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KILL THE POOR: In his first 100 days, Brown, the so-called “lesser of two evils,” has been
far more successful at dismantling California’s meager social welfare state than every Republican
party politician who has occupied the Governor’s mansion since 1966.
In his pivotal work, The State and Revolution, V. I. Lenin epitomized the essence of capitalist democracy when, quoting Karl Marx, pointed out elections are mechanisms in which “the oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them.”
For proof of this undeniable truism, we need not look any further than last year’s gubernatorial election where then-California Attorney General Jerry Brown defeated billionaire former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, the latter who spent a record-breaking $178.5 million of her own fortune in a furtive attempt to buy the seat outright.
Despite the usual round of delusional claims made by Democratic party liberals the newly-crowned Governor would offer a bold and refreshing alternative to the cronyism and gimmickry of his action-figure hero predecessor, Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, political reality being as it is, of course, is much more sordid.
Almost from the moment Brown was sworn into that office, he has veered the ship of state government to the hard right, cutting and slashing the budget wherever he can, mostly eliminating $11.2 billion from programs and services that benefit millions of working and indigent Californians: everybody from single moms to senior citizens.
In his first 100 days, Brown, the so-called “lesser of two evils,” has been far more successful at dismantling California’s meager social welfare state than every Republican party politician who has occupied the Governor’s mansion since a mediocre B-grade movie actor by the name of Ronald Wilson Reagan was elected in 1966.
Even Schwarzenegger, who despite saber rattling about “blowing up the boxes of government,” was a wimp that begged Wall Street to loan California the money it needed to avoid making the same draconian cuts Brown did nonchalantly with the stroke of his pen and with little opposition from the Democratic-controlled legislature.
And as if to add insult to injury, Brown vows further carnage–-a total bloodbath, in fact-–if the electorate rejects, as they did under Schwarzenegger, another scheme to put initiatives on the ballot to maintain regressive taxes on working people whose incomes are being squeezed by unemployment, inflation, and high fuel prices.
Under the mantra of “shared sacrifice,” Brown criss-crosses the state with a dog-and-pony show orchestrated to persuade Californians that his austerity plan is good for them; and if they don’t want to be slowly taxed to death, then they surely can die much more quickly through a thousand budget cuts.
Not long ago, Allan Zaremberg, President of the California Chamber of Commerce, the 15,000-member business lobbying group representing some of the state’s most powerful corporate interests–-from Chevron to Walt Disney–-offered praise for Brown, noting his tax proposals won’t unduly affect “high wage earners.”
From the perspective of the handful of multi-millionaires and mega-billionaires who run California as their own private fiefdom, not to mention finance both the Democratic and Republican parties, “shared sacrifice” is a euphemism meaning only working people must “share” the pain; that they must “sacrifice” what little they have.
That Brown wants public employee unions to do the dirty work of selling his raw deal to voters is welcome news to Republicans who are already using it to fan the flames of intraclass strife by convincing private sector workers the reason their paychecks grow smaller is because the pensions of “greedy teachers” are bleeding them dry.
Democratic party politicians have long since learned that by pitting unionized workers in the public sector against non-unionized workers in the private sector–and then letting Republicans run with the ball for awhile–is a much better strategy of undermining collective bargaining instead of banning it outright.
In that way, they can extract deeper concessions from public employee unions in the long run–slashed wages, reduced benefits, and smaller pensions–with little resistance from the workers themselves, and yet still maintain their elaborate charade of being a “friend of labor,” a claim that historically has always rang hollow.
But it should be no surprise to anyone Brown cut a sweetheart deal with the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, the 30,000-member prison guards union, because Democratic party politicians, much like their Republican bretheren, have always been avid cheerleaders for building a bigger, better police state.
It was, after all, the Democratic-controlled legislature in 2007 that approved of AB 900, a measure authored by Jose Solorio, a Democratic State Assemblyman from Santa Ana, to sell $7.7 billion in lease-revenue bonds to fund the addition of 53,000 new prison and jail beds to California’s overbloated prison-industrial complex.
And if history is any judge, Brown might leave office with a legacy of being known as the “great incarcerator,” because notwithstanding a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision ordering the release of 33,000 inmates, projects are underway to greatly expand California’s vast archipelago of jails, prisons, and detention centers.
Republicans have been fairly quick to assert Californians are “anti-tax” based on recent opinion polls indicating a large majority of them are opposed to Brown’s plan to close the remainder of the state’s budget deficit by asking voters to extend the triad of regressive income, car, and sales taxes for another five years.
But what they fail to acknowledge–-something Brown himself has also taken great pains to avoid discussing, incidentally-–is that the exact same polls they liberally quote from suggest a much higher percentage of people support an idea ideologically incompatible with their own myopic worldview: namely, making the rich pay more.
Given that income inequality in the United States is the worst it has been since the Bolsheviks overthrew the Czar, its understandable Californians, most of whom work from paycheck to paycheck, and many without a job, want the wealthy to dig deeper into their pockets to pay for education, health care, and other vital services.
Despite evidence of widespread public support for taxing the hell out of the well-to-do, Brown seems more content mingling with Silicon Valley businessmen than with the “rabble”–actions which make it perfectly clear the only kind of class warfare he favors is that being waged for the benefit of the few against the many.
The fact is, neither the Governor, his erstwhile allies in the Democratic-controlled legislature, nor the Republicans offer any real solutions to California’s fiscal problems beyond offering a hodge-podge of slightly different proposals all of which seek to balance the state budget on the backs of working people.
And any hints of instituting modest reforms to boost revenue, such as overhauling Proposition 13, are dismissed even though it has created an unequal system where many homeowners now pay a much greater percentage of their income on property taxes than do a few corporations that own huge chunks of commercial real estate.
It was Malcolm X, the African-American civil rights leader, who, while watching the 1964 tussle between Senator Barry Goldwater and President Lyndon Baines Johnson, mused that the Republicans and Democrats shared much in common with canines, noting “one is the wolf, the other is a fox. No matter what, they’ll both eat you.”
Perhaps the question now for millions of Californians, all of whom are in the crosshairs of one of the most reactionary state budgets in history–a budget that will eviscerate things that make this place at least a tolerable place to live–is just how much longer are they going to put up with being somebody else’s feast?
When Brown came into office he was handed a huge current year deficit by a former Governor and Legislature unable or unwilling to deal with it. The only tool he had to immeidately attack it was to propose cuts, followed by a FY11-12 budget proposal that was a mix of cuts and tax extensions (which some insisted on calling tax increases). The esteemeed Legislature coughtd up a $12-13 billion dollar smorgasboard of cuts, and the Governor accepted it. This action, plus symbolic things like travel freezes and, elimination of thousants of State cellphones with their associated costs, have been his first steps to begin to deal with the huge disconnect between actual state revenue and actual expenditures. Like it or not, Brown has displayed leadership. To label his efforts as veering to the hard right appears to be an attempt at sensationalism rather than an unbiased look at the lay of the land which would show that the house is on fire and the Governor took immediate steps to try and put it out. Why anyone would want his job is beyond me.
> Like it or not, Brown has displayed leadership.
If you define “leadership” as pushing an agenda that satisfies the financial interests of the tiny handful of multi-millionaires and mega-billionaires who run California, then you’re correct.
I do agree that California’s fiscal crisis is partly–but not primarily–the product of various games played by Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Democratic-controlled legislature.
Neither sides wanted to make cuts to popular programs nor raise taxes to pay for them for fear of the political ramifications, so they accommodated each other by borrowing money from Wall Street.
The problem with doing that, of course, is that a growing percentage of state’s general fund revenues over time must be used to pay off the principal and interest on the money that’s been borrowed.
But Schwarzenegger wasn’t able to make some of the same draconian cuts that Governor Jerry Brown has been able to do because back then the Democratic-controlled legislature wouldn’t let him do it.
And what kind of “leadership” is Brown is exhibiting? He’s not tackling big business nor the prison-industrial complex. His agenda is to make working people bear the brunt of this crisis.
It is no wonder why he’s the darling of the California Chamber of Commerce, the prison guards union, and other vested interests who stand to gain the most from his incredibly reactionary policies.
> To label his efforts as veering to the hard right appears to be an
> attempt at sensationalism rather than an unbiased look at the
> lay of the land which would show that the house is on fire and the
> Governor took immediate steps to try and put it out.
Grover Norquist, the right-wing President of Americans for Tax Reform, once said he’d like to reduce government “to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”
Well, Brown’s not drowning California government, but he’s certainly playing a role in burning it to the ground. Don’t know what Norquist thinks of Brown, but I’m sure he’s giddy about what’s going on.
But methinks a much better analogy would be to compare Brown to that of a schizophrenic homicidal maniac because he is slashing, chopping, cutting, and hacking California government to death.
Then he threatens the electorate with ultimatums which are analogous to asking the question, which way do you wanna be slaughtered? Do you wanna be killed by a knife? Or die by a shotgun blast to the face?
And of course, the people Brown’s directing these threats toward are college students, senior citizens, children, single moms, workers–not the Silicon Valley businessmen he dined with a couple of weeks ago.
Not sure if all of this is true, most of it sounds pretty good to me. By the way, it is not a “regressive” tax, it is definitional “progressive” unless you use Orwellian doublespeak.
> By the way, it is not a “regressive” tax, it is definitional “progressive”
> unless you use Orwellian doublespeak.
Well, I’ve been taught that a tax is “regressive” if it has a disproportionate impact upon people who have lower incomes over those who have higher incomes.
A $100 tax increase on someone who earns $15,000 a year has a greater burden on their household budget than a $100 tax increase on someone who earns $150,000 a year.
Although state income taxes in California are more “progressive” than other states, Brown’s proposal maintains reduced tax credits that primarily benefit people who have lower incomes.
It is true, of course, that his proposal “raises” everybody’s state income taxes, but it happens to place a much greater burden on people who have the least ability to pay.
Oh good. Our far-left blogger is back, so I can feel like a moderate again. Here’s the hilarious song you refer to in your title:
Unfortunately a few months later Ronald Reagan was elected and the Dead Kennedys had to totally re-write the song, with the titlle “We’ve Got A Bigger Problem Now.”
I’ll respond to this post paragraph by paragraph later or tomorrow…
> Unfortunately a few months later Ronald Reagan was elected and
> the Dead Kennedys had to totally re-write the song, with the titlle
> “We’ve Got A Bigger Problem Now.”
What Vern neglects to mention, of course, is that much of Ronald Reagan’s agenda couldn’t have been implemented without the assistance of the Democrats who had a huge majority in the House of Representatives and a narrow minority in the Senate for much of his term.
And some of the worst excesses of the Reagan era, like the multi-billion dollar Savings and Loan scandal of the late 1980s, where financial institutions were systematically looted by hundreds of people, was due to legislation originally introduced by key Democrats in both houses of Congress.
The article would be even more impressive if the author knew the difference between “furtive” and “futile”.
“Democrat” and “Republican” are just two brand names used by The Businessmen’s Party. (There’s no better proof than the 100.00% policy continuity from Bush 2 to Obama.) They need two brands to cover different markets. That’s why Diane Feinstein declares as Dem; in some other state she’d be a leader of the GOP. It’s a good-cop bad-cop act. In a good-cop bad-cop act, the bad cop usually carries out the actual policy of the police department, while the good cop is there to establish deniability of that policy, wringing his hands helplessly on the sidelines, but never taking any real action to restrain the bad cop. They both work for the same Chief, just doing different jobs.
Oh Duane. How I missed you. Nice one on the Malcolm X quote.
look out california….look out america! the bible says what you do to the least of my brothers, that you do unto me! people need to organize, fund credible third party candidates…..and throw the bums out! it’s happened before, and it will happen again….or we’ll all regress into a neo-feudal system where everything goes to the highest bidder….and that won’t be the poor, elderly & working people. unions aren’t the enemy….they’re the only chance poor & working class people have under our present system.