This is, it could be said, Californians' summer of discontent, to wit:
• Unemployment has spiked to 7.3 percent as a recession that began with a meltdown in the housing industry spreads to other sectors, especially retail.
• Although tens of thousands of Californians have undergone foreclosure on their homes, many thousands more still face that prospect. Home values continue to tumble.
• Sharp jumps in fuel and food prices have inflated the cost of living. The Center for the Continuing Study of the California Economy says its "misery index," a combination of unemployment and inflation rates, is the highest it's been in 15 years.
• The economic slump has worsened a seemingly perpetual state budget crisis. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and legislators are locked into an impenetrable stalemate on how to close a deficit estimated at $15.2 billion.
• The deadline for placing measures on the November ballot has passed and elements of any budget deal would require voter approval. That means politicians would have to stretch the deadline, if they can, or call an expensive special election for later in the fall.
• The deficit estimate doesn't include the $8 billion that J. Clark Kelso, a receiver appointed by a federal judge, is demanding from the state to improve health care in the state's 170,000-inmate prison system.
• While one federal judge is now running prison health care, other judges are weighing whether to assume effective control over the remainder of the prison system and begin ordering inmate releases because of severe overcrowding.
• Meanwhile, still another federal judge has, in essence, seized control of the state's water system, ruling that continued exports from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta are illegally damaging fish populations. Even so, the governor, legislators and myriad water interests are continuing a decades-long deadlock over water policy, including how to repair the Delta's ecostructure.
• Although there's been some progress, fewer than half of California's school children, it was reported this month, are considered proficient in math and English skills. But the budget crisis has blocked Schwarzenegger's plans to make 2008 the "year of education" in which the state's persistent shortcomings in academic performance would be addressed.
• To add another dash of bad news, a Nevada court has found that the state of California owes a technology inventor nearly $400 million because auditors harassed him over a tax bill he didn't owe in the first place.
Is it any wonder that, as a Public Policy Institute of California survey found in May, Californians are a very unhappy lot these days, especially with the quality of their officeholders, with just 24 percent saying the state is headed in the right direction?
Or that the Bay Area Council, a civic-business coalition, is calling for a constitutional convention to address California's chronic political dysfunction?
Call The Bee's Dan Walters, (916) 321-1195. Back columns, www.sacbee.com/walters.
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