City Journal, “The Beholden State: How public-sector unions broke California”:
The camera focuses on an official of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), California’s largest public-employee union, sitting in a legislative chamber and speaking into a microphone. “We helped to get you into office, and we got a good memory,” she says matter-of-factly to the elected officials outside the shot. “Come November, if you don’t back our program, we’ll get you out of office.’
The video has become a sensation among California taxpayer groups for its vivid depiction of the audacious power that public-sector unions wield in their state. The unions’ political triumphs have molded a California in which government workers thrive at the expense of a struggling private sector. The state’s public school teachers are the highest-paid in the nation. Its prison guards can easily earn six-figure salaries. State workers routinely retire at 55 with pensions higher than their base pay for most of their working life. Meanwhile, what was once the most prosperous state now suffers from an unemployment rate far steeper than the nation’s and a flood of firms and jobs escaping high taxes and stifling regulations. This toxic combination—high public-sector employee costs and sagging economic fortunes—has produced recurring budget crises in Sacramento and in virtually every municipality in the state.
How public employees became members of the elite class in a declining California offers a cautionary tale to the rest of the country, where the same process is happening in slower motion.
Not a big enough cautionary tale for those who believe a vote for progressives is a actually a vote for progress?
Fine. Then lets try an analogy: California is to the US as Greece is to the EU.
Remember this when the next step in Obamaco’s Coward-Piven strategy is to bring us the “fairness” of “immigration reform” over and against the “xenophobia” of the “anti-immigrant” bitterclingers.
Because I believe highlighting such a contemporaneous example of the long-term dangers of increasing government intrusion into local economies is a better strategy for beating back progressive soft-socialism than would be, say, holding reader polls to decide which anti-immigration reform conservatives are most likely to support dragging negroes behind truck bumpers.
Alas, I’m not at all sanguine such will be the case. Outrage sells, after all — and self-righteousness is like a drug to many on the both sides of the political divide these days.
(h/t Terry H)
“holding reader polls to decide which anti-immigration reform conservatives are most likely to support ….dragging negroes behind truck bumpers.”
hahahaha
This is pretty signalling!
The outreach session between RNC officials and Hispanic GOP activists had been previously scheduled, but happened to fall on the same day Brewer announced her support for the Arizona immigration bill. According to the person in the room, the activists were shocked upon learning that Brewer had enacted the law.
Reader Poll idea …
Who is a bigger imbecile?
1) Michael Steele
2) Nishit the Genocidal Eugenecist
Discuss.
I can’t decide! Can’t we just say they’re equally bereft of sense and agree to ignore them equally?
Equally bereft of sense is a good descriptor.
Eventually things will fall apart governmentally in California if things do not change. The problem is the system is unsustainable.
California is too big to fail.
California is Too Big Too Fail. If you take my meaning.
Michael Steele is a very very high-impact moron I think.
no offense to anybody intended except for high-impact moron Michael Steele, who is a high-impact moron.
The objectives of the two interests, the citizens’ government on the one hand and unionized government workers on the other, run athwart each other, from their origins, unavoidably. So the citizen’s general interest runs athwart the interest of the public-sector Unionist (and as citizen, the Unionist against himself). This conflict is built right into the relationship of the two and of necessity would show itself eventually.
So which of the two is to prove the stronger and which will prevail? Would that the question couldn’t be asked without being answered, but alas, the alliance of the Unionist with elements of a Party in power might actually defeat the interests of the sovereign people to seize sovereignty for the defecting Party and the public-sector Unionists themselves.
California is too big to fail.
And Texas is too big to fall for it. If California, or Congress, think that the functional states of the Union are going to fork over their hard-earned wealth to bail out states that have driven themselves to ruin by their own damn actions, I’d say they’ve got another think coming. I don’t see flyover country racing to rescue the people who’ve spent the last forty years mocking them.
I really do dream of a Texas governor who gives a press conference addressing Washington, saying something along the lines of “Either California leaves the Union, or we do. Your choice.”
If California left the Union, everything would be a foreign film.
That is a beautiful dream, Squid.
Stupid parasites.
Don’t they know that if the host dies, they die as well?
They prolly think they’re strangler figs, who live on after they kill the host tree.
Or that they’re those wasps that lay their eggs in caterpillars, the young feasting on the body of its host before setting off on their own.
Nope. They have no mechanism to live on after sucking the host organism dry except to make us all work for the state one way or another.
Hmmm.
I wonder how that works out? Someone should try it sometime.
I look forward to someone lodging their foot in your feckless ass, loser.
Is Steele an SEIU infiltrator?
I just lurv how nishit and her ilk can claim to be all sciencey and fact-based, a proposition that is laughable on its face, and then proceed to simply ignore the knowable and predictable results of the dirty little socialisms that they espouse.
Michael Steele does not derail nearly as many discussions with self refuting inanities.
So, at least he’s got that going for him.
“Is Steele an SEIU infiltrator?”
Hmmm. Maryland, My Maryland
Home to many outstanding Americans.
Sadly, this overt and in-your-face evidence of the union stranglehold on California will not change things.
They’ll bail out CA. We’ll all end up paying some kind of “fee” to pay for it. Meanwhile, they’ll still make movies in Canada, New Zealand and Eastern Europe where it’s cheaper.
“…some kind of “fee” to pay for it”
An excise on ammo?
A $.45 reclamation fee on Netflix and Ipods.
A $1 fee on all fruits and nuts.
Another interesting question …
Who is fatter?
1) Oliver Willis
2) JaMarcus Russell
Discuss. Racists.
lol sillie proteins…..the point of the news article is that poor Micheal Steele scheduled a hispanic outreach session only to have Brewer kneecap him ON THE VERY DAY OF THE OUTREACH!!!
that is so classic, teatards….and instead of blaming Brewer and the GOP for an EPIC PR gaffe perfectly designed to alienate hispanics and other people of color……….you blame Steele? Really?
failboats.
STFU, idiot.
You do not even understand why we do not like Steele. Actually, what you have demonstrated understanding of is precious little.
I like to think of what Brewer did as shoving a ribbed for his pleasure dildo up Meghan’s daddy’s ass and telling him to start spinning.
‘feets that was epic.
may i admire you?
“You do not even understand why we do not like Steele.”
oh yes i dooooo-oooo.
you hired him as a token black man to attract minorities all he has done is drive more minorities away and spend your money like a drunken failboat sailor.
right?
that is not wrong
Well, another thread doomed…
If they hire a black man, he is a token, if they don’t they are bigots.
Is that about it?
“1 in 3 San Francisco employees earned $100,000”*
here’s another eerie Greece-California parallel…
looks like someone’s getting his who to blame ducks in a row
Also if the folks who hire the black man are conservatives, the black man is a traitor to his race.
A smart man once said, “Beware the bond vigilantes.”
Actually, everyone will just notice that your finances are shit.
Ah, but that would never happen, because conservatives are RACIST!
Oh, the blockquote at 36 was from ‘feets’ link.
…you hired him as a token black man…
I didn’t hire anybody, dipshit. The Tea Party is born of the idea that people are well and truly sick of the dumb shit the GOP has brought to the table over the past decade or more, and even less inclined to support the brand of Democrat idiocy that takes every bad idea of the GOP and multiplies it by a factor of ten.
Lots of people hate socialists and idiotic cheerleaders like you, Eugenia. You seem to be unable to draw any distinction between the various groups that hate you and yours, but that only means that your self-styled cleverness is a sad joke.
One of the existing parties will be dragged into fiscal sanity, or else a new party will spring up to do the job. I don’t give a tinker’s damn what happens, so long as I can go to my grave knowing that my children and my children’s children won’t be slaves to the nation’s debtholders.
the google ads are unfocused and confuzzled; they want to commit to a theme but they are afraid
Imagine a private business could legally compel its customers to buy a service they don’t want… and they were still worried about their credit rating.
Incompetency score = AAA.
Maybe we could just kick the LA Metro Area out? Cut off their water and let it revert to desert? Then the state’s voting demographics would be quite a bit redder.
Hell, call it “Aztlan” while we’re at it, that’ll make the illegals happy.
Maybe we could just kick the LA Metro Area out?
Um, you’ve heard of San Francisco, right?
The most aggressive panhandlers I have ever seen “reside” in San Francisco. I left my heart there, as well as a good chunk of my wallet’s contents (okay, not really, but for the sake of a bad joke, I did).
SF is small compared to LA, even if more crazed…
And we can always have Oakland invade if they try anything.
CA and MA are living breathing examples, life-sized petri dishes, for all of the Leftist silliness of the last 20 years. This is the world nishi and its ilk wish to extend to the rest of us.
“Actually, everyone will just notice that your finances are shit.”
I think bh’s analysis is just about it. Sooner or later the CA public unions might even notice…or not.
Step One; Make government worker strikes illegal.
Step Two: Wait for the public unions to call for strikes by government workers.
Step Three: Fire striking government workers and decertify public unions.
In real life I don’t expect this to happen, but in real life the situation could lead the Feds to place California under military occupation and enact drastic reforms. Just being really pessimistic.
California has money to bust that gizmodo blogger guy. Plus didn’t these losers scrape up three billion dollars not too long ago to play with stem cells?
mr. kerry you probably was for it before you was against it.
OK! OK! OK!
What’s the problem with a few Euros of debt?
I don’t get it. Why can’t they just get the rich people drunk, and then rape them? Fuck ’em right in their yachts. And then, when that doesn’t fix it, we can fuck people for the money to need care of their families.
Simple, ain’t it?
“Fuck everybody! Where’s my fucking limo?
I know a president who does it all the time.
Lost Dog, you have forgotten. You are not a part of any of this. So quit your spraying.
In related news, liars lie.
It’s repetitious I know, but this piece of Federalist 57 comes as close as anything in the whole of the Federalist Papers I’ve seen yet to describing what took place with ObamaCare.
Spotted at Powerline, a short review of Sen. Patty Murray’s prospects (not so good, it turns out). Among her many challengers:
Nishi calls other people stupid and failures when her own socialist paradise is falling around her. Heh.
I really do dream of a Texas governor who gives a press conference addressing Washington, saying something along the lines of “Either California leaves the Union, or we do. Your choice.”
This Texan, too, dreams of that day.
At American Thinker the 2010 Public Employee of the Year Awards, from SNL.
Home to many outstanding Americans.
We in the People’s Republic of Baltimorea resent your sarcasm!
We had Spiro Agnew, bitches. Respect!
I really do dream of a Texas governor who gives a press conference addressing Washington, saying something along the lines of “Either California leaves the Union, or we do. Your choice.”
I would prefer it if it did not come to that. Secession is the final resort of final resorts. If it is unsuccessful, the result is flyover country looking like South Carolina did in 1865. If it is successful, American breaks apart. Neither is a favorable situation.
Well, you see, Andrew, the problem about doing that whole South Carolina thing is that it’s real hard to feed urban parasites without farmland.
And Nancy D’Alesandro, not to mention Daddy D’A.
Nor Barbara Mikulski. Outstanding!