Poverty Flats

If there was ever a more vivid example of what extremism can do, it was what Redding went through the past six years.  We endured a period of Tea Party majority on our city council that just about broke the city.

The Tea Party is a right wing organization that borders on fascism.  Their guiding principle is never compromise on anything, they are always right, the left is an enemy that has to be destroyed and compromise is impossible because of their Constitutional driven principles.

The truth is that they are bankrolled by right wing corporations, the Koch Brothers and others, who have declared war on  participatory    democracy in the United States.

So Redding wound up ranking almost dead last in a Gallup Poll concerning the worst places in America to live:  and the poll was taken from Redding residents.  The right wing mayor at the time actually tried to invite Gallup to Redding a second time, desperate to change the  truth.

Redding traditionally has used a bi-partisan, actually non-partisan approach to running the city.  It uses a City Manager approach and has been highly regarded across the state as a well run bureacracy in so far as public administration is concerned.

In short, Redding works.  Cadd, Jones and to a certain extent Bossetti were able in a short time to undo much of that.

Selected right wing fanatics (I know one of them well) stormed city council meetings to berate the City Manager, call for key official's firing and made the meetings so miserable the Council voted to put public comments at the END of the meeting.

Look, The Tea Party does not believe in conventional government.  They believe that to dismantle government by starving in to death by cutting taxes is good; even if this means less public safety.  Councilman Jones even went so far as publically calling for the firing of the city attorney AND the city manager.

He also championed making Redding a charter city, with a politically powerful mayor, conveniently timed to possibly take effect when HE would become the mayor.  Thankfully it failed.

And Dick Dickerson, a true public servant in every way, lost by a few votes to Mr. Cadd, who then turned around and blew up the city council's remaining ability to work together.

The citizens of Redding, in the ruins of what as once a well run city, finally threw the bums out; only Cadd remains unfortunately.

This my fellow citizens is what extremism can do.  This is what bad government looks like.  This is what gets Redding rated almost last as a nice place to live.  This is what makes Redding what it once was:  "Poverty Flats".

Had enough yet?