Most states in the union are grappling with tightening finances in the current economy. But thanks to the antitax extremism that gripped California, Paul Krugman reports that they are in worse financial shape than any other state in the union. In fact, they may be next in line for a federal bailout. The first problem that California has is the fact that they were hit hardest by the housing bubble that burst a few years ago. The second is that their unemployment rate is now at 11%, which is the fifth highest rate in the nation. All of these problems might be manageable. But the problem is that thanks to Proposition 13, California is hamstrung in a way that no other state of the union is.
Krugman writes:
Despite the economic slump, despite irresponsible policies that have doubled the state’s debt burden since Arnold Schwarzenegger became governor, California has immense human and financial resources. It should not be in fiscal crisis; it should not be on the verge of cutting essential public services and denying health coverage to almost a million children. But it is — and you have to wonder if California’s political paralysis foreshadows the future of the nation as a whole.
The seeds of California’s current crisis were planted more than 30 years ago, when voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 13, a ballot measure that placed the state’s budget in a straitjacket. Property tax rates were capped, and homeowners were shielded from increases in their tax assessments even as the value of their homes rose.
The result was a tax system that is both inequitable and unstable. It’s inequitable because older homeowners often pay far less property tax than their younger neighbors. It’s unstable because limits on property taxation have forced California to rely more heavily than other states on income taxes, which fall steeply during recessions.
And it will be a lot harder for Obama to right California's ship than it would be for him to right the Big Three. All Obama had to do was place a phone call and ask GM's CEO to leave for the good of the company. But since we are dealing with elected officials, it will not be nearly as easy for the Obama administration to come up with a plan to bail out California assuming the feds are called on to bail them out like they did the banks and the automakers.
Proposition 13 states that taxes cannot be raised except with a two thirds majority. That has created a state of political paralysis in which a minority of antitax extremists in the legislature are holding up any tax increases that could alleviate California's deficits. In other words, unlike GM and Chrysler and the banks, it may well be that California might not want to be helped -- in other words, they might be unwilling to make the changes necessary to survive. But that would be fine for the antitax extremist wing of the GOP -- they want entities like CA to fail because that would "prove" that government is the problem and not the answer. If they really wanted CA to work, then there would be no more intellectual basis for their antitax extremism at some point.
Bond agencies are stating that if the US continues to bail large companies and industries out, they will get to the point where they will lose their AAA status in a few years. However, that might be a risk worth taking in the case of CA -- assuming they want to be helped. If AIG and GM and Chrysler are deemed too big to fail, then it is only fair to assume that CA -- with its 25 36 million people and the millions of jobs that it supports -- is also too big to fail. But is this going to create a precedent which rewards fiscal irresponsibility? And will Congress have the appetite to approve bailout funds after having already done so for the auto and banking industries?
All this means that there will come a point in time when we will have to choose between continuing to feed the beast that is the Military Industrial Complex and having enough funds on hand so that we can bail out California and other states whenever their financial woes get out of hand. And what's more, our current methods of fighting warfare are becoming outdated -- there is now a whole body of work out on Fourth Generation Warfare. Poster Impeach Criminals explains, quoting William Lind:
Chet Richards is the spider of the d-n-i.net web site, which is the best source for material on Fourth Generation war. He is also the only person authorized to give Col. John Boyd's famous "Patterns of Conflict" briefing. Given that background, it is not surprising that he has produced a useful and important discussion of Fourth Generation strategy, in the form of a short book titled Neither Shall the Sword. If Washington were interested in strategy, which it is not (its only genuine interest is in court politics), it would give this small volume large attention.
The book begins by asking whether Third Generation maneuver warfare is passé. As the Urvater of maneuver warfare theory in this country, I must agree with Richards that it is. As glorious as the Blitzkrieg was, it now belongs to history; wars between state armed forces, while they may now and then still occur, will be jousting contests more than real wars. The institutional culture of Third Generation armed services, with its outward focus, decentralization, initiative and self-discipline, remains vital to any fighting organization. But unless they are relieving an inside-out Islamic siege of Brussels, Panzer divisions will no longer be streaming through the Ardennes.
You can visit the DNI website here. Lind continues:
Instead, we are faced with an evolutionary development in armed conflict, a "fourth generation" of warfare that is different from and much more serious than "terrorism" to see the difference between 4GW and "terrorism," run this simple thought experiment: suppose bin Laden and al-Qaida were able to enforce their program on the Middle East, but they succeeded without the deliberate killing of one more American civilian. The entire Middle East turns hostile, Israel is destroyed, and gas goes up to $15 per gallon when it is available. Bin Laden's 4GW campaign succeeds, but without terrorism. Do you feel better?
This applies to situations like Iraq and Afghanistan:
It's not a war followed by a blown peace. That is conventional war thinking, even if the war is waged and quickly won by 3GW. Instead, it will be an occupation against some degree of resistance, followed by the real, fourth generation war.
Much of Neither Shall the Sword is devoted to considering what kinds of armed forces the U.S. would require for 4GW, which varies depending on the grand strategy we adopt. He recognizes that the current Department of Defense, and the bulk of our forces, are untransformable.
So, in other words, instead of waging war using outdated methods, we have to be able to wage our own version of 4GW -- if we create green jobs, create a green infrastructure, and eliminate our dependence on Middle Eastern oil, then we can bankrupt Bin Laden and his ilk. And that sort of thing, along with legalizing pot and hemp will create for us the kind of tax base that we would need to be able to address crises like California's. And we will bankrupt Iran and protect Israel to boot. Third Generation Warfare is how World War II was fought. But Fourth Generation Warfare involves unconventional means of waging war -- economic warfare, guerrilla tactics, luring the enemy to their own doom, and things of that nature. In 4GW, people like Saddam and Bin Laden WANT us to invade and occupy, because the economic cost would bankrupt our economy. George W. Bush made the Mission Accomplished speech because he was thinking of the war in 3GW terms -- we had invaded, driven Saddam from power; therefore, in his reasoning, we had won. But in 4GW terms, the war had just begun.
4GW is much more Machiavellian than conventional warfare -- in other words, people like Bin Laden want the US to occupy a country to try to capture him, because every time that we kill civilian casualties, it will make us look bad. Impeach Criminals cites statistics that bear this out:
"Here is the bottom line - War is Increasingly About Civilian Dead.
* In WWI, the total number of Civilian Casualties was 10.74% of the total casualties (106,000 GIs died; 8 million civilians died).
* In WWII the civilian casualties were approximately 410,000, or 50.62% of the total (400,000 GIs died; add to the civilian total the 8 million Holocaust; and add 17 to 60 million civilian causality estimates worldwide).
* In the Vietnam War, civilian casualty estimate is 340,000, or 85.74% of total casualties (56,000 GIs died; 200,000 South Vietnamese soldiers died; 1,000,000 North Vietnamese soldiers died, Vietnam War Facts).
* In the narrow window of the Gulf War (1990-1991) 5,000 civilian casualties, or 92.89% dead and 383 GIs dead from accident or friendly fire during 1991-1992;
* But Since 1992 more than 1.2 million civilians, or 99.15% (estimates range as high as 1.7 million dead) and 10,324 U.S. GIs dead since the war (WPSR, & America's War Fact Sheet; More War Stats; And PeaceAware Vets Factsheet ). Of the 1.2 million civilian casualties, 500,000 are children under five.
The number of civilian deaths is why the Gulf War is a particularly egregious violation of the Geneva Convention and the U.S. Legal Code. 1.2 million Iraqi civilians
Figure 1 - Civilian and GI Dead form Wars
Figure 2 - Percentage of Civilians as Casualty of War
Figure 1 suggests that the number of civilian dead is a greater percentage of the total dead in successive wars.
Table 1 - Statistics used to compile Figures 1 and 2
Civilians Dead GIs Dead Total Dead Percent Civilians Dead
WWI 12,755 106,000 118,755 10.74%
WWII 410,000 400,000 810,000 50.62%
Vietnam War 340,000 56,555 396,555 85.74%
Gulf War 90-91 5,000 383 5,383 92.89%
After Gulf War 1,200,000 10,324 1,210,324 99.15%
Collateral damage, the number of civilians dying in war, is increasing each time, until 99.15% of the causalities are civilians, not military. It is for this reason, that war is no longer heroic or noble. When the majority of casualties are civilians, this is war crime, not heroics. The Gulf Wars are Nuclear Wars, wars that the media portrays as bloodless, surgical strikes. This is the age of video battles, digital displays of war. The state-controlled media knows that if the American public sees the civilian and GI war-dead body bags, then opposition will grow. In Gulf War I, video footage was carefully aimed so that no blood was shown. With massive bulldozers, the corpses of Iraqi soldiers were plowed into seventy miles of defensive trenches. This way there were no war bodies for journalist to report. The success of the war business depends upon keeping the American public ignorant of the war dead.
His stats come from an issue of the Rolling Stone in 2003. In other words, in any given war that we fight either now or in the future, 99% or so of the people we kill will be civilians. Therefore, any occupation that we commit to will become increasingly unsustainable because of the high numbers of civilian casualties that we inflict.
So, what does this all mean for California and its present state of crisis? It is simple -- we have a fundamental choice. If, in two years, it turns out that we are not making any progress whatsoever in Afghanistan, then that means that we will have to choose between committing an ever-increasing amount of national resources into an increasingly unsustainable occupation, or accepting things as they are and not what we want them to be. And that means accepting that 21st century warfare will be much different than the types of warfare preceding it. And that means that if we are going to be able to have a strong national defense, we must have a strong economic base to work with, meaning that we must have the ability to help out states in extreme financial crisis.