We were conned: Big business funded California’s shift to “top-two” primaries

SACRAMENTO — If the Republicans field enough candidates in the June primary to severely split their vote, Green Party gubernatorial candidate Luis Rodriguez could place second and face a run-off with Governor Jerry Brown.
That would be an important step in the battle for a political party of, by, and for the 99 percent — as the one percent changes the rules.
When Californians adopted the state’s “top-two” primary system in the 2010 election, they were confident it would strengthen democracy. That’s what they’d been told.
What they hadn’t been told was that the measure had been bankrolled by some of the state’s biggest corporations, among them Chevron, Walmart, Oracle, Intel, and PG&E.
They probably had not realized that they were voting to ban write-in candidates in the general election.
And only veteran Sacramento watchers were aware that the corporations were covertly funneling their contributions through a political finance committee put together by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, his “California Dream Team.”
In fact, the people of California were being conned into undermining their own democracy and remaking their electoral system to best serve the interests of the richest one percent, the capitalist ruling class.
Under the new system, every candidate of whatever party runs in an “open” primary in June. The top-two vote getters go on the November ballot.
Publicly, supporters of the “top-two” system told voters it would give independent voters a voice in the primaries and give non-traditional parties a better chance to win.
Privately, they sang a different tune: the system would assure that only “moderate” candidates would appear on the November ballot.
“Moderate” means pro-business, pro-corporate, pro-capitalist — the candidates of, by, and for the one percent.
In fact, the top-two primary that the one percent has crafted is eerily similar to the “cross-over” primaries in the South, where voters can vote in either the Republican or Democratic primaries.
In the “Super Tuesday” primary of the 1988 presidential campaign, Republican George H.W. Bush faced Democrat Jesse Jackson in the South, winning racist cross-over votes — and then he used the notoriously racist “Willie Horton” ads to defeat Michael Dukakis in November.
California is more and more taking on aspects of the South. When the cost of living is taken into account, for instance, it has the highest level of poverty in the country, nearly 25 percent – and the 99 percent is restless.
Historically, Californian’s look first to the ballot box to make change. Now corporate California is using sleight-of-hand to erode that possibility. Now the same forces that engineered the top-two system are talking about ending California’s ballot initiatives.
The one percenters deeply fear that in a true democracy, candidates of, by, and for the 99 percent would win — and that such a government might well expand political democracy into economic democracy and run the economy for the good of the 99 percent.
All that can still happen. But, as a first step, it will take building a true, active party of the working class and turning out California’s millions in primary elections — starting this year.