George Rebane

Last Tuesday’s inland tsunami washed over most of the land without much effect on the coasts.  With its margins of establishment pullback, the voters shouted loudly that the country has been going in a hard left direction under the leadership of hard leftwingers.  This, of course, is something totally invisible to those with a firm grip on the port rail of our ship of state.  Starting with our fearless leader, the problem was not his policies and legislation – which has ranged from ineffective to ravaging – but that the whole nation couldn’t be better bamboozled.  It was all a problem in messaging.

Well, there was no problem in messaging states like California and New York.  In the once golden state, the unions got out there in force and convinced ‘the blacks, the Hispanics, and selected Asian communities’ to vote the Peter/Paul Principle.  Arguably, these communities contain the most politically innocent among us and have always been ballot box fodder for the left.  2010 was no different.

What continues to amaze me in post-election talks with some liberal friends, is that some of them still don’t believe that government service unions have driven states and hundreds of local jurisdictions across America to the brink of bankruptcy.  They are convinced that all this reporting (e.g. ‘Tough Fiscal Problems Loom for Cities’) is still some rightwing anti-labor conspiracy.  And these are otherwise educated people.  This intellectual chasm is what keeps that sought after middle ground a no-man’s land.

And with Jerry ‘Moonbeam’ Brown back in the saddle, with the same gang in Sacramento that got us where we are, our direction is sealed.  Remember his ‘age of limits’; now he’s in a position to implement those limits.  The state’s Prop23 failure and Prop25 passage have given the progressives more than enough ammunition to keep California at the bottom of the stack for the indefinite future.

From the liberal lie factory we heard for months that Obamacare was going to provide better medical care, reduce healthcare costs, and lower deficits.  Casual examination of the new law quickly showed that that was not even close.  So starting in September the White House put out the word to the Dems on the stump to stop touting those lies, because the Repubs would take them to the cleaners.  Most listened, and even the lamestream media quit giving mouth-to-mouth to that progressive public policy cadaver.

Now the question is how long (please submit your entries in sealed envelopes) it will be until the “cleantech” economy-boosting, job-creating AB32 propaganda will be quietly pulled from the public view.  Along with the unions, the bay area capitalists are going to have a problem with a Congress that will put subsidizing California’s social experiments on a short leash – all that money invested in an ersatz and subsidized economic future.  The 5nov10 WSJ summarized it with –

… much of the funding to defeat Proposition 23 came from a Silicon Valley that is deeply invested in green technology and its iron lung of government subsidies. After Dodd-Frank, Wall Street is also now more than ever tethered to Washington.

The bottom line is that we continue to be at the mercy of the public service employee unions whose power has made their message short and to the point – ‘Pay us, or we’ll shut you down.’

… In other words, the results in California and New York are an instructive lesson in what happens when government doesn’t serve a state but holds it hostage.