that "established nondiscrimination rights" and the policies and programs to implement them for "groups of Americans understood as disadvantaged" (p. 4). Asian immigrants and their Asian American advocates won the elimination of the national origins quota system as a result of the 1965 Immigration Act. Latinos (and other English-language learners) secured the right to language accommodation in schools as a result of the 1968 Bilingual Education Act and Lau v. Nichols, the 1974 Supreme Court case best described as the Brown v. Board of Education for language minority students. Women received educational equality as a result of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. The disabled achieved equal access rights as a result of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. Most significantly, Latinos, Asian Americans, women, and American Indians all benefited, in varying degrees, from "the most important policy in the minority rights revolution": affirmative action in federal employment, federally supported small business development, and higher education (p. 85). Collectively, these policies and programs, which emanated from deep inside the D.C. beltway and redounded to the favor of some 60 percent of the population, [End Page 278] formed the core of what Skrentny calls the "fantastic decade" that was the minority rights revolution (p. 328). How did it happen? Skrentny advances two basic arguments over the course of his two-part book on the "government's role in the recognition and protection of minorities" (p. 165). He emphasizes the first—the "perceived needs of national security"—in chapters two and three and the second—the "legacies of the black civil rights movement"—in chapters four through nine (p. 7). In the process, he discounts a third, and perhaps the most commonly held, explanation: that social movements originating beyond the nation's capital generated waves that crashed upon D.C.'s shores and forced a recalcitrant government to take action. The Minority Rights Revolution is not a book about the southern, African American civil rights movement—a revolution from the outside in—but rather a book about what that movement wrought for groups of Americans perceived by policy makers to be "analogous to blacks"—a revolution from the inside out (p. 328). With respect to the book's first part and first argument, Skrentny presents the years 1941 to 1965 as "the prehistory of the minority rights revolution" (p. 16). World War II and the Cold War, he contends, served to catalyze (and, in some respects, constrain) the pursuit of "nondiscrimination rights" (p. 21). Beginning with President Roosevelt's 1941 creation of the federal Committee on Fair Employment Practices, and continuing with, among other things, President Truman's Committee on Civil Rights and its To Secure These Rights report in 1947, and the Department of Justice's contributions to Supreme Court cases that successfully challenged racially restrictive housing covenants (Shelley v. Kraemer [1948]), segregation in interstate train dining cars (Henderson v. United States [1950]), and segregation in public K...

The Right of Publicity and Autonomous Self-Definition

Arnold Schwarzenegger recently sued a company that was marketing a machine gun-toting bobblehead doll made in his image. Schwarzenegger claimed that the producer was free-riding on the value of his image, violating his right of publicity. But where the Terminator turned Governor of California saw an attempt to exploit his hard-earned reputation, others saw valuable political speech intended to parody Schwarzenegger. The case ultimately settled, but not before drawing attention to the breadth of the current right of publicity, which has expanded to allow claims against an everincreasing range of conduct. As critics of Schwarzenegger’s case recognized, his was only the latest in a long line of (often successful) attempts by celebrities to extend the claim’s boundaries.6 And there is no end to that trend in sight; one can discern no principle in the current doctrine or its dominant theory on which any limitation might be based.

The Role of Public Opinion on the California Governor’s Recall in 2003

The article examines the role of public opinion during the California governor’s recall in 2003 compared to partisanship and ideology. In the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) Statewide Surveys, most Californians reported that their state was headed in the wrong direction, whereas relatively few said that they trusted state government, and most said that they disapproved of the way the governor was handling his job. Californians reported that they liked the recall process in concept, and about one half said that they were pleased with its current use and satisfied with the replacement candidates. The author finds that public support for the recall was consistent over time and related to negative political attitudes and positive recall attitudes when controlling for other factors. The implications for the future use and success of recalls and on what political science has to say about the role of populism and partisanship in the direct democracy movement are discussed.

The Mouse That Roared: Teaching Vocabulary with Source-Based Lessons

berley's novel and the 1959 film starring Peter Sellers. The tiny, bankrupt duchy of Grand Fenwick declares war on the United States in hopes of being defeated so that it will be eligible for foreign aid. The concept may have been funnier in 1959 than it is today, but the point is that the contradictory idea of a roaring mouse was dramatic enough to catch the public's fancy. We were reminded of the image when Arnold Schwarzenneger turned real muscle into political muscle by getting elected governor of California. The word muscle is thought to have developed as a metaphor from the Latin musculus, the diminutive form of mus or mouse. Long ago, some creative speaker observed that a muscle resembles a mouse moving under a person's skin. Moles on people's skin were named in a similar fashion, but that's another story. Once the word muscle was firmly established, speakers developed such related terms as muscular, muscle-bound, muscular dystrophy, muscle shirt, and musculoskeletal. A little further removed is the term muscle car. When someone is muscled out of line, real muscles might be involved, but if a person is muscled out of a job or out of office, we assume the phrase is metaphorical rather than literal.

The Davis Recall and the Courts

The recall of California Governor Gray Davis generated intense litigation as recall opponents sought, without much success, to convince courts to block, modify, or postpone the election. Using an interpretive case study approach, this article analyzes these outcomes and develops the theory that the courts’ reluctance to intervene in the Davis recall process was largely dictated by the nature of the recall device itself. More specifically, the recall’s only substantive question was nonjusticiable, so litigants were limited to procedural challenges, and on most of the procedural issues, courts deferred to local election officials. The constraints on judicial review of recall highlight differences between recall and initiative, a direct democracy process courts more actively check.

<em>Hernandez v. Texas</em>: Legacies of Justice and Injustice

<em>Hernandez v. Texas</em>: Legacies of Justice and Injustice

"Planting the Seeds of Revolution": An Interview with Poet Esther Belin (Dine)

The landscape of my writing will always focus on our struggles, from my memory, what I witness in my blood coursing through my veins, and stories overheard in bar-talk. The will of my writing rises from shimá, as daily as her morning prayers in the gray hours. The hunger in my writing feeds from my journey homeward.1 Esther Belin's powerful first book of poetry, From the Belly of My Beauty, has been out in the world for almost five years now and continues to wage a drive for peace, justice, and understanding. For Belin, writing is activism, activism is writing. Raised in Los Angeles by Diné parents who were part of a federal relocation drive in the early 1950s, Belin has forged a powerful contemporary voice, one of endurance, one deeply attached to Diné culture and language. This interview grows out of our continuing long-distance conversations that usually involve our work, writing, politics, and the futures of our children. JEFF BERGLUND: I know you regularly visited your grandparents during vacations as a child, but since graduation from UC-Berkeley, you have lived and worked nearby the Navajo Nation, in Torreon, in Sante Fe, in Farmington, and in Durango. How have these years reframed your sense of your childhood? How have the last few years given you a different sense of the possibilities and/or limits of reservation culture? [End Page 62] ESTHER BELIN: I hate to admit how we re-live our parents' lives. I rather would like to believe I am still living my childhood in the sense that I am able to play and enjoy the pleasures of family and environment, and that I can still become the hero of my dreams. My current timeline is like a pot of mutton stew. And I, of course, am still simmering. JB: As a poet with an activist heart, what experiences have recently galvanized your social or political intellect? Are there incidences or trends that alert you to the need for intervention? EB: It is an everyday event—look at the California governor! [Arnold Schwarzenegger, elected after an unprecedented recall election in Fall 2003.] My gosh, I would have been up in arms rallying against his command. And of course the relationship Durango has with the local tribes, same ol' bordertown mentality. My intervention is at home with my four warrior daughters (ages 10, 8, 4, and 2)—that is how we are choosing to raise them, as warrior women, not aggressive but always aware that war is real and comes in many forms. There are both cultural and institutional wars. Our daughters are decoders and scouts. Definitely, there is a difference. As original landlords, we're coherently creating change on our own accord and in ways that "American" culture acknowledges as activism. But we have also always protested in our own ways; however, too often, these forms of activism have been misconstrued as witchcraft or forms of savagery. It is very difficult now to reimagine our ancestral forms of governing. Our world has caused humanity to outgrow our forms of governing, and we are approaching each other with new challenges like loss of language and blood quantum issues. In order for us to grow forward, we need to redefine ourselves as indigenous, because no matter how bad we want to believe we are still like Dances with Wolves, we aren't; we are so far removed, like lost teenagers rebelling. People don't like to hear that and they don't want to be responsible for dropping the cultural ball of preservation. Somewhere we were tricked into believing that we are no longer in a state of emergency. JB: I know you were active as an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, particularly during the efforts to implement [End Page 63] an ethnic studies component in the curriculum. Could...

Jack Winsor Hansen: The Sibyl Sanderson Story: Requiem for a Diva

Pompton Plains, N.J.: Amadeus Press, 2005 503 pages, $29.95 Judy Garland. Janis Joplin. Marilyn Monroe. Dylan Thomas. Bobby Fischer. Jim Morrison. Brian Wilson. Robert Downey, Jr. Jimi Hendrix. Michael Rabin. These legendary musicians, actors, writers, and chess champions are enthroned in the sad pantheon of people who achieve great fame and fortune only to crash and burn, sometimes almost overnight, their downward trajectories often made steeper and even fatal by drugs and alcohol. If they haven’t done so already, the cruel gods of burnout and failure need to dust off a chair in that pantheon for Sibyl Sanderson (1864–1903). As told in Jack Winsor Hansen’s “authorized biography,” the colorfully piteous story of the American soprano for whom Jules Massenet wrote Esclarmonde and Thaïs and revised Manon is worthy of Jacqueline Susann, a trashy tabloid, Jerry Springer, or the Hollywood Babylon books. Like the title character in a Greek tragedy, Sanderson fell from a great height. Her father was the chief justice of the California Supreme Court and made a fortune in the railroad business; he stood close to his good friend, the California governor turned transcontinental railroad mogul Leland Stanford, when the famous driving of a golden spike linked America’s east and west at Promontory Point, Utah, in 1869. A dazzlingly beautiful but wild debutante who was expelled from her boarding school when she was caught jumping over a fence to meet a boy, Sanderson almost married William Randolph Hearst, and their love for each other survived for decades despite his parents’ marriage ban and his subsequent union with a more proper mate.

The road to the hydrogen highway

The road to the hydrogen highway

Hernandez v. Texas: Legacies of Justice and Injustice

Hernandez v. Texas: Legacies of Justice and Injustice

Hydrogen energy stations: along the roadside to the hydrogen economy

Hydrogen has become more than an international topic of discussion within government and among industry. With the public announcements from the European Union and American governments and an Executive Order from the Governor of California, hydrogen has become a “paradigm change” targeted toward changing decades of economic and societal behaviours. The public demand for clean and green energy as well as being “independent” or not located in political or societal conflict areas, has become paramount. The key issues are the commitment of governments through public policies along with corporations. Above all, secondly, the advancement of hydrogen is regional as it depends upon infrastructure and fuel resources. Hence, the hydrogen economy, to which the hydrogen highway is the main component, will be regional and creative. New jobs, businesses and opportunities are already emerging. And finally, the costs for the hydrogen economy are critical. The debate as to hydrogen being 5 years away from being commercial and available in the marketplace versus needing more research and development contradicts the historical development and deployment of any new technology be it bio-science, flat panel displays, computers or mobile phones. The market drivers are government regulations and standards soon thereafter matched by market forces and mass production. Hydrogen is no different. What this paper does is describes is how the hydrogen highway is the backbone to the hydrogen economy by becoming, with the next five years, both regional and commercial through supplying stationary power to communities. Soon thereafter, within five to ten years, these same hydrogen stations will be serving hundreds and then thousands of hydrogen fuel powered vehicles. Hydrogen is the fuel for distributed energy generation and hence positively impacts the future of public and private power generators. The paradigm has already changed.