Oh, California

California – where Republican governors have ruled for 23 of the past 27 years – is a complete mess. Republican “values” have all but destroyed our education system (both K-12 and higher education). They have caused serious damage even to the University of California.

California’s economy, once the fifth largest in the world, has shrunk to 8th largest, our unemployment rate is far higher than the national average. Our infrastructure is in tatters. We have no money to help the mentally ill, so they just crowd the streets and parks. Thank you Republicans!

What is amazing to me is that Republicans keep winning here. Come on, California!

Now we have Meg Whitman, who’s biggest claim to fame is running an on-line flea market, vying to be the next governor. Now, mind you, she didn’t start eBay, she just ran it for awhile.

Whitman is basically buying the election. Whitman’s campaign consists of three “platforms” which are really just unexplained catch-phrases: job creation, reduced state government spending, and reform of the state's K-12 educational system.

Whitman’s big plan to create jobs: cut taxes. Because that worked so well over the past 27 years! Sorry, that’s a bankrupt theory, already thoroughly disproved (see George W. Bush).

Whitman’s big plan to reduce government spending: “make tough decisions.” How’s that for a non-starter. Oh, and “turn Sacramento into a part-time legislature.” The real effect: say goodbye to state parks, to state roads and highways, to the sewer system, the water system, the emergency response system, clean air and water control. All of this means firing people. How that’s supposed to help the unemployment picture is beyond me.

Whitman’s big plan to fix education: ??? She says “cut bureaucracy and overhead.” That is a catchphrase, not a plan. What bureaucracy? What parts of overhead? Heating costs, perhaps? Janitorial services? Just shut the power off?

She says typical conservative things like “California’s government must tighten its belt.”

Let’s be clear. Government can’t eat more macaroni. Government “tightens its belt” in one way – it lays people off! That just means firing more teachers, firemen, police officers, highway patrol, rangers, and sanitation workers. It also means selling off more of our state park land to private corporations, allowing our roads to revert to gravel, discontinuing use of bridges, further disintegration of dams and the means to move water from source to city, reducing access to the courts, and abandoning efforts to investigate and police the banks, corporations and landlords.

Let’s go further. Running government like a business is a BAD idea. Government has the opposite purpose of business. The purpose of business – and this is required by law – is to maximize shareholder wealth: i.e. to profit. The purpose of government is exactly the opposite, to promote long-term stability and societal welfare. The one knows nothing about the other.

And further still, Whitman claims that California has too many people on welfare, and that the solution is to cut the lifetime cap on welfare benefits from five years to two. First, it should be noted that her assertions about California’s welfare program are entirely false. They are untrue, and designed just to piss people off enough to vote for her. That strategy has worked for Republicans for the past 40 years.

A little reality is needed here. California’s unemployment rate is 13.2%. There are no jobs. Whitman is going to slash government, laying off additional thousands of people. Whitman’s faux-economic plan sounds like disaster for California, unless you are already in the top 0.5%. And we’ve already had enough of that.