Monday, July 11, 2011

Austerity Comes to California

Appropriately signed behind closed doors without a formal ceremony, and coming 2 days after Democratic Governor Jerry Brown vetoed a bill giving California’s agricultural workers the right to unionize through card check, the latest California budget is a toxic mix of shallow hopes in economic recovery and a ruthless evisceration of services and programs essential to working class Californians.Having surrendered the plan of regressive taxation meant to shore up the budget proposal Brown released in January (See http://socialistworker.org/2011/02/09/brown-attacks-those-in-need ) Brown and the Democratic legislature have moved forward with an all austerity budget. Other than some additional revenue expected from forcing online retailers to pay sales tax (itself a product not of the Democrats taking a stand for taxing the rich but instead of lobbying by Amazon’s retail competitors like Wal-Mart) what has emerged is nothing short of an open declaration of class war and a clear pronouncement that not only Jerry Brown but the whole of the California Democratic Party is lining up on the side of Capital in the struggle over California’s future.

A testament to Jerry Brown’s ideological commitment to austerity is the pride with which the Office of the Governor’s official website declares as positive the fact that “California’s General Fund spending—as a share of the economy—is now at its lowest level since 1972-73.” This budget includes $15 Billion in total cuts, with additional cuts of $2.5 Billion to be triggered if hoped for additional revenue fails to materialize.This reliance on additional revenue is built on shaky economic ground, depending on an additional $4 Billion in revenue based on a hoped for surge in income among California’s rich. For California’s ruling elite however it’s a win-win; if the additional revenue fails to come through they’ll be unaffected by cuts which eviscerate public education, if it does materialize then they’re riding high on their own spectacular wealth increase in the midst of generalized poverty and unemployment.

The bulk of the new budget however clearly relies on an assault on the services California’s poor and working people depend upon. Brown vetoed an earlier all cuts proposal from the Democrats as having been insufficient to meet California’s need for “very strong medicine”, a ‘need’ which Brown is meeting in part through a massive assault on California’s low income public health insurance program. Californians will face higher co-pays and be limited to 7 doctor visits a year, a limit which is potentially disastrous for those with chronic conditions or ongoing medical problems. $345 Million of the nearly $1.8 Billion cut and an additional $103 million cut to California’s health insurance program for children, teens and pregnant mothers is unallocated and so the full consequences of the budget are not yet known.

The state’s welfare to work program, CALWORKs, is gutted in the latest round of cuts. Grants for those in the work program have been slashed by 8% to an average of $460 for a family of three, less than 30% of what the federal government considers necessary for a family of three to meet the most basic needs in the state with one of the country’s highest costs of living. In addition this meager cash assistance is cut from 5 years to 4 years and the programs employment services and child care components have been slashed to pieces.

While the state continues to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into maintaining the death penalty and billions into the prison industrial complex as a whole, prisoners themselves who face inhumane levels of overcrowding are also going to be subject of further cuts to their already inadequate healthcare, with $82 million cut this year and $160 million cut next year. A $350 million cut to Court systems will likely grind the system to a halt. While this may provide an opening for activists seeking to utilize more militant tactics against the government with the assumption that charges will be dropped, it also means that those in jail awaiting trial and especially those denied or unable to afford bail will be incarcerated for longer.

Students who have faced unprecedented fee hikes in the last few years face another $1.7 Billion in cuts, including cuts of $650 Million each to the University of California and California State University systems, a 23% slash in state funding. California Community Colleges, supposed to provide a low cost alternative to those who can no longer afford four years at a UC or CSU, face a $400 Billion cut which will provoke a 38% fee hike and reduced course offerings and admissions for students. If the additional revenue doesn’t materialize then a further $72 million cut to community colleges $100 million cuts to both UC’s and CSU’s will be imposed.

K-12 Schools, battered by years of underfunding and neglect, will have $2.1 Billion “borrowed” from their budget for the year. If sufficient additional revenue doesn’t appear then a $1.5 Billion cut to K-12 will be triggered, slashing 7 classroom days away down to 168 days a year in a move which will further rob teachers of a job, working parents of effective daycare and children of their intellectual potential. The effects will be compounded for the poorest students, with a $248 Million cut which ends school bus transportation likely to make it difficult for them to even get to their underfunded schools.

In addition to the major cuts outlined above the budget is riddled with smaller but profoundly impactful cuts that will affect the quality of life for all but the wealthiest Californians. 70 State Parks will close, cutting off access to many of California’s stunning natural parks and beaches. The budget eliminates all state funding for public libraries which have already been gutted over the last few years. A $15 Million cut to California’s Emergency Management Agency in a State which has been long overdue for another major Earthquake has the potential to kill. An 11 percent cut to state funding for preschool and child care programs will force an estimated 25,500 children to lose access. The Governor went out of his way and used his line item veto to axe $234.6 Million in state funding for mass transport which millions of poor Californians, unlike the Governor and his friends, rely upon to make it to work and school ever y day. In addition there will be a $308 Million cut to State Employee Compensation. If the hoped for revenue doesn’t come through, among the first to suffer will be a further $100 Million to In-Home supportive services hours and $100 million to the Department of Developmental Services, once more robbing from California’s disabled and elderly to maintain corporate tax breaks.

As he signed the bill Brown declared that it “really does put our fiscal house into much better shape, but we’re not finished.” In fact it was only the complete intransigence of Republicans in the latest budget cycle that kept Brown from offering them the pensions of public sector workers on a platter, and as the crisis continues to unfold and shallow hopes of economic rebound continue to appear real only to Wall Street investors, the cuts are only going to grow more intense, more frequent and more terrible in the violence they wreak on the lives of millions of Californians.

A section of the Wall Street Journal’s “Wealth Report” was headlined “Why the Rich Fear Violence in the Streets”, describing how according to a new survey among those with over $1 million in liquid assets, “94% of respondents are concerned about the global unrest around the world today.”Anecdotal stories of the extent of despair in the US, like that of a North Carolina man who made national headlines robbing a bank in the hopes of receiving healthcare in prison, provide the negative counterpart to the positive examples of mass resistance which have emerged in Wisconsin. Yet they are emblematic of the pain and frustration ripping through tens of millions of students and workers raised on the lie of the American Dream who stand confronted with a reality of a capitalist system shedding any remaining illusions of compassion or humanity in order to salvage a few more percentage points of profit.

As the ruling classes’ neoliberal program of austerity in California, across the United States and internationally seeks to expand the assault on unions, to gut welfare and reduce the working class to a condition of immiseration unseen since the 1930’s, the rich are right to be afraid. Outside their gated communities, in the factories and workshops and retail stores where workers are bled bit by bit body and soul, and in the projects and tent cities and prisons where Capitalism’s surplus humanity is sent to be forgotten, a storm is brewing. From the occupations of University administrative buildings by students being shackled to chains of debt to the hunger strikes of prisoners locked in State Prisons, resistance is sprouting up amidst the assaults of the establishment. The worlds rich should be afraid, because when the world working class begins to fight back, it will not be “finished” until all the Jerry Brown’s and Barack Obama’s of the world are swept aside, until the very state through which they rule and enforce their dictates of austerity is smashed by the tide of workers’ democracy, and until the social system which produces a super-rich at the expense of the human potential of billions is buried and forgotten like the Feudal and Slave systems which preceded it.

As the German revolutionary Rosa Luxembourg once proclaimed, as the more honest and self-reflective sections of the ruling class seem to be remembering, and as those like Brown at the frontlines of enforcing austerity are soon to discover;

“Your 'order' is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will rise up again and to your horror it will proclaim with trumpets blazing: I was, I am, I shall be!"