The debacle of California is perhaps the most grossly underreported story in America today.
It should be no surprise that I suspect that this is because it’s a story of the failure – indeed, catastrophic collapse – of exactly the form of liberal, “everything-to-everyone” government that Obama and his Democrat majority want to bring the rest of us, and the media just can’t wrap their arms around admitting that just yet.
The London Observer comes oh, so close:
“If California was an experiment then it was an experiment of mass irresponsibility – and that has failed,” says Michael Levine.Nowhere is the economic cost of California’s crisis writ larger than in the Central Valley town of Mendota, smack in the heart of a dusty landscape of flat, endless fields of fruit and vegetables. The town, which boldly terms itself “the cantaloup capital of the world”, now has an unemployment rate of 38%. That is expected to rise above 50% as the harvest ends and labourers are laid off. City officials hold food giveaways every two weeks. More than 40% of the town’s people live below the poverty level. Shops have shut, restaurants have closed, drugs and alcohol abuse have become a problem.
Standing behind the counter of his DVD and grocery store, former Mendota mayor Joseph Riofrio tells me it breaks his heart to watch the town sink into the mire. His father had built the store in the 1950s and constructed a solid middle-class life around it, to raise his family. Now Riofrio has stopped selling booze in a one-man bid to curb the social problems breaking out all around him.
“It is so bad, but it has now got to the point where we are getting used to it being like this,” he says. Riofrio knows his father’s achievements could not be replicated today. The state that once promised opportunities for working men and their families now promises only desperation.
The story catalogues the woes – overwhelming and unsustainable social spending, the downside of sprawl – fairly capably…
…but, being from the Observer – the web end of the Labour-Party-oriented Guardian – it still misses the point:
California has long been an incubator of fresh ideas, many of which spread across the country. If America emerges from its crisis a greener, more economically and politically responsible nation, it is likely that renewal will have begun here. The clues to California’s salvation – and perhaps even the country as a whole – are starting to emerge.
Take Anthony “Van” Jones [yes, that Van Jones – but that’s not the point. Bear with us, here – Ed.], a man now in the vanguard of the movement to build a future green economy, creating millions of jobs, solving environmental problems and reducing climate change at a stroke.
All in the future tense.
We see where this is going, right?
Jones believes California will once more change itself, and then change the nation. “California remains a beacon of hope… This is a new time for a new direction to grow a new society and a new economy,” Jones has said.
It is already happening. California may have sprawling development and awful smog, but it leads the way in environmental issues.
And in this entire, otherwise-fascinatingly-thorough piece, nobody connects the two points! Nobody notes that California has clawed billions and billions from taxpayers and businesses and gutted the state’s business climate and employment base…
…to pay for the feeble “promise” of “Green Jobs“? To pay for fripperies like solar panels while the state’s business are packing up and leaving to escape rolling blackouts and confiscatory taxes?
To pay for a vision of government that will perpetuate the problem rather than ever fix it?
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