Jerry Brown for Attorney General

Litquake--the West Coast's pre-eminent literary arts festival--kicked off Friday night at San Francisco's Herbst Theater with readings from and by Bay Area writers.

The night marked the 50th anniversary of Allen Ginsberg's reading of the poem "Howl" at the Six Gallery--a legendary event in what subsequently became known as the San Francisco Renaissance

At last night's event, I shared the stage with writers Michael McClure, Armistead Maupin, Amy Tan and actor Peter Coyote for readings that focused on local writers. Naturally, I read an excerpt from one of Jack London's works. He not only lived in Oakland but ran for mayor twice.

In the wake of the awesome damage Hurricane Katrina unleashed on the Gulf Coast this month, the City of Oakland has joined many other communities across the nation in offering emergency personnel, food and supplies to the victims of this disaster.

Oakland rescue workers are already on the ground in the affected areas and have been active in rescue operations. Allen Temple Baptist Church and Acts Full Gospel Church are leading local churches in a sustained effort to aid those left homeless. Bay Area health care professionals have also answered the call for help and are streaming into the Gulf region as needed.

This week I threw a switch that activated California’s largest corporate solar power installation, a system that will provide 80 percent of the energy supply for the FedEx hub at Oakland International Airport.  FedEx’s system, designed by the PowerLight Corporation, will reduce the load on our power grid and is an important step in the struggle for energy independence and greenhouse gas reduction.

In Washington, of course, there is little urgency about either energy efficiency or global warming. Today’s automobile fuel efficiency has not improved in decades, nor has America lessened its dependency on foreign oil. Do the politicians in charge even care that California drivers are now paying 71 cents more per gallon than they were a year ago?

Despite the obvious dangers of foreign oil dependency, the possibility of irreversible climate disruption is even more ominous. Oil dependency can cripple our economy and plunge us into resource wars. Global warming can radically alter weather patterns with catastrophic consequences.

On Friday I attended the inauguration for Antonio Villaraigosa, the new Mayor of Los Angeles. It was a beautiful day. In addition to such luminaries as Jesse Jackson, David Hasselhoff, Warren Christopher and Cardinal Roger Mahoney, thousands of ordinary Angelenos filled out the south lawn of city hall and cheered their new mayor. I had the honor of swearing in the City Controller, Laura Chick.

Mayor Villaraigosa was interrupted several times by applause as he hammered away on his four main themes: crime, schools, traffic and environment.

Undoubtedly, Mayor Villaraigosa will soon hire more cops and persuade the leadership of L.A’s schools to make improvements in the learning environment that now leaves so many behind. Nevertheless, dramatic improvements on both fronts will be held hostage to our national policy of neglect at home in favor of over-extension abroad.

As the Bush presidency winds down, mayors in every major city will have a unique opportunity to increase their presence on the national stage. They directly witness the deteriorating quality of life in urban America and can help re-energize a domestic agenda, emphasizing investments in those places left behind in the grand march of globalization.

With respect to transportation and the environment, much of the solution lies at the state and national levels. Here is where the funds are to support public transit, clean fuels and road improvements we desperately need. Certainly cities can do much on the environmental front. Yet, with China and India building hundreds of new coal plants and Bush denying Global Warming, big changes will have to occur in Washington before we make lasting progress.

So all the best to the new mayor of Los Angeles. May he act locally with great success and join other mayors from throughout the country in a renewed push to recapture at the national level the dreams he articulated so well on the steps of the Los Angeles city hall.   

Fourth day of marriage -- Bliss endures. On June 18th in Oakland's Rotunda Building on City Hall plaza, Anne Gust and I were married in front of 600 friends and well-wishers. Senator Dianne Feinstein officiated.

Recently I paid a visit to the Oakland headquarters of College Track, a nonprofit organization just a block from City Hall that helps high school students prepare for college. The walls of College Track's offices were adorned with colorful college pennants. One hundred and thirty Oakland high school students receive mentoring at this unique and innovative institution. They put in long hours after school, sharpening their academic skills.

I sat down with a group of the students and discussed a wide range of subjects, including standardized tests, the state of Oakland schools, street crime and the merits of the Oakland Military Institute (OMI), a charter school that I started four years ago.

Recently, several well publicized books have made the claim that environmentalism is dead. Not so. The laws of nature don’t change to accommodate right wing politicians or “junk scientists.”

Scientists--at best--craft partial understandings or clever manipulations. That is why good science and all tradition advise humility when attempting to alter God’s creation.

St. Paul counseled “fear and trembling,” while Dr. Pangloss prescribed endless optimism in this “best of all possible worlds.” Despite his fundamentalism, it seems President Bush prefers Voltaire to the Apostle.

Here in Oakland, environmental action is alive. The city has just received the honor of being named one of the top ten green cities in the country. So judges the Green Guide, “the nation’s premier news and information source for green living.”

According to the citation:

“More affordable than its Bay Area neighbor, Oakland benefits from San Francisco’s transport system and bike friendly status, with 23 percent of residents commuting by bike or public transport. The city devotes 11 percent of city land to parks, and shares in Bay Area initiatives for renewable energy. Oakland has its own initiative allowing solar production facilities to waive design review requirements for installation, which has sped up solar energy generation use by the city.”

Oakland will have five megawatts of solar energy going online this year, and the long term plan calls for 100 percent renewable energy by 2050. A green building ordinance –- which will assure environmentally healthy and energy efficient edifices of the future –- goes before the City Council soon. Fifteen percent of the cars in the City’s fleet are alternative fuel vehicles (AFV) and that number is slated to increase.

As an industrial port city, we have our share of problems –- like diesel trucks spewing pollutants as they idle, driving up asthma rates –- and it will take creative solutions to address them. The East Bay recently received low marks for air quality, partly because prevailing winds blow San Francisco’s smog into our faces. 

The president and the president’s men have stuck their heads in the sand when it comes to the environment -- with their federal tax breaks for carbon emitting industries and persistent neglect of renewable energy and end-use efficiencies, such as energy-saving appliances, cars and buildings.

It’s up to local government leaders to carry the vision of a sustainable economy.

Bob Kerrey has ended speculation that he might run for Mayor of New York City. He won’t enter the race, but he seriously considered it. Imagine that - a former Senator and Presidential candidate fighting crime, answering pot hole questions and shepherding developers through Byzantine corridors in the planning department.

Kerrey is smart and, as a former Navy Seal, no stranger to combat. Yet, he would have found mayoring quite different from the protective groves of academe and the stately manners of the Senate. Mayors are at ground zero in the political process.

Those who would never think of traveling to Washington, D.C. or the state capitol think nothing of coming to city hall and voicing their complaints. People who are contented don't show up. So the mood swirling around a mayor gets contentious -- many a mayor never makes it to the second term.

From the vantage point of high office, issues such as crime and jobs tend to be abstract statistics. Mayors deal with the concrete and the specific. You face a specific dead body on a well traveled street or the vacant lot that will soon become a condo tower or the school down the street where half the kids don't graduate. No theory here. Not much comfort from partisan rhetoric. Just hands-on reality with names and faces. Management at the human scale vs. pontification from on high.

In Oakland this week, we broke ground for a Whole Foods store in downtown, near auto row. It will be Whole Foods' largest store west of Texas and the first new major grocery store in this part of Oakland in decades.

For those who debate war and peace and the privatization of social security, this may seem like small potatoes. But it is a big deal. It is what we deal with in the city. And it is here that democracy, "people power," still flourishes.

Neighbors count and they make their voices heard. Higher up on the political food chain, neighbors get submerged into the demographics of market research and mass propaganda.

Kerrey's not taking the plunge, but there is always Bill Clinton. He would have a ball as mayor.

Day Two of the convention, and it's a real bash – on the Governor. Arnold has managed to unite the far-flung tribes of the California Democratic Party.

Howard Dean fired up the troops tonight. He spoke about moral values and talking in a language that ordinary Americans could understand. The audience went wild.

There is something strange, though, in this rush to “morals.”

Morals represent tradition and custom. In this brave new century, tradition and custom are replaced by fashion and hype. The past is for reactionaries, we are told. Science, technology and the ever-expanding GDP will solve our problems. Yet, no society can hang together without a proper balance between stability, respect for the old ways and openness to the new. In our time—2005—we are way out of balance. Question: who gets it?  

I’ve been absent from the blogosphere, but for a good cause. I got engaged and will be married on the steps of City Hall in June. I also went to Mexico—just south of the border—for R&R.

Much has happened since I last posted. Terri Schiavo died and Tom Delay is calling for retribution against the judges who didn’t stop it. Even his own Republicans are wincing and he has started to backtrack. Arash Sigarchi – the Iranian blogger sentenced to fourteen years in prison for criticizing his country’s leaders – has been freed on bail. The Dow Jones has fallen in the tank while gas prices are soaring.

Technorati reports one billion links, though that figure may be suspect due to the amount of dead links in cyberspace. I promise you that my blog won’t be one of them.

I am writing this from the press office in the Los Angeles Convention Center, where California Democrats have gathered for their annual convention. The Party faithful smell blood as our Republican governor runs into the buzz saw of teachers, nurses, prison guards and leaders of the AFL-CIO.

I am here seeking support for my candidacy for state attorney general. Next to the governor, this is the top executive job in the state. As governor, I signed--as every governor does--10,000 new laws. If elected, I will be in a position to interpret and enforce these laws.

Now more than ever, what is needed is balance and life experience in the face of government running amok, making minute and invasive laws about everything. Isn’t it curious that the same solutions continue to chase the same problems?

More tomorrow from the convention.