As I watch Texas oil money purchasing TV stations, and newspapers becoming corporatized, including in California, I see more and more people marching to the tune of oil (and other) plutocrats.
I spend time in San Diego and Berkeley, CA and have been watching what’s happening in these two booming cities, as well as our state in general. Under the leadership of Governor Jerry Brown and now Gavin Newsom, the state has come back from it’s economic doldrums brought on by austere policies of Republican governors. Having risen to the 5th largest economy on the planet and becoming the innovation hub of the world (NY was previously the innovation hub) under Governor Pat Brown (Jerry’s father), after this great Democratic leadership in the 1960s the state would later fall to number eight under Republican governors. Jerry Brown brought the state back to number five, and now Newsom has us at number four and the innovation leader of the world receiving about 50% of all venture funding – that’s as much as all of the other states combined.
You see it all around the state. California has the 3rd largest number of housing starts in the country, and leads the nation in new business starts. Cities in California dominate the rankings for best quality of life, the happiest cities (Freemont and San Jose are #1 and 2) in the US and 4 of the top 10 cities for job satisfaction are in California. If you want to live a long healthy life, come out west to the California, Oregon, or Washington Coast to live. It’s not about the wealth of these places that engenders health, rather it’s a liberal government including proper taxation to foster the greater good. Libertarians and authoritarians, even if they’re wealthy, die young and live a miserable, selfish life. While California is home to 12% of the U.S. population, the state attracted 47% of the most sought-after investment dollars deployed nationwide last year, according to National Venture Capital Association data. The investment in California is not big simply because the state is big, because California received nearly four times its share per capita of all such investments in the USA.
If I turn on the TV to watch the news in San Diego, local stations such as KUSI and Fox, owned by Texas oil men (Texas oil also bought KTLA5 in Los Angeles), they never tell the story of California’s success. Instead they create fear, loathing, and mongering, focusing on othering – if someone’s not like you, they must be bad. Let’s obscenely rich, ultra conservatives emotionalize people about trans and gay people, how they’re taking over our schools and bathrooms, and converting our children into perverts – meanwhile because we’ve distracted you with emotional insignificances, we the rich people will deregulate and privatize everything, cut taxes to the wealthy, and take over the government so that we can continue self-aggrandizing. Oil propagates much of this. Who needs green energy when our planet is dying? Not Republicans. Paraphrasing, here’s what I hear from these Texas “oil” news stations: “Oh wait, that green energy stuff is kind of hackneyed now, let’s start something else to scare conservative people. Let’s see, we pretended to be religious people in the 90s, but Trump exposed our duplicity. Oh, I have it, let’s rework the old moral majority stuff with something called “woke.” I don’t really know what it means, but it has to do with black people, and as a white male dominated party with poorly educated people, we can make it out to be “reverse discrimination.” Forget that there has been 250 years of affirmative action for white men given the US Constitution, let’s bash the few crumbs that have been given to blacks, women, and other minorities. And, as constitutional originalists, we know that only white males who own property are allowed to vote. That’s the constitution, and we need to uphold the constitution. Oh, and while we’re at it, let’s make a big deal about that Chinese “spy” balloon to fool stupid people. We know it really didn’t spy on anyone, but let’s stoke some more fear in ignorant people and pretend Joe Biden really screwed up by not shooting down a nothingburger over populated US territories – hell, who cares if we start a major forest fire in the dry climate plagued woods that we’ve created by our newly found climate denialism.” Hell, if a big forest fire starts in California, we can blame those damn liberals for not raking their forests.
Looking at the KUSI website, it reminds of being in Texas. Prominent on the landing page is football. Next to football are popups about illegal border crossings (it’s really not a problem in California like it is manufactured to be in Texas to scare people), and high gas prices. Never mind Biden reduced illegal border crossings by 70% compared to Trump and that high gas prices are a result of Republican led deregulation and record high profits for the wealthy oilmen. And of course, the biggest problem vexing the US is gender identity, and this is one of their popups. It’s a dose of Greg Abbott right here in San Diego for Republican, middle class stooges. March to my emotional eliciting tunes while I pick your pockets. We rich guys have to pay 3% in taxes, and we need to bring that down to zero, and pretend we need that money because we are the great innovators of the world. We control the media, so most people will never know that government funds and creates most innovations.
When the rich need something more, just pay-off the Republican politicians – they’ll filibuster anything for a buck. When Democrats tried to limit payment (bribes) to politicians, and the Democratic House passed such a bill without the help of selfish Republicans, the Republicans in the Senate killed it. This was icing on the cake for Republicans who had loaded the Supreme Court with the rich man’s shills, leading to the Supreme Court “Citizen’s United” decision overturning election spending restrictions that dated back more than 100 years. Thomas, Roberts, and Alito are raking it in through their billionaire friends. This is the same party that privatized our formerly public TV and radio stations. They are now corporations, supported by corporations. Why do we call them public? It’s the same old playbook – Republican charades to placate the people. “Citizen’s United,” hehe – it’s wealthy conservatives and corporations united. Just run ads on TV saying otherwise. Afterall, because Reagan deregulated TV, we can say anything we want, even if it’s self serving bullshit. It’s the Robber Barons sequel with a new set of actors: Jack Welch, the Kock Brothers and other oilmen,, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, and many other Mad Men. And let’s not forget Vladmir Putin is loading the Republican party with his oil dollars. Putin’s comrades in the Republican Party love fellow authoritarians who believe the rich should rule.
If you think term limits are the solution, think again. First, term limits shift the balance of power in a legislature from the legislators themselves to lobbyists, which is why corporate-friendly Republicans so often push them. Historically, when a new lawmaker comes into office, he or she will be mentored by an experienced colleague who can show them the ropes, how to get around the building, where the metaphorical bodies are buried, and teach them how to make legislation. With term limits, much of this institutional knowledge is stripped out of a legislative body, forcing new legislators to look elsewhere for help.
Because no Republican has ever, anywhere, suggested that lobbyists’ ability to work be term-limited, in those states with term limits the lobbyists end up filling the role of permanent infrastructure to mentor and guide new lawmakers. And who do the lobbyists work for? Mostly the wealthy and their corporations. Once again, this is a means for further corporate takeover of the US government.
Despite the right-wing shibboleths who will tell us that low wages, no regulations, no taxes, giving cash to companies (part of the Texas strategy), and anti-union policies are what makes a business-friendly environment, California booms by doing the opposite and does not impose regressive laws, like Texas does, that include limiting the freedom and reproductive rights of women. As the fourth largest economy on the planet, and in a major growth phase, California is a leader in new housing starts (Trump slanted the 2020 census to diminish California’s population count for political purposes, leading to a massive undercount of non-whites), new business starts, and the Golden State has no peers among developed economies for expanding GDP, creating jobs, raising household income, manufacturing growth, investment in innovation, producing clean energy and unprecedented wealth through its stocks and bonds (Winkler, 2021, Bloomberg). By adding 1.3 million people to its non-farm payrolls between April 2020 and June 2021 — equal to the entire workforce of Nevada — California easily surpassed also-rans Texas and New York. California accounts for 63% of startup Unicorns (startups with a market cap of $1B or more) in the US, with a total market cap of 79% of that for Unicorns in the US. Further, California household income increased $164 billion, nearly as much as Texas, Florida and Pennsylvania combined, according to data compiled by Bloomberg (Winkler, 2021, Bloomberg). Between January 2018 through June 2021, California created or had 133,503 companies move to the state, by far the most in the US. California’s universities lead the nation in graduating founders of new companies, with Stanford and Berkeley neck-in-neck at #1 and #2. Of the top 100 colleges graduating founders, California dominates: Stanford (1), Berkeley (2), UCLA (11), USC (16), UC San Diego (28), UC Santa Barbara (43), UC Davis (51), UC Irvine (74) and UC Santa Cruz (100). Of the 6,924 corporate locations in California, 18% are research and development facilities, a ratio that easily beats the U.S. overall (11%), China (15%), U.K. (14%) and Japan (10%). Only Germany, a social democracy with more upward mobility than the US (and no slums and few people sleeping on the streets), at 19%, has a higher rate, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Ok middle class Republicans, you continued to be played by the ultra conservative rich people who have stripped your way of life from you, something that began with Reagan. Since Reagan, the US went from about 70% of us living in the middle class to about 40%. Thanks to deregulation, privatization, and financialization, the price of housing, college, and food went skyrocketing. Middle class institutions, such as public schools and mass transit were stripped bare. Salty, sugary ketchup became a vegetable, and our kids became obese. Reagan had tried to strip the University of California, one of the greatest drivers of the California economy (it’s where, for example, the integrated circuit was invented, 3-dimensional transistor, and the biotech industry was started), but thank god, it survived. And thanks to Reagan’s privatization and deregulation of healthcare, the US has the worst and most expensive healthcare system in the world. – a big part of the Medicalization of America.
Let’s look at what modern Republicans bring us. As Thom Hartmann has taught us, Jackson, Mississippi has a continuing crisis of clean water, which shouldn’t surprise any of us. Like Michigan was when Flint’s water supply was crippled, it’s a Republican-controlled state and Republicans will always prioritize tax cuts for the morbidly rich over building or maintaining infrastructure. Even in the face of climate-change-driven flooding. Nine of the ten poorest states in the nation are Red states; that’s also no surprise. Republicans, after all, have philosophically opposed both unionization and the minimum wage since the 1930s. They believe that people will only “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” when they’re confronted with horrible poverty as the alternative. The exception to this Republican philosophy, of course, are the children of rich people, who must be allowed to inherit every penny without a tax on their inheritance.
Texas privatized most of their electric grid and then Republicans in the state passed a law letting the private power barons charge whatever the market will bear because their economic philosophy is that the best outcomes derive from privatization and the least regulation. When the climate-change-driven ice storm hit in 2021, hundreds died in the blackout and, afterward, some Texans got monthly electric bills that ran into the tens of thousands of dollars. They also have the most polluted state in the country, and environmental factors, the exposome, are the biggest driver of disease. and thanks to DeSantis in Florida, the state is now in decline and has the most polluted lakes in the country and its colleges are even worse than those in Texas. That’s a big reason why there is little innovation in TX and FL, and why California, with the world’s best university system, the University of California, dominates world innovation (NY is second).
In twelve GOP-controlled states working people making around the minimum wage have no access to affordable health insurance because their non-union employers don’t offer it as a benefit and their states refuse to accept federal Medicaid money (which pays 90 percent of the costs). Republican philosophy is clear on the matter: healthcare should be the responsibility of the individual and their family, not the state.
Red states generally have the lowest levels of high school and college graduation because, of course, Republicans don’t think it’s the job of government to educate young people. That should be up to the parents, who should have been smart enough to be born into a wealthy family or, at the very least, be willing to go into debt to get Junior into a good private charter school.
As a result of this philosophy and decades of Republican-controlled governments citing it to evade their own basic responsibilities, Red states, almost across the board, have higher rates of (from Thom Hartmann):
- Spousal abuse
- Obesity
- Smoking
- Teen pregnancy
- Sexually transmitted diseases
- Abortion
- Bankruptcies and poverty
- Homicide and suicide
- Infant mortality
- Maternal mortality
- Forcible rape
- Robbery and aggravated assault
- Dropouts from high school
- Divorce
- Contaminated air and water
- Opiate addiction and deaths
- Unskilled workers
- Parasitic infections
- Income and wealth inequality
- Covid deaths and unvaccinated people
- Federal subsidies to states (“Red State Welfare”)
- People on welfare
- Child poverty
- Homelessness
- Spousal murder
- Unemployment
- Deaths from auto accidents
- People living on disability
Neoliberalism preaches that government will always be inferior to the “free market” when it comes to making any sort of meaningful decisions. Therefore, government should be hollowed out, taxes on rich people must be cut to the bone, regulations to protect workers and allowing unionization must be thrown out, companies should be free to find the cheapest labor anywhere in the world, and all functions providing for the needs of the people will be provided by voluntary organizations or private, for-profit actors. Financial meltdown, environmental disaster and even the rise of Donald Trump – neoliberalism has played its part in them all.
Sadly, both Bill Clinton and, to a lesser extent, Barack Obama bought into neoliberalism — as well as both Bush Senior and Bush Junior — giving us a continuous 40-year period of “the end of the era of big government,” “a thousand points of privatized light,” and “the end of welfare as we know it.” With public colleges being gutted post-Reagan, college became too expensive for many and other young people became loaded with debt. An educated public is not good for Neoliberalism because it promotes democracy, the enemy of Neoliberalism. Middle class robots in the Republican party were programmed to believe this stuff, so much so, that when Democrats tried to forgive a portion of student loans to the middle class – they nixed it. The Republican Supreme Court that they bribed, Thomas, Alito, and Roberts, “the Billionaire Club,” saw to that. Democrats, such as Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, are trying to clean-up the Supreme Court mess, but good luck with that given a Republican House. Remember, non-democracy rules in the US. A President not elected by the people (he lost the popular vote by millions) appoints three Supreme Court justices in a pay-off scheme.
Finally, Joe Biden has started to lead us out of this 40 years of Reagan-based stupidity. It’s a tough slog though because the wealthy are controlling the mass media and its narrative, and when the middle class Republicans hear this BS everyday they believe it. Why? It’s called Systems 1 thinking, which is the thinking that mostly dominates and drives our behavior unconsciously. It’s how our brain evolved, and this thinking works well for simple environments and the simple thinking required to deal with that environment. A complex environment requires Systems 2 thinking to figure it out. Sadly this does not turn on in most people when they continuously hear the same message over and over. And they are being told to believe rich people who steal from them, such as Donald Trump. This is why non-college educated people are particularly vulnerable, because they never had to deeply and consistently use their Systems 2 thinking. The people they hate, college professors, have much training in Systems 2 thinking and rarely fall prey to Reagan Neoliberalism.
Here’s the mumbo jumbo that Reagan’s handlers told him to say: “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. From time to time we’ve been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people.” “Well, if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?”
Stupid middle class Republicans believed him, rich Republicans used his words to usurp power from the people.
Stem Cells, Health, Technology 