Posted on 03/06/2009 7:11:06 PM PST by Kaslin
good post.
Yes, I can remember not to many yrs ago on FR, many replying, I don’t want to hear about illegals or what is the problem, no big deal.
Now other states have somewhat of a clue what we were saying
As another Freeper so aptly stated; As the Californians circle the bowl, their leaders will reach out one more time and pull the flush lever.
You bet, from Vegas to North Carolina and all points in between.
Sad. I remember during the election one of the sites had the red blue breakout for the U.S. dating for every presidential election from years past. California used to be RED and it was exciting to think of it as being so. It must have had quite a future then and been very exciting to live here. I live in Santa Barbara and homes in our neighborhood are surrounded by avocado groves and we all have lemon, lime, orange trees some have grapefruit trees. Off our shores we have oil rigs awaiting use. We have a state university and city college that oversee the amazing ocean with sun and fog filling our days. Too bad this place has been taken over by illegals and liberals. Sad indeed.
Illegal immigration and liberalism.
Every single problem can be traced back to one of those sources.
Liberalism: an insidiously evil mental disease with no known cure.....
These people were kept locked up in state institutions just 50 years ago.
Check out Muscle Beach at the 1:53 mark. It looks like Schwarzenegger playing jump rope with a woman, then catching her.
“Schwarzenegger”
#####
Gosh, why’d you have to ruin it by bringing up that Democrat’s name?
I’m not from California, but that video never fails to bring tears to my eyes, in showing what we have lost as a country.
I almost made a comment about how Arnie never fails to ruin a good thing, in this case a video.
Sorry about that.
Well let’s just pretend is was that truly great midwestern “Californian” Ronald Reagan.
“California remains America’s richest farming state, leading the nation in fresh fruit, vegetable, nut and dairy production.”
Duh! As if anyone had missed the fact that Cawl-e-fonia produces more nuts and fruits than any other state.
Not sure when it happened, but we went from building infrustructure to building paychecks. Our government isn't large, it's HUGE. Our schools get paid handsomely while tons of students either flunk or drop out every year- adding to the dependent class.
Liberalism has created a climate where the culture of California is about done. They've messed with the tax code and the penal code in an attempt to enrich themselves. And they have- we have more people in prison than we can house, while the prison union determines who gets into the statehouse via their giant political warchest.
The best thing that could happen to the state would be to throw out every liberal in government. Why? Because their parasitism is killing the Golden State. If this doesn't happen, stick a fork in it. Myself, I can't stand the thought of handing such a beautiful jewel of a state to communists and socialists.
Looking back, last year Mother Nature may have tried to burn it down rather than hand it over to the parasitic hoards. Couple that with her power to impose droughts, and people should be getting the message: straighten out, or get the hell out. And that goes for those trying to impose homo-ism on the rest of the state. Screw with Mother Nature at your own risk.
Ping for an excellent article I think you’ll appreciate.
An amazingly accurate article. (Unfortunately)
Actually... I appreciate it very much. I grew up in Southern California in that era, and spent a lot of time on those sandy beaches. It truly was the golden days in that state and I wouldn’t trade that time for anything.. just said it no longer exists... oh, California exists.. but not the California of that time.
Whodathunk we would look back on Davis as not a bad guy after all.
http://209.85.173.132/search?q=cache:e0eDst74BngJ:www.newgeography.com/content/00612-death-california-dream+east+coast+liberals+migration+to+California&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=7&gl=us
alifornia, like any gorgeously endowed person, has a natural inclination toward self-absorption. It has always been a place of unsurpassed splendor; it has inspired and attracted writers, artists, dreamers, savants and philosophers. That's especially true of the Bay Area—ground zero for California narcissism and arguably the most attractive urban expanse on the continent; Neil Morgan in 1960 described San Francisco as "the narcissus of the West," a place whose fundamental asset was first its own beauty, followed by its own culture of self-regard.
At first this high self-regard inspired some remarkable public achievements. California rebuilt San Francisco from the ashes of the great 1906 fire, and constructed in Los Angeles the world's most far-reaching transit system. These achievements reached a pinnacle under Gov. Pat Brown, who in the 1960s oversaw the expansion of the freeways, the construction of new university, state- and community-college campuses, and the creation of water projects that allowed farming in dry but fertile landscapes.
Yet success also spoiled the state, incubating an ever more inward-looking form of narcissism. Even as the middle class enjoyed "the good life" — high-paying jobs, single-family homes (often with pools), vacations at the beach — there was a growing, palpable sense of threats from rising taxes, a restless youth population and a growing nonwhite demographic. One early expression of this was the late-1970s antitax movement led by Howard Jarvis. The rising cost of government was placing too much of a burden on middle-class homeowners, and the legislature refused to address the problem with reasonable reforms. The result, however, was unreasonable reform, with new and inflexible limits on property and income taxes that made holding the budget together far more difficult.
Middle-class Californians also began to feel inundated by a racial tide. This was not totally based on prejudice; Californians seemed to accept legal immigration. But millions of undocumented newcomers provoked fear that there were no limits on how many people would move into the state, filling emergency rooms with the uninsured and crowding schools with children whose parents neither spoke English nor had the time to prepare their children for school. By 1994, under Gov. Pete Wilson, the anti-immigrant narcissism fueled Proposition 187. It was now OK to deny school and medical services to people because, at the end, they looked different.
Today the politics of narcissism is most evident among "progressives." Although the Republicans can still block massive tax increases, the predominant force in California politics lies with two groups — the gentry liberals and the public sector. The public-sector unions, once relatively poorly paid, now enjoy wages and benefits unavailable to most middle-class Californians, and do so with little regard to the fiscal and overall economic impact. Currently barely 3 percent of the state budget goes to building roads or water systems, compared with nearly 20 percent in the Pat Brown era; instead we're funding gilt-edged pensions and lifetime guaranteed health care. It's often a case of I'm all right, Jack — and the hell with everyone else.
The most recent ascendant group are the gentry liberals, whose base lies in the priciest precincts of San Francisco, the Silicon Valley and the west side of Los Angeles. Gentry liberalism reflects the narcissistic values of successful boomers and their offspring; their politics are all about them. In the past this was tied as much to cultural issues, like gay rights (itself a noble cause) and public support for the arts. More recently, the dominant issue revolves around environmentalism.
Green politics came early to California and for understandable reasons: protecting the resources and beauty of the nation's loveliest landscapes. Yet in recent years, the green agenda has expanded well beyond that of the old conservationists like Theodore Roosevelt, who battled to preserve wilderness but also cared deeply about boosting productivity and living standards for the working classes. In contrast, the modern environmental movement often adopts a largely misanthropic view of humans as a "cancer" that needs to be contained. By their very nature, the greens tend to regard growth as an unalloyed evil, gobbling up resources and spewing planet-heating greenhouse gases.
You can see the effects of the gentry's green politics up close in places like the Salinas Valley, a lovely agricultural region south of San Jose. As community leaders there have tried to construct policies to create new higher-wage jobs in the area (a project on which I've worked as a consultant), local progressives — largely wealthy people living on the Monterey coast — have opposed, for example, the expansion of wineries that might bring new jobs to a predominantly Latino area with persistent double-digit unemployment. As one winegrower told me last year: "They don't want a facility that interferes with their viewshed." For such people, the crusade against global warming makes a convenient foil in arguing against anything that might bring industrial or any other kind of middle-wage growth to the state. Greens here often speak movingly about the earth — but also about their personal redemption. They have engaged a legal and regulatory process that provides the wealthy and their progeny an opportunity to act out their desire to "make a difference" — often without real concern for the outcome. Environmentalism becomes a theater in which the privileged act out their narcissism.
It's even more disturbing that many of the primary apostles of this kind of politics are themselves wealthy high-livers like Hollywood magnates, Silicon Valley billionaires and well-heeled politicians like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jerry Brown. They might imagine that driving a Prius or blocking a new water system or new suburban housing development serves the planet, but this usually comes at no cost to themselves or their lifestyles.
The best great hope for California's future does not lie with the narcissists of left or right but with the newcomers, largely from abroad. These groups still appreciate the nation of opportunity and aspire to make the California — and American — Dream their own.
Of course, companies like Google and industries like Hollywood remain critical components, but both Silicon Valley and the entertainment complex are now mature, and increasingly dominated by people with access to money or the most elite educations. Neither is likely to produce large numbers of new jobs, particularly for working- and middle-class Californians.
In contrast, the newcomers, who often lack both money and education, continue in the hierarchy-breaking tradition that made California great in the first place. Many of them live and build their businesses not in places like San Francisco or West L.A., but in the increasingly multicultural suburbs on the periphery, places like the San Gabriel Valley, Riverside and Cupertino. Immigrants played a similar role in the recovery from the early-1990s doldrums. In the '90s, for example, the number of Latino-owned businesses already was expanding at four times the rate of Anglo ones, growing from 177,000 to 440,000. Today we see signs of much the same thing, though it often involves immigrants from the Middle East, the former Soviet Union, Mexico or South Korea. One developer, Alethea Hsu, just opened a new shopping center in the San Gabriel Valley this January — and it's fully leased. "We have a great trust in the future," says the Cornell-trained physician.
You see some of the same thing among other California immigrants. More than three decades ago the Cardenas family started slaughtering and selling pigs grown on their two-acre farm near Corona. From there, Jesús Sr. and his wife, Luz, expanded. "We would shoot the hogs through the head and sell them off the truck," says José, their son. "We'd sell the meat to people who liked it fresh: Filipinos, Chinese, Koreans and Hispanics...We would sell to anyone." Their first store, predominantly a carnicería, or meat shop, took advantage of the soaring Latino population. By 2008, they had 20 stores with more than $400 million in sales. In 2005 they started to produce Mexican food, including some inspired by Luz's recipes to distribute through such chains as Costco. Mexican food, notes Jesús Jr., is no longer a niche. "It's a crossover product now."
Despite the current mess in Sacramento, this suggests some hope for the future. Perhaps the gubernatorial candidacy of Silicon Valley folks like former eBay CEO Meg Whitman (a Republican), or her former eBay employee Steve Wesley (a Democrat), could bring some degree of competence and common sense to the farce now taking place in Sacramento. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who's said to be considering the race, would also be preferable to a green zealot like Jerry Brown or empty suits like Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa or San Francisco's Gavin Newsom.
But if I am looking for hope and inspiration, for California or the country, I would look first and foremost at people like the Cardenas family. They create jobs for people who didn't go to Stanford or whose parents lack a trust fund. They constitute what any place needs to survive: risk takers who are self-confident but rarely selfish. These are people who look at the future, not in the mirror.
This article originally appeared at Newsweek.
I still chafe at how we were all thrown to the wolves over Prop 187... that was a legal and legitimate proposition and it should have stood!
What you’re seeing in the happy, carefree kids in that video are the fruits of years of their parent’s and grandparent’s hard work.
Simple, unhip things like putting their God and their families first, saving for the future, respect for law and country, paying their mortgages, getting out of bed everyday and showing up for work, year in and year out.
What began shortly after this era was a complete abrogation of those core values, the manifestation of which is all too evident in the cesspool that is modern America.
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