There’s
a host of reasons why California resists Trump. First, our culture is deeply
rooted in our Hispanic/Latino heritage. California was, after all, once a
Spanish territory and then part of Mexico. It was wrested from Mexico under
President James Polk, who invaded that country with territorial expansion as
his goal. “In 1846 Colonel Hitchcock, commander of
the 3rd Infantry regiment, writes in his diary: ‘...the United States are the aggressors....We
have not one particle of right to be here....It looks as if the government sent
a small force on purpose to bring on a war, so as to have a pretext for taking
California and as much of this country as it chooses....My heart is not in this
business.’
“[In] 1848, Mexico surrenders on U.S. terms. The U.S. takes over
ownership of New Mexico, California, expands Texas, and more, for a token
payment of $15 million. Native Mexicans are given the choice to become US
citizens or leave the area one year after the Treaty was signed.” Quora.com.
Our labor force, from construction to food services/hospitality
to agricultural, is heavily dependent on a significant undocumented workforce
that our system has accommodated for many years. We eat Mexican food, teach our
children about Mexico’s and Spain’s cultural reach that defined who we are, and
we look admiringly on the Camino Real and the missions along the way. Sorry,
Donald, we are not threatened by Mexican and Central American asylum seekers,
but we are terrified of you and your heartless policies.
We are clearly the most populous state with the largest state
economy in the union, big enough to be the fifth largest economy in the world
if we were our own nation. We are a major food producer, have several of this
country’s leading financial and tech centers, and are the cutting edge in
non-polluting and exceptionally profitable industries. Loose gun laws may work
within your rural state base, Donald, but they are totally out-of-place in
crowded cities.
Our state colleges, particularly the University of California
system (with UCLA, Berkeley, Irvine, etc. in that mix) and private schools like
Cal Tech, Stanford, Claremont and USC, are among the best in the land, and our
industrial base is heavily dependent on STEM-educated graduates and the ability
to import exceptionally well-educated immigrants to make sure we remain on the
technology’s leading edge. So when the government pulls back on student aid and
makes recruiting international STEM superstars into our industries really tough
with short-sighted immigration policies, we deeply resent such intrusion.
Because we have so many large cities – Los Angeles, San
Francisco, Oakland, San Jose. Sacramento, San Diego, etc. – we have an
oversized burden that comes with urbanization. Crowded cities need more social
programs, infrastructural support, uniformed services, a bigger judicial system
(the California judicial system is the single largest judicial system on
earth!), healthcare and public education than do states with smaller or no real
urban populations. We have more homeless and poor folks (blame the weather) and
greater pressure on medical treatments for the poor. As Trump and his cronies
cut back on state support for healthcare and social safety nets, that burden
falls particularly heavily on California.
As a result, our state income, sales and property taxes are
among the highest in the land to accommodate those needs. So when Trump’s
failed tax plan (it pretty much was a give-away to the rich with nothing
tangible coming back for “most of us”) imposed limited deductions against
federal income tax for state and local taxes, he slammed mostly blue states
like high-tax California that are heavily urbanized and totally favored red
states that voted for him and just happened to fall within those deduction
limits.
Having fought to reduce killer smog, particularly in Los Angeles,
we do not appreciate his trying to deregulate polluters to undo years of
efforts towards more breathable air… to risk major oil spills in off-shore
drilling permits and strip our millions of acres of national parks of their
status as environmentally-protected areas. Trump’s propensity to place blame
has led him and his administration to fault California for its recent spate of
wildfires, products of global warming and underfunded forest maintenance (much
on federal lands), suggesting that federal aid for such natural disasters just
might be curtailed.
Bottom line, except for a very few underpopulated counties,
California is deeply anti-Trump. Without the slightest equivocation,
I can tell you that Donald Trump does not represent California. The Republican
Party, now Trump-controlled, did not elect a single candidate to any California
statewide office on November 6th. Virtually all the contested House
seats here turned blue.
But
while Donald Trump is the president for those rust belt and fossil fuel
extraction workers whose jobs that are falling or have already fallen into
obsolescence (they actually believe
in Trump’s false promises for a return to their halcyon days of their high
blue-collar paychecks), for traditional white evangelicals seeking to ban gay
marriages, abortions and institute Christianity as our official American faith
and for mega-billionaires who want low taxes and virtually no consumer,
environmental or financial regulation, he sure isn’t president for the rest of
us.
And
God help you in this country if you are poor; Donald Trump is clearly not your
president either. The November 23rd Los Angeles Times explains: President Trump’s push to roll back federal
regulations will take a significant toll on Americans’ health and finances,
according to a surprising source — the Trump administration itself.
These human costs — which include
more deaths from air pollution, higher medical bills and increased student debt
— rarely get mentioned by the president, who often touts the economic benefits
of his deregulatory campaign.
But a review of thousands of pages of
federal regulatory and legal filings shows that multiple agencies predict in
their own analyses that the changes will cause an extensive list of harmful,
even deadly, effects.
The Environmental Protection Agency,
for example, calculated as many as 1,400 more premature deaths a year as a
result of its proposed rule providing incentives to electric utilities to keep
coal-fired power plants operating longer.
The Department of Education, which
has taken several steps to scale back rules on for-profit colleges and
universities, conceded that one of its rollbacks had left students with more
than $50 million in additional debt.
The Department of Homeland Security
acknowledged in regulatory filings that its proposal to curtail immigrants’
access to Medicaid and other government safety net programs risks increasing
malnutrition among children and pregnant and breastfeeding women.
And the Department of Health and
Human Services predicted that a regulation lifting restrictions on health plans
with skimpier benefits would reduce sicker patients’ access to medical care and
expose them to higher costs…
Federal agencies often say in
regulatory filings that those costs are outweighed by economic benefits.
Officials project that their moves will spur economic growth, cut government
spending or reduce administrative burdens.
Trump routinely cheers such benefits.
“We’ve cut regulations more than any president ever,” he told Fox Business News
at a recent White House event in which he claimed deregulation was saving
billions of dollars.
But hundreds of patient groups,
public health organizations, consumer advocates and others dispute that, saying
that many of the administration’s proposals pose particular risk for vulnerable
Americans, including children, patients with serious illnesses and struggling
students.
‘The notion that deregulation is good
for the economy and good for consumers is ill-conceived,’ said Sally Greenberg,
executive director of the National Consumers League. ‘In fact, the overall cost
of deregulation is actually a drag on the economy because it ultimately hurts
consumers and harms their health.’
Since the Reagan administration,
federal rules have required agencies to lay out the anticipated costs and
benefits of proposed regulations through regulatory impact analyses… The rigor
of these analyses has varied greatly, according to experts. Under Trump,
several major policy initiatives have been undertaken without a full accounting
of their potential effects, particularly on vulnerable populations.
The Education Department, for
example, did not report how many student borrowers would be affected by a
proposed rule issued earlier this year making it more difficult for students
who have been defrauded by colleges to get debt relief. Nor did the agency report
how much more debt these students could face.
Only when borrowers sued did the
agency acknowledge in court filings that scaling back the federal government’s
debt relief program had left students with $56.9 million in additional debt...
Nowhere has this been more apparent
than at the EPA, an agency that has long set the standard for evaluating the
costs and benefits of proposed regulatory moves… When Trump ordered in 2017
that the EPA scrap President Obama’s landmark initiative to fight climate
change by limiting power plant emissions, agency scientists reported the move
would cause up to 4,500 premature deaths annually.
The administration’s proposed
replacement — known as the Affordable Clean Energy rule — pushed the projected
death toll even higher, according to EPA scientists, who estimated also
predicted an additional 1,400 premature deaths every year.
The agency that workers sickened by
increased air pollution from the added emissions would miss up to 48,000 days
of work annually, and sickened children would miss up to 160,000 days of school…
Another proposal by the EPA to rescind a ban on polluting diesel-engine trucks
known as glider trucks also would have been deadly, causing up to
1,600premature deaths in just one year of glider production, EPA scientists
said in regulatory filings.
Perhaps
someday even the red states will appreciate California’s resistance. But Trump
has so tilted the playing field toward the wealthiest incumbents, shifting a
massive financial burden on the bottom three-quarters of society, that this
country just might never recover in time for the hoped-for renaissance of
post-Trump America. Income inequality, polarization and irreconcilable hatred
have so infected the land that the United States simply could just end. What might
follow is hardly a comforting vision.
I’m Peter Dekom, and unless we figure
out how to live in a fact-driven political system where we all pull together
for what best for “most of us,” this plutocratic adhocracy just might put an
end to the great American experiment in democratic government.
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