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Sunday, May 24, 2009

As California Goes, So Goes the Nation

Crucial Robert Cruickshank over at Calitics:
As the crisis in California worsens, the state that may have done more than any other to elect Barack Obama president -- donating enormous sums of money and time, fanning out across the nation to push swing states into the blue column -- is finding that the love is not being reciprocated.

First it was Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner rejecting a Treasury backstop for CA short-term borrowing. Now it's Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who is planning to head a $5 billion effort to improve public education in America -- an effort he says California won't be a part of...

It's not just for California's sake, but for the sake of the nation as a whole, that the Obama Administration needs to reassess its attitude and policy toward the crisis in the states. The approach of "we'll give you some help but you have to do all the rest" might have worked in the 1990s, but it is a recipe for disaster today. It's time Californians who worked so hard to elect Obama saw a return on that investment, instead of a dismissal of our problems.

And remember, the failed Special Election may be getting framed among the Villagers these days as a painful last-ditch effort to deal with our crisis like grownups but which failed due to blanket distrust of "Sacramento" and strident "populist" anti-tax sentiment, but the truth is that those propositions were a set of irresponsible punts and diversions of funds from vulnerable to privileged constituencies and right-wing ideological poison pills all of which refused to address the actual problems caused by a reactionary minority of anti-government zealots (whose frames the Villagers have more or less parroted in the aftermath of the failed Special Election) who have held California hostage throughout this crisis and in a more general way for nearly thirty years to the cost of us all.

The people were absolutely right to reject the Propositions, just as they are absolutely right now to demand instead a Constitutional Convention to overturn the arcane 2/3rds rule that has stymied sensible taxation and regulation policies to fund and administer a government that works for everybody and overcomes our fiscal mess in a progressive way. And they are right to expect that the federal government will come to the assistance here and now of vulnerable screwed-over majorities even as we struggle to re-regulate the irresponsible behavior of greedy short-sighted incumbent minorities who falsely believed (because they were stupid) or pretended to believe (because they were evil) that you can eat your civilization and have it, too.

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