Prop 50 silences rural California
It was designed to.
California is about to vote on Proposition 50, which will redraw U.S. House maps and dilute what little voice rural residents have in the governance of the Golden State. The bill is projected to pass. Gavin Newsom is taking a victory lap, believing his ascendancy sealed.
As a journalist and documentary filmmaker, I’ve interviewed dozens of producers in the state. The consistent theme: They feel silenced. Not ignored or neglected. Silenced, by a government that has not cared about them (at best) or sought their destruction, for decades.
Rural California is more than a pastoral concept. California produces more food than any other state in America. Out of sight from the dull stretch of interstate highway connecting San Francisco and L.A., in that oceanic range of nothing, the nation’s food grows.
They were here before the movie industry, before the tech boom. Inherent to California’s ethos is the gold rush mentality that kept the most extreme pioneers moving West until they ran out of land.
Many an American dream was born in that fertile San Joaquin Valley. Families from the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Mexico, South America, Japan, brought their expertise to the Central Valley, earned their stripes in the soil, fed the growing country. In the dark north, ranchers and dairymen and miners and loggers found lush grassland, minerals, the world’s most extreme timber, abundant fisheries, and built the West. In the hot south, they found oil, fueling its progress.
The food and lumber and minerals extracted from these rural districts built the great California cities. Those cities began to change the state. Today’s California resembles a medieval feudal estate, where the serfs provide everything necessary for life, and nobles hold all the power over their futures. While imagining itself progressive, California is a vassal state in which the mega-rich and corrupt rely on the blue collar working for every item needed for survival—an unseen caste they also blame for many woes and social evils.
In a now almost binary political landscape, the working and rural in production industries vote red and urban and white collar lean blue. Gavin Newsom, millionaire vineyard owner and son of a Getty family associate, has teased his presidential ambitions. He wants nothing more than to be seen as the next votive-candle champion against Donald Trump.
When Texas redistricted after a 5th Circuit ruling that found four of its coalition districts unconstitutional, Newsom seized the opportunity to combat “gerrymandering” before a national audience. Proposition 50 would spend hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to eliminate the state’s independent districting committee, replaced with partisan, politician-drawn lines that would nudge 5 seats toward Democrats. For Gavin, erasing California’s rural districts was less than a small price to pay. It was nothing at all.
His reimagined District 2 loops isolated, mountainous Modoc County—with its wolves and cattle ranchers and loggers—and a long strip of wealthy coastline, drowning undesirable, deplorable votes in the wine and money of Marin County.
The current district is represented by Doug LaMalfa, a farmer himself and the one person who fought for the region’s water and electricity when Sacramento decided the Klamath Dams must come down for climate and salmon. If Prop 50 passes, he will most likely lose to Jared Huffman, a former environmental attorney pushing for dam removals in rural, poor Lake County.
Citizens of Lake and Sonoma and Mendocino counties oppose dam removals. Pulling down the PG&E-owned dams will cut water for some 600,000 residents. But Jared’s district also includes Marin County, and those are the only votes he needs.
In Marin County, ranchers worry their land will be flooded for a dam to replace the doomed Potter Valley Project. They know they are vulnerable, because Jared only courts the votes of the wealthy, well-padded, tech elite of Marin. The only farmers he can stomach are hobbyist viniculturists. He rarely travels as far north as Mendocino County. His new district will be even more remote, even farther north. Deep into the part of the state that is not so good for growing grapes, where cows outnumber people. Not Jared’s kind of place. His new District 2 includes land thrown into his hands for convenience. Whatever backroom the Proposition 50 maps were drawn in, the wide circle drawn around Modoc County represents a part of the state forever disposable to politicians. In the game of getting Gavin nominated, shutting up rural voices, removing representative democracy from the California working class, is just another move on the board.
The same story will be repeated in the Central Valley, in the blue collar South. Seasoned, local representatives ousted, counties consolidated under the power and influence of California Democrats who played the game, kissed the rings, have the right number of Pelosi phone numbers saved.
To Sacramento, and to presidential-hopeful Gavin Newsom, rural California is an inconvenience to be carved through with a bullet train. It is a piece of collateral to appease the climate conscious—better the Potter Valley Project than Hetch Hetchy. Rural lives are a bargaining chip to excise more funds and favors from utility companies in the aftermath of another deadly fire. Already this session, Newsom vetoed a bill that would increase pay for wildland firefighters, and signed a bill to protect utility companies from fire liability. PG&E is his second-highest donor, a major backer of Newsom’s wife’s gender identity non-profit, a listed producer on her films.
After the Paradise fire, in which 85 lives were lost and PG&E pled guilty to manslaughter on 84 of those counts, there was a closed-door meeting with Newsom staffers, attorneys, and PG&E reps. Secret, no-notes meetings like this are illegal. No one knows what was said, but the rumor in rural California is that a quid pro quo was sealed: the Potter Valley Project for a bailout bill. Soon thereafter, the bailout bill was written—by former PG&E attorneys—and PG&E announced its intention to rip out the Potter Valley dams. In an email statement, Jared Huffman’s office clarified that ratepayers would cover the cost of dam removal (estimated at some $500 million), not PG&E.
Forget it America, this is Chinatown.
Sadly I feel that Newscum is going to rig this election (the voting machines and the count) in his favor like all the other elections that have happened since he became the Governor of Commifornia. I hope this isn’t the case, but the Republican Party has been so ineffectual over the past 20 plus years here in CA. Even though apparently 41% of elegible age voters here are registered Republicans. (Who many don’t vote.) 🥹😟
Thank you, Ms Covello, for this eyes-wide-open and candid assessment.
As you observe, "In the game of getting Gavin nominated, shutting up rural voices, removing representative democracy from the California working class, is just another move on the board."
US Congressman Huffman does, by all actions he chooses, appear both to affirm and actively get behind this move in the political game, while continuing to be both uninformed about and lazily disdainful of the reality of growing food on real farms.
Newsom's and Huffman's perspectives on farmers, as well as other, in fact most of, working America's people, bear not any resemblance to working people we work with and know as family, as friends, and as co-workers. Newsom's and Huffman's understanding of working Americans and their necessary and diverse forms of productive work are at best textbook chapter gloss or casual slogans. To these two politicians, working people are either voting for them and donating to their campaigns and causes or are not voting for them and thus are political write-offs, expendables.
Their level of removal from the realities of working and living and building more secure and more democratic communities is dangerous, as are Trumpism and MAGA-ism, to constitutional rule of law self-governance. We the people are also the people who do most of the necessary work, which fact needs to stand before the rule of law on the same constitutional footing as those who do other work, productive in other ways that earn merit or are inherent in human communities and political societies. These two guys miss the point because they haven't a real world basis of experience to be connected, day in and day out, with the lives and work of most [99 out of 100 of] the people around them.
These guys have chosen a move that is the category of political game move that American constitutional rule of law governance cannot ever afford; it is the category of move that must always be avoided; the consequences are not ever temporary and politically remedial. The consequences include consequences that breed suspicion and resentment and that create political faction and political extremism.
So when they silence or muffle our voices in the political sphere of community living and self-governance, they distort the human and humanly real world that is really there to be benefited by constitutional self-governing people.
I would argue that ordinary community relationships among workers representing many different areas of work and many generations of work-produced community benefits both enliven and intelligently inform by experience are the relationships that help us bring people who know how to care and to value honest hard work into political office.
It is hard work, work to be done carefully and publicly, to find willing candidates from among honest hard-working Americans, who are willing to give their sincere and honest best effort when elected to public office. That's a responsibility we must accept and become involved in now.