Some holiday joy for the New Year...

On the eve of the announcement of record holiday payouts to Wall Street investment firms, Governor Schwarzenegger announced a fiscal emergency and a 10 percent overall budget cut that he hopes will take place immediately. The slashing is the result of the faux-free market anti-tax political ideology that has firmly taken root in the American consciousness since the advent of Reaganomics along with the spinelessness and avarice of the so-called leaders of our once-great nation.

It is the job of the Legislative Analysis Office (LAO) to go over the governor’s budget proposal after its release in preparation for the “May revise.” When Schwarzenegger rolled out his budget plan for 2007, the LAO criticized it for rosy projections that depended on revenues which never materialized due to decades of tax cuts and a precipitous economic plunge.

For anyone surprised by this, it would be instructive to remember the days of Enron and the “Dot-Bomb” era, where wildly positive fiscal predictions gave way to crisis and collapse. Millions of people lost retirement funds while the perpetrators of the crimes escaped unscathed with hundreds of million dollars in ill-gotten booty.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is not some kind of benevolent moderate, and anyone who believes that needs to drop the rose-colored bipartisan glasses. The Guvornator is pure free-market Conservative, even if he slips up and shows glimpses of a social conscience from time to time.

On May 24, 2001 as he was revving up for the recall election, Schwarzenegger met with the late former Enron Chairman Kenny-boy Lay, über-free-marketeer Richard Riordan, and corporate raider Michael “Greed is Good” Milken, who was touting a deregulation plan that purported to solve the state’s energy crisis, but was actually massive theft. From the beginning, he’s been surrounded by former governor Pete Wilson and his minions.

Schwarzenegger has been trying to privatize the public school system of California since he took office, via the Compact for Higher Education and budget cuts that have forced the K-12 system to survive on a program of bake sales and overworked teachers who spend good portions of their incomes buying school supplies.

It seems as if tax cuts for the upper levels of earners have not created the free market utopia that we’ve been promised, and our infrastructure is eroding.

This is the real agenda for “free markets”: the transfer of wealth from the public into the private sector for the enrichment of a select few, including the politicians who enable the transactions. We’re going trillions of dollars in debt to fund tax cuts and war profiteers, yet we can’t — or won’t — spend the money necessary to fund our once-great system of public education.

We keep hearing the myth about the American Dream and upward mobility, but the facts on the ground belie that faded ideal. The wealth of our nation is being stolen by a handful of über-rich, modern day robber barons, even as our schools, health care, and infrastructure crumble around our ears.

On the upside, an ill-informed and uneducated populace is a lot easier to control.