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Tag: neel kashkari
California To Be First U.S. State To Ban Plastic Bags

California To Be First U.S. State To Ban Plastic Bags

Los Angeles (AFP) — California governor Jerry Brown said he will approve a ban on single-use plastic bags, in what would make the western U.S. state the first to outlaw them.

Lawmakers passed the bill late last Friday, and it now only requires Brown’s signature to pass into law. The governor must do so before the end of September.

“I probably will sign it, yes,” Democratic veteran Brown said late Thursday during a televised debate with his Republican election rival Neel Kashkari, who is trailing badly in opinion polls.

“In fact, I’ll tell you why I’m going to sign it: there are about 50 cities with their own plastic bag ban, and that’s causing a lot of confusion,” he said, cited by the Los Angeles Times and other media.

He added: “This is a compromise .. It’s taking into account the needs of the environment, and the needs of the economy and the needs of the grocers.”

Under the Californian legislation, single-use plastic bags would disappear from grocery stores and pharmacies from July 1, 2015, and then from convenience and liquor stores from July 1, 2016.

The bill would allow stores to charge 10 cents for paper or reusable bags. Similar bans, backed by environmentalists, are already in place in cities including Los Angeles and San Francisco.

A ban is opposed by Republicans who say it would be too much government meddling for small and medium sized businesses, and by bag manufacturers who fear job losses.

Kashkari — who latest polls indicate trails by 50 percent to 34 percent for the November 4 gubernatorial post — said he opposes the legislation.

“No chance would I sign that bill,” he said in Thursday’s debate.

AFP Photo/Kevork Djansezian

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Neel Kashkari Faces 20-point Deficit Leading Up To Debate With California Gov. Jerry Brown

Neel Kashkari Faces 20-point Deficit Leading Up To Debate With California Gov. Jerry Brown

By Michael Finnegan, Los Angeles Times

After months of struggling to disrupt California Gov. Jerry Brown’s widely presumed glide to re-election, Republican Neel Kashkari will have a chance to shift the dynamics of the lopsided contest Thursday in the candidates’ first and only debate.

The televised one-hour encounter in Sacramento gives the novice Laguna Beach candidate an opportunity to introduce himself to millions who know little or nothing about him and to challenge Brown’s portrayal of a California on the rebound.

“He needs a major win, a major headline or a major Brown faux-pas, or something that would attract voter attention to the race that isn’t there right now,” said Mark DiCamillo, director of the Field Poll. “He needs to introduce some new element that voters haven’t thought of in evaluating Brown.”

With polls showing the Democratic incumbent running about 20 points ahead, Brown has all but ignored Kashkari, a former assistant U.S. Treasury secretary who oversaw the federal bank bailout. Kashkari, 41, also is a former Goldman Sachs investment banker who once was an aerospace engineer.

Brown, 76, who was first elected governor 40 years ago, is seeking an unprecedented fourth term to cap a tortuous career that included stints as California secretary of state, state Democratic chairman, Oakland mayor and state attorney general, along with three unsuccessful runs for president and one for U.S. Senate.

Kashkari, who has raised too little money for extensive TV advertising, demanded as many as 10 debates, but Brown agreed to just one, according to his campaign spokesman, Dan Newman.

It will take place in a TV studio near the state Capitol. The sponsors are the Los Angeles Times, KQED public radio and television, Telemundo, and the California Channel.

The debate will be carried live at 7 p.m. PDT on C-SPAN, 30 NPR radio affiliates across the state, major PBS television stations, the California Channel, and in Spanish on Telemundo stations.

The moderator will be John Myers, KQED’s state politics and government editor. The other journalists on the panel are Jim Newton, editor-at-large of the Times, and Dunia Elvir, morning news anchor of Telemundo’s KVEA-52 in Los Angeles.

Aides to the candidates declined to discuss debate preparations and hewed to the custom of trying to lower expectations.

“The fact of the matter is the governor’s been debating since before Neel was born, and this is Neel’s first debate,” Kashkari campaign manager Pat Melton said.

Kashkari, he said, is likely to argue that rampant poverty and unemployment, along with substandard public schools, belie Brown’s narrative of a California comeback.

“California is not back, and it’s time for real leadership,” Melton said.

Newman called Kashkari “a nattering nabob of negativism” who favors stunts over substance. The governor, a onetime Jesuit seminarian prone to occasional bursts of Latin, might debate in iambic pentameter, he joked.

“It can be challenging to talk in short sound bites when you know as much as he knows,” Newman said.

With just more than a month left until voting by mail begins, Kashkari has little time to shift public opinion. A Public Policy Institute of California poll in July found 52 percent of likely voters favoring Brown’s re-election and 33 percent backing Kashkari.

Brown was supported by 80 percent of Democrats and 52 percent of independents, along with 18 percent of Republicans. In a state where just 28 percent of voters are Republican, those numbers reflect a fierce headwind for Kashkari. Nearly a third of Republicans approved of Brown’s job performance, the poll found.

Most daunting for Kashkari is his inability to communicate directly with voters through TV ads. The campaigns’ most recent filings with the state showed Brown with $22.4 million on hand at the end of June, while Kashkari — who unlike Brown had to wage a competitive primary campaign — had just $198,000.

Photo via WikiCommons

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California Gubernatorial Candidate Trying To Push Beyond GOP’s Traditional Boundaries

California Gubernatorial Candidate Trying To Push Beyond GOP’s Traditional Boundaries

By Seema Mehta, Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES — On a recent sunny Sunday in South Los Angeles, worshipers gathered in a wood-beam Pentecostal church to sing and offer testimonials of faith. In the middle of the African-American congregation, swaying during the hymns and dropping money into the collection basket, stood Neel Kashkari, the Republican candidate for governor.

Democratic politicians often drop by the Living Gospel Church — Rep. Maxine Waters and former Rep. Yvonne Brathwaite Burke are familiar faces. But Kashkari is the first GOP candidate to visit, said church administrator Lafayette Shelton.

The campaign appearance — like Kashkari’s weeklong experiment living as a homeless person last month and marching in a San Diego gay pride parade — reflects the unconventional campaign he hopes to mount in his improbable run against Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown.

It’s a strategy driven by two factors: the need to create a buzz with little money — the Laguna Beach millionaire’s campaign is practically broke — and a belief that the state GOP needs to expand beyond its small, mostly white share of California voters to survive.

“He’s running the best campaign money can’t buy,” said Claremont-McKenna College political scientist Jack Pitney.

Provocative gambits are old standbys in politics.

Republican Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Democrat Lawton Chiles of Florida each walked more than 1,000 miles in their respective states during campaigns in the 1970s. Bob Graham of Florida and Tom Harkin of Iowa held “workdays,” doing the jobs of their constituents, such as plucking chickens and shoveling horse manure.

Last month, several Democratic politicians lived on $77 for a week, the average earnings after taxes and housing costs for a full-time worker making the federal minimum wage.

In sleeping on park benches, eating at a food bank and showering only once, as Kashkari says he did, the former chief of the $700 billion Wall Street bailout is trying to generate attention for a campaign that is largely being ignored. And he is hoping such moves will help him forge an image as a new kind of Republican.

Even many members of his own party have viewed the first-time candidate as a dilettante. Harmeet Dhillon, vice chair of the state GOP, said many Republicans supported Kashkari in the June primary out of alarm over the candidacy of controversial conservative Assemblyman Tim Donnelly (R-Twin Peaks). They had little enthusiasm for Kashkari because of his 2008 vote for President Barack Obama, his role in the bank bailout and his liberal social views, such as support for gay marriage.

Now some, including Dhillon, have changed their minds.

Kashkari’s effort to highlight poverty and unemployment was “a stance a lot of us would love to see other Republican politicians take — show some imagination and flair and take some risks and really walk the walk of the people in California who are suffering…. That is dedication, that is for real, and I am impressed,” Dhillon said.

Brown’s camp was not. The governor’s political spokesman, Dan Newman, branded Kashkari’s week among Fresno’s homeless a cynical stunt and said the candidate’s record contradicts his words. He questioned Kashkari’s concern about the impoverished, saying the candidate saved big banks while people lost their homes.

And he dismissed the Republican’s professed commitment to gay rights, pointing out his history of supporting candidates who opposed gay marriage, including President George W. Bush and 2012 GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney.

“It’s great that he now finds it politically expedient to pretend to care about issues like poverty and civil rights,” Newman said. “But people are judged by their actions.”

Kashkari faces long odds against Brown, who boasts a $22 million war chest and a 20-point lead in opinion polls. The Republican hopes to get some traction by arguing that the “California comeback” Brown has touted is not a reality for many.

“I’m using every tactic, every creative strategy I can come up with to force us in this state to have conversations” about the millions of Californians who are still struggling, Kashkari said in an interview. “I’m going to keep doing things like this, and he’s going to hide and duck, and I’m not going to let him get away with it.”

Kashkari has criticized Brown for paying too little attention to poverty and education in disadvantaged communities, topics that are not part of the traditional GOP playbook, though such issues are increasingly being raised by prominent Republicans such as Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin and Senator Marco Rubio of Florida.

Kashkari’s campaign ploys mark a return to methods he used to prepare for his gubernatorial run: He met with people around the state, slept in an Oakland shelter and picked strawberries with Salinas farmworkers.

But when he ran against Donnelly in the primary, Kashkari spent his time courting GOP voters, routinely describing himself as a “conservative Republican” and vowing to “get able-bodied people off welfare, food stamps and unemployment.” He called President Barack Obama a “partisan warrior” who put his party above the nation’s interest.

At the Living Gospel Church recently, that rhetoric was gone. Kashkari didn’t mention his GOP affiliation, compared his and the president’s life stories favorably and repeatedly noted that as a U.S. Treasury official he worked for Obama as well as for Bush.

“There is no other country in the world where a brown kid like me, the son of immigrants, gets to go to Washington and work for two presidents,” said Kashkari, who is of Indian descent.

“You know what President Obama and I have in common?” he continued. “We both got that good education, and that good education opened the doors. And if you get that good education, nothing can stop you.”

Shelton, the church administrator, said he was “incredibly impressed” by the candidate’s appearance and that he did not understand why Republicans tended to ignore African American neighborhoods.

“A lot of religious beliefs we have are congruent with their beliefs,” said the 48-year-old Chino resident.

Most of the congregation’s members are registered Democrats, but “they don’t care about party affiliation as much as they do about message,” Shelton added.

Although political analysts say the 41-year-old Kashkari cannot beat the 76-year-old Brown in November, he could improve his stature in a state where the GOP has a shallow bench of future leaders — particularly if he does better among minority voters than previous GOP candidates.

“He’s a political pioneer, but most political pioneers lose, and he will lose,” said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. “But that’s where the Republican party has to go, whether they want to or not.”

Calif. GOP Gubernatorial Hopeful Spends Week On Fresno Streets

Calif. GOP Gubernatorial Hopeful Spends Week On Fresno Streets

By John Ellis, The Fresno Bee

FRESNO, Calif. — On July 21, Republican gubernatorial hopeful Neel Kashkari stepped off a bus in downtown Fresno with $40 in his pocket and planned to spend the next week job hunting while living on the streets.

His campaign project went public Thursday, with a professional video of his Fresno experience posted on his website and a commentary published in The Wall Street Journal.

The 10-minute YouTube video shows Kashkari sleeping on a bench in Courthouse Park and on some bricks in Civic Center Square. It shows the multi-millionaire being rousted by security officials while sleeping in a parking garage.

All the while, he walks around downtown — past Club One Casino and the “Welcome to the Mural District” sign — asking about work and finding none.

“I came to Fresno expecting to find a job and take care of myself,” Kashkari says in the video. “It’s been a week and I’ve found nothing. I’ve run out of money and had to turn to the homeless shelter for food.”

The point, Kashkari said in an interview with The Fresno Bee Thursday, was to show that the economic recovery touted by Gov. Jerry Brown has not reached many parts of the state. Fresno, he said, best illustrated his point. It’s the kind of publicity that Fresno leaders would rather not have.

Asked if Kashkari should have chosen another city for his project, Al Smith, who runs the Greater Fresno Area Chamber of Commerce, said “I wish he would have. We don’t need any help from him in that department.”

Like Kashkari, Fresno Mayor Ashley Swearengin also is running for statewide office. Swearengin has been running her controller campaign against Democrat Betty Yee on a platform of turning Fresno around and leading it out of the biggest economic downturn since the Great Depression.

“A little bit of a mixed message, isn’t it?” said Tom Holyoke, a Fresno State political science professor.

But, he added, “when you desperately need (media) attention, you do these sort of things.”

Polls show Kashkari well behind Brown in both fundraising and in voter support. The video, some political experts said, got Kashkari more media attention than a week’s worth of paid television commercials in all of California’s major media markets.

Kashkari said his campaign has “talked about poverty since day one,” an a month ago the idea was hatched to have him spend some time as a homeless job hunter as a way to highlight both homelessness and joblessness.

The rule would be $40 and no more, not even a credit card, Kashkari said.

But why Fresno?

“The Central Valley gets overlooked a lot by politicians,” he said. “We wanted to go somewhere in the Central Valley. Fresno has the highest unemployment rate of any big city in California.”

He said it also has been hit hard by the state’s drought.

So he boarded a bus in Los Angeles — a city with its own homeless challenges — and rode north to Fresno. At the end of a week, he was still jobless and found himself having to eat and shower at the Poverello House.

There are certainly jobs to be had in Fresno. The Fresno Bee‘s online classified ad postings and Craigslist together featured more than 100 job possibilities on Thursday. In some parts of Fresno outside downtown, help wanted signs are up.

But Kashkari had no resume. He only once ventured more than a short walk away from the heart of downtown. Instead, he mostly popped into stores unannounced, saying he was new in town and asking for work.

“Hey, I just got into town and I’m looking for work,” he says at one point in the video. “Are you guys hiring? Is anyone around here hiring at all?”

And with only one shower the entire week, he probably didn’t smell too good after a few days.

Kashkari also clearly had a point to make with the video, which focused on the city’s most desperate residents and featured scenes such as food handout lines, rundown homes, and the burned out old Del Monte packing house in Chinatown.

There were no shots of River Park, the Palm Bluffs Corporate Center or homes along the Fort Washington County Club or on the bluffs overlooking the San Joaquin River.

“The solution is simple,” a stubble-faced Kashkari, standing on a downtown Fresno street corner, says toward the end of the video. “It’s jobs. It’s not more welfare. It’s not more food stamps. It’s jobs, and we know how to do this. These problems are of our own making. That means they’re within our capacity to solve.”

His solutions: reign in regulations, which will allow businesses to grow and hire more people. Invest in water infrastructure, which will help farmers who in turn will hire more workers
.
It didn’t take long for Fresno County Democratic Party Chair Michael Evans to send out a lengthy written response to the video.

“Let me be clear, the problems Mr. Kashkari outlines here in Fresno are real; however, his ‘solutions’ to those problems are either completely lacking or based on long-discredited trickle-down economic theory that Republicans since the age of Reagan have been pushing,” he wrote.

He pointed out that Kashkari opposes the state’s proposed high-speed rail project, which would start construction in Fresno and “offer much-needed construction jobs and connect the region to our state’s prosperous job hubs like the Bay Area and Southern California.”

Evans mocks Kashkari for concluding that food stamps, welfare, and a higher minimum wage are not the answer.

“That’s an easy thing for a millionaire to say,” Evans wrote.

Photo via WikiCommons

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