"There's a promising future ahead for this crop," says Dan Flynn, head of the Olive Research Center at UC-Davis. "With the growth in olive plantings, California could emerge as a world leader in a relatively short period of time. It might take 20 years, but that's how long it took with the other crops."

The "other crops" are almonds and canning tomatoes, once the domain of Spain and Italy but now controlled by California growers, who have the economic advantage of producing on large-scale farms.

California's oil boom results from a convergence of events that coincided with the new plantings: a chronic drought prompting farmers to seek water-sipping crops, consumers' shift toward fresh foods, their focus on heart-healthy oils, and recent findings that some oil imported as "extra virgin" might be of a lesser quality -- if it's olive oil at all.

"A lot of people believe that what is being sold as 'extra virgin olive oil' doesn't make the grade," says Flynn. A lack of government regulators allows importers to take advantage of Americans' less-discerning palates, he says.

"The best oil stays in Europe," says Claude S. Weiller of California Olive Ranch, "because Europeans, who use a lot more oil per capita than we do, are more demanding."

Californians have grown olives since the mission padres planted them along their route north. Boutique crushers create limited amounts of prized oil from century-old trees, and Lindsay near Fresno is the capital of the black canned olive market. But until the past decade, there hasn't been a move to build the oil equivalent of wine's Gallo to satisfy the U.S. mass-market demand.

"Everyone makes it the boutique way and it doesn't scale," Weiller says. "They make great oil, but not great oil available to 300 million Americans, so the industry has been kind of stuck."

In 2003, planting took off after years of tests showed hedgerows that cram 600 trees to an acre, instead of 150, produce olives just as flavorful. In 2007, the value of olives in California increased by 378 percent over 2006, and olives jumped from 66 to 43 on the list of California's top 400 commodities.

Of the three Central Valley processors planting hedgerows, the largest is California Olive Ranch, with headquarters in Oroville and a 1 million gallon crushing plant here in Artois.

In each of the past three years, the company, with 10,000 acres and counting, has doubled its production. This month food lovers' esteemed Cook's Illustrated magazine rated their "nutty, fruity" oil, which sells in half-liter bottles online for $13.97, just a fraction of a point under their test-kitchen favorite Columela from Spain, which retails for $22.95 at Sur la Table.

The company's oils are distributed in California, but officials hope for nationwide distribution as production ramps up.

"Over time, we will be producing oil at a cost lower than our competitors," says Weiller, vice president of sales and marketing. "If they don't change their production methods, we have a leg up. If they do, we have a three-to-four year advantage."

 

That would be the "Wall-E" dystopian future, folks. Nearly 20 percent of California's electricity consumed by couch potatoes watching ESPN's SportsCenter, "So You Think You Can Dance," and Hannah Montana reruns. I lust after a sweet 42-inch flat-screen as much as any other red-blooded consumer, but that certainly seems extravagant to me. Wasteful, even. And probably unnecessary, given the extraordinary gains in energy efficiency manufacturers were able to achieve with refrigerators, washing machines, and dishwashers after California told them to tighten up their act.

But don't try telling that to an industry flack.

"Television manufacturers will see an increase in the cost of compliance due to increased research and development, component sourcing, design and development," wrote Tim Brison, a senior vice president for Sony Electronics, in a Nov. 2 letter to the commission...

"The consumer electronics industry and California consumers bear the burden of the regulations so PG&E can meet its energy milestones," [said Jason Oxman, a senior vice president with the Consumer Electronics Association.]

Evil California! The energy commissars are coming to take your TV away! Next thing you know, we'll be back to black-and-white and forced to eat vacuum tubes with our broccoli. Oh the ignominy. First they demonize our SUVs and now they're shaming us for our wasteful television habits!

Prediction: Ten years from now, all the televisions sold in the United States will be vastly more energy efficient than they are now, and no one will give it a second thought. We'll also have avoided building a few new power plants just to maintain our sedentary life-styles.

Still, it does seem a stretch to think that California might elect a senator who sympathizes with the Birthers next year. But it's not out of the realm of possibility.

The Washington Independent's David Weigel has a good profile today of Assemblyman Chuck DeVore, who's running as the conservative candidate in the Republican primary next year, providing the right with an alternative to Carly Fiorina, who's seen as too moderate. It's hard to imagine that DeVore will win, in part because of remarks like the one he made in this excerpt from Weigel's article:

Nonetheless, asked what he thought of Brown’s ideas, DeVore didn’t take the chance to denounce “birther” rumors or the movement itself–which has been heavily active in California.

“The president is doing himself no favors by spending millions of dollars to block the release of documents surrounding his birth certificate,” said DeVore. “As long as the president keeps fighting tooth and nail to prevent the release of such things, people are going to remain skeptical.” The door was left open, said DeVore, because Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign didn’t go after Obama’s qualifications when it had the chance, and because there were no statutory requirements for verifying a candidate’s citizenship.

Still, DeVore does have a shot at the Republican nomination (he'd have very little chance in a general election, however). The Congressional race in upstate New York this year, in which a third-party choice favored by conservatives pushed out the official Republican candidate, demonstrated just how much power activists on the right have in their party. And DeVore's getting endorsements from some prominent conservatives -- on Monday Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., gave his backing to DeVore in a post published on the Corner, one of the National Review's blogs.

Update: DeVore's campaign is trying to walk this one back, and to claim that Weigel took the candidate out of context. Weigel has posted a fuller transcription, though, which indicates that DeVore wasn't taken out of context at all.

The assemblyman's campaign has put out this statement, disavowing any Birtherism:

I said ten years ago that the move to impeach and convict President Clinton was a distraction from countering his liberal policies. So too is the effort now to question President Obama’s legitimacy. Make no mistake, the Constitution is clear: Barack Obama is the President. The more time Carly Fiorina’s campaign spends on this side issue, the less time we have to work against the far-left agenda and failed policies of President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, and Senator Boxer.

A spokesman also told TPMDC, "Assemblyman DeVore believes that Barack Obama is the rightful, legitimate and constitutional President of the United States,"

Chiang, whose monthly missives warning of impending bankruptcy have been a staple of California life for the last year, becomes positively ebullient:

October's numbers may contain some signs that California's economy is gradually beginning to heal. Both personal income and corporate taxes beat monthly estimates, while corporate and sales taxes also came in higher than October 2008.

As California goes, so goes the nation? If we're talking budget paralysis and dysfunctional politics, that might not be a good thing. But if we're talking economic recovery, a return to health out West would be a welcome prospect for the entire country.

However, after lulling our fears with his happy talk, Chiang appends a "guest article": "Overview of the Commercial Property and Capital Markets with Implications for the State of California," by Dr. Randall Zisler.

The message from Dr. Zisler is quite different. Nationally, the commercial real estate market is in big, big trouble.

A crisis of unprecedented proportions is approaching. Of the $3 trillion of outstanding mortgage debt, $1.4 trillion is scheduled to mature in four years. We estimate another $500 billion to $750 billion of unscheduled maturities (i.e., defaults). Unfortunately, traditional lenders of consequence are practically out of the market and massive amounts of maturing debt will not easily find refinancing. Marking-to-market outstanding debt will render many banks, especially regional and community banks, insolvent, especially as much of the debt is likely worth about 50 percent of par, or less.

Stated baldly: Banks are on the hook for loans to commercial real estate developers that will never be paid back and can't be refinanced. Zisler doesn't break down the figures to tell us how much of that $3 trillion in outstanding mortgage debt is California's, but one can guess that it is a significant fraction.

California's faltering steps forward, in terms of rising tax revenue for October, could just be the calm before the commercial real estate storm finally hits. Double-dip recession, with a California topping, anyone?

The economic crash and its aftermath are affecting all sectors of the economy, real estate being no exception. Real estate, especially in the transactional sub-sectors (e.g., brokers, etc.), accounts for a significant share of the California labor force. The downturn has created a vicious negative feedback, a symptom of which is still ongoing property deflation and tenant defaults. Attendant symptoms are reduced property tax revenues, failing businesses, decimated transactions volume, and reduced income and sales tax revenues. The extent to which the recovery is delayed will depend on a number of factors, not least of which is the extent and timing of loss recognition by owners and financial institutions.

“We were applying the lessons of the Obama campaign,” says Hogarth as the polls closed in Biddeford, Maine. “The No on 8 campaign was a top-down Hillary Clinton-style campaign. This was more of a bottom-up Obama-style campaign.”

In California, activists are split over whether to take on same-sex marriage again in 2010 or 2012. Maine, for many, was the dress rehearsal. “Maine might be different from California but the National Organization for Marriage in Maine (which opposed same-sex marriage) waged a cookie cutter campaign,” says Rick Jacobs, chairman of the Courage Campaign, which is considering a push to repeal Proposition 8 in 2010. “They even used the same TV ad.”

Now marriage equality supporters are having to come to terms with another loss. Same-sex marriage in Maine was repealed 53 percent to 47 percent according to latest numbers.

In California, the fight against Proposition 8 had been led by Equality California. The organization, which had been heavily criticized by many in the LGBT rights community for how it handled the No on 8 campaign, had tried to be on the offensive in Maine. They had sent 11 field staff to Maine. They had run phone banks from California that had made over 60,000 calls. “People took a day off work to make those calls,” says Geoff Kors, executive director of Equality California. “A lot of people said they had wished they had done more against Prop. 8.”

“When something bad happens, and people’s rights are taken away, that’s when a movement is galvanized,” says Rick Jacobs of the Courage Campaign. Courage Campaign set up its own phone banks in the Bay Area in people’s houses. They had four full-time staff in Maine and 11 volunteers. “We did not budget for this,” says Jacobs. “The 11 volunteers raised their own money. We raised over $60,000 from members that went directly to the campaign.”

It was looking good. For the first time, the marriage equality folks were ahead in fundraising early in the campaign. Protect Maine Equality raised $4 million, compared with $2.5 million for Stand for Marriage Maine. Equality Maine had learned from the hits the No on 8 campaign had taken in California. When the first ads about schoolchildren learning about gay marriage showed up in Maine, they were ready with a counter ad featuring Maine’s teacher of the year.

Now with Maine voters having struck down same-sex marriage, activists in California are wondering what lessons to take back home. John Bare, a San Francisco resident who is part of a donor circle that gives money to marriage equality campaigns nationwide, cautions against reading too much into the today-Maine, tomorrow-California theories.

“Maine is in no way scalable up to California,” says Bare. “Maine is French Catholic, white, middle- and upper-class.” It also has the population of the size of San Diego. When marriage equality campaigners wanted to target their message to a precise demographic they found a French Catholic grandmother and her gay son and his longtime partner. “In California we need messages for Latino immigrants and Cantonese immigrants,” says Bare. “We need more tailoring than we could afford.”

Paul Hogarth agrees. “In California there was a serious problem with outreach to communities of color. Whatever happens in Maine, we will still have that problem in California. And a lot of liberal, progressive groups are not good at reaching these communities,” he says.

But he is optimistic that some good will come out of Maine. “The campaign learned how to listen to the grass roots. It reached out to people outside the gay havens. They did not let the opposition own the religion issue. Or the children issue.”

He says, unlike in California in 2008, he at least feels he did everything he could to save same-sex marriage in Maine.

Bare worries that the loss in Maine, coupled with the recent resignation of the chairs of the National Equality March, will be a double blow for the movement. “I think the energy might go out of many who want to go to the ballot in 2010,” says Bare.

The Courage Campaign is still studying the results of a massive survey of the state’s voters to see if it makes sense to launch a push for marriage equality in 2010, says Jacobs.

But Kors of Equality California says despite putting the best face on it, “losing is always devastating. Never before has a majority voted on a minority’s right. It’s time for that to end.”

A version of this story was originally published by New America Media.