George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 7 March 2018.]

California is a mess.  There is not enough time in this short commentary to describe all the ways in which our state has fallen to the bottom of the barrel, but I will attempt to summarize some of the more visible areas.  And the scariest thing for our future is that most Californians don’t have a clue about the dire straits of our state.  California has been effectively under one party control for so long that in this election year most people have forgotten there are alternatives.

Let me start by pointing out some facts that you may have missed because our media has also been flying in tight formation with the architects of our multiple maladies, and they aren’t about to point a finger at all the things that have gone wrong on their watch.  Because if you do find out, then you’ll start asking all kinds of questions, and pretty soon you’ll vote the bums out of office.  Then where would they be?

California has attracted and given rise to the nation’s highest population of welfare recipients.  We are only one of eight Americans, but California is home to more than one of three Americans dependent on the government to keep body and soul together.  We are the welfare capital of our country (here).  Our state taxes at 13.3% of earnings are among the highest in the nation.  But that, of course, makes no never mind to almost half of us who pay little or no taxes.

California’s roads, bridges, freeways, reservoirs, and the rest of our infrastructure are in bad shape because of rampant corruption in Sacramento.  The high taxes we have paid have not been used for the promised infrastructure maintenance and improvements.  It has gotten so bad that recently the state had to again increase our gas taxes, already beyond the nation’s highest level.  And by the way, the latest raise was done by Sacramento just because they could.  We were told that this time the collected monies would really, really go to repair roads, honest Injun.  None were supposed to ask why the other gas taxes we have paid for years, and still do, haven’t been used as promised.

And contrary to what you been told, California is broke.  The state has enormous unfunded pension liabilities for its workers and teachers.  To give you a rough idea, we only have two dollars for every three we owe the new government retirees.  The total amounts of money we don’t have add up to over $100B.  And there is no provision to make up such deficits. These generous pensions were negotiated by government employee unions with politicians on the take for campaign funds and votes that guaranteed their stay in office.

The state’s business and environmental regulations are simply draconian.  By the hundreds, California companies are moving to more business-friendly states, taking with them productive middle-class workers who then get an immediate raise as they settle elsewhere into their new affordable homes.  The state’s net out-migration of its formerly established residents is now epidemic (here).  Our sluggish population growth is maintained only by the immigration of low skilled workers, illegal aliens, and high birth rates, primarily among groups that used to be called minorities.

Among our high indigent population are the homeless which Sacramento now admits has risen to crisis levels.  Homelessness and emigration are also fostered by the mountains of building and environmental regulations that have created an ongoing housing crisis in the state, especially in the low-cost segment which impacts our poorer residents.  Special interests in real estate have every motive to keep California housing prices high.  Visible evidence of all this are California cities that have recently gone bankrupt, have crime-ridden downtowns, and are losing residents.  We recall that California always led the nation in everything good that America had to offer.  That is no more.  Today, for the first time, California cities are absent from the top 25 fastest growing cities in the nation (here).  And we don’t even have time to talk about the enormous problems we have with over-crowded prisons and educating our young, where we now rank 10^th from the bottom.

All this has given rise to factions of Californians that want radical changes which range from splitting the state into parts, each inhabited by more like-minded people, to actually leaving the Union and setting up a separate country.  Meanwhile, more and more Californians go to the polls to vote for ever bigger government and government checks.  And the party in power has no other plan but to continue raising taxes and fees along with more costly regulations, all in the hope that California’s scenery and climate will convince enough businesses and the rich to continue paying for arguably the most butt stupid, corrupt, and incompetent state government in the Union.  There’s much much more, but time is up – in the meantime please reflect on Einstein’s definition of insanity.

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the addended transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively.  However, my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.

[Addendum]  Not including California’s self-inflicted water shortages was probably the most noteworthy omission from the above recounting of the state’s grievances (here and here).  It is simply unbelievable how the embedded imbecilities of socialism manifest themselves.  Mankind has known for millennia the ups and downs of weather, climate, and fortune.  And has long responded by storing everything from food, fuel, fodder, water, …  during the years of plenty for the years of need.  It was not rocket science then and is not now.  Societies of all kinds knew how to prioritize the necessities for their survival and well-being to make possible the caching of such critical commodities.

Today’s useless idiots count the loss of that knowledge among the many deficits that they burden us with their established access to the government gun.  Despite the doubling of California’s population, we continue to service our water needs with the infrastructure planned and built generations ago.  Today we refuse to husband the precious water that irregularly pours out of the Sierra in abundance by dumping it into the Pacific instead of storing it in newly built reservoirs and behind rehabilitated dams.  Read (here and here) about what the econazis and the Water Resources Board are doing to stop construction of the Sites and Temperance Flat Reservoirs (in addition to our own Centennial Dam).

Astonishingly, the same progressive elites advise us that the solution to our water shortage requires yet more conservation, which doesn’t come close to adding up if you run the numbers on our population and agriculture.  But that is their quiet and continuing obeisance to the Agenda21's 'stack-and-pack' objectives, which above all are based on the premise that people are the scourge of the earth whose numbers must be first corralled and then reduced by whatever means will work – the Final Solution.

[8mar18 update]  A regular reader (what would we do without them) sent me the link to a 7mar18 article by Joel Kotkin titled ‘The Left and Lefter in California’.  The piece mirrors my above commentary from the perspective of the radical leftward movement of California’s Democratic Party and the pro-socialist (cum communist) elements of the national Democrats.  Highlighting the above woes of America’s former Shangri-la, Kotkin describes how “Golden State Democrats seem ready to break for good with mainstream, moderate liberalism.”

It was a bit of a shock, even to this hardened political observer, listening to yesterday’s screeds by Moonbeam and his attorney general Becerra accusing AG Sessions of “going to war against California” and “unleashing a reign of terror” on “California’s immigrants” in Washington’s attempts to enforce longstanding federal immigration laws, especially against criminal illegal aliens. (more here)

These political fusillades underline Kotkin’s point, and are somewhat astounding when one considers what kind and size of audience did Brown and Becerra address with their out-of-the-park rhetoric.  My own assessment is that they felt there are enough terminally stupid and/or ideologically calcified Californians out there in their constituent base to make such screeds worthwhile.

Concurrently NPR and the lamestream in general is reinforcing the violation of US immigration laws, especially when they justify such actions in the name of promoting “family reunification” aka chain migration.  The continued use of ‘immigrants’ to identify illegal aliens reinforces their point with our light thinkers, both those who can’t tell the difference and those who can but maintain that such usage makes no never mind in the public forum.  On the contrary, it does, and the progressives abet that mislabeling with their every use of that label to evoke images of east European legal immigrants waiting in long lines on early 20^th century Ellis Island.  Everyone knows that these people (I and my own family to boot) are our ancestors who assimilated and became productive, law-abiding Americans.

The lamestream press will not corroborate the national crime statistics published by the DoJ and DHS.  As a quick look, these report that “more than one-in-five of all persons in Bureau of Prisons custody were foreign born, and that 94 percent of confirmed aliens in custody were unlawfully present.”  Such reporting would put candidate Trump’s admonitions about illegal alien criminality in a very different light. According to Pew Research, California is the home away from home to more than 2,500,000 illegally in America.  The estimate for state and federal outlays for California’s illegal alien care is $57.9B offset by about $2B in taxes they pay. (more here and here).

The evidence, totally rejected and cynically suppressed by the Left, is overwhelming that California-led socio-political policies, which foster open borders, provide succor, and promote amnesties for unassimilating illegal aliens, are destructive to America.