#1 California Thread: As California Goes, So Goes the Nation

[Alex Linder]

California: The Road Warrior Is Here
July 29, 2012 - 10:56 pm - by Victor Davis Hanson

Where’s Mel Gibson When You Need Him?

George Miller’s 1981 post-apocalyptic film The Road Warrior envisioned an impoverished world of the future. Tribal groups fought over what remained of a destroyed Western world of law, technology, and mass production. Survival went to the fittest — or at least those who could best scrounge together the artifacts of a long gone society somewhat resembling the present West.

In the case of the Australian film, the culprit for the detribalization of the Outback was some sort of global war or perhaps nuclear holocaust that had destroyed the social fabric. Survivors were left with a memory of modern appetites but without the ability to reproduce the means to satisfy them: in short, a sort of Procopius’s description of Gothic Italy circa AD 540.

Our Version

Sometimes, and in some places, in California I think we have nearly descended into Miller’s dark vision — especially the juxtaposition of occasional high technology with premodern notions of law and security. The state deficit is at $16 billion. Stockton went bankrupt; Fresno is rumored to be next. Unemployment stays over 10% and in the Central Valley is more like 15%. Seven out of the last eleven new Californians went on Medicaid, which is about broke. A third of the nation’s welfare recipients are in California. In many areas, 40% of Central Valley high school students do not graduate — and do not work, if the latest crisis in finding $10 an hour agricultural workers is any indication. And so on.

Our culprit out here was not the Bomb (and remember, Hiroshima looks a lot better today than does Detroit, despite the inverse in 1945). The condition is instead brought on by a perfect storm of events that have shred the veneer of sophisticated civilization. Add up the causes. One was the destruction of the California rural middle class. Manufacturing jobs, small family farms, and new businesses disappeared due to globalization, high taxes, and new regulations. A pyramidal society followed of a few absentee land barons and corporate grandees, and a mass of those on entitlements or working for government or employed at low-skilled service jobs. The guy with a viable 60 acres of almonds ceased to exist.

Illegal immigration did its share. No society can successfully absorb some 6-7 million illegal aliens, in less than two decades, the vast majority without English, legality, or education from the poorer provinces of Mexico, the arrivals subsidized by state entitlements while sending billions in remittances back to Mexico — all in a politicized climate where dissent is demonized as racism. This state of affairs is especially true when the host has given up on assimilation, integration, the melting pot, and basic requirements of lawful citizenship.

Terrible governance was also a culprit, in the sense that the state worked like a lottery: those lucky enough by hook or by crook to get a state job thereby landed a bonanza of high wages, good benefits, no accountability, and rich pensions that eventually almost broke the larger and less well-compensated general society. When I see hordes of Highway Patrolmen writing tickets in a way they did not before 2008, I assume that these are revenue-based, not safety-based, protocols — a little added fiscal insurance that pensions and benefits will not be cut.

A coarsening of popular culture — a nationwide phenomenon — was intensified, as it always is, in California. The internet, video games, and modern pop culture translated into a generation of youth that did not know the value of hard work or a weekend hike in the Sierra. They didn’t learn how to open a good history book or poem, much less acquire even basic skills such as mowing the lawn or hammering a nail. But California’s Generation X did know that they were “somebody” whom teachers and officials dared not reprimand, punish, prosecute, or otherwise pass judgment on for their anti-social behavior. Add all that up with a whiny, pampered, influential elite on the coast that was more worried about wind power, gay marriage, ending plastic bags in the grocery stores — and, well, you get the present-day Road Warrior culture of California.

Pre- and Post-Modern

I am writing tonight in Palo Alto after walking among nondescript 1,500 square-foot cottages of seventy-year vintage that sell for about $1.5-2 million and would go in a similar tree-shaded district in Fresno or Merced for about $100,000. Apparently, these coastal Californians want to be near Stanford and big money in Silicon Valley. They also must like the fact that they are safe to jog or ride bikes in skimpy attire and the general notion that there is “culture” here amid mild weather. I suppose when a car pulls out in front of you and hits your bumper on University Avenue, the driver has a license, registration, and insurance — and this is worth the extra million to live here. My young fellow apartment residents like to jog in swimming suits; they would last one nanosecond doing that on De Wolf Avenue outside Selma.

Survival?

Meanwhile, 200 miles and a world away, here are some of the concerns recently in the Valley. There is now an epidemic of theft from tarped homes undergoing fumigation. Apparently as professionals tent over homes infested with termites, gangs move into the temporarily abandoned houses to burrow under the tarps and loot the premises — convinced that the dangers of lingering poisonous gas are outweighed by the chance of easy loot. Who sues whom when the gangbanger prying into the closet is found gassed ? When I get termites, I spot treat myself with drill and canisters; even the professional services warn that they can kill off natural pests, but not keep out human ones.

No one in the Central Valley believes that they can stop the epidemic of looting copper wire. I know the local Masonic Hall is not the Parthenon, but you get the picture of our modern Turks prying off the lead seals of the building clamps of classical temples.

Protection is found only in self-help. To stop the Road Warriors from stripping the copper cable from your pump or the community’s street lights, civilization is encouraged to put in a video camera, more lighting, more encasement, a wire protective mesh — all based on the premise that the authorities cannot stop the thieves and your livelihood is predicated on the ingenuity of your own counter-terrorism protocols. But the thief is always the wiser: he calculates the cost of anti-theft measures, as well as the state’s bill in arresting, trying, and rehabilitating him, and so wagers that it is cheaper for all of us to let him be and just clean up his mess.

Reactionary Dreaming

In around 1960, rural California embraced modern civilization. By that I mean both in the trivial and fundamental sense. Rural dogs were usually vaccinated and licensed — and so monitored. Homes were subject to building codes and zoning laws; gone were the privies and lean-tos. Streets were not just paved, but well-paved. My own avenue was in far better shape in 1965 than it is now. Mosquito abatement districts regularly sprayed stagnant water ponds to ensure infectious disease remained a thing of our early-20th-century past. Now they merely warn us with West Nile Virus alerts. Ubiquitous “dumps” dotted the landscape, some of them private, ensuring, along with the general code of shame, that city-dwellers did not cast out their old mattresses or baby carriages along the side of the road. It seems the more environmental regulations, the scarcer the dumps and the more trash that litters roads and private property.

I walk each night around the farm. What is the weirdest find? A nearby alleyway has become a dumping place for the rotting corpses of fighting dogs. Each evening or so, a dead dog (pit bulls, Queensland terriers) with a rope and plenty of wounds is thrown up on the high bank. The coyotes make short work of the remains. Scattered about are several skeletons with ropes still around their necks. I suppose that at about 2 a.m. the organizers of dog fights drive in and cast out the evenings’ losers. I have never seen such a thing in 58 years (although finding plastic bags with dead kittens in the trash outside my vineyard was a close second). Where is PETA when you need them? Is not the epidemic of dog- and cock-fighting in central California a concern of theirs? (Is berating in Berkeley a corporation over meat-packing a bit more glamorous than running an education awareness program about animal fights in Parlier?)

Education, Education, Education…

The public schools were once the key to California’s ascendance. Universal education turned out well-prepared citizens who were responsible for California’s rosy future — one based on an excellent tripartite higher education system of junior colleges, state colleges, and universities; sophisticated dams and irrigation systems; and a network of modern freeways and roads. In the private sphere, the culture of shame still prevailed, at least in the sense that no one wanted his 16-year-old son identified in the papers (with his home address no less) as arrested for breaking and entering. And such crime was rare. Rural California was a checkerboard of 40- and 80-acre farms, with families that were viable economic units and with children who worked until dark after school. It is hard to steal when you must disc ten acres after baseball practice.

I think it is a fair assessment to say that all of the above is long past. Since about 1992, on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) testing, California ranks between 41 and 48 in math and science, depending on the year and the particular grade that is assessed. About half of the incoming freshmen at the California State University system — the largest public university in the world — are not qualified to take college courses, and must first complete “remediation” to attain a level of competence that was assumed forty years ago in the senior year of high school. The students I taught at CSU Fresno were far better prepared in 1984 than those in 2004 are; the more money, administrators, “learning centers,” and counselors, the worse became the class work.

I finally threw out my old syllabi last month: the 1985 Greek Literature in Translation course at CSU Fresno seemed to read like a Harvard class in comparison to my 2003 version with half the reading, half the writing, and all sorts of directions on how to make up missed work and flunked exams. It wasn’t just that I lost my standards, but that I lost my students who could read.

Life in the Whatever Lane

Does any of that matter? Well, yes. Those who are not educated soon inherit the reins of public responsibility. In practical terms, the symptoms are everywhere. I now expect that my county property tax returns will have common errors, from the spelling of my name or address to the particular acreage assessed.

When entering the bank, I expect people not just to not speak English, but occasionally not to write any language, and thus put a mark down, in Old West fashion, to cash their checks.

When I deal with a public agency, I assume the person on the opposite end of the counter or phone will not to be able to transact the requested service, or at least not be able to transact any other service other than the narrow one trained for. Calling any public agency is to receive a recording and then an incoherent order to press numerous buttons that lead to more recordings. Woe to the poor fool who walks into a Department of Motor Vehicles office on an average day, seeking to obtain a copy of his pink slip or find a registration form. The response is “get a number,” “make an appointment,” “get in line,” “wait,” or “see a supervisor.”

Cocooning

I quit not just riding a bike on the rural avenues where I grew up, but walking upon them as well. Why? There is a good chance (twice now) of being bitten not just by a loose dog without vaccination, but by one whose owner is either unable to communicate or vanishes when hunted down. And then there are the official agencies whose de facto policy is that our ancestors did such a good job eradicating rabies that we can more or less coast on their fumes.

Forty years ago I assumed rightly that cars parked along the side of the road were out of gas or needed repair. Now? I expect that the cars are much more reliable, but the owner of any car parked outside my house is either stealing fruit, casing the joint, using drugs, or inebriated. Last week I explained to a passer-by why he could not steal the peaches from my trees; he honestly thought not only that he could, but that he almost was obligated to.

What makes The Road Warrior so chilling a metaphor is the combination of the premodern and postmodern. While utter chaos reigns in rural California, utter absurdity reigns inside the barricades, so to speak, on the coast. So, for example, San Franciscans will vote on whether to blow up the brilliantly engineered Hetch Hetchy water project (I bet they won’t vote yes), more or less the sole source of water for the San Francisco Bay Area. The National Park Service debates blowing up historic stone bridges over the Merced River in Yosemite Valley — as hyper-environmentalists assume that they have so much readily available power and water from prior generations at their fingertips that they have the luxury of dreaming of returning to a preindustrial California. Of course, they have no clue that their romance is already reified outside Madera, Fresno, or Bakersfield.

High-Speed Madness

Take the new high-speed rail project, whose first link is designated to zoom not far from my house. An empiricist would note there is already an Amtrak (money-losing) line from Fresno to Corcoran (home of Charles Manson). There is now no demand to use another lateral (getting nowhere more quickly?). There is no proof that California public agencies — from universities to the DMV — can fulfill their present responsibilities in such a way that we would have confidence that new unionized state workers could run such a dangerous thing as high-speed rail (e.g., if we can’t keep sofas and washing machines out of the local irrigation ponds, why do we think we could keep them off high-speed rail tracks? Do we think we are French?).

If one were to drive on the 99, the main interior north-south “highway” from the Grapevine to Sacramento, one would find places, like south of Kingsburg, where two poorly paved, potholed, and crowded lanes ensure lots of weekly accidents. Can a state that has not improved its ancestors’ highway in 50 years be entrusted to build high-speed mass transit? Can a state presently $16 billion in arrears be expected to finance a $100 billion new project? Can a state that ranks 48th in math field the necessary personnel to build and operate such a postmodern link?

We Are Scary

One of the strangest things about Road Warrior was the ubiquity of tattooed, skin-pierced tribal people with shaved heads and strange clothes. At least the cast and sets seemed shocking some thirty years ago. If I now sound like a reactionary then so be it: but when I go to the store, I expect to see not just the clientele, but often some of the workers, with “sleeves” — a sort of throwback to red-figure Athenian vase painting where the ink provides the background and the few patches of natural skin denote the silhouetted image. And stranger still is the aging Road Warrior: these are folks in their forties who years ago got pierced and tattooed and aged with their sagging tribal insignia, some of them now denoting defunct gangs and obsolete popular icons.

I am not naïve enough (as Horace’s laudator temporis acti ) to wish to return to the world of my grandfather (my aunt was crippled for life with polio, my grandmother hobbled with the scars and adhesions from an unoperated-on, ruptured appendix, my grandfather battled glaucoma each morning with vials of eye drops), when around 1960, in tie and straw hat, he escorted me to the barber. The latter trimmed my hair in his white smock and bowtie, calling me at eight years old Mr. Hanson.

Like Road Warrior, again, what frightens is this mish-mash of violence with foppish culture, of official platitudes and real-life chaos: the illiterate and supposedly impoverished nonetheless fishing through the discounted video game barrel at Wal-Mart; the much-heralded free public transit bus zooming around on electrical or natural gas power absolutely empty of riders, as the impoverished prefer their Camrys and Civics; ads encouraging new food stamp users as local fast-food franchises have lines of cars blocking traffic on the days when government cards are electronically recharged; the politician assuring us that California is preeminent as he hurries home to his Bay Area cocoon.

On the Frontier

I find myself insidiously adopting the Road Warrior survival code. Without any systematic design, I notice that in the last two years I have put a hand pump on my grandfather’s abandoned well in the yard and can pump fresh water without electricity. I put in an outdoor kitchen, tied into a 300-gallon propane tank, that can fuel a year of cooking. I am getting more dogs (all vaccinated and caged); for the first time in my life I inventoried all my ancestors’ guns in all the closets and found shotguns, deer rifles, .22s etc.

I have an extra used pickup I chose not to sell always gassed in the garage. For all sorts of scrapes and minor injuries, sprains, simple finger fractures, etc., I self-treat — anything to avoid going into the local emergency room (reader, you will too, when Obamacare kicks in). And the more I talk to neighbors, the more I notice that those who stayed around are sort of ready for our Road Warrior world. At night if I happen to hear Barack Obama on the news or read the latest communiqué from Jerry Brown, the world they pontificate about in no way resembles the world I see: not the freeways, not the medical system, not the educational establishment, not law enforcement, not the “diversity,” not anything.

Hope and Change

Yet I am confident of better days to come. Sometimes I dream of the booming agricultural export market. Sometimes hopes arise with reports of gargantuan new finds of gas and oil in California. At other times, it is news of closing borders, and some progress in the assimilation of our various tribes. Sometimes a lone brave teacher makes the news for insisting that her students read Shakespeare. On occasion, I think the people silently seethe and resent their kingdom of lies, and so may prove their anger at the polls, perhaps this November.

One looks for hope where one can find it.

http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson...inglepage=true

[Fred O'Malley]

"The melting pot," is no more. Now we have isolated spheres of varying cultures that refuse to become Americanized. Americans should declare them illegal aliens and destroy them. Oh wait, we tried that.

Moral underpinnings are absent in today's society, we have no such thing as normalcy. The kike has done their destructive work well.

[Mr A.Anderson]

In a news release this week, R-CALF USA says the Environmental Protection Agency has, in effect, declared hay a pollutant, potentially requiring farmers and ranchers to store it in pollution containment zones.

The issue stems from a compliance order from EPA’s Region 7 charging Callicrate Feeding Company with environmental violations. The Region 7 office outlined the alleged violations in an August 22 news release. Following is the information provided regarding the Callicrate operation in the release:

“A.J. Jones, d/b/a Callicrate Feeding Company, St. Francis, Kan. - An inspection in February 2011 identified significant NPDES permit violations, including failure to maintain adequate wastewater storage capacity, failure to meet Nutrient Management Plan requirements, failure to conduct operations within areas that are controlled in a manner capable of preventing pollution, and failure to maintain adequate records. The order requires the operation to comply with all terms of the Clean Water Act and its NPDES permit, and to coordinate with the Kansas Department of Health and Environment on its compliance. The order requires the operation to comply with the terms of its Nutrient Management Plan, including sampling and recordkeeping requirements. The feedlot has a permitted capacity of 12,000 cattle and was confining approximately 3,219 cattle at the time of the inspection.”

According to the R-CALF release, Mike Callicrate, after presenting information on country of origin labeling at R-CALF’s annual convention last week, was asked whether the EPA has declared hay a pollutant. He indicated that in his case at least, they have. “Now that EPA has declared hay a pollutant, every farmer and rancher that stores hay, or that leaves a broken hay bale in the field is potentially violating EPA rules and subject to an EPA enforcement action,” Callicrate said. “How far are we going to let this agency go before we stand up and do something about it?”

Much of release moves from the hay issue to broader complaints against concentration in the packing and feeding sectors, including implications that packers are conspiring to drive small feeders out of business. The title of the release, “EPA declares hay a pollutant in effort to antagonize small and mid-sized U.S. cattle feeders,” and additional statements in the release, suggest EPA is singling out certain feeding operations for enforcement actions. “I believe the EPA’s enforcement action is a premeditated effort by EPA to partner with the beef packers to finish the job the beef packer’s couldn’t do alone,” says Callicrate. “Along with my feedlot, the EPA has filed enforcement actions against five other smaller feedlots, including one with only 400 cattle.”

The idea that the EPA has joined a conspiracy with packers against small cattle feeders seems a bit of a stretch, but the hay-storage issue certainly raises concerns. The information provided in the EPA news release uses a fairly broad accusation of “significant NPDES permit violations,” but does not mention anything about hay storage. Drovers/CattleNetwork has contacted EPA’s Region 7 for more information on specific charges in the case. We’ll let you know what we find out.

**edit - this is not the California Zone - but it just goes to illustrate the point that our government is doing everything in its power - and beyond its power - to take all rights away from its citizens.

[Svante]

Originally Posted by Fred O'Malley

"The melting pot," is no more. Now we have isolated spheres of varying cultures that refuse to become Americanized. Americans should declare them illegal aliens and destroy them. Oh wait, we tried that.

Moral underpinnings are absent in today's society, we have no such thing as normalcy. The kike has done their destructive work well.

.
It is also true that White population i s to become minority
in many countries because of much slower birth rate then
non white populations.


.

[Fred O'Malley]

Mr. A has it right, the government is at war with business, WHITE-OWNED business. They are destroying the ability to live in this fucked up country.

We take it back or we die, get it?

[Nate Richards]

Road Warrior is actually pretty damn cool. Hanson isn't so clever. He calls thieves "road warriors" but forgets that the Road Warrior was the good guy.

He had an article a while back about "two californias" that cracked me up. He's describing all this obviously mexican-flavored squalor, in rural areas of a mexican-invaded state that borders mexico, and he describes the destruction as.... "caribbean".

This old faggot needs, and probably wants, his copper stolen.

Hell, in "Road Warrior", even most of the bad guys were heroic. This clown hanson enjoys watching the indians steal his shit, so he can bitch about it. Bitch about it, and connect it to fictional white characters.

That movie, "The Road Warrior", is infinitely more valuable than Hanson and his whinings. Watch all three of them. The first is a little slow but they get better.

AYATOLLAH OF ROCK N ROLLAH!!!! lol even the bad guys are good, compared to the Hansons.

I work at a lot of gas and oil wells, plants, etc in ND and sometimes wonder who will be fighting over them in a few decades. That movie is, or will be, true-er than ever! lol except colder. Imagine snowy "mad max" trilogy action. Good times ahead. Fuck you, hanson. As California goes, so goes you. Good riddance.

[Dale VanderMeer]

One kwanish "reporters" thoughts on California's and Greece's woes with far-left handouts and the illegal blight within both areas.:

Greece and California draging down a union and a nation...

By Kyle Smith
LONDON — This island off the course of northwest Europe is turning out to be an excellent viewing platform for three blockbuster shows this summer: Queen Elizabeth’s 60th anniversary Jubilee, the London Olympics and the implosion of Europe.

The group of countries using the euro as a joint currency is “a burning building with no exits,” says Britain’s foreign minister William Hague. The Europeans with flames lapping around their ankles are the Greeks, but the whole continent is about to feel the burn.

Yoking most of Europe together with a single currency has proved as unstable as Napoleon or Hitler trying to lasso it with a single army. The euro project was doomed from the start, when the expert economists and Ph.D.s and we-are-the-world Eurocrats almost unanimously agreed that pushing through monetary union without fiscal union was a sound idea. It turned out to be like giving alcoholics the keys to the liquor store.

Panicked Greek voters, who haven’t been able to elect a government with a working parliamentary majority, are about to have a second round of elections in June. The most popular party in polling is the far-left Syriza outfit, led by a 38-year-old former communist named Alexis Tsipras, who has labeled Greece’s latest bailout and austerity package as “criminal.”
If he takes over, he vows to default on Greece’s loans, launch a new spending spree and dare the Eurozone to throw his country out. That would cause or, more likely, be preceded by, a run on Greece’s banks as Greeks hoard euros against the inevitably weak drachmas that would replace them.

On Monday (May 21), Greeks withdrew $900 million from their bank accounts. “Of course there’s no panic,” said Greece’s figurehead president Karolos Papoulias, “but there’s great fear which can evolve into panic.” Somebody give this guy the award for least-reassuring reassurance of the year.

Almost as non-reassuring is the comment of Paul Krugman that this isn’t a “bank run” but a “bank jog.” And we all know jogging is good for you.
How bad are things in Greece? Syriza has no plan to pay for its fantasies — wiping out its debts wouldn’t mean Greece magically had enough funding to pay for obligations going forward — and Germany has repeatedly said it will continue to fund Greece only if it will continue to cut back on its bloated government spending while enforcing serious tax hikes. The Greeks want to stay in the euro (by a margin of 78% to 12%), and they want to go back to spending freely. They cannot have both. What looks like “draconian austerity” right now is going to look like a sunny day on Sifnos compared to what’s coming.

Greece is simply a bubble that had to pop. As Michael Lewis showed in his book “Boomerang,” Greece needs massive corrective measures just to return to the range of how normal countries operate. By longstanding tradition, tax evasion is a way of life: Two-thirds of doctors reported income of less than 12,000 euros, below which no income tax is owed. Serious enforcement would mean putting every doctor in Greece in prison, a knowledgeable observer informed Lewis. Many workers have enjoyed retirement and state pensions as early as age 50 or 55.
Despite having one of the lowest education rankings in Europe, pre-austerity Greece employed four times as many teachers per capita as Finland, which has the best. A state railroad system is so badly run that an economist calculated it would be cheaper for the government to simply pay for cab rides for everyone.

Such countries never should have been invited to join the Euro in the first place. Greece and others phonied up their numbers to prove they had reformed their habit of simply printing money to pay their bills. Joining the Euro meant they could borrow cheaply on Germany’s credit card — but they were now in the control of the country that hates inflation more than any other. A rupture was inevitable.

Jacques Delors, as European Commission president, cheered the creation of the Eurozone and played Monsieur Magoo when it came to looking at the books. Now he says, “The finance ministers did not want to see anything disagreeable which they would be forced to deal with” and “Everyone must examine their consciences.” What’s French for “Oops”?
At this point, the British are wiping their brows in relief that they rejected Eurozone membership. Conveniently forgotten is how opponents of the euro were once scorned as “backward.”

The Financial Times said “immaturity is the kind explanation” for the views of the rear guard of UK Conservatives who successfully opposed the elites’ calls to replace the British pound with the Euro. The FT declared of Greece, “membership of the Eurozone offers the prospect of long-term economic stability.” As late as 2008, the paper was still saying of the monetary union, “it has succeeded.”

The “Blighty” blogger for The Economist writes, “I first became interested in politics at around that time and recall vividly that in my then newspaper of choice the term ‘Euroskeptic’ would often be partnered with a phrase such as ‘swivel-eyed’ or ‘foaming at the mouth’ in the same sub-clause, even though, by any measure of public opinion, it was far stranger to be pro-euro.”

Now the tubercular Greek economy has shrunk by 20% and is still contracting by 5% a year. Greece is looking like it will crash out of the Euro, to the accompaniment of the destruction of Greece’s banks, empty coffers for all those dependent on government checks and general panic in the streets which could easily cause bank runs and similar chaos in Portugal, Spain or Italy.

Weak drachmas wouldn’t be able to pay for vital imported goods like medicine. Economic refugees would (try to) flee the country, but other countries’ citizens would scream for the borders to be closed up quickly.

In the absence of clear authority, conditions would be ripe for a strongman to take over Greece. Strongmen tend not to be very nice. A majority of police officers, according to a survey published in the Athens paper The Tribune, voted this month for the "neo-Nazi" group Golden Dawn.
Lee Harris, writing for the American Enterprise Institute, brings up a crucial point about Greece: In the US, “No one seriously argues that the period of austerity (i.e., recession) was the deliberate policy of this or that administration. But the European austerity programs are the deliberate policy of the governments that have imposed them, and this is a fact that every citizen forced to tighten his belt is perfectly aware of.”
Greeks aren’t going to be waiting patiently in breadlines singing “Brother, Can You Spare a Drachma.” We’re talking about serious rage. Greece may be the cradle of democracy, but its current democracy is only 37 years old. Before that: military rule.

These sound like just the kind of conditions you probably don’t want if your best hope of climbing out of recession is to attract tourists.

Nationalism, which the EU was supposed to cure forever as all member nations joined hands and sang hosannas to Delors, is rising again like heartburn: A left-wing Greek member of parliament declared, “Achtung Frau Merkel. The Greek people want to live free and they don’t want to be under a new occupation from Germany.” A left-wing extremist group torched a car belonging to a German who leads an EU task force on Greece. In relatively unscathed France, extremist parties captured 30% of the vote in this spring’s presidential elections.

ATHENS? I’d like you to meet Sacramento. The two of you should have a lot to chat about. Such as what to do when you’re in a burning building with no exits.

In California, efforts to close the budget deficit by taxing the rich resulted in the deficit shrinking from $9 billion all the way to $16 billion. Gov. Jerry Brown’s proposed solution: Tax the rich even more (and tax everybody else, too, by hiking sales tax).

California contains about one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients (despite having 12% of the nation’s population) and is planning a high-speed rail system that will cost an estimated $68 billion, including $4 billion on a section The Los Angeles Times dubbed a “train to nowhere.” Its pension costs for public employees, 85% of them unionized, rose 2,000% in the first decade of this century, which is 1,976% more than revenues increased. A CEO survey in April ruled that California was the least business-friendly state in the US.

In 1999, when the state was flooded with dotcom tax revenue, it set in place a law, SB 400, that assumed the good times would continue forever and allowed government workers as young as 50 to retire on 90% of salary they earned in their final year, when they would ramp up the overtime. In order to cover these commitments through the CALPERS investment fund, the Dow Jones Industrial Average would have to be over 25,000 by now.

Pension and health-care spending for retirees are set to triple this decade. More than 12,000 state and local workers are collecting more than $100,000 a year in pensions. Even convicted felons can collect pensions.
Greek and Californian politicians made the same mistake: They wanted union backing so badly that they promised far more than they could ever deliver. They knew that they’d be long gone before the crisis kicked in, or maybe it would solve itself. Either way, they didn’t care. They were happy to use tomorrow’s seed corn to buy themselves power. California’s pension plans face a $500 billion hole in unfunded promises.

Gov. Brown says he wants to reform the cost structure of California by raising the retirement age and making other adjustments in a 12-point plan that looks much like pouring a glass of water on a forest fire. He won’t be able to get it through his union-bought Democratic legislature anyway. And courts have ruled that pension plans can’t be changed retroactively for current workers or retirees.

There are only so many Mark Zuckerbergs to tax (and Zuck’s old roommate Eduardo Saverin renounced his US citizenship and moved to low-tax Singapore. He saved himself at least $67 million in capital gains taxes by so doing.) California could default on its bonds, but then how would it borrow again? For a state to declare bankruptcy is unprecedented, and there is no provision for it under federal law anyway.

One certainty is that California is our problem, just as Greece is Europe’s. They’re both too big to fail. The UK’s ex-finance minister Alistair Darling notes that even if Greece exits the Eurozone, the rest of Europe will have to pitch in anyway, this time not to backstop the banks but simply to “stop people going hungry.”

We are constantly being told that the national conversation is being hijacked by ideological zealots — Second Amendment freaks or evangelicals or eco-catastrophists. Until recently in American history, though, unions were seen as a good thing, a tool the ordinary worker could use to get some leverage against “heartless capitalism.” Then, while voters weren’t looking, public-sector unions hijacked taxpayers to award themselves extravagant pay and benefit packages.

“Sustainability” is a word we use a lot, yet hardly ever when it comes to fiscal matters. California’s largesse is no more sustainable than Greece’s. Each of them is bound to face a horrible reckoning.
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Found Here

[Fred O'Malley]

Are you hand-out junkies getting this?

Now the tubercular Greek economy has shrunk by 20% and is still contracting by 5% a year. Greece is looking like it will crash out of the Euro, to the accompaniment of the destruction of Greece’s banks, empty coffers for all those dependent on government checks and general panic in the streets which could easily cause bank runs and similar chaos in Portugal, Spain or Italy.

Weak drachmas wouldn’t be able to pay for vital imported goods like medicine. Economic refugees would (try to) flee the country, but other countries’ citizens would scream for the borders to be closed up quickly.

In the absence of clear authority, conditions would be ripe for a strongman to take over Greece. Strongmen tend not to be very nice. A majority of police officers, according to a survey published in the Athens paper The Tribune, voted this month for the "neo-Nazi" group Golden Dawn.

Lee Harris, writing for the American Enterprise Institute, brings up a crucial point about Greece: In the US, “No one seriously argues that the period of austerity (i.e., recession) was the deliberate policy of this or that administration.

But the European austerity programs are the deliberate policy of the governments that have imposed them, and this is a fact that every citizen forced to tighten his belt is perfectly aware of.”

[Alex Linder]

There Is No California

Palo Alto and Fresno share a state government, but that’s about it.

By Victor Davis Hanson

Driving across California is like going from Mississippi to Massachusetts without ever crossing a state line.

Consider the disconnects: California’s combined income and sales taxes are among the nation’s highest, but the state’s annual deficit is still about $16 billion. It is estimated that more than 2,000 upper-income Californians are leaving per week to flee high taxes and costly regulations, yet the state government wants to raise taxes even higher. California’s business climate already ranks near the bottom in most surveys. Its teachers are among the highest paid, on average, in the nation, but its public-school students consistently test near the bottom of the nation in both math and science.

The state’s public employees enjoy some of the nation’s most generous pensions and benefits, but California’s retirement systems are underfunded by about $300 billion. The state’s gas taxes — at over 49 cents per gallon — are among the highest in the nation, but its once-unmatched freeways, like 101 and 99, for long stretches have degenerated into potholed, clogged nightmares unchanged since the early 1960s.

The state wishes to borrow billions of dollars to develop high-speed rail, beginning with a little-traveled link between Fresno and Corcoran — a corridor already served by money-losing Amtrak. Apparently, coastal residents like the idea of European-style high-speed rail — as long as the noisy and dirty construction does not begin in their backyards.


As gasoline prices soar, California chooses not to develop millions of barrels of untapped oil and even more natural gas off its shore and beneath its interior. Home to bankrupt green companies like Solyndra, California has mandated that a third of all the energy provided by state utilities soon must come from renewable energy sources – largely wind and solar, which currently provide about 11 percent of the state’s electricity and almost none of its transportation fuel.

How to explain the seemingly inexplicable? “California” is a misnomer. There is no such state. Instead there are two radically different cultures and landscapes with little in common, the two equally dysfunctional in quite different ways. Apart they are unworldly; together, a disaster.

A postmodern narrow coastal corridor runs from San Diego to Berkeley; there the weather is ideal, the gentrified affluent make good money, and values are green and left-wing. This Shangri-La is juxtaposed to a vast impoverished interior, from the southern desert to the northern Central Valley, where life is becoming premodern.

On the coast, blue-chip universities like Cal Tech, Berkeley, Stanford, and UCLA in pastoral landscapes train the world’s doctors, lawyers, engineers, and businesspeople. In the hot interior of blue-collar Sacramento, Turlock, Fresno, and Bakersfield, well over half the incoming freshmen in the California State University system must take remedial math and science classes.

In postmodern Palo Alto, a small cottage costs more than $1 million. Two hours away, in premodern and now-bankrupt Stockton, a bungalow the same size goes for less than $100,000.

In the interior, unemployment in many areas is over 15 percent. The theft of copper wire is reaching epidemic proportions. Thousands of the shrinking middle class have fled the interior for the coast or for nearby no-income-tax states. To fathom the nearly unbelievable statistics — as California’s population grew by 10 million from the mid-1980s to 2005, its number of Medicaid recipients increased by 7 million; one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients now reside in California — visit the state’s hinterlands.

But in the Never-Never Land of Apple, Facebook, Google, Hollywood, and the wine country, millions live in an idyllic paradise. Coastal Californians can afford to worry about trivia — and so their legislators seek to outlaw foie gras, shut down irrigation projects in order to save the three-inch-long Delta smelt, and allow children to have legally recognized multiple parents.

But in the less feel-good interior, crippling regulations curb timber, gas and oil, and farm production. For the most part, the rules are mandated by coastal utopians who have little idea where the fuel for their imported cars comes from, or how the redwood is cut for their decks, or who grows the ingredients for their Mediterranean lunches of arugula, olive oil, and pasta.

On the coast, it’s politically incorrect to talk of illegal immigration. In the interior, residents see first-hand the bankrupting effects on schools, courts, and health care when millions arrive illegally without English-language fluency or a high-school diploma — and send back billions of dollars in remittances to Mexico and other Latin American countries.

The drive from Fresno to Palo Alto takes three hours, but you might as well be rocketing from Earth to the moon.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The End of Sparta. You can reach him by e-mailing [email protected]. © 2012 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articl...r-davis-hanson

[America First]

When China takes over or maybe itsalie, they will chase the savages out that were used to chase US Whites OUT.

Prop 187 in 1995, that White man was the writing on the Wall About Voting.

Originally Posted by Alex Linder

There Is No California

Palo Alto and Fresno share a state government, but that’s about it.

By Victor Davis Hanson

Driving across California is like going from Mississippi to Massachusetts without ever crossing a state line.

Consider the disconnects: California’s combined income and sales taxes are among the nation’s highest, but the state’s annual deficit is still about $16 billion. It is estimated that more than 2,000 upper-income Californians are leaving per week to flee high taxes and costly regulations, yet the state government wants to raise taxes even higher. California’s business climate already ranks near the bottom in most surveys. Its teachers are among the highest paid, on average, in the nation, but its public-school students consistently test near the bottom of the nation in both math and science.

The state’s public employees enjoy some of the nation’s most generous pensions and benefits, but California’s retirement systems are underfunded by about $300 billion. The state’s gas taxes — at over 49 cents per gallon — are among the highest in the nation, but its once-unmatched freeways, like 101 and 99, for long stretches have degenerated into potholed, clogged nightmares unchanged since the early 1960s.

The state wishes to borrow billions of dollars to develop high-speed rail, beginning with a little-traveled link between Fresno and Corcoran — a corridor already served by money-losing Amtrak. Apparently, coastal residents like the idea of European-style high-speed rail — as long as the noisy and dirty construction does not begin in their backyards.


As gasoline prices soar, California chooses not to develop millions of barrels of untapped oil and even more natural gas off its shore and beneath its interior. Home to bankrupt green companies like Solyndra, California has mandated that a third of all the energy provided by state utilities soon must come from renewable energy sources – largely wind and solar, which currently provide about 11 percent of the state’s electricity and almost none of its transportation fuel.

How to explain the seemingly inexplicable? “California” is a misnomer. There is no such state. Instead there are two radically different cultures and landscapes with little in common, the two equally dysfunctional in quite different ways. Apart they are unworldly; together, a disaster.

A postmodern narrow coastal corridor runs from San Diego to Berkeley; there the weather is ideal, the gentrified affluent make good money, and values are green and left-wing. This Shangri-La is juxtaposed to a vast impoverished interior, from the southern desert to the northern Central Valley, where life is becoming premodern.

On the coast, blue-chip universities like Cal Tech, Berkeley, Stanford, and UCLA in pastoral landscapes train the world’s doctors, lawyers, engineers, and businesspeople. In the hot interior of blue-collar Sacramento, Turlock, Fresno, and Bakersfield, well over half the incoming freshmen in the California State University system must take remedial math and science classes.

In postmodern Palo Alto, a small cottage costs more than $1 million. Two hours away, in premodern and now-bankrupt Stockton, a bungalow the same size goes for less than $100,000.

In the interior, unemployment in many areas is over 15 percent. The theft of copper wire is reaching epidemic proportions. Thousands of the shrinking middle class have fled the interior for the coast or for nearby no-income-tax states. To fathom the nearly unbelievable statistics — as California’s population grew by 10 million from the mid-1980s to 2005, its number of Medicaid recipients increased by 7 million; one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients now reside in California — visit the state’s hinterlands.

But in the Never-Never Land of Apple, Facebook, Google, Hollywood, and the wine country, millions live in an idyllic paradise. Coastal Californians can afford to worry about trivia — and so their legislators seek to outlaw foie gras, shut down irrigation projects in order to save the three-inch-long Delta smelt, and allow children to have legally recognized multiple parents.

But in the less feel-good interior, crippling regulations curb timber, gas and oil, and farm production. For the most part, the rules are mandated by coastal utopians who have little idea where the fuel for their imported cars comes from, or how the redwood is cut for their decks, or who grows the ingredients for their Mediterranean lunches of arugula, olive oil, and pasta.

On the coast, it’s politically incorrect to talk of illegal immigration. In the interior, residents see first-hand the bankrupting effects on schools, courts, and health care when millions arrive illegally without English-language fluency or a high-school diploma — and send back billions of dollars in remittances to Mexico and other Latin American countries.

The drive from Fresno to Palo Alto takes three hours, but you might as well be rocketing from Earth to the moon.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The End of Sparta. You can reach him by e-mailing [email protected]. © 2012 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articl...r-davis-hanson

[SmokyMtn]

Moody’s Warns Of Mass California Municipal Bankruptcies
Friday, August 17, 2012 at 8:03PM
Source: Testosterone Pit

Contributed by Chriss Street. Specialist in corporate reorganizations and turnarounds, former Chairman of two NYSE listed companies. His latest book, The Third Way, describes how to achieve management excellence and financial reward by moving organizations from Conflict and Confrontation to Leadership and Cooperation. Chriss lives in Newport Beach, CA.

The klaxon horn went off Friday evening for California municipal bondholders when Moody’s credit rating service issued a report stating that the plummeting financial condition of many California counties, cities, school districts and other government agencies will soon result in large numbers of municipal bankruptcy filings. Concerned about their own potential liability for providing high ratings that encouraged conservative elderly Americans to invest in risky bonds; Moody’s announced they will undertake a wide-ranging review of municipal finances because of the growing insolvencies.

The Moody’s report comes just two days after we reported that “CALIFORNIA SALES TAX REVENUE NOSE-DIVES BY 33.5%.” Stock brokers have often recommended California municipal bonds as very safe investments, due to historically low default rates and relatively stable finances. But Moody’s said that outlook is changing after the Chapter 9 Bankruptcy filings of Stockton, San Bernardino and Mammoth Lakes.

Moody’s is especially concerned with the growing attitude among many cash-strapped cities that filing bankruptcy to avoid paying bondholders, is politically more advantageous than cutting spending. As a result, Moody’s will re-assess the financial condition of all California cities, which issues about 20 percent of the municipal bond volume nationwide, “to reflect the new fiscal realities and the governmental practices.”

The Moody’s report said the credit rating service will also examine the outlook for municipal bonds in other troubled states. Robert Kurtter, Managing Director of public finance at Moody’s, would not say which states they will review, though Kurtter mentioned Michigan and Nevada as possibilities.

Tonight’s report noted that many cities across the nation are in financial distress, but emphasized that a greater share of bankruptcies are expected to come from California. Local officials were quick to try to downplay this grim forecast. Chris McKenzie, Executive Director of the League of California Cities responded: “Moody’s has an obligation to review changing circumstances, but we would just suggest that their assessment of the framework and ground activities is perhaps exaggerated.”

Tom Dressler, spokesman for California State Treasurer Bill Lockyer, cautioned against overacting to only three bankruptcies from California’s 482 cities: “No city’s going to blithely skip into bankruptcy court to avoid its obligations.” Mr. Dressler called the report “a little hyperbolic.”

Moody’s detailed that over 10% of California cities have already declared fiscal crises, with the most troubled areas lying inland in the middle of the state and east of the Los Angeles area. Mr. Kurtter said the declarations of emergency were “a reflection of the broader fiscal stress in the state” and went on to warn that Moody’s may issue an “across-the-board rating revisions are possible following a review of our ratings on California cities over the next month or two” for all California cities. Chris McKenzie acknowledged that such a move “would have a terrible impact on taxpayers.”

Moody’s highlighted growing doubts that cash-strapped cities are willing making good-faith efforts to pay their bonds debts in full. Former Treasury official Paul Rosenstiel, a Principal at DeLaRosa & Co municipal bond investment-banking firm in San Francisco stated: “Credit analysis is based on the ability to pay and the willingness to pay. Investors have historically assumed that cities are willing to pay their debts because they want continued access to the bond market” … “What is being considered is whether the willingness to pay is something that needs to be factored in more than in the past — and if so, how would you measure it?”

California cities already pay higher interest rates to borrow money from municipal bond investors because the state has the second lowest bond rating in the nation, only Louisiana is lower. But if any city’s credit rating is cut to the “junk bond” level, rates would rise so high that the city would be forced to file bankruptcy. Most cities are already are financially deteriorating, because of a steep drop in tax revenue.

The Moody’s report is raising alarms for city leaders who fear it may trigger a market panic. ”Every city in the state is looking on with some concern,” said Dave Vossbrink, spokesman for the city of San Jose. ”Governments of all kinds borrow money, usually to build infrastructure that lasts a long time. It’s like getting a mortgage to build roads, a sewage plant, whatever it might be.” Mr. Vossbrink emphasized that San Jose has cut laid off cops and closed libraries. Residents also recently voted to cut public pension benefits for city workers, but those cuts may not be enough prevent a downgrade.

Moody’s said it will conduct in-depth financial stress tests for all California cities in the coming weeks and issue appropriate downgrades in September. The timing of the Moody downgrades may be especially devastating for the California state budget. Governor Jerry Brown kicked off his drive this week to save the state’s solvency by encouraging voters to pass an $8 billion tax increase initiative on the November ballot. But bad press and rising bankruptcies is sure to undermine voter support. Cross-posted from Chriss Street's blog.

Chriss Street and Paul Preston Co-Host “The American Exceptionalism Radio Talk Show” Streaming Live Monday Through Friday at 7-10 PM Click Here to Listen: http://www.mysytv.net/kmyclive.html

[Alex Linder]

http://www.hoover.org/news/daily-report/110946

[Tom Scabdates]

Originally Posted by America First

When China takes over or maybe itsalie, they will chase the savages out that were used to chase US Whites OUT.

Prop 187 in 1995, that White man was the writing on the Wall About Voting.

You are a pole dodging POS AF. Just like your buddy "Hugh". You're garbage. No one listens to your inane drivel.
One might as well be tuned into Frontpagemag than listen to AF, or "Hugh".

[Fred O'Malley]

Is there any talk about Cali breaking up into several smaller states? Let the muds and fiscal in-conservatives bail their own boats. Let them take their share of unfunded pensions and allow them to go belly up.

[America First]

Keiser Report: Consumption-tration Camps (E329) - YouTube

Keiser Report: Consumption-tration Camps (E329) - YouTube

14,000 plus now work for 24 cents an hour, to boost the GDP ?

[America First]

What We've Got Here is Failure to Communicate - YouTube

What We've Got Here is Failure to Communicate - YouTube

[Bernie]

Good God!

I'm Australian, back in 1981 I was a bit of a hotshot in a large British Insurance company which rewarded achievers by sending us around the planet to the best places on Earth.

My wife and 9 year old daughter and I spent 2 weeks in California which was simply beautiful. To think that it has descended to where it is today would have been unthinkable back then, I remember returning to Brisbane and seeing how slow and empty the place was when compared to LA.

Thank God I'm in OZ. You guys need a real and bloody revolution! It seems the shadow ZOG really hates you and he has set out to destroy what was once a fabulous place. Shoot the bastards!

[Jason 916]

There's plenty of space at least, but disappearing. Northern and Southern California would separate if there ever was to be a separation. Wouldn't really mind it.

[Hunter Morrow]

In 2010 California reported that of itz 38 million residents, at least 7.3 percent were known to be illegal. You can't have civilization with all of these four foot 10 inches, felon invader spic midget retards. You just can't swing it. 1/3rd of the country's entire "welfare" expenditure is in Mexicaliforeigna and they only have about a 9th of the population!

The state is only 40 percent non-Hispanic White and it is 30 percent Mexcrement. I lived there for 2 years and I think census data is sugar-coating that, too. 15+ million Mexcrement. You know why Mexico is so fucked up? Because it has Mexcrement. Now why is California fucked up? Oh, this and that and anything, anything to avoid saying the glaringly obvious: The state went to shit when it became North Mexico.

Shame. It didn't have to be this way. 1960 California was the envy of the entire world. 2012 California is a multi-kult cesspool of ragingly incompetent politicians ruling over a Kwa fifedom of mud welfare leeches.

[P.E.]

It MUST get worse. This system must collapse.

The only way whites will ever regain their autonomous spirit is when they are out of this comfort zone suburbia debt-paid bubble where they soothe their vanity by preaching equality, and into the reality of spics, niggers, and every other non-white stinkbomb of the earth, where they become discontent with the two options of breathe in the stench or stop breathing.

The multitude only cares about their immediate surroundings and their vanity. When they finally are in the sludge with these brown pigs, when they cannot even enjoy their vanity and admire themselves -- because the multitude can only admire themselves when they can believe they are above others, when they can despise others --, they will then want it again.