Posts tagged California
A Smokin’ Take-Away from the Midterms
Nov 21st
I heard plenty of commentators pass off the defeat of Proposition 19, the marijuana legalization measure on the November 2010 ballot, with a condescending, “Even California isn’t that crazy.” You would think these professional pundits would know by now that it is never a good call to underestimate the craziness of California.
Which leads up to my favorite election fact from the 2010 election: More Californians voted to legalize pot than voted for Meg Whitman for governor. So we really are that crazy!
With the final votes yet to be tallied, Meg got 4,027,661 Californians to vote for her while nearly half a million more, 4,502,657, voted to legalize pot. You could almost double the population of North Dakota with the difference between the two tallies. The Whitman campaign spent $163 million on her failed effort ($141 million of her own money and a mere $22 million in Meg-free campaign contributions), so each vote she collected cost her $40.47. The much-derided Prop 19 supporters, in contrast, spent $4 million on their campaign, or $1.13 per vote.
More significant, though, is what running a social-reform proposition in California means to the rest of the nation, even if the proposition loses. Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the pro-legalization Drug Policy Alliance, put it this way, “California’s Proposition 19 may not have won a majority of voters yesterday, but it already represents an extraordinary victory for the broader movement to legalize marijuana. Its mere presence on the ballot … elevated and legitimized public discourse about marijuana and marijuana policy.”
Students for Sensible Drug Policy, another pro-legalization group, added, “One of the greatest hidden victories of the Prop 19 campaign was that it trained the emerging generation of marijuana reformers on how to run a legalization campaign, and left virtually all of them wanting to win on this issue in 2012.”
Colorado is a likely target, underscoring California’s continuing ability to influence American society, even if the state’s voters continue to vote as strangely as they did in 2010.
In the “Fail Race,” California is Tops
Sep 29th
I didn’t know that in the world of financial prognosticating, successfully predicting a bank’s dividend cut in 2008 would remain a salient kudo in 2010, but that’s the way it is, at least at Fortune, Bloomberg and Business Week, which used that as the sole qualifier for one Meredith Whitney’s credibility. Be that as it may, I think the gal’s spot-on with her latest future-gazing:
Meredith Whitney, the analyst who correctly predicted Citigroup Inc.’s dividend cut in 2008, will release a report rating California’s financial condition as the worst among the 15 largest U.S. states, Fortune said.
The report rates the states by four criteria: economy, fiscal health, housing and taxes, Fortune said, citing Whitney. Texas and Virginia are the only two states to receive overall positive ratings, the magazine reported yesterday. An official at Meredith Whitney Advisory Group LLC in New York confirmed the document’s existence and said it wasn’t immediately available.
Crippling debts and deficits are about to make individual states the next casualty of the credit crisis, Whitney said, according to an article on the CNBC website.
“The similarities between the states and the banks are extreme to the extent that states have been spending dramatically and are leveraged dramatically,” Whitney said. “Municipal debt has doubled since 2000. Spending has grown way faster than revenues.”
It comes as no surprise that California would top Whitney’s list of fiscal bottom-dwellers. I’ve got about 200 pages of notes for Crazifornia, including at least 50 pages on budget- and spending-related issues that support Whitney’s findings. I also think her analogy to banks is on the mark. There have been 127 bank failures nationally so far this year (nine of them in California), and that doesn’t include the spectacular failures that triggered the recession.
California is the coming spectacular failure that could well trigger the much-anticipated double dip recession.
Crazifornia will cover this thoroughly, especially in its chapter on how California taught the rest of America the art of government over-spending. The state has continuously increased its spending on welfare, the environment, pensions, education and thousands of questionable pet projects while systematically destroying its business and industrial base, which it needs for revenues. Last year, business and industrial tax receipts in California dropped 40 percent from the previous year! Interestingly, Texas is taking the opposite route and remains in good financial standing, according to Whitney.
Image: New York Times
Barking Towards Oblivion
Aug 4th
Yesterday, the California Democrats unveiled their budget proposal, an utterly uninspiring amalgamation of new burdens on businesses and taxpayers, with no proposals to cut spending – not one.
Businesses would be scammed out of $2 billion by letting some rare California business tax breaks expire. Personal income tax and car fees (what got Grey Davis drummed out of office, for cryin’ out loud!) would both go up. There would be no cuts to welfare entitlements, no sanity injected into the state’s prison system, and certainly no purging of useless, duplicative state commissions, boards, agencies and departments – in short, there was no respect for the people of California.
Against all that, I give you my vet, Dr. Mike Eberhardt. I’m going to a Rancho Santa Margarita Planning Commission hearing on his behalf tonight, to speak in favor of innovation and against the expensive repression of business that goes on so routinely in Crazifornia.
Dr. Eberhart’s clinic is in an industrial park, not a neighborhood. An innovative vet, he built a fenced-in dog run behind the building, encircling it with an expensive wrought iron fence, in keeping with the design of other fencing in the park. He uses it to let dogs walk off anesthesia, and to better diagnose dogs. He found that dogs on a metal table in a vet’s treatment room will mask their symptoms, but if he and the owner go out to the dog run, in a few minutes, the dog will drop the mask and a better diagnosis can be made.
Ah, but the city of Rancho Santa Margarita has a policy requiring a Conditional Use Permit for dog runs like his. And they’re recommending that the Planning Commission deny his application. Overseeing dog runs may be a good idea if you’re attempting to regulate doggy daycare facilities, where such runs can create a lot of barking and a lot of poop. But his dogs are there for one-on-one observation, are never left alone, and are cleaned up after, so it’s … well … an entirely different animal.
What’s logical to you and me is missed in the regulation-addicted mindset of California government. How crazy is it? Well, Dr. E’s spent over $20,000 to date on attorney’s fees, and will ring up a bunch more as his attorney prepares for and sits through tonight’s hearing.
Welcome to business in California – where every good idea gets the bureaucratic bum’s rush, and every good business gets taxed into oblivion.
Not-So-Esteemed
May 29th
On Tuesday, I’m interviewing my long-time blogging friend Bookworm for Crazifornia – not that there’s much at all “crazi” about Bookworm, mind you; she’s one of the saner Californians I’ve come across. But she is the product of a Bay Area education, and I’m very curious to hear her recollections about what it was like to be schooled in the Petri dish of liberal education programs.
Everything that’s wrong with America started in California, and that goes for education, too. Bookworm mentioned that she still struggles with math after having been a guinea pig for new math, and my oldest daughter is still a lousy speller after being exposed to “creative spelling” as a youngster. Most famous of all the California-bred education crazes is the teaching of self-esteem. Here are some relatively current examples, from a 1999 LA Times article:
Similarly, bumper stickers distributed by Cleveland Elementary School in Santa Barbara proclaim that “all children are honored” at the school. Principal Michael Vail said he uses the school’s monthly award ceremony to stress “over and over again . . . that they’re all students of the month.” …
School districts including San Francisco Unified have justified their creation of single-sex academies and proposals that students read books by nonwhite and female authors partly on the grounds that students’ self-regard would be improved. …
Dip into the history of the self-esteem movement, and you’re swimming in California waters. U.C. Davis psychology prof Stanley Cooperman, who died in 1979, led the charge with his 1960s studies into the personality’s sources of strengths, which culminated in his 1967 book, The Antecedents of Self-Esteem, and the intellectual father of the movement, Nathaniel Brandon, studied at UCLA and still practices today in Los Angeles. (Brandon was once the young lover of Ayn Rand – which was probably pretty darn good for his self-esteem – but dumped her for an attractive young model – which was probably pretty darn bad for Rand’s. She reacted by purging his name from all future editions of Atlas Shrugged.)
And of course, you can’t even say “self-esteem” without mentioning John Vasconcellos, the California assemblyman whose 1986 legislation led to the creation of the California Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem and Personal and Social Responsibility. He later compared society’s new emphasis on self-esteem with unlocking the secrets of the atom and opening the door to outer space.
Even after most of the claims of the self-esteem movement have been trashed, as research shows no correlation between high self-esteem and good grades or success, the movement lives on in America’s education system, with over 300,000 hits on a Google search for “elementary school mission statements for self-esteem.” Leading that charge is Michele Borba and her Esteem Builders curriculum for schools.
Borba’s base of operations? Palm Springs, California.
Crazifornia Exclusive! Jerry Brown, Oil Baron
Apr 16th
I’ve done a lot of interviews researching the Crazifornia Project; this one was by far the most interesting. There’s a lot more to this story, but this op/ed – indicative of the kind of things you’ll read in Crazifornia – appeared in the Washington Times on-line edition on April 16, 2009.
Pearce: Jerry Brown, Oil Baron
Little-known Foreign Oil Holdings Might Tint Decisions
By Laer Pearce
When Jerry Brown recently held his first fundraiser as an official candidate for governor, he chose as the venue the Sacramento apartment where he lived the last time he held that office, after famously declining to live in the governor’s mansion. Faced with multimillionaire Republican opponents, Mr. Brown wants to be seen as just a regular public employee, trying to hold his own against tycoons at the top of America’s wealth disparity. While politically expedient, the image of Jerry Brown as everyman is patently false.
Mr. Brown has a lot of money – how much exactly is not public – and unhappily for his environmentalist and global-warming-alarmist supporters, it’s oil money. Even more unhappily for his campaign managers, it’s money that may have led him to an attack against California’s largest employer and a rewriting of state regulations to feather the family nest.
Sacramento Bee political columnist Dan Walters spent months researching the source of the Brown family wealth 30 years ago and recently shared the story with me in his small office crowded with family pictures, catty-cornered from the Capitol.
In a nutshell: After Jerry’s father, Pat, left the governorship in 1967, he was introduced to the Indonesian generals who had just overthrown the country’s post-colonial dictator, Sukarno, and set up a military junta. The former governor was able to cobble together a consortium of banks that lent $12 billion to the junta – “a lot of money in the late ’60s,” Mr. Walters said. The banks were interested in the immense Royal Dutch Shell petroleum holdings in Indonesia, which Sukarno had nationalized and the junta controlled.
The grateful generals then set up two trading firms – one in Hong Kong and one in California – that handled the oil-exporting paperwork and were rewarded with a fee for each barrel, “a little taste, as they might say in the Mafia,” Mr. Walters said with a grin. Pat Brown was given 100 percent ownership of the California brokerage and half-ownership of the Hong Kong office. The deal was a very lucrative one because California’s early clean-air standards set a sulfur limit for the fuel burned in power plants – a limit only the clean, low-sulfur oil from Indonesia could meet.
Jerry Brown, alone among the Brown children, didn’t get a share of the business, but that changed after Alaskan oil came on the scene and threatened the monopoly Indonesian oil had in California’s power plants.
Chevron had just finished building a refinery in El Segundo that was designed to process Alaskan crude to compete against Indonesian oil for the California power-plant market. Before the facility could refine a barrel of North Slope crude, however, Jerry Brown’s Air Resources Board – headed up by his former campaign manager, Tom Quinn – passed a new air-quality standard for sulfur just barely too high for Chevron to meet with Alaskan oil. That cemented the Indonesian monopoly, and the Brown family, as the only oil provider to the California power industry.
Not surprisingly, when Jerry Brown left the governorship, Pat Brown finally gave him his own cut of the family oil business.
“To this day, Jerry’s very sensitive about it,” Mr. Walters told me. “He just hates the idea that people will bring it up because what it is, is the Brown family is in partnership with these corrupt, murderous dictators. It’s not something that a Jerry Brown wants to be associated with.”
The junta generals of Pat Brown’s day have given way to the more transparent, democratic government that rules in Indonesia today. The question here in California is: Will Jerry Brown also become more transparent and share with voters the details of this foreign influence on his personal finances?
Laer Pearce is a 30-year public-affairs professional currently involved in the Crazifornia Project, chronicling egregious policies responsible for tarnishing the Golden State.
Crazifornia, Here I Come!
Apr 14th
Even decades after Al Jolson crooned, “Open up those golden gates, California here I come!” California was a dream state, attracting hundreds of thousands of new residents yearly with its promise of great weather, terrific schools, lots of jobs, and a small government in far-away Sacramento that saw its role as supporters and facilitators of the state’s growth.
My, my, my! How nightmarishly things have changed. The Crazifornia Project documents those changes. Or more specifically, how the death-spiral trio of liberal Democrats, no-growth environmentalists and public employee unions have come together in a Progressive campaign to tarnish all that was once golden in the Golden State.
You can help! Via the “Contact Crazifornia” button above, or by email to crazifornia @ laer [dot] com, send me your own story about how Crazifornia’s ridiculous regulations, ludicrous legislation or puerile policies are driving you crazy. If I use your story, you’ll get a mention in the acknowledgments of my upcoming book,Crazifornia – How California Ruined Itself and is Poised to Take the Rest of America with It.
While you wait for the book to be published, enjoy these posts from my old blog, Cheat-Seeking Missiles, that spawned the whole Crazifornia idea.
Crazifornia: Zero Intelligence in Concord Schools
Crazifornia: Regulators Want to Ban Big TVs
Crazifornia: Imperial Imperviousness
And too early to get the “Crazifornia” moniker:
Coastal Commission Attempting to Ban Fourth of July Fireworks
