HOLD BUSH AND CHENEY ACCOUNTABLE

CALIFORNIA: STATE OF CONTRADICTIONS

My family moved to California in the 1960's and back then California truly was the Golden State. We had wonderful infrastructure, a great economy, and good schools. That was in the era of Governor Pat Brown. Since then, we've had a number of bad Republican governors starting with Ronald Reagan on up to Arnold Schwarzenegger. We had the passage of Proposition 13, a right-wing initiative that has made it almost impossible to do anything fiscally responsible. The right-wing Republican minority is able to block almost anything it wants to block. So much for democracy.

California is where we have liberal San Francisco and the push for gay rights. It's also the home of the John Birch Society. California had the hippies in the 1960's, but Sacramento is where Rush Limbaugh got his start. California, derided by gasbags like Limbaugh as the "Left Coast," sent right-wingers like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan to the White House. California, a leader in high tech industries, has also depended heavily on poor farm workers, often illegal immigrants, to maintain the agricultural industry In this column Paul Krugman talks about the horror of the federal government copying California in letting reactionary minorities derail meaningful change. The column is at www.nytimes.com:

What’s really alarming about California, however, is the political system’s inability to rise to the occasion.

Despite the economic slump, despite irresponsible policies that have doubled the state’s debt burden since Arnold Schwarzenegger became governor, California has immense human and financial resources. It should not be in fiscal crisis; it should not be on the verge of cutting essential public services and denying health coverage to almost a million children. But it is — and you have to wonder if California’s political paralysis foreshadows the future of the nation as a whole.

The seeds of California’s current crisis were planted more than 30 years ago, when voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 13, a ballot measure that placed the state’s budget in a straitjacket. Property tax rates were capped, and homeowners were shielded from increases in their tax assessments even as the value of their homes rose.