AFT 1493 San Mateo Community CollegeBacks Oil Extraction Tax Initiative To Fund Education

AFT 1493 Backs Oil Extraction Tax Initiative To Fund Education

Prop 1481, The Oil Extraction Tax To Fund Public Education
by Rodger Scott, AFT 2121

To put Prop 1481, the Oil Extraction Tax To Fund Public Education, on the ballot, volunteers throughout the state will have to collect 504,760 valid signatures of registered California voters by September 30. The initiative, which would impose a 15% tax on each barrel of oil extracted in California, is estimated to raise $3 to $3.5 billion annually to fund the 4 sectors of public education: 30% to K-12, 48% to Community Colleges, 11% to CSU and 11% to UC. Over 260,000 petitions have been printed and around 85% of the petitions (each has space for 5 signatures) are in the field. Two weeks ago when many schools were just beginning the fall semester, Lead Proponent Peter Mathews, a Cypress College political science instructor, estimated that volunteers throughout the state had collected about 60,000 signatures. Now that figure is much higher.

If we succeed in qualifying the initiative, the people of California will have an opportunity to vote their solidarity with and support for the 9 million public school students in Kindergarten through the University of California. The students in higher education, especially the 2.7 community college students, are leading this effort to improve a once great educational system that a dysfunctional legislature has battered and neglected. Around 15 years ago a journalist described the California Legislature as the Yahoo Capital of the World. That title resonates even more now since two-thirds of the legislators have yet to discover any connection between equitable taxation and the common good. A quality public education system will always be the adversary of politicians who oppose teaching evolution in the public schools but have no vocal or material opposition to the evolution of our country from a democracy to an oligarchy. In fact, their tax-phobic legislation has widened the gap between the super-rich and the rest of us.

The excessive oil company profits in the only major oil-producing state that has no oil extraction tax combined with massive cuts in classes and services, faculty and staff layoffs, and recent increases in tuition and fees (19% for UC students, 23% for CSU students and 38% for Community College students) have angered and energized the students, who are the vanguard of this historic grass-roots movement; however, faculty, staff and administrators throughout the state have joined them. San Francisco City College Student Trustee Jeffrey Fang and Board of Trustees President John Rizzo submitted a resolution to endorse Prop.1481, which the Board of Trustees passed unanimously at the Aug. 27 meeting. San Francisco City College student Dora Palacios, got 15 signatures within an hour after a Prop 1481 committee meeting ended. Barbara Shaw, an ESL instructor at the Mission Campus, and her dog Puck got over 50 signatures sitting in front of a grocery store in San Francisco’s Mission District. Foothill-De Anza Community College District Student Trustee Emily Kinner drove from Long Beach to Cupertino on Labor Day to deliver 6 boxes of petitions, and 60 T-shirts with the text

TAX OIL TO FUND EDUCATION

Sign the Petition for Prop 1481

and a faculty member at San Mateo College telephoned a Bay Area coordinator and said: “The students are circulating petitions all over the campus.”

The educational community and our allies expect continuing contributions of money, signature-gathering efforts, endorsements, and help shaping a comprehensive, strategic cyber campaign. The goal of San Francisco is 100,000 signatures. AFT 2121, the San Francisco Labor Council, and the San Francisco City College Board of Trustees have led their counterparts throughout the state in endorsing the initiative. And one of the first AFT Locals to join the cause was the San Mateo Community College Federation of Teachers, AFT Local 1493. If the initiative gets on the ballot, there's a good chance that the popular support for the Oil Extraction Tax (that's so long overdue) will withstand the multi-million dollar media campaign by the oil companies and their right-wing billionaire allies. We hope they’ll be almost as successful as Meg Whitman was in her campaign to become the CEO of California.

Economic justice, allegiance to the common good, and functional democratic institutions are certainly under siege but the people can still prevail, as William Faulkner, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Cesar Chavez reminded us. For volunteers to get a statewide initiative on the ballot is unprecedented but so is the righteous anger--and the enlightened self-interest of 3 million students in public higher education. They and their allies see a connection between the top 2% of the population controlling two-thirds of our nation’s wealth at a time when students fortunate enough to get a bachelor’s degree end up owing on average $22,900 because the tax base for education and other human services inevitably erodes when the richest individuals and corporations aren’t patriotic enough to pay their fair share of taxes. Passing the oil extraction tax to fund public education is part of the broader struggle for economic justice that includes reforming an inequitable tax system, creating a Single Payer Health Care System, taxing fairly the top 1%, stopping the wars and occupation and bringing the war dollars home to fund human services. This struggle can also be a living civics lesson: Neither a state nor a nation can be “indivisible with liberty and justice for all” unless political democracy and economic democracy are also “indivisible.”

http://www.rescueeducationcalifornia.org