June 30, 2003
California Taxes And Denialists
So, in California, both houses are controlled by Democrats, and they have a Democratic Governor. However, in order to raise taxes, they need a 2/3 majority. This is the root of all its problems, want to bet they don't need a 2/3 majority to cut taxes? This was probably yet another republican trick to manipulate politically unsophisticated people into thinking that Democrats don't have their best interests at heart.Here's how it works. You get a whole bunch of people and you give them services they learn to rely on, that you pay for by taxing them. Then you gradually lull them into complacency and encourage them not to see the linkage between the taxes they pay and the benefits they get from the taxes. Then you pound home the message that their taxes are being wasted, over and over and over again. You don't have to prove it, you just appeal to their fear and desperation about money. You of course encourage their desperation about money in the meantime by telling them how horrible their lives will be if they have less of it.
You convince them that you have their interests at heart and want to protect their pocketbooks. You tell them you won't let the big bad government take away any more of their money. You appeal to their greed and their fear, and you buy their votes.
Here's what else you do. You pass an amendment saying that you can't raise taxes unless a 2/3 majority accepts it. That way if there's a budget shortfall, you can blame anyone who wants to raise taxes, and you can also blame them for cutting needed services. When there's a surplus, you blame them for taxing too much and for having taxes that are too high, and when there's a shortfall, you blame them for not thinking ahead.
So now you set about ruining the economy. You manufacture an electricity shortage by deregulating public utilities and then selling all your state power to other states, claiming a shortage, and massively raising your prices and margins to "ration" the state. You get the state to bankrupt its surplus while you pocket the profits. If you get sued, that's okay, they won't get enough money back to make up for what they lost.
You also get lucky with a nationwide recession that doesn't impact your own party since you're all rich and powerful legislators. You encourage the recession to require more service cuts and tax raises so you can further blame the people that are unable to stop the service cuts and are trying to raise the taxes.
You refuse any and all suggested tax raises and rub your hands with glee as your state falls apart around you. You cut up the safety net, you kick the elderly out of their nursing homes, you cancel summer classes in community colleges, you fire thousands of academic faculty. You blame the Governor for attempting to raise taxes after irresponsibly handling the economy. You blame the Governor for cutting needed services after irresponsibly handling the economy. You oppose the Governor taking any action at all, and support a recall of the Governor on the grounds that he isn't taking any action at all.
If you're able to stomach doing any part of that, then congratulations - you have what it takes to be a California Republican.
I hate these guys. They are denialists. That is my term for someone whose only reason for living is to deny (subvert, stand in the way of) anything that someone else does, while advocating nothing. And if you think about it, it's true - these Republicans are advocating nothing. They only know how to ruin; they create nothing, solve nothing. They amass power and money for no purpose, they use these resources as ends when they are supposed to be used as means to create good. They turn motion into stagnation, energy into density, life into death.
And it is hard to oppose. They will seek to compromise their opponents' integrity at every turn. They will use guilt, shame, and fear at every opportunity.
The only way to oppose it successfully is with truth. To battle them you must be skilled with recognizing false choices. You must have the ability to articulate subtleties clearly. You must be able to starkly illustrate grey areas. You must be able to hit back without losing your footing. You must be guiltless, shameless, fearless. You must beat them not at their own game, but instead by forcing them out of their game, by refusing to even accept their rules.
And when you start to learn how to expose them, it starts to become easier. When they attack you in front of others, you realize you don't have to be embarrassed, or cover yourself in defense. Instead, you can turn to the audience and explain to them exactly what they are trying to do. You can expose their tricks, their lies, their games, their lack of advocacy.
I would love to see a day when we have a leader that can expose these stunts. That can show us how amusing their harrumphs and indignance and donald-duck-like sputterings are when they are called out. A leader that realizes that the way to fight them is not to appease them, nor to humor them, nor to engage them, nor to ignore them, but to simply banish them into their own sphere, their own right place, where they can deny each other to their hearts content, until they form their own black sticky mass of hatred and stagnation and density and death, separate from those of us who chose to live in peace, constructive intent, motion, emotion, and freedom.