Arnold's greed

Arnold can’t leave office soon enough. Today he blasted as “greedy” oil companies Valero and Tesoro, which are funding the initiative to repeal the mega-jobs-killing AB32.

In a few months he’s going to be in Gstaad, skiing and writing his memoirs — which should be titled “My Struggle” — as he awaits Obama appointing him to head the federal EPA — and while AB32 continues to gut businesses and jobs.  Thus spake Arnold:

As you know, there are greedy Texas oil companies that are trying to take out AB 32 and roll it back.  We of course do everything we can to fight them because for us it’s very important to protect those laws and not have outside oil companies that only think of one thing — and this is profits — to come into California and to try to take those laws out and roll them back and so on.

There it is: Arnold has outlawed profits in California. No wonder our unemployment rate, about the same as the national average when he took office 7 years ago, now is a whopping 2.7 percentage points higher mainly because of his misrule, in particular AB32 and his tax increases.

And actually, although based in Texas, those oil companies sell gas in California, so they’re California companies, too. Or does Arnold want any company not based here to leave — that is, leave faster than he is driving them out?

And as to greed, Arnold himself is greed personified. He made his hundreds of millions — not just in movies, but in real estate — in the years before he became governor and wrecked the state.

He also has a greedy ego. Everything is about Arnold! Arnold! Arnold! Arnold! In his 2006 re-election bid, he didn’t lift a finger to help anybody else on the Republican ticket. (Yet star-struck Republicans still slavishly endorsed him.)

There’s a good side, though. Having turned California into Greece-on-the-Pacific, his approval rating is so low that anything he opposes will be embraced by the electorate.

— John Seiler