Pasadena Sub Rosa

WITHOUT THE LAW THERE IS NOTHING

When the Law Does Not Pay

Victor Davis Hanson

I do not think in California there is much law these days. We are regressing to the days of my grandfather’s stories. He used to relate to me a wild Central Valley circa 1900, when the sheriff was a day away. A neighbor down the road is now openly violating county zoning regulations by simply moving in immobile Winnebagos and creating a sort of ad hoc mobile home park — with jerry-rigged electricity, sewage, and water. “Restaurants” pop up around my farm along the side of the road, exempt from state and local inspection, apparently by parking a canteen, plopping down some plastic chairs, an awning, a porta-potty, a hose — and, presto, we have an eatery, with signs no less.

There are no dumping laws enforced in rural California: stopping the guy who throws out his garbage and a sofa is a money-loser; finding the guy in the Mercedes who uses his cell phone is a money-winner.

Yet most state lawlessness out here is predicated on priorities of enforcement and driven by public employee unions who see us the people in terms of “fees” and “fines” to feed their salaries, perhaps in the way the Thanksgiving chef eyes the roasting turkey amid hungry mouths.

AWOL in Washington

The new lawlessness at the federal level, however, is far more serious, because it is predicated on “social justice”: those deemed “in need” shall be exempt from the law; those “not in need” shall not.

The War Powers Resolution, like it or not, is the law of the land. It requires the president to notify Congress within 48 hours of committing armed forces to military action. Without an authorization of the use of military force or a declaration of war, the military cannot remain in combat abroad. That’s whyGeorge W. Bush went to Congress to authorize the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. During the heated rhetoric over the Iranian missile controversy, presidential and vice-presidential candidates Obama and Biden both expressed support for the resolution — apparently outraged that Bush might unilaterally bomb Iranwithout notifying a Senator like themselves.

So when we recently passed the 60-day limit after the initial and continual use of armed forces in Libya, why did not Obama seek permission from Congress?

Here the question is not the usual Obama hypocrisy that has seen him demagogue and damn Guantanamo, preventative detention, tribunals, renditions, the Patriot Act (just signed by a former critic via computerized autopenfrom the UK no less), and Predators — only to expand or embrace them all. Rather, the problem is a question of legality itself.

Is the War Powers Resolution the law of the land or not? Or are we to assume a progressive president is complying with both UN resolutions and an Arab League mandate, and therefore, as the good internationalist and Nobel laureate, sees no reason to consult, as American law requires, his own elected U.S. Congress — the latter a more suspect and reactionary body that does not enjoy the moral stature of the UN or the Arab League?

This disregard reminds us of the shake-down of BP, when the administration more or less declared by fiat that the demonized corporation had to cough up a $20 billion contingency clean-up fund — reminiscent of someone in the classical Athenian ekklesia or late 18th-century French assembly going after the better off by mere proclamation.

In that regard, an administration is sworn to uphold the established law; why, then, was the Defense of Marriage Act arbitrarily rendered null and void without legislative appeal, simply because it was considered illiberal by those now with executive power? Can President Obama and Attorney General Holder de facto declare a law unconstitutional and then not enforce it? Could a renegade conservative counterpart likewise declare Roe vs. Wade unconstitutional, and go after abortionists because it deemed them too liberal?

Or perhaps a better example is the bailout to Chrysler that was contingent upon reversing the contractual order of creditors, putting union members and retirees, contrary to law, to the front of the line, and those who held Chrysler debt to the rear. Was the logic something like the following spread-the-wealth notion: Bondholders are wealthier anyway and so have enough money already; union members — and Democratic stalwarts — actually do the work, and so have a moral claim to the money that trumps the superfluous legal right of the wealthy and powerful?

Or we might ponder the administrative decision by bureaucratic decree to stop a company like Boeingfrom opening a new airline production line in South Carolina, purportedly because it is a red, right-to-work state. Again, the logic is that companies cannot open factories where they wish, since they havemoral obligations that must stand above a mere legal notion of freedom of commerce and association.

Do we remember the voter intimidation case dropped against the Black Panthers — on the supposition that, given the history of the poll tax and Jim Crow voter discrimination, a little minor pushback is small potatoes?

Then we come to federal immigration law, or rather the deliberate effort to undermine it — in a fashion that goes well beyond the neglect of the law shown by previous administrations. The Obama administration is going to court, along with Mexico, to sue the state of Arizona that is trying to find ways to bolster a federal law that the administration will not enforce.

But it gets worse: the Obama administration tries to subvert states that wish to follow its own laws, but ignores cities that deliberately flaunt them by declaring themselves “sanctuary cities.” And consider entire states like California, whose Assembly just passed its own version of the “Dream Act” to provide millions in state funds to support illegal aliens at the state-run colleges and universities (at a time when the state is $15 billion short in balancing its annual budget, and, due to such a shortage of funds, must release 40,000 prisoners because of an inability to comply with a court order addressing overcrowding).

By now we know the accustomed logic. Demonize those who would seek to obey the law (e.g., they wish to arrest kids on their way to ice cream, they want alligators and moats in the Rio Grande, they are “enemies” that Latinos should “punish,” they have already “basically” finished their fence) and apotheosize those who break it (e.g., no mention of the 20,000-30,000 illegal alien felons in theCalifornia penal system).

A Slippery Slope

I find all this quite frightening for a variety of reasons. Once the moral high ground is claimed, then legality is constructed as some sort of reactionary impediment in the way of egalitarian “fairness.” The process works geometrically: each time the federal government rules by fiat instead of following the law — for reasons of humanitarianism abroad, ecological responsibility, worker fairness, gay rights, or empathy for the alien — it becomes a little bolder the next time.

The Left simply disregards its former purported role as guardians of constitutional law, and grows quiet, again on the apparent logic that the rare progressive presidency is simply too precious a commodity to endanger by maintaining any consistent criticism in the manner it once went after the Bush administration.

Imagine the reaction of the New York Times, NPR, or a Senator Obama had a President Palin decided to bomb Iran off and on for 70 days without congressional consultation, or had she decided to throw open the U.S. border to any from Europe who could fly in, or had she violated union contracts to favor junior Wall Street creditors, or had she demanded that an Al Gore organization plop down several million in a contingency fund for the damage it had done oil workers by obstructing efforts of companies to gain oil leases.

Where does this end, this effort by Ivy League lawyers and civil libertarians to substitute supposedly enlightened progressivism for purported reactionary law? We easily and rightly condemn the crime when the Right tries to overthrow legality in the cases of a Franco, Hitler, Greek colonels, or Pinochet, who are easily identified as autocrats and dictators openly subverting constitutional government. But the assault from the Left is more insidious, given that the miscreants do it in self-declared high-minded fashion for “us.” I think here of the frightening trial of Socrates in ancient Athens, the ascendency of the Jacobins during the French Revolution, or Hugo Chavez’s thuggery in Venezuela — not coups as much as overdue punishment of “them.”

Without the law, there is nothing.

 

A 'MODEST PROPOSAL' ON MEMORIAL DAY

California has now reached the place where satire is no longer possible. Irish priest Jonathan Swift’s satire “A Modest Proposal” written in 1729 suggested that the problem of overpopulation in Ireland be solved by deporting Irish babies to be eaten to solve the famine problem elsewhere. What would Swift write about if the British Parliament had already enacted a law permitting cannibalism?

This must be the dilemma faced by Rick Reyes of Bell Gardens, an Iraq and Afghanistan War veteran, who, believe it or not, on Memorial Day, believes it is important to remember those who have died in foreign wars by proposing to “Save the San Gabriel Mountains.”  Reyes is a member of Vet Voice Foundation of California, yet another non-profit agency most likely taking money from the babies of taxpayers by hitting politicians up for donations. http://www.vetvoicefoundation.org/

Pray tell, are the San Gabriel Mountains about to vanish and thus need saving?  And from what do they need saved especially when every few years a wild fire destroys much of its vegetation?  And why would you want to save the San Gabriel’s from wild fires when that provides so much employment to fire fighters, some of whom have been found to start such fires to keep their political sinecures? The fire fighters might not like you "saving" the San Gabriel's.

I give Reyes and his Vet Voice Foundation credit however for an ingenious way to hit up the wealthy gentry that live along the beautiful San Gabriel foothills to keep their non-profit veterans organization alive.  How many non-profit foundations do we have already protecting the San Gabriel’s? Pasadena has 1,000 non-profits including the Arroyo Seco Foundation.

Only in postmodern California could the Iraq-Afghan Wars be blended in some mysterious way with saving open space into a single cause. The postmodern mind wants everything merged into a Mystic Matrix. The linking of such feel good causes as open space preservation and adopt-a-veteran is a blend of Blue Collar patriotism and Green activism. Call it the "Greening of the Post-Iraq War Veteran's Mind." 

But, Rick, what is the implied message in your guest editorial? Might your guest editorial be misconstrued to mean that if all those wealthy gentry living along the San Gabriel’s don’t support your nonprofit that Iraq-Afghan War vets just might use their skills at using flame-throwers acquired in the military and ignite some forest fires?  What a great implied message to send on Memorial Day!  For sure, I will never forget such a message. 

Yes, we have many unemployed veterans that have returned from wars fought in the Middle East.  They need jobs for sure. But veteran's organizations advocating open space preservation on Memorial Day is right out of Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” or maybe the website “The Onion.”  Let’s not forget our veterans who have returned from still ongoing wars.  They need jobs.  But on Memorial Day let’s forget the proposal to “Save the San Gabriel’s” and save that for another day like Earth Day or Nonsense Day.  The memory of those lost fighting foreign wars is too painful to cheapen it by linking it with some ecological cause to preserve the views of the wealthy living along the foothills.  

I would rather have been spat on returning from the unpopular Viet Nam War than remembered on Memorial Day by advocating the silly preservation of the mountains. Let's not trivialize Memorial Day.  

And I must give credit to the Pasadena Star New editorial staff for vetting this guest editorial. What a stroke of marketing genius!  Just think of all the hit counts online from Pasadena Greenies reading about a veteran's organization in Blue Collar Bell Gardens?  You can reach two markets in one editorial!  Let's call it "Postmodern" editing. 

Semper Fi! ("Always Faithful!) Or is it now Semper Fry? ("Always Fearful?") 

Wayne Lusvardi is a Viet Nam War vet - apparently the last modern war fought before "Postmodern" warfare. 

Note: You can read Mr. Reyes’ guest column here:

http://www.pasadenastarnews.com/opinions/ci_18166296

 

WE OWE OUR WARRIORS TO TELL STORY OF WHAT THEY ACHIEVED

Memorial Day: The War in Iraq

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD - The American Interest Online

How to commemorate those who have laid down their lives for their country?  Memorial Day wasn’t much of an issue in my childhood.  100 years after the Civil War, most white Southerners still considered this a Yankee holiday.  Robert E. Lee’s birthday, a state holiday across much of the South, got more press.  White folks didn’t go much to events like the annual commemoration of the Union prisoners who died in the Confederate POW camp in my father’s hometown of Florence, SC.

For me that changed when I went north to Pundit High School at the age of 13 on a full scholarship.  Memorial Day was a BIG event there; the 200 boys in the student body spent many spring evenings learning to march around the campus in preparation for the town’s Memorial Day parade out to the cemetery where the names of all the town’s war dead going back to the Revolution were read out.  A combination of precocious anti-Vietnam feeling and, I think, culture shock at the vast difference between Pundit High and everything else I had known led me to the conclusion that on conscientious grounds I should not march.

The best way, I argued to my put-upon parents and long suffering Headmaster, to commemorate the war dead was to stop the militaristic displays that made new wars and new deaths more likely.  The school made it clear: it was march or go home.  My parents told me it was my decision to make; I thought hard and eventually marched that spring and every spring thereafter until the time came to move on.  I wasn’t quite finished being adolescent about this national holiday.  The school band provided musical accompaniment as we marched, and I wrote French lyrics to the tune “Over There” which many of us sang to complain about the school food. “Pommes de terre,” it began, “pommes de terre; Içi on ne jamais mange que pommes de terre.“

Je ne regrette rien, but L’Académie Française has  yet to call.

I’ve always thought that to march was the right choice, more than ever now that I’ve moved past the pacifism of my teen self.  But the question of how to commemorate those who have given their lives for our country is still a vexing one — and especially now, as the US role in Iraq winds down and we think about the 4,434 Americans who died there to date, the 32,074 who will carry the wounds they suffered there, and the hundreds of thousands who will carry the memories of their service through their lives.

 

Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day 2008 (Wikimedia)

 

 

After the Vietnam war, a divisive conflict that tore this country apart and failed to prevent Communist triumph in Vietnam and genocide in Cambodia, the country groped its way toward a compromise way to remember the dead and honor the veterans.  Regardless of the merits of the war, those who did honorable service in it or laid down their lives at their country’s call, deserve our respect and our thanks.

That was better than nothing, and a way to reduce the damage that the memory of Vietnam did in the US long after the shooting stopped; there are signs that we are aiming to repeat a compromise of that kind when it comes to the war in Iraq.  Those who opposed the war and those who supported it can unite in tribute to the loyalty, the courage and the sacrifice of those who served there.

That is something, but it is not enough.  The Americans who served, suffered and died in Iraq — and who still serve there today — changed the world and won a great and a difficult victory.  No account of their service, no commemoration of the dead that ignores or conceals this vital truth is enough.

 

US Marines enter one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces in Baghdad (Wikimedia)

 

 

To celebrate a momentous victory in Iraq is not to acknowledge that President Bush was right to go into Iraq when and how he did; it is not to justify or excuse the years of poor choices and strategic fumbling before the President found the generals who knew how to win.  (One can say the same thing, of course, about President Lincoln.  Like most great leaders, he failed his way to triumph.)  I supported the invasion because I believed Colin Powell’s solemn assurances about weapons of mass destruction; I continued to support the war despite the absence of such weapons and the chaos and incompetence attending the occupation because I believed that vital issues were at stake in Iraq, that defeat was unacceptable, that victory was not nearly as unattainable as the hand wringing, pseudo-smart choruses of despairing ex-hawks so cluelessly and insistently asserted, and that if nothing else we had a duty to the Iraqis and to ourselves not to leave the country without giving it a fair chance to shape the future for itself.

Because of President Bush’s steadfastness, because of the military genius of General Petraeus (or Betray Us as the keen wits and intellects at Moveon.org so memorably called him as, to their frustration and fury,the evidence of victory began to appear) and his associates, because of the professionalism and honor of American officers, and above all because of the dogged courage, patriotism and humanity of the extraordinary men and women who served in the ranks, we won the war.

MoveOn.org’s controversial full page advertisement that ran in the New York Times on September 10, 2007

 

That victory was much more than a dignified escape from a sticky predicament.  The coalition victory in Iraq was a historical turning point that may well turn out to be comparable to the cannonade of Valmy.  It changed the course of world history.  We have not done justice to those who gave their lives in Iraq until we recognize the full dimensions of their achievement.

The story of Iraq has yet to be told.  It is too politically sensitive for the intelligentsia to handle just yet; passions need to cool before the professors and the pundits who worked themselves into paroxysms of hatred and disdain for the Bush administration can come to grips with how wrongheaded they’ve been.  It took decades for the intelligentsia to face the possibility that the cretinous Reagan-monster might have, um, helped win the Cold War, and even now they haven’t asked themselves any tough questions about the Left’s blind hatred of the man who did more than any other human being to save the world from nuclear war.

It may take that long for the truth about the war in Iraq to dawn, but dawn it will.  America’s victory in Iraq broke the back of Al-Qaeda and left Osama bin Laden’s dream in ruins.  He died a defeated fanatic in his Abbotabad hideaway; his dream was crushed in the Mesopotamian flatlands where he swore it would win.

Osama’s goal was to launch the Clash of Civilizations against the West.  He would be Captain Islam, fighting against the Crusader-in-Chief George W. Bush.  By his purity, wisdom, daring and above all by his special knowledge of the hidden ways of God, Captain Islam would crush and humiliate the evil Bush-fiend and unite the Muslim world behind the Truth.  Osama would complete at a spiritual level the mission his father undertook on the physical plane.  His father’s construction company rebuilt and modernized the ancient holy city of Mecca; Osama would rebuild and restore the entire Muslim world.

The 9/11 attacks propelled Osama to the historical height he sought: in the minds of many he had become a caliph-in-waiting, the fierce servant of God whose claims to leadership were vindicated by the dramatic success of his plans.  Angry young people across the Islamic world, frustrated by a host of frustrations and privations, wondered if this was the charismatic, God-aided figure who would overturn the world order and lead Islam to its old place on the commanding heights of the world.

9/11 was the trumpet, Iraq was the test.  The US invaded an Arab country, overthrew its government, and found itself condemned to the hardest task in international politics: nation building under hostile fire. More, the US had taken a country run by its Sunni minority and put power into the hands of an inexperienced and fractious Shi’a majority.  Then the US occupation began to fail: the government institutions fell apart, there was no security in country or in town, the economy went into free fall, and basic services like electricity and health failed across the land. The provocations were serious and real; the Americans were clumsy and awkward.  US checkpoints and raids were humiliating and degrading; the scalding Abu Ghraib scandal was a propagandist’s dream come true.  The ham-handed diplomacy and tongue-tied defense of American policy from Washington created a sense of rising, unstoppable global opposition to Bush’s War.

There could be no more favorable terrain for Al-Qaeda.  From all over the world, young people intoxicated on radical Islam and hatred of the United States rushed to defend Sunni Iraq from the devil’s own alliance of crusaders, Zionists and schismatics.  Across the embattled Sunni heartland in central Iraq, the fighters were welcomed as reinforcements by desperate tribal militias and former Iraqi army groups fighting the monstrous new order.

So favorable was the terrain for our enemies and so difficult the tasks we faced that the shrewdest critics of the Iraq war argued that the US had in effect fallen into an Al-Qaeda trap.  Bush had blindly and recklessly rushed forward into a quagmire; Iraq would be America’s Dien Bien Phu, a new hopeless colonial war.  It was our Algeria, a second Vietnam, a well-deserved comeuppance for imperial arrogance.  Osama baited the trap, and Bush rushed in to his doom.

For roughly three years America writhed in the toils of our predicament in Iraq.  The Democratic establishment had supported the war.  Some leading Democrats did so out of conviction, some out of a political calculation that no other stand was viable in the post 9/11 atmosphere.  Now the grand panjandrums of the Democratic Party, one after another, made their pilgrimage to Canossa.  Some came to believe and perhaps more came to say that the war was lost and that their original backing for it had been a mistake.

Well do I remember the many impassioned statements in those dark years by leading politicians and pundits that the war was lost, lost, irretrievably lost.  It was over now, they wailed on television and in print.  The Iraqi government was a farce and could never take hold.  These clowns made Diem look like Charles de Gaulle.  We had no option but to get out as quickly as possible.  On and on rolled the great choir of doom, smarter than the rest of us, deeper thinkers, capable of holding more complex thoughts behind their furrowed brows.

Now they have glibly moved on to other subjects; the mostly complicit media is helping us all to forget just how wrong — and how intolerant and moralistic — so many people were about the ‘lost’ war.

While the politicians washed their hands and hung up white flags, and while the press lords gibbered and foamed, the brass kept their heads and the troops stood tall.  And gradually, a miracle happened.  America started winning the war.

We won it the one way the critics could not imagine: we won the contest with Al-Qaeda for Iraqi Sunni support.  The Sunni Arabs of Iraq had seen the Americans at their worst: culturally insensitive and arrogant invaders; failed economic planners and bad managers; cruel abusers of prisoners; incompetent protectors.  They saw Al-Qaeda at its best: God-fearing freedom fighters traveling great distances and taking great personal risks to uphold the cause of the believers against the foreign oppressor.

Yet chief after chief, tribe after tribe and town after town, the Sunni Arabs of Iraq made a fateful decision.  They chose America over Al-Qaeda.  They took the measure of America’s officers and combat troops, and they took the measure of Al-Qaeda’s ‘jihadis’.  They saw us warts and all — and decided that the future lay with America rather than the woman-stoning bomb nuts.  Our troops would secure the safety of their families better than Al-Qaeda could.  Despite the immense religious and cultural differences between us, democratic America stood closer to their values than fanatical Al-Qaeda.

That decision by the Sunni Arabs of Iraq is what left Al-Qaeda gutted and floundering.  That is what turned it from strategic threat to abiding nuisance.  That is what set the limits of Al-Qaeda’s appeal and turned Osama bin Laden from the aspiring caliph of a great Islamic wave to (apparently) a porn-watching recluse in a Pakistani garrison town.

The Sunni Arabs made that decision, but it was the competence, honor and courage of the Americans on the ground whose conduct won them over.  Suspicious Sunnis, still burning with resentment over foreign invasion and loss of status to the Shi’a, watched our troops fight Al-Qaeda, watched young Americans lay down their lives to protect Muslim children and old people from suicide bombers.  They learned to believe that American officers keep their promises and deliver on their commitments.  They saw that an army composed of people from many religions (and some holding no religious belief of any kind) lives up to the ideals of Islamic combat better than an army of fanatical zealots.  They also saw for themselves to what barbarities and absurdities Al-Qaeda’s parody of Islam can lead.

Al-Qaeda’s rejection by Sunni Iraq punctured the Osama bubble in the Muslim world.  His following didn’t dry up overnight, but his dizzying rise yielded to dispiriting decline.  And the damage went farther than Al-Qaeda.  Radical Islam lost its allure as the coming thing in the Arab world.  It is no longer unrivaled as the ideology of youth and the hope of the nations.

The French scholar Gilles Kepel, no friend of the war in Iraq and no admirer of George Bush, makes the core point.  Osama’s dream was to shift history into the realm of myth.  He passionately believed that the ordinary course of mundane history wasn’t what really mattered: there was a divine and a miraculous history just behind the veil.  Osama aimed to pierce the veil, to bring hundreds of millions of Muslims into his reality, transfixed and transported by the vision of a climactic fight of good against evil, of God against America and its local allies.

That dream died in Iraq.

But on this Memorial Day it is not enough to remember, and give thanks, that Osama’s dream died before he did and that the terror movement has been gravely wounded at its heart.

Because the dream didn’t just die.

It was killed.

And it was killed by coalition forces.  They killed it by fighting harder and smarter than the enemy and they killed it by winning trust and building bridges better than the enemy.  They did it because they were better, more honorable warriors and better, more honorable partners for peace.  Mostly American and mostly Christian, the coalition forcers were more compassionate, more just, more protective of the poor and more respectful of Arab women than the crazed thugs who thought setting off bombs in the market was fulfilling God’s will.

We must continue to honor and thank the Arab allies and tribal leaders who made the choice for America in a dark and a difficult time.  But especially on this Memorial Day we must honor and remember the American heroes who by their lives and by their deaths brought victory out of defeat, understanding out of hatred and gave both Muslims and non-Muslims a chance to get this whole thing right.

The story of America’s victory over terror in Mesopotamia needs to be told.  In justice to those who sacrificed so much, and for the sake of those who may have to face similar dangers in the future, somebody needs to tell the real story of how, against all odds and in the face of unremitting skepticism and defeatism at home, our armed forces built a foundation for peace and reconciliation in the Middle East.

All wars are tragic; some are also victorious.  The tragedies of Iraq are real and well known.  The victory is equally real — but the politically fastidious don’t want to look.  The minimum we owe our lost and wounded warriors is to tell the story of what they so gloriously achieved.

On this Memorial Day, a truth needs to be told.

We have not yet done justice to our dead.

 

RUN FOR THE BORDERS

SCOTUS Makes It Official: California A Failed State

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD - The American Interest

The controversial US Supreme Court decision (pdf) that could ultimately force California to release tens of thousands of prison inmates is more than a shockingly broad exercise of judicial power.  It is also an official declaration by the highest constitutional authority in the land that California meets the strict test of state failure: it can no longer enforce the law within its frontiers.

Let there be no mistake: when you produce so many criminals that you can’t afford to lock them up, you are a failed state.  Virtually every important civil institution in society has to fail to get you to this point.  Your homes and houses of worship are failing to build law abiding citizens, much less responsible and informed voters.  Your schools aren’t educating enough of your kids to make an honest living.  Your taxes and policies are so bad that you are driving thousands of businesses away.  Your management systems must be fouled and confused to the max for you to create something so dysfunctional, so wildly beyond your means, that the Supreme Court of the United States (wisely or foolishly is another question) starts to micromanage your jails.

California used to be the glory of this country, the dream by the sea, the magic state.  Now it produces so many criminals it can’t pay to keep them locked up.

This is partly a blue social model thing.  California’s public unions are sucking the state dry — like a parasite killing its host.  Too many Californians buy the ideology of entitlement best described by that great Louisiana prophet of the blue social model Huey Long: “If you aren’t getting something for nothing, you’re not getting your fair share.”

The federal government’s generation of serial failures in migration policy is also to blame.  More exposed to illegal migration than any other state, California has been overwhelmed by both legal and illegal immigrants.  Immigrants are a net plus for the United States, but neither the federal nor the state governments have been willing to provide the appropriate policy framework to manage this flow — and to cope with the consequences.

Some of the fault is judicial.  California’s prison blues partly reflect micromanagement by a host of addled judges who among them have imposed a conflicting and overlapping set of requirements that increase costs to the point where overall conditions decline.  One judge imposes a health mandate; another throws in some food and nutrition requirements; somebody else issues an order for exercise, education, visitation rights or what have you.  In the end the system becomes unmanageable and unsustainable and in yet another fatheaded intervention the Supreme Court supports a lower court order for mass prisoner release.  Judicial intervention in the prison system needs to be safe, legal and rare: at the moment it seems to be none of the above.

It’s partly about corporate flight.  Destructive and shortsighted tax policies have literally driven big corporations out of the state.  For the last five years, Southern California has been losing roughly one Fortune 500 corporate headquarters a year, while the state as a whole has lost four such companies in the last twelve months in an accelerating flight to greener pastures in less-dysfunctional states like Texas, Colorado and Virginia.

Meanwhile, California has the one of the worst business climates in the country: in three widely-cited rankings, California came 49th or 50th.  High taxes, rigid regulations, bribery, unresponsive bureaucrats: California has it all.

It has one of the most expensive and least effective governments in the country.  California has the country’s 6th highest total tax burden and yet also the largest budget deficit ($25.4bn projected for FY2012 — that’s about $687 per capita).  North Dakota, by contrast, balances its budget every year, educates its kids better, is creating new jobs and taxes its residents at less than half California’s level.

California’s school expenditures bear no relationship to results.  In 2008, although California spent more on public schools than any other state in the country and more per pupil than many, its students ranked 49th (out of 51, including DC) in reading achievement, 48th in math.  States like South Dakota spent much less per pupil and got much better results.

The former paradise of the automobile can’t even get car policy right; it has the country’s second highest gas prices and some of the worst traffic in the United States.

Californians weren’t always this incompetent.  In fact, California invented the modern American dream.  The brilliant banker A.P. Giannini pioneered the mass marketed thirty year mortgage.  Under his leadership the Bank of America perfected the growth engine that drove this whole country for sixty years.  The bank lent money through the municipal bond market to build the infrastructure for new subdivisions.  It lent money to real estate developers to build housing developments and lent money to consumers for mortgages and to buy cars.  The tax revenues from the higher land values in the subdivisions payed for the bonds and the schools.  The jobs provided by a favorable combination of a good business climate and government support (highway infrastructure, defense spending and industrial investment originally related to World War Two and continuing through the Cold War) put money in consumers’ pockets to pay for it all.  Hollywood (also originally banked by Giannini) sprinkled it with magic dust, and the world gazed in awe.

Amadeo Piotro Giannini (Wikimedia)

I’ll never forget my own first trip to Golden California.  After I graduated from Pundit High, my parents gave me the use of our beat up old Volkswagon Beetle and a gas credit card for a month.  Following a series of misadventures that I hope will NOT see the light of day after all these years, we crossed the California state line and like generations of easterners before us we were awed and stunned by the beauty and wealth of the natural environment and the progressive utopia rising on every side.  Gas was 18 cents a gallon; artichokes cost a nickel.  The freeways sparkled in the sun; the roses that grew in the median strips were lush and well kept.  The LA Times was one of the world’s great papers; the California university system was the wonder of the world.

San Francisco’s glorious Golden Gate Bridge, which Giannini also helped finance.

That glory has gone.  Californians pay more to and get less from their state government than anybody else in the civilized world.  The progressive meltdown of every important and valuable institution in the state is paralleled by the collapse of California’s place in our national cultural life.  San Francisco once looked to be the literary capital of the Pacific; today it is a more provincial, less interesting city than it was fifty years ago.  Lost Angeles is a parody of itself, a city to escape rather than a goal to be reached.

California politics and analysis is mostly a blame game these days.  When you go to failing states outside the US, you are often treated to long and impassioned arguments among intellectuals about where it all went wrong.  Arabs, Argentines, Russians, Nigerians, Pakistanis, Mexicans and, lately, the Japanese sit up into the wee hours about when precisely the key bad decisions were taken — when the point of no return was passed.

That is what discussions about California increasingly sound like.  My guess is that we’ll have more of these going forward.  Increasingly, I lean to the idea that California as we know it has been decisively and finally lost.  Embers are still burning in the ashes (Hollywood, Silicon Valley), but the flame of the west gutters low.

To rekindle what used to be the most glorious star in Columbia’s crown, we are going to have to get away from what has become the California state obsession in recent years: reform.  California reform commissions and committees are as common as parking lots these days; the results of past reforms in the form of propositions and constitutional amendments are part of the problem.  Most new reforms will meet the same fate: the California state government long ago jumped the shark.

The only hope I can see is to break it up.  California’s core problem is that it has outgrown the constitutional model we have for it.  California is too populous, too diverse, too complicated to flourish as a single state.  Unless we carve this beast into something like five more compact and manageable states, Californians will never have decent representative government at an affordable price.

If California had been on the East Coast, or if it had entered the Union at any time other than the crisis years before the Civil War when slave states jealously worked to minimize the number of free states, the idea of making it one state would have looked absurd from the start.  As it is, the constituent parts of California have almost nothing in common.  Northern California is more like Washington and Oregon than like anything farther south.  The neighborhood of San Francisco Bay has its own history, character and interests that set it off from the rest of the state.  Greater Los Angeles, the Central Valley and the Far South centered on San Diego also have what it takes to be successful and happily governed states on their own.

California, Reimagined (Image Source: Wikimedia)

Meanwhile, the state is so huge and has so many major media markets that elections for statewide office are prohibitively expensive.  Special interests including public sector unions and corporations play a greater role in California, and grassroots politics matters less, than in most of the rest of the country.  The vast differences in interest and outlook between its various regions makes for stalemate and sterile, lowest common denominator compromises in state politics.

At the time of the first US census in 1790, the total population of all 13 states and the western territories was 3.9 million (pdf).  Los Angelescounty has more than twice that many people now.  The state with the largest population in the US in 1790 was Virginia with almost 394,000 inhabitants.  Seven cities in California are bigger than that now.

Representative government in California is not failing because Californians are stupider than other people.  It is not failing because we somehow can’t find the right mix of redistricting, constitutional amendments and other chicken-wire-and-spit fixes to kludge a working government together.

Representative government is failing in California because we keep using the wrong template.  You can’t run a big city through a series of  New England town meetings; you can’t run the 8th biggest economy in the world with an institutional mix designed for much smaller, more homogenous units in a much simpler time.  California is a region, not a state, and until we adopt the political institutions that match this reality, the state will continue to fail — our very own Sudan by the sea.

California isn’t the only state with this problem, by the way.  New York, Florida, Texas and Illinois are obvious candidates for break up; figuring out how to decentralize and localize state government is an important part of making America work in the 21st century.

There are problems with breaking up states.  There are common assets like university and road systems.  There’s the question of state debt: should citizens of California’s rural regions be indefinitely saddled with debts due to large infrastructure projects in other parts of the state?  There are resource issues (in California, think water above all).  There are some non-trivial constitutional issues about how to get it done (joint resolution by Congress following petition?  constitutional amendment?  something in between?).

There are some cost issues as well: would five state governments be five times as expensive as one, for example?  I tend to think not; the less populous states will need less government and less regulation and be free to shed layers of management and governance they never needed in the first place.  The new states (like all states) should switch to unicameral legislatures — state senates have served no serious purpose since the Warren Court bizarrely ruled that the traditional overrepresentation of rural areas in many state senates was unconstitutional (each county had the same number of senators regardless of population, like the US Senate and the states).

America can’t afford for California to keep failing, and despite the best efforts of a lot of smart people, there’s no way that the Golden State can function in its current form.

There’s no way around it, friends: we need more stars in our flag.

 

 

CITY INCUBATOR KILLS CHICKEN RESTAURANT?

The Rio Rio "Brazilian Steak House" at 2675 East Colorado Boulevard (corner of Colorado and San Gabriel Boulevard) is closed.  Which makes us wonder whether the city subsidized restaurant incubator a few doors away killed it?  What a great idea - subsidize competition so that existing restaurants go out of business. 

 

PATRICIA HUFF'S BLUFF ABOUT SCHOOL BUDGET CUT FLUFF

Patricia Huff’s Bluff on School Funding Fluff

Patricia Huff of Arcadia has written a self-righteous letter rebuking Guillermo Guzman for being uneducated about school taxes.  Ms. Huff needs to go back to school herself.

First, she needs to learn how to spell and write without using run on sentences that make no sense, like this:

“In other words, knowing that this could be the outcome, now is the time to take responsibility as a society in placing our priorities where they should be and that Mr. Guzman does not mean to stay in the realm of the problem but to shift your awarenss (AWARENESS) into solutions.”

Second, she might try educating herself about the financing of public schools in California. To do that one needs to stop reading the hysteria and disinformation found in local newspapers.

Here is what she might find if she “educated” herself about taxes and public education:

1. California cut school financing by about $4.5 billion last year. 
2. None of those cuts resulted in layoffs to core teachers.  In the PUSD, there weren’t even any layoffs to music or arts teachers as claimed.  The cuts were all fluff.
3. According to the State Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) the “funding mandate system” for K-12 schools is “broken” in California. It is full of pork barrel ancillary jobs programs that were created by legislators to buy votes.

Contrary to Ms. Huff, it is not the taxpayer’s “responsibility” to pay for political pork.  Go back to school Ms. Huff.  Only don’t try the public education system.

PATRICIA HUFF LETTER TO PSN BELOW

A shift to a solution

I would like to comment on the letter written by Guillermo Guzman of South Pasadena directed toward the letter written by Rabbi Grater regarding supporting teachers and public schools.

Mr. Guzman points out that Rabbi Grater is uneducated and therefore unaware of the fact that we already pay the highest taxes in the nation, face high unemployment as well as overpaid school administrations.

I, too, read Rabbi Grater's letter to the editor that emphasized the challenge we all face as parents, teachers, students and citizens to take responsibility even if it means paying higher taxes. In other words, knowing that this could be the outcome, now is the time to take responsibility as a society in placing our priorities where they should be and that Mr. Guzman does not mean to stay in the realm of the problem but to shift your awarenss into solutions. Educating oneself in this difference would be very beneficial to Mr. Guzman.

Patricia Huff

Arcadia

 

REPLY TO RABBI JOSHUA GRATER - UNNEEDED TAX UNETHICAL

Preface: Below is a response to Rabbi Joshua Grater's letter to the editor in the May 16 PSN - see letter below. 

Religion Last Refuge of School Tax Scoundrels

By Wayne Lusvardi

In my hometown of Pasadena, and I suspect statewide, there is a concerted effort of local religious leaders to bombard local newspapers with letters advocating a state increase in taxes to save public schools.

What is being sought from religious leaders is to convince the public of the moral legitimacy for a tax increase.  But is it ethical to ask misinformed religious leaders to advocate for a state tax increase for public schools that may be unneeded?

School Funding Mandate System is Corrupt

The nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) report of Feb. 2011 titled “Education Mandates: Overhauling a Broken System” apparently didn’t think it was ethical to do so.  The LAO stated: “virtually every aspect of the K-14 (public school) mandate finance system is broken.” The LAO report further stated that if a mandated service does not serve a fundamental purpose, “the mandate should be eliminated.”  The LAO’s package of recommended reforms would relieve schools districts and junior colleges of “hundreds of unnecessary activities that provide little value to students.” 

It sounds more like the moral high ground might be to cut political jobs earmarks and pork-barrel programs rather than continue their funding in a time of widespread austerity and inflation in gasoline and food prices.

Ethical Precedent for Cuts

Apparently public school tax advocates are not apprising religious leaders that along with Federal Stimulus funds, cutting the fat out of the state education budget is what saved the California public school system in 2010. 

Back in 2009 the State Legislative Analyst (LAO) recommended that the State legislature deregulate funding mandates for “categorical” jobs and programs.  “Categorical” is a bureaucratic term meaning a political earmark for a politically protected job or program not related to core teaching or essential school administration.

In response, the legislature responded and passed Assembly Bill ABX-4-2, which reduced mandatory expenditures (or “political earmarks”) by $4.5 billion, thus saving K-12 public schools for the 2010 fiscal year.

The LAO report recommended another round of deregulation of mandated “categorical” jobs and programs for 2012 that would save $7.4 billion. 

Included in this recommendation was a modest increase in average class sizes from 21 to 24 students statewide. The many anecdotal reports of increasing the average class size by up to double are at best hysterical and at worst intentionally dishonest and misleading. This doesn’t sound like a way to capture the moral high ground for a tax increase for public schools.

Single Ledger Accounting is Unethical

What is unethical about the way public education bureaucracies go about issuing press releases and statements to the public about the situation of public school funding is that they only talk about the half-truth of the forecasted loss of tax revenues for schools, not the reduction in expenditures on the other side of the ledger. 

It is unethical for the press or public school bureaucrats to issue reports of dire school budgetary situations by only informing the public about the revenue side and not the expenditure side of the budget numbers as well. 

For example, the $4.5 billion cut in school funding mandates in 2010 cited above would equate to a $726 per student state tax increase.  If the LAO’s recommendation of $7.4 billion in addition cuts of funding mandates was enacted by the legislature for 2012 this would be the equivalent to an additional tax increase of $1,195 per student. 

Gov. Brown has just reported that he is increasing school funding for the 2012 school year by $3 billion due to unexpected increased sales tax revenues.  This would equate to $484 per student more for the coming school year than was budgeted.

On a net basis, school funding for core education activities could have potentially been increased by $7.4 billion or $1,195 per student since 2010 when revenue increases and actual and potential expenditure reductions are both factored into the equation.  This is because tax cuts have mainly been to ancillary jobs and programs (“earmarks”) and not to core educational activities.

Potential Net Gain to Core Education Budget – 2010 to 2012

Year	Status	Amount	Per Student
2010	Actual cuts to earmarks - ABX-4-2	$4.5 billion	$426
2012	Proposed cuts to earmarks - ABX-4-2	$7.4 billion	$1,195
2012	Proposed revenue increase by Governor	$3 billion	$484
Subtotal Gain To Core Education Budget		$14.9 billion	$2,405
Prop 98 School Cuts 2010-12		$7.5 billion	$1,211
Potential Net Gain/Loss to Core Education Activities		+$7.4 billion	$1,195

 

 Governor Jerry Brown’s proposed 2012 General Fund Budget document reports that Prop 98 guaranteed funding for K-12 public schools was cut from $56.6 to $49.1 billion from 2008 to 2012, a $7.5 billion total cut. 

But if Gov. Brown increases school funding $3 billion for 2012, the $7.5 billion loss in school funding from 2008 to 2012 would be entirely offset (ABX-4-2 $4.5 billion + $3 billion).

If another round of cutting public school earmarks were enacted by the legislature, funding for core education activities could potentially increase by $7.4 billion, or $1,195 per student.  The situation at hand indicates that budget cuts to earmarks, coupled with the Governor’s $3 billion proposed revenue increase, could result in more revenues for core educational activities without needing to raise taxes.  Thus, the ethical situation at hand calls for budget cuts, not tax increases.

But that is not what you are hearing from state and local school officials.  And unfortunately misinformed religious leaders are apparently being conned into believing untruths. A budget crisis apparently is a horrible thing to waste.

Bureau Speak is Unethical by Definition

The newspaper media and religious leaders should be wise enough to expect that bureaucracies are always going to be issuing self-serving statements.  Government bureaucracies don’t necessarily lie as much as they filter out half of the information that does not meet their self-interest.  That is how bureaucracies by definition behave. They behave to protect their bureaucratic turf and political patronage.  If they didn’t behave that way they wouldn’t be a bureaucracy. 

But apparently the press and religious leaders take the pronouncements of public school bureaucrats at face value and uncritically, which is ethically dubious. If the press is not going to look critically at what government bureaucracies report they have no ethical standard for the public to have faith in. And if religious leaders are going to allow them selves to be duped and used to make pleas for unneeded tax increases, the public should consider them to be “false prophets.”  Religious leaders cannot merely claim ignorance.  Ignorance is neither bliss nor ethical.

“Were you honest about taxes?”

The Wikipedia entry for “Jewish Ethics” states:

The Talmud denounces as fraud every mode of taking advantage of a man's ignorance, whether he be Jew or Gentile; every fraudulent dealing, every gain obtained by betting or gambling or by raising the price of breadstuffs through speculation, is theft (B. B. 90b; Sanh. 25b). The Talmud denounces advantages derived from loans of money or of victuals as usury; every breach of promise in commerce is a sin provoking God's punishment; every act of carelessness, which exposes men or things to danger and damage is a culpable transgression. There is a widely quoted tradition (Talmud Shabbat 31a) that in one's judgment in the next world, the first question asked is: "were you honest in business?"

To which we might add the question: “were you honest about government taxation?”

The teachers unions, public school boards and support organizations, League of Women Voters, and most newspaper editorials are perpetuating a fraud when they advocate an increase in unneeded taxes mainly for public school earmarks at a time when people are trying to make house payments on Unemployment checks. 

Even a prominent City Councilperson in the Pasadena area where this writer lives is pending foreclosure on the loan on their home.  It is unethical to confiscate money from people suffering during the economic recession to pay for political earmarks while their homes are being foreclosed.  But this hasn’t deterred the local school district to hysterically advocate for a state tax increase to save public schools and proposing to put a future school parcel tax on the ballot. 

To propose an unneeded state tax increase or a local school parcel tax for politically mandated public school earmarks, which even the State Legislative Analyst says is a “broken” system, is a fraud and as such is unethical. 

There is no moral high ground for school tax increases or local parcel taxes at this time and religious leaders should beware not to be duped into endorsing such.  Be as ethical as a rabbi, but as wise as a serpent might be good advice.

LETTER TO EDITOR PSN - BY RABBI JOSHUA GRATER

Justice for schools
Posted: 05/15/2011 07:02:50 AM PDT

I stand with the teachers, parents, students and the concerned citizens of Pasadena, and all of California, who are rightly worried and upset about the proposed cuts in education that our schools face.

One of the marks of a successful civilized society is how much investment we place in our public schools. The Talmud, the Jewish legal code, and one of the oldest living codes of law, says that education should be the highest priority of any community, with a publicly funded school being mandatory. My children are currently in a private, Jewish day school, but they will be attending high school in Pasadena in the future, and I want them to have the highest, best quality education possible in a public school. I am the product of public education, attending El Camino Real High School in Woodland Hills, and I want the same top quality experience I had for my children.

We must decide, as a community, as a state, as a nation, what our priorities will be over the coming years. Will we have tax breaks for the wealthy, the corporations and the lobbyists at the expense of our citizens? Will we take responsibility for ourselves, our future and our children by investing in education, health care and infrastructure, even if it means raising taxes?

Will we stand idly by while our money, and our future, is lost in a bottomless pit of deficits?

These are serious questions that demand serious consideration, reflection and ultimately, serious action.

I stand with those who are ready to invest in our children, in our future and to make the necessary sacrifices to do so. That is what the "greatest generation" taught us to do.

Rabbi Joshua Levine Grater

Senior Rabbi, PJTC

Member, Greater Pasadena

Jews for Justice

Pasadena

 

 

 

GOV. BROWN TAKES WIND OUT OF SAIL OF PUSD PARCEL TAX IDEA

Governor Brown Cancels Tax Until Next Year

California Governor Jerry Brown has cancelled his effort for a $5 billion package of tax increases this year due to rising state sales taxes.  

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-state-budget-20110514,0,1139364.story?track=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+latimes%2Fnews%2Flocal+%28L.A.+Times+-+California+|+Local+News%29&utm_content=Google+Reader  

 

SIERRA MADRE TATTLER SUES CITY OVER WATER RATE HIKE

Read here:

http://www.pasadenastarnews.com/news/ci_18034342

 

DEMOCRATS IMMUNE FROM SMEARING FOR DUI'S

Recently, a candidate for PUSD School Board was smeared by the Pasadena Weekly for having a pending DUI offense, plea bargained down to reckless driving.  As pointed out by this blog there are apparent elected officials in Pasadena who have had similar legal offenses but were never disclosed in the newspapers when they ran for re-election and were never barred from entering PUSD campuses. 

Now it comes to light that a Santa Clara City Councilman, and apparent Democrat, has a DUI record that is being similarly glossed over. 

I guess all drunk driving arrests are forgiven if you're a Democrat (see below*)

http://www.sacbee.com/2011/05/08/3611580/san-jose-city-councilman-discloses.html    


(*Obviously because he is a City Councilman I don't know for sure if he is a Democrat but have deduced it based on the fact that he was a Santa Clara County public defender for 11 years representing indigent drug users, currently teaches "Race and the Law" at Lincoln Law School in San Jose, was supported almost exclusively by unions and environmentalists when he ran for City Council, and has served on an array of housing, planning, air quality and transportation boards.)

http://www.sjdistrict2.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=171&Itemid=214