The situation is thus: The state government is buried in debt; most likely it won't be able to pay most of that debt. (Due largely to a structural inability to raise new taxes.) This year alone, it is facing a $24 billion gap between revenue and expenditures. Roll that around. $24 billion.
A Salon.com article explains the consequences:
The world's eighth-largest economy has just gone belly-up. When midnight tolled on Tuesday night with legislators and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger still deadlocked over how to resolve the state's staggering $24 billion budget shortfall, California became unable to pay its bills. The state will have to begin issuing IOUs to its creditors as early as Thursday. It is the worst budget crisis in the state's modern history.
There is an unreal, almost dreamlike quality about this moment. Dreadful things are about to happen: Hundreds of thousands of children will lose their healthcare. Five thousand state workers will be laid off. Massive cuts will decimate education at every level. Social services will be slashed. Two hundred and twenty-nine parks, out of a total of 280, will be shut down. Even some of the state's landmarks may go on the auction block to raise money.
One of the state parks likely to be shuttered is Mount Diablo State Park, which I've run up and around for years. This hits close to home. These savage cuts - which will amount to the destruction of everything the California government does except for prisons, police, and roads - will lower standards of living for most people in the state.
And make no bones about it: This "black budget" will damage or ruin the prospects of most Californians. And it will do so largely due to a minority's refusal to raise taxes on the wealthy. This is class struggle in naked form. And they're winning.
The irony of this economic crisis is this: It was caused, in a general sense, by the excessive greed of a few, by growing inequality papered over by exploding debt. It was caused, in short, by ascendant capitalist class power. By rights, the people who benefited from the bubble should lose out in the crash. But that's not been the case - in general, the economic crisis has resulted in the consolidation of that same power, at the expense of the rest of society. (As David Harvey argues.)
The situation in California is one manifestation of that - the poor and middle class must suffer vicious cuts to healthcare and education, and the end of welfare. This at a time when California has an unemployment rate of 11.5%. But higher taxes for the wealth is a political impossibility. The likely result? A catastrophically raised poverty rate and severely reduced social mobility.
Much of the commentary about this refers back to California's "Golden Age" in the postwar era, when rising prosperity went along with expansion of education and government investment in infrastructure. As a Washington Post article notes:
The terrible irony in decimating the public sector to save the state is that the California that was the epicenter of the postwar American dream was fundamentally a creation of government. Fighting a Pacific war during World War II compelled the federal government to spend billions on California industry and infrastructure, and the state was the leading beneficiary of Pentagon dollars during the Cold War. As Kevin Starr, California's leading historian, points out in "Golden Dreams," his brilliant new history of the state in the 1950s and early '60s, fully 40 percent of all defense dollars for manufacturing and research in 1959 went to California, anchoring the state's booming economy in a well-paid workforce that was either unionized or professionalized, and seeding an electronics and high-tech sector that was to blossom in the following decades. Building on that prosperity to create more prosperity, Earl Warren, Goodwin Knight and Pat Brown -- two Republicans, one Democrat -- invested state dollars in schools, universities, freeways and aqueducts that were the best in the world. The Golden State was never more golden.
Of course, the time for that is long gone. Since the 1970s, California has been increasingly committed to imprisonment over education, funding social programmes and infrastructure with bonds rather than taxes, and scraping back social expenditure. And now, as the state government comes to a crisis that was born out of these short-sighted policies, it is ready to double-down on short-sightednes:
Today, its governor seems determined to turn that gold to dross. On Monday, the Democrats in the legislature passed a budget that included cuts of $11 billion, levied a tax on oil companies and tobacco, and raised auto registration fees by $15 per car to keep the state parks from closing. Schwarzenegger reiterated his refusal to raise any taxes or fees and said he would veto the budget.
From a model for far-sighted investments in the future, California has become a state that uninvests in the present and has no vision at all for the future. Proposition 13, enacted by state voters in 1978, effectively blocked its cities and counties from funding their own endeavors, and the Republican minority in the legislature, abetted by Schwarzenegger, has made it all but impossible to invest in the kind of projects that Warren, Knight and Brown undertook.
I don't have a great deal to add to these points. I've never particularly been a student of California history or politics. The state has been a touchstone for me most of my life - when I lived in Nigeria it almost seemed like a golden land - rather than an ongoing process. I recognized the geological dynamism, the plate tectonics that are still shaping the landscape, and missed the political rottenness. California almost struck me as cast out of history, a place that would basically continue on without serious crisis for a while.
It's no fun to have your illusions stripped away.
Perhaps the Clash isn't the best music for the moment. Perhaps we need to go to Cracker's album about loss, travel, and California, Greenland, which leads us into "a trip to California to see where those old days had gone". It takes us "from Point Arena to Stinson Beach /from Arcata to Bodega Bay" - many of which will be closed down this year - and shudders to a halt with a few plaintive wails:
Darling, we’re out of time—so pack up that old circus tent, even the animals know this is the end / Darling, we’re out of time / Our best days have come; our best days have gone / It’s already hard, let’s not make it harder / Darling, we’re out of time—so put on that dirty red lipstick...
Back to the Salon article one last time:
...California has time and again proven itself to be a national and global trendsetter. The least American of places, a piratical exception to East Coast gentility on the far end of the continent, it is also the most American of places, with its brilliant, selfish and wanton extremities mirroring the oldest and still-unresolved contradictions of the American spirit. As Kevin Starr, dean of California historians, writes in his superb 2003 book, "California: A History," California has "long since become one of the prisms through which the American people, for better or worse, could glimpse their future."
There are many things I love about California. There are the soon-to-be-shuttered wild spaces, totaling 13% of the state's land area, the long roads that seem to stretch off into the future, the sense of vibrancy and growth. On a social and cultural level, there is iconoclasm, dynamism, a ceaseless will to change and reinvent. It's been, for much of its history, a place of rebirth, second chances, and big dreams. It's heartbreaking to see such a great place fold in on itself.
1 comments:
This is terrible.
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