Opinion by Allan McNew
Recently the question was posed “How can anyone vote for a Democrat?” One person’s answer was to “… vote for someone (Democrat) who actually cares about the future of this country.”
At one time I believed in such things as single payer medical care, “social justice” and all the rest of progressive assertions as a vague theory consisting mainly of heart felt talking points and slogans rather than a concrete understanding of what socialism really is.
California was once indeed the land of opportunity for regular folks, a place where, for the most part, a family could be supported on one income. There was a strong middle class. It had the premier educational system in the world. Comparatively speaking, California had everything going for it.
Under the onslaught of progressivism since the ‘60s and subsequent conversion to one party rule, California has the largest gulf between rich and poor in the nation, as well as the highest poverty rate. With more administration personnel than ever, California education is an an epic, bottomless money pit failure dangling near, if not at, the bottom of national ranking. The homeless, consisting mostly of mentally ill people whose brains were permanently scrambled by drugs, construct wall to wall tent enclaves in downtown areas of many larger cities, creating a carpet of feces and used hypodermic needles as well as a breeding ground for medieval diseases eradicated in the US many decades ago.
In California, the middle class is being ground out of existence.
The Democratic majority in Sacramento jacks up the cost of living with their insatiable need to increase taxes and ever multiplying social engineering schemes. Increasing energy costs multiply the cost of everything else, and every penny more wrested by taxation does the same. Some people might think that split roll property taxes affect only fat cat corporations and “the rich”, but that chicken comes home to roost with more expensive goods and services, increasing small business failures and a nasty surprise when the house rent comes due.
In the meantime, those incomprehensible denizens of Sacramento politics invite every single minimally educated, unskilled third world foreigner to come here, if for nothing else, to be supported on the public dole from housing to medical care. This lowers wages, increases rent by contributing to the housing crisis and severely impacts the state operating budget – which leads to increasing taxes, as well as further straining a water supply crisis Sacramento refuses to address.
Meanwhile, progressives seek to control society in many ways. The vicious social media pile on, doxxing and ultimately depriving someone of income are derived from the Maoist method of “struggle session” where the target is simularly subjected to all sorts of public verbal and physical abuse for some thought crime or another and forced to confess and apologize – then possibly executed. Those who clamor for tolerance will beat you down in the streets for minor disagreement with mob action. The call for “diversity” is implemented by dividing everyone by racial, gender and any other possible way. The gender pronoun and other nonsense is another purposeful Maoist control mechanism – controlling speech will control actions. Gradually herding society from single family suburban dwellings into multi-story, multi-family apartment buildings is another manipulation. People who live like that tend to have certain political beliefs and vote a certain way besides forcing prospective homeowners away from the concept of private property ownership.
The “Green New Deal” strikes me like an adapted version of Chairman Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” where, in an attempt to propel China into the then modern industrial world, millions of Chinese starved to death by the implementation of senseless, dogmatic requirements on society. On the other hand, Representative Ocasio-Cortez’ political handler, Saikat Chakrabati, admitted that the “Green New Deal” was nothing more than a ploy to take control of the economy. If any progressive politician were serious about man made climate change, they would be talking about China, by far the most egregious gross polluter on earth.
Take the cost of higher education. In a most oppressive expression of capitalist greed, anti-capitalist progressive administrators lobby Washington to keep student loan debt exempt from bankruptcy discharge, then peddle worthless degrees in virtually unemployable fields while churning out prohibitively expensive textbooks. Thus, a couple of generations have been saddled with crushing debt they can’t get rid of.
In all, I believe the progressive-socialist plan as evidently being carried out by the progressive elite. is to bankrupt the nation while collapsing society as a mechanism for establishing their socialist “worker’s paradise”, where the elite live like sultans and the general population are their serfs.
Try as I might, I can’t see it any other way.
— Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary