[Bret L]

California: South Africa Revisited?

By Boethius

"What, besides perfect weather, does modern California have in common with Apartheid-era South Africa? More than meets the eye.

That California is in deep financial trouble is no secret. Also no
secret (at least while Lou Dobbs was on the air) is that a major
source of the trouble is the swollen population of low-income
Hispanics who pay no income taxes while needing more social services
than the working-class Americans they displaced.

However, there is more to California’s fiscal nightmare than a
mismatch of falling taxes and rising needs. There is also the
staggering cost of salaries, benefits, and pensions for California’s
unionized public employees, exposed by California journalist Steve
Greenhut in a City Journal essay entitled Plundering California
[November 23, 2009]and in Plunder!, the book-length version.

According to Greenhut, there is no amount of taxes that will bring
solvency to a State where the average pay and benefits package of a
firefighter is $175,000, where it takes years to remove terminated
teachers from the State payroll, and where 80% of police chiefs retire
on "disability".

What has this to do with South Africa? Well, there are many myths
about South Africa, one being that the white Afrikaner population,
descended as they were from the courageous Dutch Voortrekkers, were a
hardy lot of sunburned, Rugby-playing, yeomen farmers. In fact, by the
end of the Apartheid era, most Afrikaners were employed by the
government, dealing with the mounting security and social issues that
one expects would arise in so dysfunctional a society.

While intelligent and ambitious South African whites could find their
way into the highly-paid professional and managerial classes that ran
the Apartheid economy, those who did not own farmland and were not
destined for the upper classes had little opportunity to earn a living
in the private sector, where native African labor was available at
rock-bottom wages. Since it was difficult for the average South
African white to emigrate, the government was truly his employer of
last resort.

Dynamics similar to those that shaped South Africa in the decades
preceding majority rule are today at work in California. The white
workers who once filled 90% of California’s private-sector jobs have
been largely displaced by lower-paid immigrants from Mexico and
elsewhere. African-American workers have probably suffered even more,
as evidenced by a Government Accounting Office report on the use of
Mexican workers to destroy the black janitorial unions in Los Angeles.
(See The Rainbow Coalition Evaporates, by Stephen Malanga.)At the same
time, the number of whites finding employment in the civil service, as
well as the rewards for such work, have risen dramatically.

Given current trends, the only working-class whites left in California
will be retirees and public employees.

This is not to say that the public sector in California has absorbed
even a quarter of the private-sector workforce displaced by
immigration. Even the politically-inflated payrolls described by
Greenhut are not nearly large enough to absorb the displaced
multitudes. However, unlike South Africans, white Californians unable
to land a government job can readily emigrate—for example, to Nevada—
and for the most part have done so. Since 1990 the number of Americans
moving out of California has exceeded the number moving in by more
than three million.

There are many curiosities here. Curiously, but not surprisingly, the
left-wing public service unions, which invariably side against
patriotic immigration reform, enjoy their lavish perks precisely
because entry into their profession is tightly controlled and mostly
closed-off to recent and especially illegal immigrants.

Also curiously, but again not surprising once you think about it: the
gold-plated employment opportunities for California’s civil servants
have grown hand-in-hand with the growing demand for State services—
especially public education, public health, and crime control—
attributable to the very group that drove working-class whites from
the private sector into the hands of the public service unions:
immigrants, legal and illegal, from the Third World.

California’s highly-paid army of teachers, nurses, policemen, firemen,
welfare workers, etc. also explains a gaping hole in the "Sailer
Strategy." As Steve Sailer has persuasively argued, the growth of the
U.S. minority population, at least in the near term, is not a threat
but an opportunity for the GOP. Republicans are generally strongest in
the States (e.g. the South) where the minority population is so large
that the Republican Party, whether it likes it or not, becomes
perceived as the "white Party" by working-class white voters who feel
threatened by affirmative action, guestworkers, gang-related crime,
and the like.

But in spite of Sailer’s irrefutable logic, the theory has not worked
out (yet) in California. Barack Obama got a majority of the white vote
in spite of the State’s having the largest and most radicalized
Hispanic minority in the country.

Polls show that white Americans, including white Californians, are no
more enamored of illegal immigration than they are of racial quotas or
gay marriage. Why then has the GOP been unable to capitalize on
outrage over liberal immigration policies in the very epicenter of
illegal immigration?

Gross stupidity within the California GOP’s leadership is certainly
part of the answer. But California’s rent-seeking public service
unions provide another. What is left of California’s white working
class is largely employed by the State and dependent on the largesse
of the legislature’s Democratic majority.

I do not believe that the rank and file share the radically pro-
immigration politics of their union leaders. Nor do I believe that
they consciously welcome the growth of the immigrant population
because they calculate it increases the demand for their services.
(Why worry about such things if you can’t ever be fired?)

But it seems clear that their own natural inclinations on "social
issues" like immigration, which should make them trend Republican, are
outweighed by the pocketbook issue of keeping the gravy train on
track.

Indeed, the success of the Democrats in dominating a state where they
routinely act against the interest of the white working class may
point the way to the "anti-Sailer Strategy"—a "California Strategy" if
you will—in which permanent political domination by liberal Democrats
is founded upon an “iron triangle” of special interests comprising

(1) wealthy whites whose lifestyles are subsidized by cheap labor in
their businesses and back yards;

(2) Immigrants who cannot resist the liberal Democratic package of
welfare for the working class and affirmative action for the middle
class;

(3) Coddled public service unions led by radicals and populated by
working class whites who have in effect been bribed into going along
with an agenda set by folks who despise them.

The main impediment to widespread imitation of the California strategy
is, well, the example of California. Sounds good in theory, but who
can afford it?

For Western opponents of Apartheid, the stereotypical South African
was wealthy businessman engaged in suppression and exploitation of
poor Blacks. But for most South Africans, the daily reality was
clinging to one’s position in an overstaffed, overpaid, predominantly
white government workforce engaged in managing the social consequences
of an economy constructed on the backs of low-wage nonwhite labor.

How much of this saga will be replayed in the Golden State?"

Boethius [Email him] works in the business world, where any friend of
VDARE.com is advised not to admit it. If you want to know how much
trouble you can get into by offending the orthodoxies of the day, read
The Consolation Of Philosophy.

http://www.vdare.com/boethius/100113_california.htm