I may not be the angriest man in Pedro these days. In fact, I’ve been accused lately of being downright civil. But it’s times like this that I do get pissed off at what I see going on. The governor tells us we are in a budget crisis and he proposes to slash a couple of billion dollars in funding for education. For the Los Angeles County schools, that is $1,035,952,000!

Now, after years of trying to improve schools, raise grades, test scores and decrease drop out rates, this is what our “oh-so -concerned-about- the -children” governor proposes? This is idiocy pure and simple, which I believe he is, simple. Not only does the Schwarz not take into account just how we got into this predicament in the first place—the energy crisis, which got him elected and Gray Davis deposed—but now just a few years later his Public Utilities Commission is once again considering the possibility of deregulating the California energy market again. This is economic suicide, not a plan to solve a budget deficit!

As I have warned you in the past, this “budget crisis” mess is the governor’s own underhanded attempt to hollow out government, to eviscerate the social gains of the liberal majority of this state by force. This budget proposal is an attack on every school district in every county in this state, and thusly a direct attack on every teacher, every school union, every student and every parent. If you haven’t tuned into this yet, you should be slightly more than indignant–perhaps even angry!

It is perhaps a mistake on my part to call them idiots, for this assumes that they know not what they are doing, and this would be wrong. The governor and his rightwing cabinet know exactly what they are after. They are ultimately after a policy to divest the state of its assets, privatize social services and introduce market competition into every corner of the California economy without raising a single tax. But first—à la Naomi Klein’s book, The Shock Doctrine—you have to have a crisis to force the Democrats to cut social programs. I’m not buying it.

The Democratic majority needs to wise up to the game that’s being played, which is not unlike the game in the US Congress—they may have a majority of the votes but they don’t have a two-thirds majority to override a veto, or in the case of California the super majority to pass a new tax. The Republicans watch passively and abstain while the Dems are forced to swallow the poisonous legislation.

Why not close the tax loophole on luxury yacht owners or increase the tax on all the McMansions, you might ask, but more importantly why aren’t we taxing the shipping companies who are making billions in profits pumping 20 percent of all the diesel air pollution into the South Coast Air Basin from their cargo ships in the ports? The legislature certainly has no qualms about taxing cigarettes based on the very same premise of being bad for public health.

Even Councilwoman Hahn’s idea of an extraction tax on oil pumped out of the ground inside the city limits could be expanded to a statewide program which oddly enough has some very progressive and historical precedents.
Back in the days of the first Governor Brown, the tidelands oil revenues were used by the State to fund expansion in the California College and University system. This made our college system the envy of world. This of course was not a new idea, as 30 years previous the notoriously popular governor of Louisiana, Huey P. Long used a similar tactic against Standard Oil to build roads and buy school books in that impoverished state.

The oilmen hated Huey Long, and in California the shipping companies weren’t too impressed with Governor Pat Brown, either. But around the same time that the Howard Jarvis group launched Prop 13—the tax limit on real estate—the corporate interests at the ports sued the state over the use of tidelands oil revenues used outside of the tidelands—for stuff like schools. So right after the Reagan years (remember, he was our governor before he became the “great communicator” as President?) California’s education system was defunded twice. Once with Prop 13, the other by Supreme Court decision on tidelands oil. The state’s educational system never really recovered.

What should really make the younger set angry, and more so than their parents, is that the State college education that they just paid some $60,000- $80,000 used to cost $600-$1,500 a year for anyone who had the grades to get in! It was virtually free if you got a Cal-grant or a scholarship, and student loans didn’t make students indentured servants for the foreseeable future.

In the end every parent, teacher, school administrator and union rep should not only be shocked by Schwarzenegger’s budget proposal to cut education, but like Peter Finch’s character in the classic movie Network, you should all open up your windows and scream out, “We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore!” The ones who need to hear this most are the liberal Democrats in the legislature for I’m quite convinced that the Governator is quite deaf to the crying needs of our future—the children of California.