California: America’s first failed state?

California: America’s first failed state?

On Sunday mornings at Glide Memorial United Methodist Church in the rough-edged Tenderloin district of San Francisco, the sanctuary is always rocking to old-school gospel music.

“It's so good to come together,” Pastor Cecil Williams declares. His is a diverse congregation - white and African American, gay and straight, young and elderly.

For four decades, Pastor Williams has been an outspoken advocate for the city’s poor and marginalized. On one bright October Sunday recently, he preached a sermon on compassion and the need for social justice.

“You affirm who you are when you stand up for others in need,” Williams told his flock. “And you can say, we are going to change this old world to a new world.”

Hard times

But it is a harsh new world in California these days. A state once synonymous with opportunity and prosperity, sunshine and surf, Hollywood and Disneyland, has fallen on bitterly hard times.

The evidence is no further away than the church basement, where free meals are prepared for homeless and hungry people like Robert Shirley. He’s been homeless - on and off - for months, he says. 

“California was the land of opportunity. You could make it out here,” Shirley says. “Hey, I’m sorry but California is not that way anymore.”

The number of meals served here has jumped 21 per cent since last year. Williams says the free kitchen’s clientele has changed drastically.

“They were people who were carrying briefcases, people who were dressed in suits, people who were dressed up very nicely and people who had been a part of the middle class,” he says. “And we were seeing them come through the lines. And that of course was shocking.”

Sinking state

California is the world’s eighth-largest economy, but its unemployment rate is over 12 percent — the highest in 70 years. Millions of people lost their homes when the housing bubble burst. Millions more have been thrust into poverty by the recession.

In July, the state legislature haggled for weeks over how to close a $26 billion budget gap. Instead of increasing taxes of corporations or the wealthy, the budget deal that emerged to be signed by Republican Governor Arnold Schwartzenegger ordered deep spending cuts, laying off tens of thousands of state workers.

Reduced funding for education, coupled with big tuition increases, sparked a student and faculty strike at California’s public universities. Programs for ex-prison inmates and parolees have been slashed. And the social safety net of healthcare and services for the poor, children and elderly - the least powerful and least vocal members of society - has been systematically shredded.

“The people that are going to be affected first and foremost will be the poor, those who are in great need,” Williams says sadly. “They are not considered to be human beings.”

Abandoning the poor

In Pleasant Hill, a suburb outside of San Francisco, I met a remarkable young woman names Amy Fedeli. Only 24 years old, she has deferred her dream of college and a career in nursing to support her 75-year-old grandmother Margaret and 7-year-old niece Emilia. She’s keeping faith with her loved ones in a state that is systematically abandoning its poorest and least powerful people.

Margaret, who suffers from a neurological disorder and mild dementia, is too frail to be left home alone while Amy goes to her job at a medical records company. So she attends a state-funded adult day care program, where she gets physical and occupational therapy, health checkups, and a chance to interact with other people and keep her mental faculties sharp.

But as part of the effort to pare down the budget deficit, California has cut many programs for the elderly poor. New rules would limit seniors to three days a week in adult day care. That’s a big problem for the Fedeli family. Without the daily care she gets at the senior center, Amy says, Margaret might not survive for long.

“She would probably end up in a nursing home,” Amy says. “She would probably pass. She would probably die, God forbid.”  To care for Margaret, Amy would have to quit her job, leaving the little family without any income. Why has she accepted so much responsibility at such a young age? “It's family, that’s all I can say,” Amy says. ”Your family, you stick with them — that’s all.”

A legal challenge has temporarily halted some of the cuts to elderly care. But Governor Schwartzenegger is trying to overturn the court ruling and re-institute the cuts.

'Obscene' politics

Donna Calame, who runs a state program that provides in-home care for seniors, told me the attitude of Schwartzenegger and the legislature makes her livid. “For me, its really obscene,” she said in an interview. “We are a rich state. I think it’s because of the wealth in California that, to me, makes the choices that have been made this year so morally reprehensible.”
 
Critics say California’s politics are so deadlocked, its government so dysfunctional, it may become United States’ first failed state. The state legislature is hamstrung by a law requiring a two-thirds majority vote to raise taxes and pass a budget. That makes compromise practically impossible.

 I asked political analyst Sherry Bebitch Jeffe of the University of Southern California what’s wrong with California.

“What is the matter with California is, that we have become politically so polarized that we can’t agree on something that will make this state work,” Bebitch Jeffe laments. “Somewhere, somehow, the public good, as a concept of governance, has disappeared in this state.”

The failure of California’s government has bred profound cynicism among its people. Back at the soup kitchen, Robert Shirley has some blunt advice for the people in charge of the Golden State.

 “If our politicians don’t get their heads out of their asses, this state is going to be — let’s put it this way: some of those third-world countries are going to look a lot better than California.”