Thread: LA- This is a Corruption Crisis, not a Budget Crisis

The California Budget Crisis
Alex Wierbinski
The Real Deal, This is a Corruption Crisis, not a Budget Crisis
August 9, 2008 - Despite the bitching of the Dems about the intrangence of the Repugs concerning tax increases, which is matched by the carping of the Repugs about the wild spending of the Dems, we are not having a budget crisis in California. What we are experiencing is a crisis of corruption. This crisis has been brought on by the shared environment of institutionalized corruption that makes the Dem and Repug parties partners in corruption.

The budget crisis we are experiencing is nothing more than the annual demonstration of the failure of democracy in California. The gridlock of the annual budget crisis is the result of these corrupted parties having divided up every electoral district in California between them.
The fact is that there is not one election district in California that is not the property of one party or the other. This division of our democratic rights was made by mutual private agreement between the parties.

The parties crafted this dirty deal to divide the political power of our state between themselves during the last redistricting. The parties controlled this redistricting, and cooperated to draw the election district lines in such a way to assure that each district is the property of one party or the other.

The Dems were awarded the most districts in this private division of governmental power by the parties, but the price was the destruction of our democratic right to elect our own representatives. The parties would now decide who our representatives would be without the interference of the people of California getting in the way.

Although the Dems received the most districts, the Repugs received enough districts in the deal to check the Dems on all bills requiring a 2/3rds vote, such as the budget. This dirty deal guaranteed that that particular balance of power between the parties would be virtually unassailable for the decade between census readjustments.

This deal was made by the parties with the full knowledge that they were corrupting elections to serve their party interests. They also knew that this particular division of power would render our state government merely competent to pay off each party's respective bribers, but incompetent to craft policy necessary to provide basic governmental services.

And no election can change the basic split that the party's corrupt redistricting cut into the forehead of our democracy. The redistricting cut a virtual scarlet "C" for corruption into the forehead of our democracy: every electoral district in California is designed and guaranteed to elect the candidate of one party.

This means that neither party has anything to fear from openly exposing their corruption, greed, cupidity, and incompetence during the legislative sessions and the annual budget crisis. The corrupt bastards in both parties collect millions in bribes from lobbyists and special interests during these fixed elections and at the end of each legislative session, when they pay the big bucks to bend the law to their will.

Thus our brilliant politicians designed a system where monopolized districts funded by open bribery determines the direction of policy and law in the California legislature, and there's not a thing we can do about it. We are in the midst of a full-blown corruption crisis in California politics, not a budget crisis.

The fact is that neither party in California has any interest in democracy or good government. Both parties are dedicated to collecting and paying off the special interest bribes that keep them in office while living a life of pampered luxury and ease, traveling the world on the dime of the biggest special interests in the state and the country.

As the party's division of political power in California assures that there is nothing the voters and citizens can do about it, neither side has any incentive to change. The open corruption both parties use to maintain their positions assures the voters of both parties that their voices and values are no more than props their party and politicians use to distract the voters from who they really serve, the special interest bribers who bankroll this dirty scheme.

Taking a deeper look at the ethical aspects of the horrid political situation in California is disturbing. Below the dirty mechanisms of redistricting fraud and bribery that the parties have used to cheat us out of our democratic rights (and our wealth, our health, our wages, our benefits, and our education system) we are confronted by a group of bad people who have no honor, who do not believe in democracy, who are devoid of honesty, and will do and say anything to maintain the lies, bribery, corruption, and the crooked elections that keep them in power.

We have a budget crisis because both parties are no more than political mafias who have put themselves, their personal and party interests, and the interests of their bribers far above the needs and general welfare of the citizens of our state. Under this system that the parties constructed for themselves, neither party will suffer any consequences for their corruption, greed, and incompetence.

Systems of corruption of a similar nature are repeated in states all across America, and the concentration of bribery and corruption is particularly strong in our federal government.

In this system of corruption that the Dems and Repugs created in California, the skill sets required for political success are corruption, greed, and incompetence.

Until term limits were passed we were stuck with the same corrupt politicians until they died in office. I'm not kidding. The only way to remove one of these corrupted tools from office was for them to die in office, or by getting busted for corruption, which is almost impossible in a system run by and for the corrupt.

Now, after California passed term limits, every open seat in the Assembly and Senate causes a mini party war over which party minion gets to win the general election.
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Don't be fooled by the lying politicians of both parties. The budget crisis is not a product of the 2/3rd rule, despite the Dems boringly predictably insistence that it is. They repeat this mantra every year, as if they believe the voters of California will lower the threshold to pass a money bill. Fat Chance.. There are fewer things lower than Bush, and one is the popularity of the California Assembly.

On the other hand, the budget crisis is not solely the product of overspending by the Dems, as the Repugs boringly repeat every year, although there is a bit of truth in their claim. It is very expensive for the state to subsidize the social costs of the massive illegal cheap laboring force the Dems maintain in California.

The real source of the annual budget crisis, despite the lies of the party politicians, is the dirty deal that divided our democratic rights and governmental powers between these two thoroughly corrupted parties. This scam assures each party a monopoly of districts, and it also assures gridlock in our legislature when the state budget comes up every year.

It is crystal clear that this crude, corrupt division of our electoral districts exposes the reality that both parties have mutually set up a system that has effectively institutionalized the ability of one party or the other to steal every election in the state.
The trade-off for gutting honest elections is a dishonest government incompetent to create a budget capable of protecting the general welfare of our citizens. Hell, the government in California is toxic to the spirit of honest people, bad for their health, and incapable of educating their children.

These are but minor shortcomings and tradeoffs to the parties, considering the rewards they reap. The parties traded our democracy to achieve their goals, not ours. The Dem and Repug redistricting in California assures that the party machines will remain in perpetual power, and can not be held accountable for their corruption and incompetence by the voters of our state.
The division of our state's electoral districts between the corporate parties assures that the only elections of importance in California that are actually contested are the statewide elections. These are the only elections that rise above the corrupting effect of the crooked districts the parties cooked up.

In the case of the Governor and Attorney General elections, the outcome of the election generally comes down to a bribe war between the richest and most powerful special interests in our country. The winner is almost always the candidate who collects the most corporate and special interest bribe money, as the candidate who collects the most bribe money wins almost every time.
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According to the Dems, our educational and medical systems are being put at risk by the budget crisis.
This is an out and out lie. The California educational, medical, water, and road systems failed long before this year's budget crisis, and neither the Dems or Repugs have given a damn about our education or health systems, except to subsidize cheap labor and the profits of the health industry, respectively..

An honest analysis of California's education system indicates that it has failed to educate the majority of the children of our state for at least the last twenty years.

If we extend this honest analysis to evaluate our state's whole infrastructure, we can see that both parties have been co-conspirators in shifting the wealth of our middle and lower classes into the hands of their biggest corporate bribers for the last thirty-five years, by robbing our infrastructure to pad corporate profits..

During most of this thirty-five year period the Dems have had control of Sacramento, and they have not done a damn thing but stuff our schools full of millions upon millions of illegal children, making the state subsidize the costs of their cheap illegal laboring force. The Dems and Repugs have welcomed crimigrants into our state to serve their corporate bribers at wages that destroyed the middle class and crushed the institutions that once served the middle-class.

The Dems style themselves as the party of education, when their educational policies indicate that they should be called the party of ignorance, not education. Not only have they failed to support education for the last thirty-five years, but they have been fully aware that their policies are designed to impoverish the working-class citizens in our state while enriching their corporate bribers.

Both parties have actively used illegals to transfer the wealth of our state from the middle-class to their corporate bribers, but only the dems have openly offered to break down our borders in exchange for the votes of criminals who they never should have made citizens in the first place.

Ironically, as the Dems fight to take away our rights as citizens, they are also fighting to make criminal subservience to corporate greed, the willingness to work cheaply, and the desire to consume the standard of American citizenship.

The dems would also have us believe that California's medical system is threatened by this budget crisis. This is a bald face lie. California has no medical "system." The politicians long ago failed to provide a fair or honest system to meet the medical needs of our citizens, leaving us to be ripped off by their corporate health bribers.

At this point in time our country contains way too many consumers of the empire, and far too few citizens of the Republic. Neither the Dems nor the Repugnants are democratic parties of the Republic. In reality they are both corporate parties of a criminal empire.
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The dems have proven themselves to be the party of ignorance, not education. The Dems have proven themselves to be the advocates of Corporate health profits, not health care for our citizens. In brief, The dems have proven that they will do exactly the same thing the Repugs do: Divide up the political power in our state between themselves and the Repugs, and then use this ill-gotten political power to extort bribes from the well-heeled corporate interests and their tiny elite unions, all while promising to make the foreign criminals who serve them citizens. In the meantime our state's social, political, economic, and environmental infrastructures have been sucked dry in a frenzy of greed and irresponsibility.

The Dems and Repugs are playing exactly the same game. Both parties are dedicated to draining the citizens of this state of their wealth, health, and education to serve the needs and profits of their corporate bribers.
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There is only one way we can take our government back: we must restore the fundamental processes of democracy in California. To do this we must be willing and able to pull the fat heads of the greedy politicians out of the trough of corruption.
The path before us is clear. We must end every bit of corporate and special interest bribery paid to every candidate in the state. Period. Entities, special interests, and corporations must be prohibited from "contributing" one red cent to any candidate, in any election.

Only individuals qualified to vote in an election can be permitted to contribute to candidates in that election. We must restore the local voter as the primary source of the vast majority of campaign funds in their local election. Citizens who cannot vote in that election must be restricted to participation that reflects their actual free speech and assembly rights, rather than using free speech and assembly as a thin cover for what can only be called bribery.

The key entity for rebalancing the non-voter's assembly and speech rights against the right of the local voter to select their own representative is the political party.

The key to restoring our democracy is determining the role of the party in financing elections. As it stands today, the parties are no more than money laundering operations for well-heeled special interests, lobbyists, and corporations. They are engines of bribery and corruption.

The parties collect and redistribute vast sums of what can only be called bribes. I propose that we make one simple change in the party process of collecting and redistributing bribes: allow them to collect, but limit the redistribution part of the equation.
As we cannot legally, and would not if we could, stop parties from collecting contributions that reflect political opinion or economic interest (which may be indistinguishable much of the time) we would be wise to put limits on the distribution of these funds to assure they are subordinated to the funding, and interests, of the local voters.

I propose that individuals, entities, special interests, and corporations be allowed to give freely to the parties, as they do now. But no candidate can be allowed to receive more than 30% of their funding from any combination of party or outside sources.
Let all the interests and individuals in the country give money to the national, state or local parties. But the combined total of contributions of these parties to their, or any candidates, must not be allowed to exceed 30% of the total contributions of the local voters in the election. This provides a sliding scale of contributions limits that balances the free speech and assembly rights of non-voters against the right of the local voter to select their own representative.

These rules will not just satisfy the legal and common sense requirement that the elimination of outside money does not also eliminate political parties, which would certainly be an infringement on our right of assembly, but these rules will also assure that the local voter is the biggest source of financial support for their representative. And as money is the mother's milk of politics, this will make the milk, and therefore political power, flow from bottom-up, as our Constitution requires, rather than the top-down, as is occurring now.

These reforms will translate the democratic principals of our Revolutionary and Constitutional Forefathers into our corrupted corporate age. These reforms will bring the will of the people back into our legislature, and allow us to craft law and policy democratically, rather than as a cattle auction.

Only then will our Assembly be competent to craft policy and law that is legitimate. Only then will our government craft immigration, education, retirement, and health policies that reflect the interests of our citizens, rather than the desire for profit and power of our corporations.

Alex Wierbinski is a fifth-generation San Franciscan born in 1958 and raised in the Bay Area. I have had the misfortune to witness the Bay Area's transformation from a beautiful place to live into a mega-city that is, sadly, almost indistinguishable from Los Angeles. My life's work is to end the corporate bribery that has displaced our democratic process. Once that is achieved, we can easily change the qualification for citizenship from being an illegal servile economic slave, to belief in the core principals and practices of our democratic republic.

Alex Wierbinski operates the Committee for Democracy Website
We Invite you to visit his website

Alex Wierbinski email: alexwierbinski@committeefordemocracy.ogThis e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

http://www.borderfirereport.net/alex-wi ... risis.html

Sounds like Chicago.

Originally Posted by crazybird

Sounds like Chicago.

Sounds very much like Mexico as well:


Taking a deeper look at the ethical aspects of the horrid political situation in California is disturbing. Below the dirty mechanisms of redistricting fraud and bribery that the parties have used to cheat us out of our democratic rights (and our wealth, our health, our wages, our benefits, and our education system) we are confronted by a group of bad people who have no honor, who do not believe in democracy, who are devoid of honesty, and will do and say anything to maintain the lies, bribery, corruption, and the crooked elections that keep them in power.

Great Commentary "FedupinFarmerBranch" Long but well worth the read. thanks for posting it!

Sending to my realives in Calif.

United States (Redistricting)
In 36 states, the state legislature has primary responsibility for creating a redistricting plan, in many cases subject to approval by the state governor. To reduce the role that legislative politics might play, 5 states (Arizona, Hawaii, Idaho, New Jersey and Washington), carry out congressional redistricting by an independent, bipartisan commission. Iowa and Maine give independent bodies authority to propose redistricting plans, but preserve the role of legislatures to approve them. Seven states avoid the issue completely because their low populations qualify them for only a single representative for the entire state; these are Alaska, Delaware, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming. The state constitutions and laws also mandate which body has responsibility over drawing the state legislature boundaries. In addition, those municipal governments that are elected on a district basis (as opposed to at-large) also redistrict.

Each state has its own standards for creating Congressional and legislative districts. In addition to equalizing the population of districts and complying with Federal requirements, criteria may include attempting to create compact, contiguous districts, trying to keep political units and communities within a single district, and avoiding the drawing of boundaries for purposes of partisan advantage or incumbent protection. In the states where the legislature (or another body where a partisan majority is possible such as IL or OH) is in charge of redistricting, the possibility of gerrymandering (the deliberate manipulation of political boundaries for electoral advantage, usually of incumbents or a specific political party) often makes the process very politically contentious, especially when the two houses of the legislature, or the legislature and the governor, are from different parties. The state and federal court systems are often involved in resolving disputes over Congressional and legislative redistricting when gridlock prevents redistricting in a timely manner. In addition, the losers to an adopted redistricting plan often challenge it in state and federal courts. Justice Department approval (which is known as preclearence) is required under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in certain states that have had a history of racial barriers to voting.

Partisan domination of state legislatures and improved technology to design contiguous districts that pack opponents into as few districts as possible have led to district maps which are skewed towards one party. So many states (including Texas, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Florida, Georgia and Maryland) have succeeded in removing competition for most House seats in those states that it has deadened competition for House seats nationally. Other states (New York, New Jersey, California) have opted to protect incumbents of both parties, again reducing the number of competitive districts. The Supreme Court's ruling on the Pennsylvania gerrymander in Vieth v. Jubelirer [1] effectively cemented the right of elected officials to choose their constituents, and it is up to a small number of competitive districts in a small number of states to determine majority control of Congress, since each party has about 190 districts which have very little likelihood of changing party control. The 2003 redistricting in Texas and the mid-decade redistricting in Georgia established the precedent of allowing the majority party in state governments to redraw the boundaries to favor the election of the majority-party candidates in subsequent elections.