California’s once-and-perhaps-future governor, Jerry Brown, is widely viewed as the most ambidextrous of politicians – a man of the Left who nonetheless tacks Right as often as necessary to assure his continued political future. Political junkies still marvel at how then-Governor Brown, an ardent foe of property-tax-limiting Proposition 13, instantly embraced the measure after its 1978 passage, or how, since being mayor of Oakland, he copped a law-and-order image that just happened to coincide with his ambition to be the state’s top cop.

Most recently, we’ve watched as Attorney General Brown – the man who signed the 1977 law that gave public-sector unions the right to collective bargaining and thus paved the way for the massive looting of treasuries by public employees – has taken a high-profile position with regards to the city of Bell. “The California attorney general’s office announced Monday that it had issued a new round of subpoenas to force nine current and former Bell officials to give depositions and to turn over federal and state income tax returns,” according to a Los Angeles Times report. “Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown is also demanding personal records relating to pay and pension benefits, gifts the officials have received, and documents pertaining to bank accounts and business interests.”

This is Brown to a tee – despite his history as a virtual subsidiary of Government Union Inc., and his reliance on union independent expenditures to win him the governorship in November, he is able to use his political powers to catch the populist backlash against the increasingly publicized instances of public-sector plundering. This no doubt is giving fits to the at-times hapless GOP nominee, former eBay executive and billionaire Meg Whitman. Whitman had been calling for pension reform, but has been so careful in her proposals – i.e., exempting public safety officials from reform, and thereby putting the bulk of the problem off the table – that she allowed Brown to essentially outflank her on the Right. Even some ardent pension reformers wonder whether Brown might be able to achieve more than Whitman on the pension reform front given his ideological flexibility and Whitman’s risk-averse behavior.

Now Whitman is wisely countering with radio spots and a mailer pointing to Brown’s own pay and perk scandal under his watch in Oakland, and fortunately she has the cash to respond quickly to Brown’s taxpayer-funded bully pulpit at the Department of Justice. The Whitman campaign quotes from writer Heather MacDonald: “Despite repeated promises to keep salaries of top city employees under control, the number of city employees earning more than $100,000 has risen 47.5 percent in the past two years. Perhaps more startling is the astronomical increase – 740 percent – between 2003-04 and 2005-06 in the number of city employees earning more than $200,000.” This is a good rebuttal, but Brown has essentially muted his weakness on this issue by going after the loathsome Bell ex-city manager, Robert Rizzo, and the city’s cast of alleged crooks and miscreants. Even I’m glad to see him take on the scoundrels, regardless of the political shamelessness of his quest.

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Every successful revolutionary movement starts with an act of defiance – as ordinary people stand up against the tyrants who are ruling them. The Boston Tea Party of 1773 is an iconic example, as colonists dumped a shipload of tea into the harbor rather than acknowledge the right of the British Parliament to tax it. The tea party, of course, helped spark the American Revolution as its message of “no taxation without representation” gave voice to deeply held resentments throughout the American colonies.

The media have made much ado about the political Tea parties, started in 2009, that have had some level of success in protesting the government expansions under the Obama administration. Unfortunately, that movement – for all its many good points and despite the clarity of its Taxed Enough Already moniker – represents a mish-mash of ideas and has been plagued by factional disputes. The most successful mini-revolutions take place when the People are unified around a simple and clearly understood theme.

One of the best recent representations of that old defiant spirit can be found in the past couple of weeks in the Los Angeles suburb of Bell, a poor mostly Latino city of about 37,000, where about 2,000 city residents showed up and forced the resignation of worthless city officials after they learned about the way they had enriched themselves at the expense of city taxpayers. As one Bell resident said after a council member gave a self-serving justification of her $100,000 part-time salary (council members typically earn about $8,000 a year): “You were a crook yesterday, you’re a crook today, and you’ll be a crook tomorrow.”

That’s a simple idea most of us can rally around! The crooks are ripping us off.

The Bell situation garnered national attention because of the level of plundering. A city manager, Robert Rizzo, earned $787,000 a year from the impoverished burb – a place that has been cutting services and where 10 percent of the budget went to Rizzo, Police Chief Randy Adams ($457,000) and Assistant City Manager Angela Spaccia ($357,000).

Rizzo – who lives in fancy digs in Huntington Beach and has a horse farm in Washington state – boasted that he could have easily earned as much in the private sector, which is a load of nonsense and something that all city managers claim. Yet these managers, who typically make nearly $300,000 a year in California, manage basic city tasks in a bureaucratic monopoly environment. They do not run the equivalent of private, competitive firms.

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Before Tuesday’s elections, I wrote about a nasty union battle in the heart of conservative Orange County, Calif.

The good news: The unions might have a nearly endless source of cash in the form of employee dues, but they don’t win every battle. On Tuesday, in an election that holds nationwide lessons, a pension-reforming candidate for OC supervisor withstood a million-dollar-plus union onslaught and lived to tell about it. A county Republican Party chairman, put to the test over his “manifesto” to fellow GOP officials, is now taking his lessons to other counties.

In January, Chairman Scott Baugh berated Republicans who side with union benefit-enhancement deals and declared that no GOP candidate for office would receive party support if the candidate did not eschew union support. OC GOP support is a big deal in that still-overwhelmingly Republican county.

The showdown came this week in a contest to replace a supervisor, Chris Norby, who went on to the state Assembly. Fullerton Councilman Shawn Nelson took party chairman Scott Baugh’s pledge to refuse union funds seriously as he sought election to the powerful county board. Nelson was named the county GOP Elected Official of the Year after he blew the whistle on a retroactive pension deal in his city. He displayed the courage Baugh said he is seeking in Republican elected officials.

Nelson’s top opponent, Anaheim Councilman Harry Sidhu comes from the go-along, get-along wing of the party. He signed the “no union support” deal, but then he sat back and said nothing as the county’s major public employee unions dropped upwards of a million dollars on his behalf – including for vile smear ads against Nelson, depicting him as a friend of child molesters because his law firm does criminal defense work. Sidhu also promised that, as supervisor, he would drop a county lawsuit challenging the retroactive portion of a past pension increase.  It was almost unbelievable the number of mailers and TV and radio ads the unions paid for – something bordering on overkill for this type of county race.

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“Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction,” said German psychologist Erich Fromm. Whatever greed does to one’s psyche, it does even worse things to public budgets. California, sinking amidst a structural $19 billion deficit and facing as much as one-half-trillion-dollars in pension debt, is paying the price for years of legislators giving away the store to public employee unions.

Yet even as unlikely sources (former Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, Treasurer Bill Lockyer and California Public Employees’ Retirement System chief actuary Ron Seeling) recognize the grave threat outrageous pension deals pose to the state’s long-term fiscal health, the state’s unions and Democratic leaders continue to operate as if there is no problem. The public seems increasingly agitated by the injustice of a situation that requires private sector workers to work late into life to pay the higher taxes needed so that public sector workers can retire in their early 50s with six-figure, cost-of-living-adjusted deals. But to the politicians, the unions still rule.

In my old haunts of Orange County, Calif., a particularly nasty race for the Board of Supervisors has been unfolding in the past month. On June 8, voters in that heavily Republican and generally anti-union county will fill the slot of a supervisor who has since been elected to the state Assembly.

Back in January, party leader Scott Baugh threw down the gauntlet after watching one Republican after another sell out to the state’s unions. In what has been referred to as the Baugh Manifesto, Baugh slammed Republicans for their role in expanding debt. He promised to use the party to hold Republicans accountable. He called for the party to do more than just endorse those with an “R” after their name. He made two specific demarcations: No Republican will get party support without backing a now-dead Paycheck Protection Initiative, which limits the ability of unions to use dues for political purposes. And no Republican will get party support “who receives contributions from public employee unions.”

It was tough stuff and the party has stuck to these demands.

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