Reading my friend Laer Pearce’s book Crazifornia:
Tales from the Tarnished State – How California is Destroying Itself and Why it
Matters to America made me crazy.
Laer is a wonderful writer with straightforward, prose, a witty sense of humor
that doesn’t overwhelm the narrative, and a commanding mastery of facts about
California’s politics, business, education, and public policy. In theory, I
should have galloped through Crazifornia in three hours. In
fact, it took me three days to read.
Why did I have a problem with this fascinating book?
Because, when I started I did not know how deep the Crazifornia rot
ran in the state, nor was I aware quite how infectious the insanity is when it comes
to the rest of America. To keep up with the deluge of evidence proving that
California is indeed crazy, I repeatedly stopped reading so that I could
scratch out little notes to myself: “California’s all-powerful bureaucrats are
an army of Leftist Rube Goldberg’s with guns.” “This is a perfect example of
voter credulity and bureaucratic overreach.” “California takes a legislatively
created energy crisis and makes it worse with more legislation.” The scariest
note I wrote was also the shortest: “As California goes, so goes the nation.”
That last note is why you should read the book — and
give it to friends and family — in the days remaining before the election.
California isn’t just a basket case, it’s a proselytizing basket case, with its
environmental zealots, community organizers, and wishful economic thinkers
aggressively selling their ideas to other states and to the federal government.
As Laer demonstrates, while the recession is slowing the other forty-nine
states from buying into California’s governing philosophy, the Obama government
is an enthusiastic supporter. Another four years of Obama, and California won’t
be the only bankrupt crazy place in America.
Unlike the federal government’s swift, Obama-driven
belly flop into bankruptcy, California actually has a long and occasionally
honorable history of Progressive politics. Crazifornia explains
that back in the early years of the last century it was California Progressives
who helped bankroll the movement across the United States. These early ideologues
were actually fighting some legitimate battles, most notably against San
Francisco’s utterly corrupt alliance between railroad moguls and local
government. Take away these honorable battles, though, and you learn that the
early California Progressives were exactly the same as today’s California’s
Progressives: they were the rich and the educated, which meant that they could
fund their ideas and pass them on to subsequent generations.
Because California had long been blessed with enormous
natural resources and a vital, growing population, it had the wealth to keep
the impractical Progressive dream going for decades. It could absorb the
enormous financial and human losses from almost heroic bureaucratic ineptitude
(Chapter 5); laws and regulations that suck the life out of both new and
established businesses (Chapter 6); ridiculous educational experiments and an
all-powerful teachers union that has little interest in student well-being and
education (Chapter 7);* environmentalism run amok (Chapter 8); and public
sector unions and pensions that have managed to go wherever one ends up when
“amok” is a distant memory (Chapter 9).
Lately, though, things haven’t been going so well for
California. Part of the problem is the national recession. The other part is the
fact that California’s collection of Progressives, Environmentalists,
Educators, and Reporters, whom Laer collectively christens “the PEER axis,”
have destroyed the state’s ability to tap into her resources, both natural and
human. Take, for example, the Prop. 50 fiasco, which is one of a huge subset of
fiascos generated by a California citizen’s right to vote on legislative ballot
initiatives.
The PEER axis bankrolled and sold California voters on
the Water Quality, Supply and Safe Drinking Water Projects Act (aka Prop. 50),
an initiative that added $3.4 billion of indebtedness to California’s already
overburdened economy. Thanks to fine print in the newly enacted legislation,
the Ocean Protection Council, which has nothing to do with drinking water, managed
to get its hands on Prop. 50 money. Lunacy ensued:
So, what are Californians getting for their money,
which costs them $227 million a year in interest payments? For starters, the
bureaucrats that serve as the council’s staff engineered a quarter-million-dollar
grant to a Portland, Oregon outfit called Ecotrust to develop a pilot program
for a seafood market at San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf that would be filled
with “regionally sourced” seafood. Talk about inept. Any visitor to Fisherman’s
Wharf can tell you free market enterprise has already filled the place with
fishmongers hawking regionally sourced seafood. That doesn’t keep Sacramento’s
eco-bureaucrats from subsidizing an Oregon group’s seafood stand on the Wharf,
even if it has nothing to do with the clean water voters thought they were
voting for when they passed Prop. 50.
If the Prop. 50 economic adventure was just a single
boondoggle, one could laugh the whole thing off, despite the high price tag.
The problem is that this vignette — voters being sold a bill of goods, only to
see legislators, bureaucrats, unions, environmentalists, and carpetbaggers
waste the money — is repeated over and over again at both the state and county
level. For example, in the normal world, a prison doctor too incompetent even
to provide the basic care accorded prisoners is fired. In California, the
Department of Corrections pays him $400,000 annually to work in the prison mail
room.
Then there’s the California Courts’ new integrated
case management system. Originally budgeted for $260 million, the current cost
estimate is now $1.9 billion, with another billion needed after
completion so that the system can actually be deployed (seven years late).
That’s going to be some integrated case management system, right? Noooo, not
so. After two of the largest counties that participated in a system trial
serious contemplated pulling out entirely:
An audit by the California State Auditor recommended
that the whole CCMS endeavor be stopped and reconsidered because it is so far behind
schedule, so far over budget and so at risk of quality problems when it finally
is implemented.
In the private sector, heads would roll. In
California, this is government business as usual.
Mere inefficiency isn’t the only problem. There’s also
significant corruption. One notable example of this corruption endangered the
lives of thousands of Bay Area commuters. In 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake
destroyed a section of the Oakland Bay Bridge. Almost twenty-three years later,
the California Department of Transportation is still working on rebuilding the
bridge. (To be fair to the men who do the very difficult and sometimes
dangerous labor, it took almost twenty years before they even started
construction. Caltrans was too busy dealing with regulations,
environmentalists, and unions to start the work any sooner.)
Caltrans assigned one of its own, Duane Wiles, to do
the seismic testing on the new bridge span. In an area bounded by both the Loma
Prieta and San Andreas faults, this is a very responsible position. Wiles
wasn’t up to the job:
A Sacramento Bee investigative report found that Wiles
failed to properly conduct tests on the Bay Bridge’s new span and dozens of
other bridges, fabricated results on at least three Caltrans projects, often
discarded his raw data files and inflated his overtime pay. Perhaps all this
was merely the side effects of personal problems Wiles was experiencing at the
time, as he faced felony charges for a sex crime against a child.
That’s bad. Here’s worse: Alert employees had given
Caltrans notice about Wiles’ ineptitude three years before a
whistleblower approached the Sacramento Bee. Caltrans did nothing.
Then, when the reporter approached Caltrans asking about Wiles, Caltrans’ first
response wasn’t to fire Wiles, but to move him to a less visible job.
Again, the Wiles’ adventure wasn’t unique. If
you take this bureaucratic instinct to protect its own, and combine it with an
environmental zealotry that actively seeks to return California to a pastoral,
pre-industrial (and very poor) age, and you end up with the sorry history of a
regulatory decision that, when it goes into effect, will make trucking
prohibitively expensive in California.
There’s nothing unusual in California about a
pro-environment, anti-business regulation. What is unusual is that trucking
regulation was based upon provably false data. Even more unusual is the fact
that the California Air Resources Board, which promulgated the regulation, knew
that the data was false, termed the falsity a “distraction,” passed the
regulation, and suspended the malfeasor for a mere 60 days. Balancing those 60
days out, however, was UCLA’s decision to fire the professor of epidemiology
who exposed the fraud. UCLA reached this decision because the professor’s work
was “not aligned” with his department’s academic mission. (The professor has
appealed that decision and is still working.)
Crazifornia describes a dysfunctional state, one that can
best be summed up as a banana republic governed, not by oligarchs, but by a
toxic mix of environmental fascists, greedy unions, corrupt or ideology-driven
legislators, and all-powerful bureaucrats. But before you get too angry at
these jackals, perhaps you should reserve your wrath for the ones who truly
deserve it: the California voters.
Despite a dying economy, a feckless government, and
dangerous corruption, voters are undeterred. It sometimes seems as if all 100%
of the 47% who won’t be voting for Romney are voting in California. If you
don’t know what California voters look like, I certainly do:
It’s probably too late to save California. Laer tries
to inject some optimism at the end of each chapter and in the conclusion to his
book he notes that voter patterns might finally be changing (although recent
polling data makes me
less optimistic). As cities go bankrupt, gas and food prices rise, businesses
bail, and the California middle class becomes poor, some of the voters might
finally be growing up. Whether they can reverse California’s downward trend
remains questionable. Laer has some excellent suggestions for getting the
political pendulum unstuck from its far Left position, but it will be ugly, and
it will have to be carried out by people who have been subjected to one hundred
years of California’s Progressive propaganda.
When you read Laer’s book (and I hope this review has convinced you to do so), you will see that it is a profound morality tale
about what happens when America’s green, anti-capitalist Progressivism gains
the upper hand in government. So remember, only you can prevent the
Crazifornication of America.
_____________________
* In the interests of full disclosure, Laer
interviewed me regarding some of my own experiences as a public school student
in San Francisco, and he includes parts of those interviews in Chapter 7. Plus,
I get an awfully nice thank you in the Acknowledgements section.
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