That’s turning out to be a problem with the North-South California high-speed rail program. The Times reported:

“California’s bullet train officials begin to lay plans for the system’s Los Angeles segment, a major technical issue is coming under close scrutiny: incompatibility between the sleek, high-speed electric trains and the region’s older, diesel-powered commuter rail network.

“The state’s plan for initial passenger service calls for high-speed trains to shuttle between Merced and Burbank by 2022, a first leg of a $68-billion line that eventually is expected to link Los Angeles and San Francisco.

“Under the current design, Los Angeles-bound passengers pulling into Burbank, at least in the early years of operation, would have to transfer to a diesel-powered commuter train on another platform for the final 13-mile trip to downtown’s Union Station.”

It’s hard to see how walking is “high-speed.”

Perhaps it could be advertised as a rail trip and a fitness workout.

By John Seiler

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal (YouTube below), Jesse Jackson said of defenders of the Second Amendment, “They’re fighting the government. This is a Confederate ideology. This is like serious [unintelligible] power with something to do with how they feel.”

For the record, I’m a Michigan Yankee living in California.

And he has the history of gun control exactly backward — during Black History Month, no less. The first gun control in America occurred after the Civil War when the Ku Klux Klan used the governments of the South to seize the guns of blacks, leaving the blacks defenseless against lynchings and other violence.

White racist gun controllers

UCLA constitutional law professor Irwin Winkler, although a liberal, concedes:

“It was a constant pressure among white racists to keep guns out of the hands of African-Americans, because they would rise up and revolt. The KKK began as a gun-control organization. Before the Civil War, blacks were never allowed to own guns. During the Civil War, blacks kept guns for the first time — either they served in the Union army and they were allowed to keep their guns, or they buy guns on the open market where for the first time there’s hundreds of thousands of guns flooding the marketplace after the war ends. So they arm up because they know who they’re dealing with in the South. White racists do things like pass laws to disarm them, but that’s not really going to work. So they form these racist posses all over the South to go out at night in large groups to terrorize blacks and take those guns away. If blacks were disarmed, they couldn’t fight back.”

It’s also worth mentioning that the much-demonized group the National Rifle Association was formed in 1871 after the Civil War by former Union Army officers to help the marksmanship of soldiers. In 1871, the Union Army still was occupying the South as part of Reconstruction. That is, the Army was insisting that the South continue is abandonment of slavery mandated by the 13th Amendment.

And the Union Army enforced the 14th Amendment, Section 1 of which reads:

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

That means that anyone who’s a “citizen” of the United States, which included blacks after manumission, is entitled to “the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States,” mainly meaning the Bill of Rights.

And the Bill of Rights includes the Second Amendment “right to keep and bear arms.”

But when Reconstruction ended in 1877, the U.S. government no longer enforced many of the rights the 14th Amendment had granted to blacks. The Ku Klux Klan arose to deny blacks their rights, including the Second Amendment, meaning the Klan got governments to take away the blacks’ guns.

If Jackson wants to help blacks, he’ll instead encourage them to arm themselves, get some training by the NRA and fight the hoodlums in Chicago and elsewhere that he rightly has attacked for the increase in murders.

As in the South after the Civil War, the way for blacks to protect themselves, from murderous local hoodlums as well as against Jackson’s imaginary neo-Confederate terrorists, is to arm themselves.

By Wayne Lusvardi

Speaker John A. Perez’s push of Assembly Bill 1532 through the State Assembly on Tuesday, May 29, signals a shift from regulation of air pollution to an outright civil war on business and industry in California.

AB 1532 is not content with just using pollution taxes collected under California’s Cap and Trade emissions trading program to lower water, power, and natural gas bills for ratepayers, due to the looming higher price of green power. Rather, AB 1532 will directly use Cap and Trade taxes to parasitically transfer jobs taken from the private sector, to political pork jobs in the public sector.  It could also end up circumventing the limitation of new taxes of Propositions 13 and 26.  The passage of AB 1532 is a provocative act that crosses the line between regulation and outright plunder of the private sector for public sector make work green jobs programs.

AB 1532 passed the State Assembly by a 47 to 26 vote. The record of who voted for or against AB 1532 was not available online as of the writing of this article.

AB 1532 is a parasitical public sector jobs grab

Cap and Trade is a set of regulations under California’s Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 — AB 32 — to reduce air pollution by requiring industries and public utilities to buy pollution permits, also called pollution credits or allowances.

In reality, Cap and Trade is a program to socialize water, power, and natural gas rates to shift the coming burden of the high cost of green power onto the middle class.  Thus, the enormous taxes collected under the Cap and Trade program were to be rebated to utility ratepayers to socialize the “rate shock” of green power.  But AB 1532 takes this one step further by using Cap and Trade taxes to fund local governments and create parasitical green jobs programs.

AB 1532 will not backfill jobs lost in those industries directly affected by California’s Cap and Trade pollution permit trading law.  Instead, it will create another self-perpetuating bureaucracy of political patronage and jobs programs under the guise of “clean tech” industries and air pollution reduction programs.

AB 1532 will divert “investment towards the most disadvantaged communities in the state.” It will also fund “small businesses, schools, affordable housing associations, water agencies, local governments, and other community institutions (including public universities) to benefit from statewide efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

In other words, AB 1532 is just another tax to fund government and public schools, and redistribute jobs in return for political patronage.  It is an end run around Prop 13 and Prop 26, both of which require a two-thirds vote for any tax, fee, levy, or tax allocation.

Price of pollution permits will go up even without gaming system

Once established, it will incentivize government gaming of the Cap and Trade system to inflate the price of pollution credits. According to energy consultant Robert Lucas of the California Council for Environmental and Economic Balance, government gaming of the Cap and Trade system will likely double the annual amount of taxes collected under Cap and Trade regulations. Cap and Trade taxes would be expected to rise from $6.25 to $12.5 billion per year — or from $50 to $100 billion over the next 8 years.

Even if government does not game the system to its taxing advantage, the program is supposed to reduce the number of pollution permits each year as air pollution is improved.  The fewer the permits, the higher the price for the pollution permits, and the greater the pollution taxes collected. By design, there will be about 15 percent fewer pollution permits available to trade by the year 2020. Thus, pollution permit prices will likely rise without any gaming of the system. What is made to look like the workings of the so-called pollution credit market will actually be a structured way to inflate the price of pollution permits.

Reduce production or ration public utilities?

If, however, there are no credits to buy because there is no more pollution that can be realistically reduced, then industries and utilities may offset their pollution by planting trees or burying carbon in the ground. More of a false economy will be created and expanded.

But this will do little to reduce air pollution as long as population policies under AB 375 — the anti-urban sprawl bill — continue to divert growth to urban air basins that trap pollution.  The solution to pollution is dilution, not concentration.

Or if all else fails, industries and utilities can simply reduce production or call for rationing of water, power, and natural gas. Clean air at any cost.

AB 1532 is point of no return — the “Pottery Barn Rule”

The next step with AB 1532 will be its review in the state senate. Under Senate President pro-tem Darrell Steinberg, this is likely to result in passage and forwarding to Gov. Brown for signature.  The legislature and governor are likely to pass AB 1532 before political redistricting may change the composition of the legislature.

AB 1532 has fired the first symbolic shots in a civil war of what is permitted under the Global Warming Solutions Act — AB 32.  Several nonprofit liberal think tanks have rendered quasi-legal opinions that California’s Cap and Trade taxes cannot be used beyond providing utility ratepayers with rebates.  But Assembly Speaker John Perez has signaled he is going to push the legal limits of what can be funded with Cap and Trade taxes.

In the ancient Roman Empire, Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon River with his army, thus signaling civil war with the Roman Senate.  At Fort Sumter, the South fired the first shots in the Civil War between the North and South states. California State Assembly Speaker John Perez has crossed the point of no return with AB 1532, signaling a war on California’s business, industry and the middle class.

Gen. Colin Powell once cited what is called the “Pottery Barn Rule” about starting an unpopular war: “if you break it — you buy it.”  And Assembly Speaker John Perez and the Democratic Party are about to buy themselves a civil war chock full of unforeseeable consequences.

By WAYNE LUSVARDI

Is Gov. Jerry Brown dangerously inferring that if he does not get his proposed state budget balanced high, urban riots are not only inevitable but permissible?

On April 10, he spoke at the Reagan State Building in downtown Los Angeles using Civil War metaphors for describing the level of political partisanship he is finding over the inability to reach consensus on a state budget.

Gov. Brown told CBS News reporter Dave Bryan:

[T]he country hasn’t been this divided since the Civil War…. We are at a point of civil discord, and I would not minimize the risk to our country and to our state. It is not trivial. I’ve been around a long time.  I’m a student of history.  I’m a student of contemporary politics. We are facing what I would call a ‘regime crisis.’ The legitimacy of our very democratic institutions are in question.

Is Gov. Brown trying to persuade the electorate to vote for his high-balanced state budget, or is he dangerously trying to extort the outcome he wants?

No Mandate for Taxes

Brown and a fawning press continue to portray the Nov. 2, 2010 election, a clean-sweep victory by the Party of Government for all statewide public offices up for election, as a mandate for tax increases.  The fact is that in the same statewide election Brown’s party lost every ballot initiative  that had anything to do with raising taxes. That included Proposition 25, which passed and allowed the legislature to pass a state budget with only a bare majority vote, but only — read the fine print — if taxes are not raised!

Brown continues to pretend that he and his party were granted the “consent of the governed” to raise taxes — when they most definitely were not.   Put in the intellectual terms that Jerry Brown uses, raising taxes was deemed an “illegitimate” option.

It most certainly is a legitimacy crisis for his party’s regime, just as it was for former Gov. Schwarzenegger when he lost his package of reform initiatives in 2005.  But how dare Brown raise the legitimacy issue when his political party has opposed the will of the people again and again with Proposition 187 (immigration reform) and the two same-sex marriage measures, Proposition 22 and Proposition 8? His party also has helped create government agencies with unelected officials far removed from the consent of the governed such, as the California Air Resources Board (CARB) and the Water Resources Control Board.

Tax and Spend Regime Was Declared Over by Voters in Nov. 2010

But how can it be called a “crisis” when the voters spoke loud and clear beforehand that raising taxes was not legit? The electorate already sent a message that the “tax and spend regime” of the past is over.  But Gov. Brown and the media want to spin that it never happened and that rejection of his tax package would spell a “regime crisis.”  Denial is a fictional river in California, not Egypt.

Political scientist Robert A. Dahl came up with an apt metaphor for explaining how legitimacy works in a state such as California with its perpetual droughts.  Dahl described legitimacy as a “reservoir.”  Inasmuch as the water is at a given level, political stability is maintained; if it falls below the required level, political legitimacy is endangered.”

In other words, political legitimacy is not gained by merely getting elected, even in a clean sweep of all offices. In California this is mainly due to the mechanics of gerrymandering that guarantees non-competitive electoral districts.  Elections in such highly gerrymandered districts do not confer the consent of the governed to raise taxes.

Proposition 11, passed by voters in 2008, is supposed to end the gerrymandering by establishing the California Citizens Redistricting Commission to draw non-partisan districts without gerrymandering. But columnist Dan Walters, among others, is skeptical that it will work as advertised.

Political legitimacy can’t be merely gained by highly gerrymandered votes, laws or regulations, the charisma of an articulate leader or even an approving press.  Legitimacy can ultimately only be gained by political “virtue,” a misunderstood concept not having anything to do with personal morality but with doing what is best for the people in the long run even at the expense of one’s popularity.

The U.S. Civil War Was Not Inevitable

With all his talk of Civil War, Brown seems to be implying that the predictable results from a failed budget will be civil war.  As historian Douglas G. Egerton describes in his 2010 book, “Year of Meteors: Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, and the Election that Brought on the Civil War,” the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 was not inevitable.  The reason that full-scale hostilities broke out was the result of a conspiracy of a relatively few men.

Abraham Lincoln was covertly supported for president by a band of Southern extremist, pro-slavery politicians called the “Fire Eaters” who wanted to trigger the secession of Southern states.  According to Egerton, the Civil War came about not when the Southern states seceded but when the Northern states tried to stop them.

It was small provocations, verbal insults, race baiting, taunts, conspiracies, yellow journalism and other gestures that led up to the Civil War.  Such may be the case of a Civil War metaphor today in California, which may be misinterpreted to mean that without an approved state budget there will be “war.”

Which raises the question: Is Jerry Brown issuing a warning or is he granting tacit approval for a civil war?  To repeat, civil war is not inevitable.  It is something that comes about typically when leaders, and small groups of elites, together with the press, are able to indirectly communicate that violence is a permissible option and may not even be punished.

No less a role is played by the press. As Egerton writes in his book, “Democratic [Party] newspapers angrily placed the failure of conciliation squarely on Lincoln’s party and the President-elect.”

John Brown Failed Because His Violent Means Were Illegitimate

Coincidentally, it was a person name Brown, abolitionist John Brown, who helped incite the Civil War by leading a raid on the Harper’s Ferry arms depot in 1859 in the hope of arming slaves for a slave rebellion.  John Brown believed his cause was legitimate, but failed because the slaves refused to follow him and arm themselves for an uprising.

Not that there couldn’t be urban riots fomented by elites in California today, but I find that Gov. Brown’s use of Civil War rhetoric to be dangerous unless he qualifies that any such actions would be severely punished and that his role is as a reconciler.

State Needs to Carry Out Will of the People

What would be best for California right now would be for its leaders to tone down and out the rhetoric of war, to quit scapegoating Republicans and to declare that in November 2010 the people voted for an end to the “tax and spend” regime.  That’s what elections are for: to replace violent dissension and war.  Thus, the “civil war” over the state budget was already held in November 2010.  That war is over and the Democrats lost, despite gaining every statewide political office on the ballot, and a majority of the seats the gerrymandered Legislature.

Martin L. Gross wrote that “government loses its claim to legitimacy when it fails to fulfill its obligations.” Which means today:

* It is time for Gov. Brown and the legislature to carry out the expressed will of the people about “no more taxes.”

* It is time for the press to quit spinning that the voters want taxes raised.

* It is time for moral leaders to not sanction civil strife.

* It is time to exert the rule of democratic law and not descend into the anarchy of Greece fomented by Leftist groups.

* It is time for the state government to regain legitimacy if we are going to have an economic recovery.

Has Civil War Now Gained Legitimacy?

With Gov. Brown’s unfortunate statement about the plausibility of civil war has given such a war a kind of legitimacy, I asked a prosecutor friend of mine  to comment on Jerry Brown’s use of Civil War rhetoric. My friend replied:

Jerry Brown is nothing more than California’s Obama.  He ran as if he knew the answers, and was ready to make the tough decisions.  In truth, he had no answers except the wrong ones (more taxes), and has no intention of making any tough decisions unless someone puts a figurative gun to his head or a recall election on the ballot.  The Republicans have called his bluff, and now he’s in a pickle.

This new “civil war” rhetoric is like the last gasp of a drowning man.  Brown thinks he can scare people into embracing a totally bankrupt remedy that may provide a few more breaths of air, but has no chance of solving the state’s problems.

I don’t think anyone’s buying his budget proposal for one minute.  He wants to do everything but get realistic about how to solve this mess.  That would take real leadership and real guts.  Neither is his strong suit.