Aint Got The Do-Re-Mi: The Beginning of The End of The Californian Dream

The patient survived a suicidal fall off the Golden Gate and is now in intensive care. The bleeding has stopped, but there is massive internal damage and during the next year surgeons will amputate most of remaining limbs including $1.4 billion from the Californian prison system, $4.7 billion from its cities and counties, and $9 billion from its public schools, colleges and universities.

Class sizes will explode, more professors will be furloughed and California's state-of-the-art post-secondary system where the space race and high tech revolutions were first imagined, will fall into the disrepair of a third world post office.

State offices will close three days a month. The poor will go without health care in the state where health care for the poor was invented. 27,000 extra criminals will clog the streets and the 11 percent unemployment rate will only increase while mortgage foreclosures probably climb. Neighborhoods will change. Street crime will rise, of course. Personal safety will decline. There will be more guns and more nasty, desperate drugs and many more shooting deaths. Urban insurance rates will soar.

Also as more state employees become pensioners, the CalPERS pension deficit will increase until California can no longer afford to honor these commitments. There will be a whole, new class of indigents, elderly former state employees. And if the state itself cannot technically go bankrupt, this is not true of its municipalities. Last year, as a result of extremely high salaries for its police and firefighters and current outlays for its large base of pensioners, Vallejo, became the largest city in California ever to file for Chapter 9 Bankruptcy.

So, in the coming years, anticipate vital services like water, power, police, firefighting, every type of city-works and government pension to be cut out from under Californians who live in communities with the smallest tax bases and largest budgets. In Los Angeles, corpses of the indigent poor are now cremated to save the city $200 a piece. At some point, state and municipal taxes will have to increase. But as a first step, cities like Salinas will increase their local sales tax. That will not help much.

Today, although California's population was projected to double from its current 38 million by 2050, smart money is already trickling out of the state. Business employers will soon follow. Next year California may lose one of its 53 congressional seats as a result of slow trickle of out-migration taking place among the middle-class who can no longer live comfortably in California.

Although I have nothing but admiration for Governor Arnold for forcing any budget to happen, the current instrument will only worsen California's problems by reducing its tax base, since there are already nicer, more affordable places to live a better lifestyle. Think Texas! Arizona and Nevada of course have suffered even greater shortfalls than California in the economic devastation of the home mortgage crisis. But in sheer dollar terms, California's deficit is the national champ dwarfing those of other states including New York and New Jersey which also have truly large deficits, and whose unemployment and reduced quality-of-life is now driving similar out-migration. Nationally, (according to the Washington Post) the total deficit facing all 50 states through fiscal 2011 is estimated at $230 billion. Like California, America is facing many years of no frills government...

So now, let's reflect for a moment. How are the neighbors doing?

In 1982, Mexico entered a spiraling tailspin of inflation and devaluation that has only worsened in subsequent decades. The current war against its stupid, savage drug cartels is as much a function of Mexico's economic collapse during the 80s and 90s as are the profound demographic changes that happened in the United States at the end of the last century. After '82, tens of millions of Mexicans fled to America where they changed the demographic composition of the country becoming its largest minority in a short span of 20 or 30 years. Remember the nation-wide demonstrations against the Sensenbrenner bill in 2005? Those Latinos were mainly from Mexico.

The Mexican situation is slightly different because their economic crisis was accompanied by vast environmental devastation. Subsistence farming became impossible due to the prolonged assault on the country's topsoil, and anyway most of the available water had already been redirected to the nation's export agribusiness. There was nothing to come home to so Mexicans stayed in America becoming citizens whenever they could, and sending remittances -- as much as $9 billion in good years -- home to their loved ones.

In California and in other states of America, the economy is now as bad as it was in Mexico in 1982 when all public programs were canceled. It is going to stay that way for many years, but the U.S. has not yet suffered the environmental devastation that made Mexico's la crisis a devastating one-two combination of punches from which the country has never recovered.

Today, however, a second punch -- an environmental or ecological right cross -- is headed straight for California's chin. There is already insufficient water in California to support its current population, industry and agribusiness and the state's water supply -- from the Colorado, from snow melt from the aquifer of the Central Valley -- is actually in decline as climate change raises the state's mean temperatures, desiccates its forests and dries out its topsoil.

In the coming years, droughts, heat waves and increasingly large forest mega-fires (like the ones now beginning near Bishop, Lake Naciemento, San Bernardino and Ventura) will increase the state's irreparable economic devastation while reducing its carrying capacity and making California -- especially southern California -- a truly miserable place to live.

The dream is genuinely over. This is the beginning of the end. As I write this, I am very sad because I have postponed returning to California for 16 years, and in the meantime it has been ruined by greed and mismanagement. Without any help in sight, California is now unable to cope with any major crisis -- a mega-fire, an earthquake, a drought -- so climate change can only continue to kick the state, and keep it down in the coming years.

I remember my first day on the beach in Santa Monica in late August 1980. It was so goddamn beautiful I thought that I would stay in SoCal forever. But we had kids and left for a more affordable life in my native Canada. Now, the Paradise I loved is gone. It's like that song-of-a-girl you were going to find the nerve to dance with before the party ended. For the rest of your life you'll feel the disappointment of not following through.

Sad day. Time too, for the rest of the nation to get their guest rooms ready -- friends will be calling from the coast.

 

Comments

[popart]

when i first arrived in Southern California in 1958 i thought that i had died and gone to heaven....but over the years most of the things that i had loved so much about California have vanished...then in 2002 my wife and I visited ireland and now we are now "habitual residents" of that country. Ireland is not without its issues and its problems but it is a good place for retired couples like my wife and me to live. I never thought that i would leave California but you know what...it wasn't hard at all.

[gilesslade]

I remember teaching in the low rise suburbia of the Valley and meeting an older man, a native californian, who described the orange orchards of the 50s to me. Sorry I missed all that beauty. I think Big Sur is still pretty good though. I do understand what you see in Ireland and I especially like the fact that artists (including writers) do not pay taxes there. (Why can't that idea catch on elsewhere?) My great-grandfather left the place during the potato famine. Then his daughter married into a Baptist family and things became very complicated for my dad who dropped both kinds of guilt (Orange and Green) and became a Unitarian, I think simply out of a desire for peace of mind... For me with this complicated history, going to Eire as a full time resident would be exactly that. Still, I love the country, the people and 'the craik' which you'll understand.

I think in the coming decades the southwest will dry out and heat up and the problem of where to go will become an extremely pressing one for a large number of Americans. We moved north to B.C. in 1993 and despite some misgivings, the place has been good to us and has been a good place to raise our children. I think many more Americans will take this option by mid-century, and I hope they find it welcoming and lucky.

[KarelS]

"Today, although California's population was projected to double from its current 38 million by 2050, smart money is already trickling out of the state."

This is the key folks, not only as to why the Golden State is in the state it's in but why it's doomed to even more failure in the future. Population growth will not only kill California, but also the rest of the planet. And there is simply no way to deny this "fact". To bring an semblance of control over our lives, there has to be a way to limit population growth--and I'm not talking about the Republican way of declaring war on sovereign nations and start killing their populations for fun and profit.
Bill Gates should forget about his multi-billion dollar program to inoculate children of the poorest nations against communicable diseases. As noble as this program is, it doesn't address the underlying cause of their problem: Too many with too few resources to go around; what's the use of preventing diarrhea in a child if he doesn't have anything to eat?
To do anything without first introducing birth control through education and condom distribution will doom us to a future of scarcity for all people on the planet--including Californians.

[gilesslade]

Karel, your concern about world population levels is well founded. Even here in North America, climate change will reduce the carrying capacity of the United States by about 2/3 in the current century.

I'm writing a book about the wave of human migration that will result from the reduction of habitability across the continent.

NORTH AMERICAN ARK: CLIMATE CHANGE AND HUMAN MIGRATION is nearly finished and now only needs a bold, visionary publisher.

-Surely there's one out there...

[Indra]

California has not been a good place to move for a long time. It use to be a nice state. Not any more.

[TJCole]

"California's a Garden of Eden, a paradise to live in or see, but believe it or not, you won't find it so hot, if you ain't got that Do Re Mi..!"

Woody Guthrie..

Ry Cooder does it best...

[lightningbolt]

The stupidest thing Californians could do was to elect a republican as governor. They should have elected a third party. I hope they learned their lessons. The democrats and the republicans are useless.

[robinhood1]

Giles says: "Also as more state employees become pensioners, the CalPERS pension deficit will increase until California can no longer afford to honor these commitments. There will be a whole, new class of indigents, elderly former state employees." The public employee pension system has been abused, especially by the public safety unions. The recently retired fire chief of a small fire district (under 40,000 people) collects an annual pension of $241,000 + medical benefits. He figured out how to game the system and he did it quite well. The indigents will be the private sector retirees living off of Social Security, what's left of their small 401K accounts (IRA rollovers) and in the exceedingly rare case, a small company pension. You mama should have told you to become a fireman. And by the way, the retired fire chief is back at his old job, collecting a salary of over $14,000 a month, along with his pension, until his successor can be recruited. Nice work if you can get it.

[RyanCSmith]

California will not fail so long as there are people in this state who are committed to ensuring the Golden State's glory will not be tarnished by the GOP's desire to appease their corporate paymasters.

As long as we act quickly, clean out the deadwood from the state Constitution, and take the corporate whores to task we can stop this downward slide.

[Tim303]

"Hasta la vista to the car tax baby!"

[outnow]

This is the Shock Doctrine in action.

[jsgaetano]

The Conservative Movement's goal is to attack each large economy Blue State one by one until they tear down America to the third world.