Business Council’s Blueprint for OC
Thirty years ago, there was a billboard on the freeway that described Orange County as “The California Promise.”
Three decades later, it is clear that this promise has been kept. No other region in California has been able to duplicate Orange County’s special blend of economics, educational institutions, the arts, lifestyle, diversity and entrepreneurial spirit. But new challenges face us.
The current energy crisis is pervasive. It threatens to derail economic opportunities in every community, every business and touch every resident of Orange County.
Since late last year, the Orange County Business Council and its partners have turned this challenge into a rallying cry for the entire Orange County business community. Our united voice about the effect on so-called “interruptible customers” was heard. After more than 10,000 Business Council e-mails, full-page advertisements in local publications and countless hours working the phones by our staff, the Public Utilities Commission agreed that interruptible customers would no longer face the penalties that threatened to put many of our Orange County companies out of business.
Other challenges include:
—Workforce development. The strength and viability of our economy depends on our ability to have an educated and highly trained workforce.
—Affordable housing. Orange County families must have the opportunity not only to find well-paying jobs, but also to find adequate housing at affordable prices near those jobs. The Orange County Business Council is playing a key role by establishing the Orange County Affordable Home Ownership Alliance. This alliance brings together civic and business leaders to develop solutions that increase the availability and supply of quality affordable housing for Orange County’s working families.
—Diversity. California is the home to 1 million minority-owned businesses, one-third of all such businesses in the entire U.S. The lion’s share of these companies are in Southern California, and Orange County is at the very epicenter. The challenge for all of us is finding effective ways to develop this incremental source of economic prosperity by helping these ethnically diverse companies expand outside their local communities.
—Transportation infrastructure. Transportation is a foundation on which Orange County’s continued prosperity will be built, balanced by the legitimate concerns of all our residents.
Orange County businesses, community organizations and local officials can and must work together to address these issues head-on today.
Peter P. Case (Case is chairman of the Orange County Business Council and senior district vice president for Merrill Lynch)
Winfire’s Demise
I was extremely disappointed to see that the Winfire Inc. bankruptcy earned a paltry two lines in the Executive Summary of your March 5 edition.
I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that the paper would want to bury the impending bankruptcy of the OCBJ “poster children,” after having subjected your readership to pages and pages of inflated hype over the past year.
Christian Conrad, Transpac Technology Inc. Aliso Viejo
Debating Campaign Finance Reform
Over the past 10 years, wealthy contributors have increasingly taken advantage of loopholes in our federal campaign laws to donate enormous amounts of unregulated “soft money” to political parties. Last year alone the Democrats raised $217.9 million and the Republicans raised $239.2 million. The amount of soft money raised during the past presidential election year was about double the amount of soft money raised in 1996 and five times the amount raised in the 1992.
The policies of both the Democratic and Republican parties are skewed toward the needs of the special interests that can afford to donate these enormous amounts of money.
But there is something you can do about it. The proposed McCain-Feingold-Cochran Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2001 will fight soft money abuses in several ways. It will eliminate the unregulated donations of soft money to national political parties, bringing these soft money donations under the same laws that apply to donations to candidates for federal office. It will require the parties to publicly disclose their receipts and disbursements of contributions. It will limit the ability of federal office holders and candidates for federal offices to raise or spend “soft money.” It will cut down on the ability of wealthy donors to buy advertisements for federal office candidates in lieu of direct donations to the candidates. Finally, it will enact a number of other regulations to close loopholes in the existing campaign finance laws.
If you do your part, the McCain-Feingold-Cochran Act will have a fighting chance.
John Oetken, Michael Abney (Oetken and Abney are co-coordinators with Tustin-based Common Cause Orange County)
Sen. John McCain, as a former victim of a North Vietnamese prisoner-of-war camp, certainly knows the meaning of the deprivation of liberty. Yet he is in the forefront of a battle to undermine a fundamental freedom: the freedom of speech. Sen. McCain is again leading the fight to further restrict a citizen’s right to contribute to the campaign of his choice.
Political contributions are inherently a mode of speech,more clearly so than many of the forms of “symbolic speech,” such as nude dancing and the filing of lawsuits, that have previously been protected, because they explicitly entail the expression of ideas.
The alleged goal of campaign finance limits is to end corruption, or even the appearance of it, in the political processes. But the cause of this problem is the vast power that politicians have to impose punishments, or rewards, on companies. The “special interests” contribute to candidates (often on both sides of an election) in order to escape some new controls or to appeal for legislative favors. Drastically reducing government’s power will simultaneously reduce the attempts to make use of that power.
If Sen. McCain succeeds in further restricting the individual’s right to contribute to political campaigns, he will be moving America in the direction of regimes like that of his former captors.
Andrew Lewis, Senior writer Ayn Rand Institute Marina del Rey
