George Rebane

The State of Jefferson movement was started over a year ago to offer northern Californians and the citizens of its thinly populated rural counties an alternative to being ignored by the social engineers, central planners, and bureaucrats in Sacramento.  The cry from these people has been ignored for over a generation, and working within ‘the system’ of a state dedicated to serving the populous coastal urban areas which have totally different interests and goals has not worked, and shows no signs of working in the future.  If anything, the urban voters have sent more legislators to Sacramento to double down on the regulations and strictures they have already imposed on the rural north.

When the SoJ movement started, our collectivist neighbors could not contain their mirth at the foolishness of those of us who supported such a separation and creation of the 51st state (full disclosure, I was on the leadership committee of Nevada County’s SoJ contingent).  They pointed out what in their minds was the total infeasibility of creating such a jurisdiction – its finances would not work out, its economy would be in permanent shambles, and its citizens would become the nation’s poorest of the poor.

The problem with all those dismissive critiques is that they assume that SoJ would come to be and then dwell in a cocoon of eternal stasis – an environment where commerce, industry, resource harvesting and management, education, relationships, money flows, and ongoing government intrusion would remain as it is now.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

But the development I draw your attention to today is the sudden formation of a new ‘non partisan’ PAC called ‘Keep it California’ (KiC).  Something seems to have happened during these past months that has given pause to the smug voices of confident collectivists and nay-sayers, they are beginning to see the never-to-be-admitted possibility that SoJ may actually come to pass.  And even if it does not, then the growing debate surrounding SoJ, and other similar movements in states with unrepresented populations, would draw unwanted attention to the nation’s progress toward a command society that has adopted but not acknowledged the goals and objectives of Agenda21.  In the case of northern California, SoJ's growth and development must be stopped, and the region must be retained as a repository of natural resources inhabited by a docile and compliant shrinking population of the politically powerless.

The 17apr15 Union reports that KiC is now in a frenzy to quickly establish their chapters in all the counties where SoJ is active.  Their stated aim is “to monitor and respond to any incursions by Jefferson proponents.”  (emphasis mine)  They will begin these activities at the upcoming 12may15 Board of Supervisors meeting at the Rood Center during which the NC SoJ committee will be allowed one hour to present the merits of forming the new state.  KiC will be there to counter SoJ during the Q&A and public input segments of the gathering.

It is interesting that KiC also claims to support more representation and a louder voice in Sacramento for northern California, but they have not told us what things they would say with such louder voice.  In this regard they have presented nothing other than the intention to continue doing the same ol’ same ol’.  The only thing new about KiC is that it is the Left's belated and somewhat embarrassing recognition that SoJ is a real, visible, and dangerous movement which should be quashed in its cradle lest it change socialism's course in California and thus infect the rest of the nation.

Yes, the SoJ movement is putatively also non-partisan, but you have to be pretty dim not to understand that the overwhelming number of SoJ supporters are of the conservetarian bent, and that those now speaking for KiC are liberals.  And this is as it should be to explain the ideological foundations of both efforts.  One side is for ever larger government and control, and the other side is for smaller, less intrusive government and more individual liberties.

This is confirmed by SoJ opponents who base their arguments on the Left’s well-established notion of stasis.  They do not believe that a new state with a reinvigorated approach to constitutional governance can do better, or can recover from our country’s increasing pace toward socialism.  However, historically such sclerotic thinking is not and has never been in the American mindset.  In this most exceptional country the world has ever seen, the new and never-been-tried has always served as a beacon to innovation and a better life.

[19apr15 update]  We are fortunate in this post to have the enthusiastic participation of Mr Steven Frisch who joins his fellow liberals in opposition to the SoJ movement while contending that in California all is well.  In fact, according to Mr Frisch, under the load of the nation’s most strict and encumbering environmental regulations that burden us, he sees their impact as having provided a “wildly successful” environment in which these regulations have become “huge drivers of economic development and benefit in California.”  Mr Frisch’s participation in this debate provides considerable value to the reader along several avenues, all revelatory of today’s progressive mindset and methods.

For those new to these pages, Steven Frisch is one of this region’s leading liberal intellectuals who daily labors in the vineyards of collective thought as a career apologist for the Left’s consolidation of their overwhelming influence and power in the Golden State.  For the lightly read, Mr Frisch operates under the perfectly camouflaged canopy of a grant-fed NGO fortuitously (cynically?) named the Sierra Business Council.  As its CEO and public voice Mr Fisch promotes the progressive agenda both in the local councils of electeds and in our public forums.  He and his SBC minions busy themselves in assembling programs and delivering lectures to explain to our commissions and governing jurisdictions how best to comply with and enjoy the glories of policies and regulations pouring forth from Sacramento and Washington, and how higher taxes serve to benefit one and all.

With this background we may examine the course of the debate in the comment stream below.  And true to form, Mr Frisch does not recognize the economic disaster that has befallen California since 2007.  Here he rejects all reports and attendant evidence of what the nation and the world now recognize as the Great California Exodus.  For him and his, large corporations have not moved their plants and offices to greener climes.  And such enterprises have not chosen to locate their growth in other states.  There is no stream of productive Californians going to live elsewhere, to be replaced by the indigents and illegals making the state home for a third of the nation’s welfare recipients.  With more than one eighth of America’s economy, California’s fall in the Great Recession was deeper than that suffered by the nation overall, all due to its stifling regulatory environment and perversely skewed tax structure.  And for the same reasons the state has been a drag on the country, contributing to its tepid recovery.  However, Mr Frisch sees none of this, nor does he recognize the data, analyses, and reports that have made such crippled economic performance known worldwide.

Instead, the astute reader will recognize Mr Frisch presenting data that he considers to not only counter all that, but instead prove that California's economy is wildly successful.  To do that he dredges up analyses of gasoline prices in the state, and the number of increased jobs, and other figures to invite into the weeds the unsuspecting reader who may not recognize the irrelevancy of his specifics, and the presentation of baseless statistics (the raw numbers mean nothing, it’s the base-relative ratios that tell the tale).

The Left, as illustrated by Mr Frisch, does not want to look at the aggregates that impact and illustrate California’s dire straits within the nationwide context.  Our public schools’ performance, our relative GDP growth, our population dynamics and growth, rate of business formations, unemployment rate, … .   To the state’s progressive contingent all is well, all is well.

Finally, it is in recognition of all these truths that an organized, formidable, and well-funded opposition is now necessary in the form of a new PAC named ‘Keep it California’.  It is because we live in two different Californias, where we observe and experience two different realities, that the SoJ movement is not only alive and well, but has become the clear and present danger to achieving the larger objective to make California into the Potemkin posterchild of progressive governance and socialist success.