California governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has dropped an H-bomb on the state poor, sick, unemployed. He has proposed balancing the huge budget deficit by ending state social safety, CalWorks.
We are not entering the twilight zone. This is not uncharted territory. We have not lost control of our televisions. We have relinquished control and are being driven steadily back to a bygone century of child labor, high death rates for the poor, prostitution, and slavery.
If these human rights crimes seem beyond the pale and impossible for a civilized country to contemplate, look at the US government's friends, like the dictatorships in the Middle East our spokespersons say nothing about while the enslavement of South Asians and child labor persists for profits in their midst. There is no depth unknown in this moral dungeon into which we are being plunged.
If I am sounding alarmist it is because I am alarmed. I am alarmed that the governor has decided in his infinite wisdom to throw our most vulnerable, our most sacrificed into the sea as maliciously as a US-backed Latin America general was known to drop leftists dissidents literally into the oceans.
Health officials have been clear: people will die. Mental health treatments denied. HIV antiretroviral drugs denied. Services to drug addicts denied. Medical services to prison population denied. These affected will head not to Sacramento for emergency care but rather to their local clinic and hospitals, which will have less funds since the governor is "borrowing" from local funds for three years. Remind the families of the dead the money borrowed will be paid back with interest.
The governor says the state would be insolvent without these cuts. The truth is our right wing political culture - which includes the Democrats who reply they hope not to make all the cuts proposed, so will allow one person to live and another die - has wanted to dismantle our social services for more than a generation. Reagan and the Dept of Education. Welfare queens. The privatization of social security. Welfare reform. Not to forget successive Howard Jarvis "tax revolts," like the infamous Prop 13, which dropped another bomb on California's once-stellar public school systems. Prop 13 cannot be mentioned enough for it was the canary in the mineshaft - to those who care about the condition of miners, that is.
This is not a natural disaster but a political one. The governor can as easily cut food to the hungry and medicines to the sick as he can take the gluttonous third helping from the rich or raise their taxes. But we don't live in that kind of country, do we? There is no God to these creatures but the ghost of Ayn Rand.
If you liked this article, check out: Jury system answer to direct democracy * California is being waterboarded in special election * Race war seethes beneath the class war in LA
For more info: Health care cuts would mean higher costs and possibly deaths * From golden state to 19th century backwater
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