Food or Fish, Liberty or Oppression, Victim or Fighter? We Californians have many decisions to make about our future, thanks to our maniacal third-World wanna-be dictator-Governor Jerry Brown – a childless Marxist, who cares only about himself. Brown has never lived a life that calls upon one to sacrifice for the benefit of one’s own family and children. And it shows.
The narcissistic manic Gov. Jerry Brown, California’s four-term Democratic Governor is mostly responsible for the decline of the state. The once-golden state is now a socialist, climate-compulsive, utopia with open borders. This has occurred, cheered-on and virtually uncriticized by California’s mainstream media – almost as if the media is state-run.
Brown, who wants to outlaw private ownership of automobiles, supports universal single-payer health care, and issues in-state “visas” for illegal aliens, hates the Californians who have “little green lawns,” are climate deniers, and “freeloaders.” California is a cesspool and Jerry Brown offers absolution to criminals through hundreds of pardons and commutations.
Narcissists have several telltale diversion tactics they use to escape responsibility:
Intimidate/Blame. Accuse/Project. Argue/Exhaust. Deny/Rewrite. Divert/Attack. Fear/Avoid.
We’ve witnessed California’s ludicrous Governor Jerry Brown use all of these tactics to divert responsibility for the demise of the once great Golden State. Yet California is a glaring example of radical leftist policies to avoid, and in far too many places resembles a third-world banana republic. In 2017, Brown said the world needs ‘brain washing’ on climate change. Sounding indeed brainwashed, Brown said, “The problem … is us. It’s our whole way of life. It’s our comfort … It’s the greed. It’s the indulgence. It’s the pattern. And it’s the inertia.”
California has one of the worst failing education systems in the country, the highest income taxes, highest gas tax, highest poverty in the nation, a billion dollar budget deficit, the state pension system is underfunded by $1 trillion, and violent crime is on the rise. If that’s not enough bad news, a constitutional amendment by Democrat Assemblyman Kevin McCarty, ACA-22, would more than double the state’s corporate income tax rate to a staggering 18.84 percent, up from 8.84 percent, in an attempt to reclaim some of the tax cuts that corporations now receive under President Trump’s federal tax overhaul. Known as the “middle class tax justice,” proponents say corporations can afford to pay more in California taxes.
Never mind tax cuts and increases – we now have transgender bathrooms, and a new law that says knowingly transmitting HIV to a partner will no longer be a felony offense. Oh, and illegal aliens will be able to serve on state boards if Democrat State Sen. Ricardo Lara’s SB 174 is passed. Titled “Citizens of the state,” the bill conflates legal immigrants with illegal aliens. This explains why leftists now refer to illegal aliens as “undocumented residents.”
California’s Financial Distress Refutes “Surplus”
According to Republican State Senator John Moorlach, a CPA, many of California’s 482 cities are in financial distress, facing a tipping point to insolvency mainly due to unfunded pension liabilities. Moorlach says:
- California has the nation’s highest income taxes. California also has the highest corporate tax in the Western United States. According to the Tax Foundation’s 2016 Facts and Figures, California is ranked 48th overall.
- The governor raised the minimum wage earlier this year to $15 per hour. His own estimates show that it will cost the budget $4 billion per year in additional personnel costs.
- For the 12th year in a row, California was named the worst state for business in a survey of 500 CEOs by Chief Executive Magazine.
Those are the facts. Yet a recent op-ed by Bonnie Castillo, the Executive Director of the radicalized California Nurses Union, summed up what she says is wrong with California. Only she claims “these glaring needs are a testament to the worst inequality in the United States since the Great Depression,” ignoring that it is the Democrat Party’s own socialistic policies which gave us:
- a major affordable housing and homelessness crisis;
- a lack of jobs that pay a living wage;
- a health care system that leaves behind millions of Californians because they have no health coverage or because they have exorbitant out-of-pocket costs for health insurance;
- escalating public college and university tuition that limits educational opportunity or leaves students weighted down with debt for decades.
Her solution? More and higher taxes. “Legislators should continue to require the wealthiest among us to contribute to the societal common good,” Castillo said. She also took a shot at Proposition 13, which cut property taxes down to 1 percent and limited the growth rate of future assessments to 2 percent. Even with Proposition 13, California is ranked 17th out of all 50 states in property taxes, according to WalletHub.com.
High Taxes = Outbound Migration By Millionaires
Ms. Castillo’s and Jerry Brown’s socialistic attacks on the wealthy have so dramatically impacted California, that according to new research from Stanford University and the California Franchise Tax Board, California lost an estimated 138 high income individuals due to the passage of the Proposition 30 – a tax hike pushed by Gov. Jerry Brown and approved by voters in 2012, ZeroHedge.com reported. Prop. 30 retroactively raised taxes on the state’s highest earners to 13.3%, leaving California top-earners with the highest state income tax rate in the country. It also hiked the tax rate on income between $300,000 and $500,000 by 2%, while raising the tax rate on income over $500,000 by 3%.
“How viable are millionaire taxes when lower-tax states are a short distance away?” the study asks. “Can states sustain these new millionaire taxes without suffering out- migration of top tax payers? How attached are millionaires to the places where they currently earn their income?” Indeed.
Water Lies
Droughts are nature’s fault; they are naturally occurring. Water shortages are the fault of government officials, and California’s water shortages fall squarely on Jerry Brown. The state of California hasn’t significantly invested in water storage since the 1970s when Jerry Brown was governor the first time around. “This is an era of limits and we all had better get used to it,” Brown said upon being elected governor in 1975, embracing the “small is beautiful” way of thinking. Since then, California’s population has doubled, as have environmental demands. And, more than fifty-percent of the state’s water resources are allowed to flow out the San Francisco Bay to the Pacific Ocean.
Rather than build the desperately needed infrastructure projects to collect and store water during the wet years, Gov. Jerry Brown recently signed into law a new water conservation act that will limit each citizen to just 50 gallons per person per day by 2050. According to the San Jose Mercury News, Governor Brown “signed two bills, SB 606 by Sen. Robert Hertzberg (D-Van Nuys) and AB 1668 by Assemblywoman Laura Friedman (D-Glendale), that require cities, water districts, and large agricultural water districts to set strict annual water budgets, potentially facing fines of $1,000 per day if they don’t meet them, and $10,000 a day during drought emergencies, Daily Wire reported.
The truth is that 50 percent of California’s water goes toward environmental purposes. Of the rest of the water, only about 10 percent goes to “urban” uses for homes and businesses, and 40 percent is used by agriculture. A full 50 percent of the water is used for environmental purposes.
Democrat lawmakers and federal environmental regulators have authorized more than 81 billion gallons of water to flow out to the ocean, instead of being used for human consumption. This is environmental extremism at its worst, and it is killing California agriculture.
More than 80,000 acres of farmland could be back into production, if only farmers and ranchers had the 81 billion gallons of water running off into the ocean.
In 2015, when California’s 5-year drought was still in full force, Gov. Brown’s hand-picked appointees at the State Water Resources Control Board ordered the release of massive amounts of water from the New Melones Reservoir and Lake Tulloch, to save a dozen fish. This occurred at the same time Brown was threatening to fine residents who water “their little green lawns,” and for lingering in the shower too long.
So while the governor and his environmentalist water gatekeepers were going to empty reservoirs to save a few fish, farmers have been deprived of water.
“Friday, the board’s regulators released their plan to disrupt a century of California water law and demand twice as much water flow down the Tuolumne, Stanislaus and Merced rivers in a purported effort to save salmon,” Mike Dunbar wrote in the Modesto Bee over the weekend. “This is a water grab, pure and simple. And we must fight it, not just talk about it.”
Dunbar added, “This declaration of economic war is not just about water. It’s a war over our homes, our jobs and our children.”
California is home to one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients. California is home to the most residents living below the poverty line in the country. And now with our politicians’ disregard for federal immigration laws, more than a quarter of the 38 million Californians were not even born in the United States.
California’s Oligarchs
“Why would a labor union, for example, support open borders?” Ed Ring wrote in a recent op ed. “Don’t they understand that if you continue to import low-skilled workers, wages will remain low? But maybe these labor organizations don’t want things to improve for California’s low income communities. Maybe the worse things get, the more members they’ll recruit, the more resentment they’ll exploit, the more agitators will join their army. Maybe this is just about power.”
Governor Brown’s aberrant style of leadership has been as maniacal as a third-World dictator, and his legacy is a complete and total failure, tainted by frequent lunatic ravings.
Brown says humankind would face dire straits if his climate change policies are not fulfilled. “Maybe not in my life, I’ll be dead…Most of you people, when I look out here, a lot of you people are going to be alive,” Brown said at a legislative hearing one year ago extending his cap and trade legislation for another decade, despite no evidence of air quality improvements. “And you’re going to be alive in a horrible situation. You’re going to see mass migrations, vector diseases, forest fires, Southern California burning up. That’s real guys. That’s what the scientists of the world are saying.”
“I’m not here for some cockamamie legacy that people talk about,” Brown added. “This isn’t for me. I’m going to be dead. It’s for you. It’s for you and it’s damn real.”