March 18, 2005

At Length -
Lost Memories and the Future Dismantling of the Golden State
By James Preston Allen, Publisher

      I was raised from early childhood on the stories of my family being uprooted by  the Great Depression in Montana and moving lock, stock and barrel to California via a Model-T Ford with grandpa Charlie at the wheel. They landed in what was then  “semi-rural” North Hollywood where my grandma Faye got involved in Upton Sinclair’s EPIC campaign for governor to End Poverty In California. Sinclair lost that election by a very narrow margin because of the scare tactics used by Harry Chandler of the LA Times and William Randolph Hearst of the San Francisco Examiner along with almost every other major newspaper in the state. Four years later the EPIC reform movement was swept into office with Culbert Olson elected as governor with a majority in the legislature.
     The march for democratic social reform was moving forward in 1938 with the adoption of the Social Security Act, labor law reforms that included child labor laws, workers’ disability and the rights of workers to be represented by unions. This would change the future of California ’s working class for more than two generations, making them solidly (and for the most part securely) middle class by protecting their incomes and jobs. These reforms, along with many others passed by the Roosevelt Presidency, saved America’s banking system with federal insurance, restructured the home mortgage market to enable broad middle-class homeownership, and grew this state’s economy into the fifth largest GDP in the world—and the nation’s being first. None of this, of course, would have taken place without the billions upon billions of government spending on infrastructure (roads, schools, water and sewer systems etc.) and the hundreds of billions, probably trillions spent on the various wars of the last 65 years. 
     The American war business of this era has been the biggest government make-work program in the history of mankind, surpassing even the Egyptian pyramids and the building of both the Suez and Panama canals in terms of total dollars invested and manpower exerted. There obviously were some side benefits to these public expenditures. Things that we take for granted now, like fax machines, cell phones or even the simple flush of the toilet, which was not available to many of the depression era. 
    So what’s the point you ask?
    We are now being confronted by both the President and soon the Govenator to roll back nearly 70 years of hard fought social reforms that have made this nation and particularly this state two of the dominate economies in the world. First, there were massive tax cuts targeting the wealthiest, and creating massive deficits, where record surpluses had been. Now, on the national level the attempted dismantling by Congress of Social Security will not make the vast middle class any more secure by investing in the stock market nor will eliminating the income tax in exchange for a national sales tax provide for any future public investments like we have seen in the last half century.
     One only needs to ask Bush’s congressional cheerleaders what will happen to privatized retirement savings accounts the next time Wall Street takes a crash like 1987 or shall I even dare to mention 1929. And what do you suppose happens to the spending power and subsequently the retail economy in real dollars when the common people lose their life’s savings to the frailties and frequent deceits of the open stock market? A flat sales tax as described in our letters column as FairTax alleviates the corporations of their obligation to contribute to the common good while placing the majority of the burden on you––the consumer. This is anything but fair!
     In California , Governor Schwarzenegger is preparing to use the “progressive era” initiative process to do the Texas two-step to re-gerrymander political districts to his liking in mid-decade. His saying he is taking his “reforms” to the people belies the fact that his vision of change constitutes a counter revolution to the historic social reform movement that made this state a great destination for people all across this nation—and especially for immigrants like himself, who come here only to partake of the immense benefits without any understanding of its history. 
     If Schwarzenegger’s $50 million war chest buys him this election, it will inevitably buy him more votes in the legislature and in turn, allow him and his neocon California Chamber of Commerce/corporate executives to deconstruct, and dismantle the regulated free market and the protections of this successful social-economic democracy. You see in the eyes of those who are pushing the global free market California stands as the best example of why they are wrong. How can they sell the “free market” ideology abroad when California stands out as one of the best examples of a controlled market—especially as efforts to protect our health, environment and security in the Port highlights the need for a strong and sensible state to make the market work as it should—internalizing its true costs.
     We have been to the brink of bankruptcy here in California with the theory of deregulation being good for the people, and the myth that the free market in electricity will lower prices. Enron and the phony energy crisis have thoroughly refuted that myth. And because of the complete catastrophe that deregulation brought us and the deficit spending caused by this mistake, the governor is now trying to balance the state’s budget by dismantling and gutting the social reforms of two generations. 
     The Govenator and his Chamber of Horrors crew along with the idiot we call the President will destroy every social reform we have for an economic ideology that could not even prove itself successful under the fascist dictatorship of Pinochet’s Chile. Doesn’t it make you slightly squeamish that we have this Austrian born swine Hoff-muscleman-celebrity trying to sell us the future of our democracy based upon this pitch?
     I, for one, have not forgotten this history, and our schoolteachers, our legislators and our nurses need to remember and pass it on even if Arnold never learned it in the first place in one of our under-rated public schools.