New America in California: Publications, Events and More

Newly revised economic data vividly illustrate the difficulty of the choices confronting California legislators as they try to close the state's $35-billion budget deficit. Not only has the current recession claimed many more jobs than previously estimated, but the state's private sector, the major source of tax revenue, is shrinking at an alarming rate.

Since March 2001, when the downturn began, California has lost a net 370,000 private-sector jobs. That's 75% of the loss in the early 1990s recession, regarded… more

Few Californians seem aware of the state's disturbing economic circumstances. The economy is losing well-paying blue-collar and middle-class jobs at an astounding rate, especially in the Bay Area. Meanwhile, growth is increasingly concentrated in a handful of outlying counties. As a result, California's economy is fragmenting as never before between slow-growth, politically powerful population centers and pro-growth, politically marginal counties that surround urban cores. And California's leaders seem indifferent.

Since January 2001, the state has officially lost a… more

On a bright California day last April, Arnold Schwarzenegger was out of character. Instead of shooting up bad guys on a movie set, he was driving to the Los Angeles county clerk's office in a truck loaded with petitions bearing 750,000 signatures in support of a ballot initiative to fund California after-school programs, known as the After School Education and Safety Act. The proposal, spearheaded by Schwarzenegger, would offer a matching grant to every public elementary, middle, and junior high… more

Los Angeles is the only big city built on the promise of the suburban dream. Unlike New York, where migrants move to be part of a continuing civic enterprise, the genius and fundamental weakness of Los Angeles is that you rarely feel obliged to be part of anything. Nothing short of cataclysmic events like riots, earthquakes or a Lakers championship can ignite a strong sense of civic unity.

Southern California's appeal has always been its temperate weather and the allure… more

Even as the Enron and Global Crossing bankruptcies further expose the spectacular waste fostered by the 1990s' Information Age bubble, an army of lobbyists in Washington is fighting to secure government support for broadband communications, the "next wave" of the "new economy." Subsidizing an ultra-fast Internet, it's said, will energize everything, from the stock market to our democracy itself. But if the unbalanced, profligate economy of the '90s has taught us anything, it should be the danger of granting any… more

For more than two decades, a mural on the wall of a public housing project in East Los Angeles has been exhorting the neighborhood's mostly Mexican-American residents to stop thinking of themselves as members of a minority group. "We are NOT a minority!" the image of a finger-wagging revolutionary declares.

After a generation of mass migration, this slogan is becoming a statistical reality in Los Angeles and other areas across the Southwest. Last week, the Census Bureau announced there are more… more

One sunny day in June of 1979, President Jimmy Carter installed solar water heaters on the roof of the White House. This symbolic act would mark the height of a mini-boom in solar energy in the U.S. It was accompanied by the creation of the Solar Energy Research Institute (now the National Renewable Energy Laboratory), the introduction of incentives and subsidies for renewable energy, and a major call for energy independence -- what Carter called "the moral equivalent of war."… more

There is always something new out of California. Watch out for an initiative on the state ballot in March 2002 that will take the first step towards barring the identification of Americans by race. It could overturn, in time, the whole apparatus by which government delivers social policy. It could mark the start of the end of "hyphenated Americans": those who call themselves African-American, native-American, Chinese-American and so on. A new generation is arriving that may spurn the definitions their… more

While visiting Ellis Island at the turn of the 20th century, Henry James wondered how the sweeping tide of immigrants would ultimately affect… more

In June, President Bill Clinton ventured onto George W. Bush's Texas turf in the hopes of cutting into the governor's Latino support. He appealed to Mexican American … more

Reports that 88% of California's 6,700 elementary, middle and high schools failed to meet the state's Academic Performance Index (API) goals stirred new calls for reform.… more

Anyone who has followed America's culture wars of the past few decades can be excused for thinking that the process of assimilation is a thing of the past. Right-wing nativists have been chanting their mantra that contemporary immigrants are actively resisting mainstream culture and will never integrate. Left-wing multiculturalists and ethnic nationalists… more