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2013-03-03 Economy
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Paradise Lost - California is not too big to fail.
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A civic unease runs through California these days. Premonitions abound of terrible things ahead. Not the space invaders or blade-runners of cinematic imagination, but padlocked -public services, interminable DMV lines, closed classrooms, off-limits recreational areas, public employee strikes, inadequate or nonexistent police, fire, and medical responses.
Just days before the Northridge slaughter, San Bernardino city attorney Jim Penman addressed a crowded city council meeting in the wake of an elderly woman's murder, telling residents of the bankrupt municipality to "lock their doors and load their guns." Penman was not alone among California city officials forced to slash law enforcement budgets. Nor did he back down amid the predictable media tut-tutting: "You should say what you mean and mean what you say."
California voters in November overwhelmingly pulled the lever for a one-party state. Democrats control the governorship, statewide offices, and veto-proof legislative majorities--all beholden to powerful state employee unions. If the recent standoffs with such unions in Wisconsin and Michigan seemed dramatic, just wait for the coming epic in California, a state known for manufacturing drama. No prospective Scott Walker or Rick Snyder, the governors of Wisconsin and Michigan, appears on the political horizon. But that doesn't mean peace with the unions--the money to buy it doesn't exist. So there will be a budget war of multiple battles and skirmishes. With Republicans already prostrate, some joke darkly--this, mind you, in the land of Reagan and "sunny optimism"--of adopting a Leninist approach: Let it all collapse . . . break the whole egg carton . . . build on the ruins . . . make lots of morning-after omelets. A dark scenario indeed, but name another more likely for Republicans.
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To be sure, and before the joke is taken seriously, Lenin actively instigated disorder and turmoil, the better to erect his totalitarian structure and, yes, his one-party state. The gallows humor of California Republicans is strictly passive; they are resigned to let nature take its course, the better to dismantle failed structures and launch productive, pluralistic systems consistent with freedom. The state's new political dispensation gives Republicans no alternative other than to be ready with workable proposals after the fall.
With California already under a U.S. Supreme Court mandate to relieve inmate overcrowding by multiple thousands, the Pasasouk case pricked the anxieties of a public already alarmed by what violent crimes may await them. At the end of the year the Sacramento Bee reported that gun sales had jumped dramatically--600,000 last year alone, up from 350,000 in 2002. Giving credence to the argument that more guns equal fewer crimes, gun injuries and deaths also plummeted over a corresponding period, the latter by 11 percent, though the Bee, not without an ideologically satisfactory explanation, attributes the improved numbers to "a well-documented, nationwide drop in violent crime." Sure.
Meanwhile the malaise. The once-Golden State now has the country's highest poverty rate, more than 23 percent. Also depressing: California, whose population is 12 percent of the nation's, is home to a third of the country's welfare recipients. A hardened underclass, as Chapman University urbanologist Joel Kotkin has put into uneasy relief, is emerging as a source of social, economic, and political strife.
Already, as Kotkin points out, the once-prosperous middle class has shrunk essentially to state retirees and those still living in homes protected by the Proposition 13 property tax limits. Allergic as they have historically been to class analysis and warfare, Republicans must answer by showing how a vigorous, free-enterprise economy can jump-start growth, spread prosperity, and lessen the chasm between the hyper-successful creative class on the coasts and the lumpenproletariat left behind on public assistance.
When multimillionaire golfer (and Republican) Phil Mickelson grumbled about his tax burden and threatened to leave the state, he found little sympathy among the suffering Californians who, their personal finances far more modest, are thinking of joining the growing out-migration of middle-class producers. A rebuilding GOP of necessity will have to direct its message to them and to ethnic groups, from the inner cities to the Central Valley, for whom the California dream of self-advancement still resonates.
The class anxieties were forced into relief when Texas's Republican governor Rick Perry, in radio spots and personal appearances, put the welcome mat out for struggling businesses. As Perry knows, enclaves of California expats are mushrooming in Dallas and Austin suburbs. With exquisite symbolism, the national financial newspaper Investor's Business Daily announced its plan to relocate its production facilities to the Lone Star State--not the first business to do so.
Brown's inelegant response? Perry's ad was but a "fart." California's glorious coastline, majestic mountains, and fair climate, reasoned the governor, would keep businesses slaving under his spell. But Perry, the bumbling cowpoke of last year's presidential debates, has outfoxed him, perhaps having taken Benjamin Franklin's counsel to "fart proudly." Let the coastal breezes do their work. 
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Posted by GolfBravoUSMC 2013-03-03 00:00||
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Posted by Anguper Hupomosing9418 2013-03-03 01:07||
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Posted by dan 2013-03-03 08:20||
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Posted by Barbara 2013-03-03 11:07||
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00:33 EMS Artifact
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