Jerry Brown's Assault on California

Jerry Brown's Assault on California

A washed up, aging Republican movie star is replaced by a Democratic governor who leads the state to adopt a budget cutting program vastly more conservative then that of his right wing predecessor. He gains a reputation as a fiscal conservative and is applauded by the right wing while those hoping for progressive change are left sorely disappointed. The year was 1975 and the aging movie star was a man by the name of Ronald Reagan who was just replaced by a Democrat named Jerry Brown. Karl Marx's famous quip that history repeats itself "First as Tragedy, then as Farce" has never seemed more prescient then it is in California today as the same Jerry Brown, 36 years later, has replaced Schwarzenegger in the governors house and is moving to implement on an exponentially more catastrophic scale the sort of cuts and austerity measures which made him one of the Right wing's favorite Democrats.

Far from the progressive that unions and liberal organizations have sought to present him as, California Governor Jerry Brown's history reveals that he's been as staunch a conservative as any Republican and economically would fit in well on the far right of the Republican Party.

In his previous tenure as Governor, Brown managed to be significantly more conservative then Ronald Reagan. Whereas Reagan had actually boosted spending an average of 12.2 percent a year, Jerry Brown cut it down to 4.6% in his first year, less then the rate of inflation effectively imposing cuts on California.

Although he was initially opposed to Prop 13, after it passed he spearheaded its implementation, declared himself a "born-again tax cutter" and won the praise and vote of the Republican who sponsored the act. Polls showed that by the end most Californians actually believed Jerry Brown had supported Prop 13. This fervent commitment to cutting taxes paid off for him in his re-election when he managed to carry Orange County, the states bastion of wealthy republicanism.

Jerry Brown's economic policies have been consistently far to the right of even mainstream American politics. In his 1980 Presidential Campaign he called for a constitutional convention to support a balanced budget amendment. Later in his 1992 Presidential Campaign he went so far as to call for and supported the institution of a flat income tax and flat sales tax, one which forces poor people barely getting by to pay the same percentage of their income as billionaires, an idea which is considered beyond the pale by even most of today's Republican Party.

Brown's more recent reign as mayor of Oakland is well described by a glowing review he received from American Conservative magazine.

"As mayor, Brown allied himself with cops and developers. He shooed away citizens who fretted that a new condo would disturb some ducks, aggravated labor activists by courting investment from The Gap, allowed the Marines to conduct urban-warfare training maneuvers in the city, and pushed through public funding for the Oakland Military Institute, a prep school for members of the California Cadet Corps."

Finally as attorney general he buried one of his few redeeming features, opposition to the death penalty, and pushed for the resumption and execution of the death penalty in California. Ending the Death penalty in California, a solution conspiciously absent from budget discussions in Sacramento, could easily save the state as much as $1 Billion over 5 years.

It should be clear from this that working class Californians do not have a friend in the Governor, and that Jerry Brown's resume as an "ally of cops and developers" places him front and center as an opponent of California's working class. A reputation which he is moving to reinforce by spearheading the latest round of Austerity measures in California.

While budget cuts have been a frequent and devastating aspect of life for all Californians who suffered through Republican Governor Schwarzenegger's tenure, this new assault by Jerry Brown constitutes nothing less then an attempt to impose Greek levels of austerity which will devastate working class people and cut lifelines for those most vulnerable in the state. The proposal includes

* $1.4 Billion in cuts from higher education, including $500 Million each from the UC and CSU systems and $400 million from the Community College System. The result will be slashed services, slashed wages for workers and the acceleration of the privatization of education.
* $1.7 billion from Medi-Cal, including vastly increased copays which will drive poor Californians to put off medical care to the last minute or be unable to seek it at all.
* $1.5 billion from California's welfare-to-work program, a massive attack on one of the few programs to provide work and help to the unemployed. As the real level of unemployment in California reaches over 20%, this will be a devastating blow to the state's poor
* $750 Million in cuts to child care, eliminating services for 11 and 12 year olds, and decreasing eligibility from 75% to 60% of median income. In a state where the Median family income of $56,000 is already considered less than what's needed to get by the costs of the crisis will be pushed on to families already struggling to raise their children.
* $580 million from state operations and employee compensation, a new round of pay cuts to workers already suffering through furloughs and cuts for the last few years. Expect continued assaults on state worker's pension funds.
* $200 million in cuts to the court system. If you don't have the money to make bail, expect to spend months if not years awaiting trial.
* Although K-12 Is being left as it is in the current proposal, Brown's budget will take $1billion dollars from Prop 10 which helps fund children's programs and prepares younger kids to be able to go to school.
* Almost all state funding for libraries will be slashed
* An end to housing aid for those transitioning out of Foster Care

Many of the most devastating cuts however are going to be directed towards the mentally and physically disabled, those least able to fight back against what's an unprecedented assault on services which were already insufficient for supporting the state's disabled. These include

* Supplemental Security Income, benefits for those affected by disabilities or mental illness, will be cut to the bare minimum of $830 a month
* A reduction in the hours In-Home Supportive Services workers care for elderly and disabled residents by 8.4 percent
* $750 Million in cuts to regional centers overseeing care to the developmentally disabled
* $861 Million will be "borrowed" , which is to say stolen, from funding set aside by voters for Mental Health services.

The only taxes Jerry Brown is considering putting through are regressive taxes on the working class. Brown is pushing for an extension of increases in the sales tax and vehicle registration fees, both of which will disproportionately affect poor and working class Californians.

These tax hikes were the same ones presented by Schwarzenegger in 2009 and rejected as the regressive taxes they were. Interestingly enough, and quite revealing of California Politics, one of the biggest funders of the 2009 initiative were California Oil Corporations hoping to make sure they avoided any of the taxes they're subjected to in every other state, including and especially even Alaska.

California is currently the third largest oil producer in the state yet is the only major oil producing state to give companies like Chevron a free ride. A mere 6% tax on oil extraction could raise $1 Billion, if the tax was the same as it is in Alaska, 25%, that would be over $4 Billion dollars. Since all Oil Companies are doing is essentially pumping money out of the State of California into their profit margins it wouldn't be unreasonable to demand a much higher rate of 50% or even full control of California's own oil resources, something which would more then cover the cost of the cuts being proposed this year.

Yet even the subject of taxing oil in California leaves out the most obvious solution to the problem and the one which any working class citizen of the state should demand, taxing the rich.

According to the California Labor Federation, the state gives a way more then $50 Billion in tax waivers and loopholes for the rich and Corporations. The four richest Californians alone have a net worth of $69 Billion, more then 3 times the budget deficit. In fact the combined wealth of only those billionaires wealthy enough to make the Forbes 400 2010 list is $250.85 Billion, 10% of which would provide enough to close the deficit and even expand services without a single budget cut or tax on the working class.

And it's not like the wealthy have been hurting over the past year, not long ago Merrill Lynch unveiled it's World Wealth Report, which charts the finances of the world's super-rich, this year the wealth of those with over $1million in liquid assets grew by 18% with the numbers even higher among those in wealthier brackets. This is all wealth which has overwhelmingly come from stock market speculation and the dividends the super-wealthy have received from the bank bailouts financed by the country's poor and working class.

Yet taking back even a slice of this wealth won't be on the table under California's Democratic Governor Jerry Brown and the overwhelmingly Democratic legislature. Instead, workers, students, the unemployed, families and the mentally disabled have become the target of one of the most vicious budget cuts in California history. The necessity of building mass resistance independent of and opposed to the Democratic Party is about to become not only an urgent political need but for Californians about to be thrown off aid, cut off from services and left stranded without help it will become a prerequisite to survival.