We have to get domestic news from foreign newspapers. Amazing.
So how will the Stocktonites be voting this Tuesday? Think they’ll reelect BO?
"So, what brought us here? [Speaking of CA's current financial and social disaster:]
"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."
Stockton is still California and fully invested in Barack Obama's Amerika. It is still counting on help from Washington and Sacramento and is still making payments to CalPERS for all of its retired public employees who are living large off of those still lucky to have a job out there.
So what if the city is unlivable and unsafe during the nighttime hours. 2/3 of a city is better than none and the politicians and police and firemen are just biding their time there until they too can tap that CalPERS retirement and get away to Nevada or Montana or Idaho and turn those cities into the next Stockton and their capitols into the next Sacramento.
Stockton is still California and fully invested in Barack Obama's Amerika. It is still counting on help from Washington and Sacramento and is still making payments to CalPERS for all of its retired public employees who are living large off of those still lucky to have a job out there.
So what if the city is unlivable and unsafe during the nighttime hours. 2/3 of a city is better than none and the politicians and police and firemen are just biding their time there until they too can tap that CalPERS retirement and get away to Nevada or Montana or Idaho and turn those cities into the next Stockton and their capitols into the next Sacramento.