Exclusive: Gina Loudon gives America hard look at life in leftist-controlled state
I once asked a major journalist with the British Broadcasting Corporation why that news corporation has so many journalists in the U.S. His answer was simple and profound: The U.S. is so important in the world that anything it does affects everyone else.
So too, what happens in California is often prelude to what the nation might expect – from trends in fashion, to music, even business. Good and bad, if it starts in the Golden State, the wise investor gives it consideration. While the low-information voter gives little consideration to the presidential debates and has no clue who Justice Antonin Scalia was, the wise conservative considers the magnitude of what lies before us. California has given us a hint of what may be to come should Americans choose poorly in November. The picture should send fear through us all.
Most of us on the right see Obama as a Marxist, a radical who seeks to spread wealth around and diminish the power of the United States in the world. Hillary and Bernie are promising to continue the same course, but where is that course leading us?
Consider leftist-controlled California, the most progressive and oppressive state in America. Progressive Democrats have a lock grip on Sacramento, including at times supermajorities in both chambers and currently every statewide office. They hatch their schemes from think-tanks on the campus of Berkeley and in offices in the Bay Area. The rest of us find ourselves questioning attacks on our liberty from major decisions like the Keystone XL pipeline to the seemingly trivial issues, like bans on plastic bags. Most of us have no idea that the same tiny cadre in the San Francisco Bay area is driving all of it. While our brothers in the Heartland and the South and occasionally other free states manage to turn back most of these insane ideas, almost every one of the craziest initiatives is law in California.
In just the past few years, California lawmakers indeed passed a ban on plastic bags. They also passed cap-and-trade, an insidious hidden tax that makes California gasoline the most expensive in the nation. They raised the income tax to the highest in the nation. They legalized pot, and made school boys and girls have to share locker-room showers with members of the opposite sex who claim gender confusion. They actually banned parents from being able to take those same confused children to counselors who would suggest they stay straight. While 24 states have banned the construction union giveaways called Project Labor Agreements, or PLAs, California lawmakers fully embrace them, going so far as to sanction taxpayers who dare to ban them locally. Californians often bemoan that one literally cannot make this stuff up.
With such an unimpeded ability to build the workers’ paradise, one would think California is nearing the utopia promised by the socialists teaching our children, the ones who think Sweden has it right. The gap between rich and poor in California should be the narrowest in the country.