Georgia on My Mind?

In today's Sacramento Bee, a conservative columnist, former speach writer for Wilson, Reagan; etc., wrote a piece extolling the virtues of Georgia over California, for Georgia's supposed economic vitality versus California's lagging economy. She went on and on about Georgia's gentiel ways, its beautiful mansions....oh how "Gone with the Wind...ish!"

I guess she never drives west from Sacramento anymore to visit Silicon Valley, or the Bay Area, that is roaring back from the recession. Oh, that's right, San Francisco and the Bay Area is liberal territory. She must be talking about rural California, where conservatives rule, and everyone is broke!

Anyway, what follows is a response to her diatribe:

Are you kidding me? You actually deified the South, particularly Georgia, as the place California should be?

What! This is the same Georgia that killed Civil Rights Workers, forced thousands of Cherokees off their ancestral lands, fought for the continuation of slavery, was a bastion of segregation, and today has low wages, poverty and an economy based on third world values.

You wrote longingly about the Confederate Soldier Memorial, with its grand tribute to.....traitors. Yes, that is right, every Confederate Soldier, everyone was technically a traitor. And, those who had been soldiers before the war, broke their solumn pledges to preserve and protect the Constitution of the United States. They were not heros, they were traitors that cost the nation almost 600,000 dead! They cost another 100 years of Jim Crowe, countless lynchings, and agony beyond belief.

Did you read "The Help"?

The engine of California prosperity was two things: in the north the huge federal projects that gave us the Sacramento Valley as the breadbasket of the country; in the south, the huge wartime industry during WWII that morphed into the Defense Industry of today. The Space Race, with its enormous federal infrastructure investment, poured billions into California's economy.

Gold started the boom, mining next, logging, then agriculture and defense spending (lots of it).Through all of this, the state accepted the idea that the government needed to provide the infrastructure for commerce to thrive; so we have (too many) freeways, a K-16 "low cost" educational system; and a university research engine that has revolutionized the world.

Have you visited Silicon Valley lately? Everyday, Stanford, U.C. Berkeley, and the U.C. CSU system pours out thousands of research papers, reinventing us.

If we would listen to them, and embark on new green energy initiatives, solar power;etc., we would be into yet another Golden State boom.

But, thanks to wing-nuts like yourself, who are tying us to the automobile as it plunges us over the oil peak cliff, we are missing the train (literally and figuratively).

Does Georgia have a Silicon Valley, a Sacramento Valley? Your economic values and points of view are deeply flawed, and we are suffering everyday the products of a philosophy that has deregulated and savaged our economy.

Oh, I suppose "tax and spend" policies created the housing bubble, that is the single greatest reason California has not recovered fully from the recession. The housing bubble was a direct result of President Bush's wrongheaded "ownership society" deregulation nonsense. It was not caused by tax and spend...we had huge tax cuts, remember?

The state deficit, that you have the cheek to blame on tax and spend Democrats, is in fact the product of decades of senseless and non-productive tax cuts, that have greatly weakened the infrastructure supporting education, and transportation systems.

Our colleges are turning away the next Steve Jobs everyday. Our schools are overcrowded, class sizes at national highs, and a drop out rate second to none.

You are killing us! Conservatives convinced us in the 1970s, thanks to your patron saint Ronald Reagan, to stop supporting the very political approach that had resulted in decades of prosperity.

But Georgia, and the south, as an example for California to emulate? Really!?

If you like it so much, move there! Please.