Yet any shipping lost in recent days might never come back.

Houston, in particular, has been building its port into a mega-facility. As Joel Kotkin wrote recently:

The Port of Houston, connected with the Gulf of Mexico by the 50-mile Houston Ship Channel, is now the nation’s Number One export hub, feeding off the energy revolution and expanding economic exchange with Latin America. Mexico and Brazil are by far the port’s largest trading partners. Houston’s port business has grown almost fourfold since 2000 — far faster than either New York’s or Los Angeles’s. Port officials estimate that the trade sector contributes $500 billion in economic activity and more than 1 million jobs to the state of Texas annually.

This is one reason why Houston and the rest of Texas are weathering the current downturn in oil and gas prices better than they did a similar downturn in the late 1980s.

Back out here on the West Coast, the Los Angeles Times reported it may take a while to return to normalcy:

West Coast ports are emerging from the most contentious labor dispute in more than a decade, but lingering resentment and structural problems may complicate a return to normality.

Activity picked up Saturday at Western harbors after the dockworkers union and employers reached a tentative agreement late Friday on a new five-year contract that will cover 20,000 workers at 29 ports.

Although there are obvious differences, this is somewhat like how a 2011 grocery worker strike was avoided in Southern California. That was unlike in 2003, when a four-month strike cost grocery companies $2 billion in profits and shook up the entire industry, including mergers, multiple store closings and greater use of automated tellers.

Despite its problems, the U.S. economy in most ways remains diverse and competitive.

Why? I think Dennis Prager is on to something with his theory about what’s driving this thinking:

Yes, of course, as individuals with a heart, most people, right and left, care about people losing their jobs. But in terms of what matters to the left and the policies they pursue, they don’t care. The left and the political party it controls do not care if their policies force to companies to leave the state (or the country). They don’t care about the …  job-depressing effects of high taxes, or energy prices that hurt the middle class, or compelling businesses to leave.

They don’t care because the left is not interested in prosperity; the left is interested in inequality and in the environment. Furthermore, the worse the economic situation, the more voters are likely to vote Democrat. The worse the economic situation, the greater the number of people receiving government assistance; the greater the number of people receiving government assistance, the greater the number of people who will vote Democrat.

Therefore, both philosophically and politically, the left has no reason to be troubled by bad economic news. And it isn’t. It is troubled by inequality and carbon emissions.

–In the last 20 years, about 4 million more people have left California than came in from other states. Most of those leaving are young families.

–In the last 15 years, one-third of California’s industrial employment base has disappeared. That’s 600,000 jobs that have disappeared.

–California has the 48th-worst business tax climate. (The Tax Foundation)

–California’s electricity prices are 50 percent higher than the national average.

–Middle-class workers, those who earn more than $48,000, pay a top income tax rate of 9.3 percent. That’s higher than what millionaires pay in 47 other states.

–California’s unemployment rate is fourth highest in the nation.

–From 2010-13, California produced fewer than 8,000 jobs, while the country added 510,000.

“The biggest onshore story is the potential of the Monterey Formation (also known as the Monterey Shale), a zone of petroleum-rich rock that extends much of the state’s length. The Monterey holds an enormous amount of oil, estimated at up to 500 billion barrels. Though it has long been difficult to extract oil directly from it, advancing technology, along with rising oil prices, has put much more of its oil within reach. If even a small fraction of its reserves proves accessible, the Monterey would be the biggest shale oil play in the nation. In July 2011, the federal Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimated that the Monterey had 15.4 billion barrels of recoverable crude—four times what’s estimated to lie within the Bakken shale formation, which is fueling North Dakota’s current oil boom. Those 15.4 billion barrels would be worth about $1.5 trillion at today’s crude prices.

“The potential impact of 15.4 billion barrels of oil is enormous. Even if California managed to tap just half of that quantity over the next 35 years, the state would be adding an average of 220 million barrels a year—doubling its current output and matching its peak year of 1985. It would also be pumping $22 billion each year into its economy if crude prices stayed near their current levels (in light of global demand, it’s more likely that prices will rise). If the EIA estimate is reasonably close to the mark, the Monterey Formation would be in a class with oil fields in Saudi Arabia.”

Since then, Gov. Jerry Brown has signed legislation that sets the framework for hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to be expanded in California to access this huge resource. But this has triggered a backlash from his fellow Democrats, and there are signs everywhere that a multifront legal war will be mounted on all aspects of any plan to sharply increase energy exploration in California, whether it involves fracking or not. The president, at least ostensibly, declares his support for an “all of the above” approach to creating additional energy for America. Not California liberals.

No better option for middle-class job growth

Too bad. Allowing California’s natural resources to be developed could trigger a massive boom in middle-class energy-exploration jobs — which don’t necessarily require college degrees.

Joel Kotkin, the wonderful Los Angeles writer and futurist, took a road trip to Fargo, North Dakota, to see how fracking and other economic initiatives had transformed the remote state:

“North Dakota leads the nation in virtually every indicator of prosperity: the lowest unemployment rate, and the highest rates of net in-migration, income growth and job creation. Last year North Dakota wages rose a remarkable 8.9%, twice as much as Utah and Texas, which shared honors for second place, and many times the 1% rise experienced nationwide.”

Fargo isn’t in the drilling area, as Kotkin notes, and owes its transformation to many factors. But the old JFK line about a rising tide (economy) lifting all ships certainly holds for North Dakota in general. California could benefit immensely from the same economic multiplier — at least if it can overcome the green religionists and their trial-lawyer buddies.

“When you set aside the class-warfare rhetoric that Democrats so enjoy, the drivers of income inequality are plain. The first is rarely acknowledged. It’s the increasing tendency of highly educated professionals to marry each other. Doctors used to marry nurses. Now they marry other doctors, concentrating family wealth.

“The second is that the modern economy places an ever-higher premium on job skills, and yet we don’t have a public education system that responds to this fact. In 2013, how is it possible that a year or more of computer science isn’t a universal high school graduation requirement?

“It’s not just information-technology jobs going unfilled because of a mismatch between what schools teach and what employers need. In many skilled-job categories — welders, critical-care nurses, electrical linemen, special-education teachers, geotechnical engineers, respiratory therapists — unemployment is practically zero.

“So long as we have an absurdly complex tax code in which the amount that the very wealthy pay depends on the skill of their tax attorneys, the Occupy argument that the U.S. is rigged to help the rich will resonate with some. But this doesn’t address the disconnect between what our schools teach and what our economy needs.”

Liberal think tank: Higher job skills more rewarded than ever

Now the most venerable liberal think tank of all — the Brookings Institution, the one a Nixon aide wanted to firebomb — has released a study of big-city income inequality that makes some of the same points. This is from the L.A. Times’ write-up of the study:

“Los Angeles has one of the highest levels of income inequality in the nation, but that’s due in part to a relatively strong local economy that’s stoking the fortunes of higher-income people, according to a new study.

“Of the 50 largest U.S. cities, L.A. has the ninth-highest level of income disparity, according to the analysis by Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. …

“Inequality has become a flash point nationwide as the wealth of top earners surges while the middle and lower classes grapple with stubborn income stagnation. Politicians have clashed loudly on what’s driving the dichotomy, and what steps, if any, should be taken to reverse it.

“The study found, however, that rising inequality may simply be an unavoidable byproduct of robust local economies that plump the incomes of coveted workers.

“Fast-growing industries with highly paid employees — such as technology, finance and entertainment — tend to cluster in large metropolitan areas, said Alan Berube, a Brookings researcher who specializes in inequality. And the ongoing gentrification of many cities, such as in downtown Los Angeles, is drawing wealthier people.

“At the same time, big cities also draw large numbers of low-income people seeking lower-skilled jobs.”

Needed: a much smarter and more focused education system

Joel Kotkin, the shrewd Los Angeles Democratic futurist, points to the best approach to income inequality in his piece last week in New Geography:

“A pro-growth program today could take several forms that defy the narrow logic of both left and right. We can encourage the growth of high-wage, blue-collar industries such as construction, energy and manufacturing. We can also reform taxes so that the burdens fall less on employers and employees, as opposed to those who simply profit from asset inflation. And rather than impose huge tuitions on students who might not  finish with a degree that offers employment opportunities, let’s place new emphasis on practical skills training for both the new generation and those being left behind in this ‘recovery.'”

The problem facing this approach in California, alas, is that the state’s education status quo has fierce guardians. They don’t want sweeping change because it would cost many CTA and CFT members their jobs.

And given that the CTA and CFT are by far the most powerful forces in the state, this is an immense problem for those who want to do something more constructive about income inequality than tampering at the margins with pseudo-solutions like raising the minimum wage.

By Chris Reed

California’s official embrace of trendy “smart growth” — the policy/religion that assumes it’s best for individuals, communities and Gaia for most people to live in densely packed areas near transportation hubs, so they don’t use devil fossil-fuel cars — was formalized in 2008 with the enactment of SB 375.

Sen. Darrell Steinberg’s brainchild was, of course, reflexively embraced by the L.A. Times’ George Skelton:

The glory that is (not) ‘compact development’

“The measure (SB 375) links regional planning for housing and transportation with California’s new greenhouse gas reduction goal (AB 32) enacted in 2006. …

‘If people are going to drive — and they are going to drive — we need to plan in ways to get them out of their cars faster. That means shrinking — not the amount of housing, not economic development, not growth — but shrinking the footprint on which that growth occurs.’

“Steinberg wants it to occur within a smaller circle around downtown.

“Basically the bill would work like this: Each metropolitan region would adopt a ‘sustainable community strategy’ to encourage compact development. They’d mesh it with greenhouse emissions targets set by the California Air Resources Board, which is charged with commanding the state’s fight against global warming.

“And this is the key part: Transportation projects that were part of the community plan would get first dibs on the annual $5 billion in transportation money disbursed by Sacramento.”

Greens: no more growth ‘in the wrong location’

“‘It’s a watershed moment for the environmental community,’ Tom Adams, board president of the California League of Conservation Voters, told the Assembly Local Government Committee on Tuesday as the panel approved the bill. ‘We realized we had to encourage growth, but growth in the right location. Otherwise, we’d get growth anyway, but in the wrong location.’

“Adams calls the measure ‘the most important land-use bill in California since enactment of the Coastal Act’ three decades ago.”

Five years later, the “smart growth” dream has never been realized in California. There are still seminars and press releases and politicians who promise that change is a-coming. Those behind the hype just can’t offer many concrete examples.

Why? The public just isn’t that into “compact development” and prefers to live in the “wrong location.” Even the powerful incentives that SB 375 provides can’t change this fundamental dynamic.

This is from a recent commentary by Chapman University’s wonderful futurist Joel Kotkin that looked at America’s fastest-growing cities since the recession.

“It was widely reported that the Great Recession and subsequent economic malaise changed the geography of America. Suburbs, particularly in the Sun Belt,, were becoming the ‘new slums’ as people flocked back to dense core cities.

“Yet an analysis of post-2007 population trends by demographer Wendell Cox in the 111 U.S. metro areas with more than 200,000 residents reveals something both very different from the conventional wisdom and at the same time very familiar. Virtually all of the 20 that have added the most residents from 2007 to 2012 are in the Old Confederacy, the Intermountain West and suburbs of larger cities, notably in California. … growth is still fastest in the Sun Belt, in suburban cities and lower-density, spread out municipalities. …

“Nothing in the data …  suggests a revival of the older, dense “legacy” cities that were typical of the late 19th century and pre-war era. Most of the fastest-growing big cities since 2007 are of the sprawling post-1945 Sun Belt variety … .

Suburban sprawl routs unpopular, dumb ‘smart growth’

The anti-smart growth pattern was particularly notable in California, Kotkin writes.

“The other somewhat surprising result is the strong performance of more purely suburban cities, that is, ones that have grown up since car ownership became nearly universal. They are not the historic cores of their regions but have developed into major employment centers with housing primarily made up of single-family residences. These include the city that has grown the second most in the U.S. since 2007: Chula Vista, a San Diego suburb close to the Mexican border, whose population expanded 17.7%. It’s followed in third place by the Los Angeles suburb of Irvine (16.3%); No. 7 Irving, Texas; and the California cities of Fremont (13th) , located just east of San Jose-Silicon Valley, and Oxnard (17th), north of Los Angeles.

“…  Americans continue to move decisively to both lower-density, job-creating cities and to those less dense areas of major metropolitan areas particularly where single-family houses, good schools and jobs are plentiful. …

“Migration numbers for 2010 to 2012 alone hammer home that suburban areas are continuing to attract people, and that the more dense core areas do not generally perform as well. Although their growth has slowed compared to the last decade, suburban locales, with roughly three-quarters of all residents of metropolitan areas, have added many more people than their core counterparts. …

“The urban future will continue to evolve in directions that contradict the prevailing conventional wisdom of a shift toward more crowded living.”

Bad news for Darrell Steinberg and the other Stalinist planners who want to dictate where and how we live. Good news for those who believe in the American dream of a single-family home with a car or two in the sprawl that green schemers so hate.

By Chris Reed

The Associated Press points out a basic fact about California that our media rarely note:

“California’s San Joaquin Valley is one of the richest agricultural regions in the world, with Fresno County farmers receiving a record $6.8 billion in revenues last year. But the region also consistently ranks among the nation’s most impoverished. Sometimes called ‘Appalachia of the West,’ it’s where families, especially Hispanic immigrants and their children, live year after year in destitution.

“This divide causes concern because of what it may foretell as the nation’s Hispanic population explodes and the U.S. moves toward becoming a majority minority nation. Census data show that non-Hispanic whites will cease to be a majority somewhere about the year 2043. The shift is largely driven by high birth rates among Hispanics as well as by declines in the aging white population.

“Already there are a record number of Hispanics living below the poverty line nationwide, and the number of Hispanic children in poverty exceeds that of any other racial or ethnic group. Largely less educated, Hispanic workers are concentrated in relatively low-skill occupations, earning less than the average for all U.S. workers.

“‘America’s communities have become divided between economic winners and losers,’ said Daniel Lichter, a Cornell University sociologist and past president of the Population Association of America. ‘Increasingly, Hispanics begin life’s race at a decided disadvantage, raising the specter of new Hispanic ghettos and increasing isolation.'”

Might this have something to do with the government-driven high cost of living? With a public education system designed to protect the interests of adult employees, not struggling students? With environmental policies more concerned about snail darters than about getting water to agricultural fields to they can employ destitute farm workers?

Bingo, bingo and bingo.

CA ruling class devoted to promoting class inequality

Joel Kotkin has been writing about this dichotomy for years:

“Even before the economic downturn, California was moving toward greater class inequality, but the Great Recession exacerbated the trend. From 2007 to 2010, according to a recent study by the liberal-leaning Public Policy Institute of California, income among families in the 10th percentile of earners plunged 21 percent. Nationwide, the figure was 14 percent. In the much wealthier 90th percentile of California earners, income fell far less sharply: 5 percent, only slightly more than the national 4 percent drop. Further, by 2010, the families in the 90th percentile had incomes 12 times higher than the incomes of families in the 10th—the highest ratio ever recorded in the state, and significantly higher than the national ratio.

“It’s also worth noting that in 2010, the California 10th-percentile families were earning less than their counterparts in the rest of the United States—$15,000 versus $16,300—even though California’s cost of living was substantially higher. A more familiar statistic signaling California’s problems is its unemployment rate, which is now the nation’s second-highest, right after Nevada’s. Of the eight American metropolitan areas where the joblessness rate exceeds 15 percent, seven are in California, and most of them have substantial minority and working-class populations. …

“Yet while the working and middle classes struggle, California’s most elite entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are thriving as never before. …

“One reason for California’s widening class divide is that, for a decade or longer, the state’s progressives have fostered a tax environment that slows job creation, particularly for the middle and working classes. …

“Still more troubling to California employers is the state’s regulatory environment. California labor laws, a recent U.S. Chamber of Commerce study revealed, are among the most complex in the nation. …. In addition to these measures, California has imposed some of the most draconian environmental laws in the country … .”

The Central Valley’s ‘manmade drought’

What does this mindset yield? For one region, catastrophe:

“The man-made drought in California is no secret. Burdensome environmental regulations restricting water pumping in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta have contributed to hundreds of thousands of acres of fertile farmland going fallow in recent years.

“During California’s 2007-2009 drought, the Democratic majority and the Obama administration stood on the sidelines while farmers were forced to forgo planting, joblessness rose and families stood in food lines. “

Read more about the “man-made drought” here.

By Chris Reed

The feudalization of California that Joel Kotkin has written about so smartly for years just keeps accelerating. Wealthy coastal professionals and public employees with deep job security and high pay simply don’t care that the high cost of housing and the lack of decent-paying private-sector jobs are driving away middle- and low-income individuals and families by the hundreds of thousands.

Allysia Finley recently wrote about this phenomenon for the Wall Street Journal in a piece headlined “The Reverse Joads of California”:

“During the Great Depression, some 1.3 million Americans — epitomized by the Joad family in John Steinbeck’s ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ — flocked to California from the heartland. To keep out the so-called Okies, the state enacted a law barring indigent migrants (the law was later declared unconstitutional). Los Angeles even set up a border patrol on the city limits. Soon the state may need to build a fence to keep latter-day Joads from leaving.”

Now historian Walter Russell Mead is detailing how this progressive contempt for the less affluent is combining with the brown energy boom in red states to change basic population patterns in the U.S.:

“The US Census Bureau reports that the Great Plains and Texas are experiencing the country’s most rapid population growth. Thanks to the energy boom, strong hiring growth, rising home prices, and other factors, the Northeast and Midwest are bleeding domestic migrants bound for cities like Austin, Orlando, Phoenix, Denver, and Raleigh.”

One in 25 Americans moved to a different county in 2011, the highest figure in several years. It likely would have been far higher had not so many families been rendered immobile by being underwater on their mortgages.

Social justice = protecting public employees, causes of rich liberals

We’re accustomed to California leading the nation and the world, but the growing feudalization in blue states is a perverse example. It underscores a point that can’t be made enough: The party that supposedly cares about social justice instead often uses minorities as props to protect and advance the interests of its affluent liberal professional elites and its secure, well-paid public employees.

That’s bad enough. What’s appalling is how — at least in California — many elected Latinos don’t mind being props for the most powerful Democratic special interests.

The epitome of this phenomenon: Assembly Speaker John Perez. The Los Angeles Democrat’s primary role? Being the enforcer of a diseased education status quo that values teachers infinitely more than students, especially struggling minorities.

By Chris Reed

Over the weekend, the U-T San Diego had a story about the Texas vs. California business-climate debate. It featured an astounding claim from Gov. Jerry Brown’s top economics adviser:

“California provides a higher level of service than other states, said Kish Rajan, director of California Gov. Jerry Brown’s Office of Business and Economic Development, Go-Biz.

“Rajan defended the state’s tax rates, saying they fund key services and are a known quantity to businesses who can budget for them. But, he said, there is work to be done on overlapping and confusing regulations.

“’I think that a lot of things that these states are selling are lower costs, lower costs, lower costs, and our mantra in California is we’re not in a race to the bottom with any other state,’ he said. ‘We have found a way in our state to have very high quality, very high value. We’ve proven that you can have a successful economy and still preserve the environment and look after workers and protect consumers and look after the public health.’”

No, you aren’t hallucinating. I didn’t make up the part that I boldfaced.  Jerry Brown’s economics guru really did describe California as having a “successful economy.” I laughed up a storm at that. But if I were without a job in our rotten economy, or had a spouse, parent or kid who had been hunting for work without success for years, I would be infuriated.

Brown administration blithely indifferent to economic suffering

Here’s part of my U-T San Diego editorial reacting to this blithe ignorance and indifference from the Brown administration:

“So the Golden State has a ‘successful economy’? Really?

“California is in its longest sustained stretch of high unemployment since the depression. Its jobless rate has been higher than 8 percent since September 2008. For 52 months, there have been at least 1.5 million people in this state actively seeking work who can’t find jobs. And those numbers don’t even reflect the ‘underemployed’ – those with part-time jobs – and the hundreds of thousands of people who have given up looking for work. In January, the state’s unemployment rate was 9.8 percent, among the worst of any state and significantly higher than the national average of 7.9 percent.

“Rajan’s comments make clear the immense disconnect between the powerful wing of California’s Democratic coalition – urban professionals, academics, public employees and those in the entertainment industry – and the coalition’s ignored wing – poor and lower-middle-income residents who struggle to find work and make a living in our expensive state.

“California has a ‘successful economy’ for those who have jobs. Those who can’t find full-time work? Jerry Brown says, ‘Let them eat cake.’”

Joel Kotkin, the brilliant Los Angeles demographer and a Democrat himself, has written about his party’s indifference to the poor and minorities and its hostility to capitalism for years. Here’s how to judge whether California most influential Democrats will like a policy proposal: Does it make a thrill go up the legs of the denizens of the faculty lounge? If not, who cares?

By John Seiler

In another incisive article, Joel Kotkin writes how economic power in America is shifting from high-tax, highly unionized states, including California, to the freer, more business-friendly states of the U.S. South:

“The common media view of the South is as a regressive region, full of overweight, prejudiced, exploited and undereducated numbskulls. This meme was perfectly captured in this Bill Maher-commissioned video from Alexandra Pelosi, the New York-based daughter of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.”

Nancy Pelosi, of course, comes from California and is the poster-girl for what the late Jeanne Kirkpatrick called “San Francisco Democrats.” By herself, as House Speaker in 2010, Pelosi scared millions of Americans into voting GOP, thus losing the House for Democrats. The causes of the South rising again:

“demographic trends, economic growth patterns, state business climates, flows of foreign investment and, finally and most surprisingly, a shift of educated workers and immigrants to an archipelago of fast-growing urban centers.

“Perhaps the most persuasive evidence is the strong and persistent inflow of Americans to the South. The South still attracts the most domestic migrants of any U.S. region. Last year, it boasted six of the top eight states in terms of net domestic migration — Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, South Carolina and Georgia. Texas and Florida alone gained 250,000 net migrants. The top four losers were deep blue New York, Illinois, New Jersey and California.”

At the federal level, Republicans sell out their supporters; hence the massive Jan. 1 tax increase they brokered with President Obama. But at the local and state levels, Republican are appreciably better than Democrats. In California, of course, Republicans are close to being an extinct species, leaving Democrats it total control and out of control.

“Perhaps more importantly, these states are nurturing families, in contrast to the Great Lakes states, the Northeast and California. Texas, for example, has increased its under 10 population by over 17% over the past decade; all the former confederate states, outside of Katrina-ravaged Mississippi and Louisiana, gained between 5% and 10%. On the flip side, under 10 populations declined in Illinois, Michigan, New York and California. Houston, Austin, Dallas, Charlotte, Atlanta and Raleigh also saw their child populations rise by at least twice the 10% rate of the rest country over the past decade while New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston and Chicago areas experienced declines.”

Remember how the Proposition 30 tax increase was sold by Gov. Jerry Brown as being “for the children”? Actually, the population figures show, high taxes are anti-children because they make it difficult for parents even to afford children.

“It is more likely that the culture of the increasingly child-free northern tier and the slow-growth coasts will, to evoke the past, be the ones gone with the wind.”

Gov. Jerry likes to advertise California as a dynamic, future-oriented place. He attacks nay-sayers as “declinists.” But he’s living in his 1970s past. His own policies — massive increases in taxes, spending and regulations — have tied California down.

The future lies in the low-tax, low-regulation South.

By Chris Reed

As a libertarian believer in free minds and free markets, I’ve watched for decades the uneasy coalition in the Republican Party of libertarians/libertarian lites and determined social conservatives. What the former hold most dear isn’t remotely what the latter does.

But in the California Democratic Party, we have at least as strange a coalition, one that has achieved enduring and near-hegemonic power over the Golden State. Its dominant wings are public employee union members, white liberal environmentalists and often-poor Latinos. The priorities of the first two groups are wildly different than those of the last group.

This is why former state Sen. Gloria Romero has for years pointed out the insanity of Latinos allying with a Democratic establishment that values teachers unions over minority students. Unfortunately for Latinos, pols like John Perez would rather keep climbing the career ladder than take on teachers unions that increasingly use crude “Bell Curve”-style rationales to explain why minorities don’t do as well as whites in public education.

Now along comes another Los Angeles Democrat, albeit of a different pedigree, to point out more of what’s crazy about the Democratic coalition. It’s the very sharp Joel Kotkin:

“[M]inority representatives in Sacramento –- with few exceptions -– consistently vote against the interests of their own constituents on issues such as water allocations in the Central Valley or regulations that boost energy and housing prices. In their clamor to join the ‘progressive’ team, they, in effect, are placing the California ‘dream’ outside the reach of the state’s heavily minority working class.

“It’s almost surreal to see people who represent impoverished East Los Angeles and Fresno, for example, vote exactly the same way as those who represent rich, white and older voters in Marin County and Westside Los Angeles. You don’t have to watch ‘Downton Abbey’ to see ‘upstairs, downstairs’ politics. Despite mouthing progressive rhetoric, California’s minority legislators seem intent of creating an increasingly feudalized California.”

A few Latino Democratic lawmakers appear to care about small businesses. Lou Correa of Orange County, for example, often talks the talk. But comparisons between how the California Democratic coalition functions and what it values and the Democratic coalitions in other megastates couldn’t be more telling.

America’s (not California’s) norm: Bipartisan interest in creating jobs

In Texas, plenty of Democratic politicians, white and Latino alike, care about promoting the state’s energy, aerospace and farming interests. In Florida, there are many Democratic lawmakers who work to keep tourism strong and to make the other Sunshine State a fulcrum in U.S. trade with the Caribbean and Latin America. In New York, from Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Sen. Charles Schumer on down, there are plenty of Democratic lawmakers who want the Empire State to remain the capital of world finance, banking and publishing.

But here in California, the most high-profile Democrat bewailing the state’s business climate is Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has as much real power as a Siskiyou County supervisor.

In Texas, it’s not hard to find pro-growth Latino Democrats like Rep. Henry Cuellar, who represents a heavily Latino district that extends from the San Antonio suburbs to the border town of McAllen.

There are no Henry Cuellars in the California Legislature or congressional delegation. If we had a few more, then we wouldn’t be on our way to being a 21st-century version of a feudal state, in which a minority of privileged elites (mostly white) enjoy affluence while the majority (mostly nonwhite) struggle to get by.

Joel Kotkin, a New Yorker by birth, a lifelong Democrat, a truth-seeking public intellectual and a Californian since 1971, gets this.

People like George Skelton? They’ve never met anyone who isn’t for higher taxes. Sheesh.

We don’t just need more Cuellars. We need more Kotkins.