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Politics & Government

Colleen O'Connor: Jerry Brown—Smart Guy, Dumb Choices

Gov. Jerry Brown needs to change course quickly. Please.

What is Brown thinking?

California is tanking. Housing has double dipped. Unemployment is in double digits. Renters are doubling up. So, why double down on a losing strategy of more taxes?

Forget the budget. That mess has morphed into a petrified forest of competing interests.

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Change course. Quickly, please.

Stop micro-managing the state legislature. It is dysfunctional.

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Start macro-managing the economy of this state: i.e., its farmland, its water supply, and its high-tech companies. Work with them. Their future needs you now.

California is a nation, not a municipality. Treat it as such. Take a longer view than a single fiscal year. Protect what can make California fabulously rich again—food, water and tech.

Tech, everyone gets. Food and water only the big conglomerates, big countries and big hedge funds get.

China gets it, buying up so much agricultural land and mineral resources in Africa that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned African leaders of a “new colonialism.” Surprise, China was miffed.

Hedge fund speculators get it—increasing their net long positions in farm goods. Corn futures have more than doubled in the past year. Cotton and sugar are up more than 50 percent. More people on the planet means more demand for food, means higher prices.

Monsanto gets it—buying and hoarding seeds to better manage its monopoly on genetically modified “Frankenstein food” in the midst of almost constant threat of a famine caused by demand, drought or floods somewhere on the planet.

Europe gets it. Suffering the worst drought in more than 100 years, France has deployed soldiers to “distribute rations [of expensive hay] to hungry cattle waiting on sun-cracked dirt,” according to BusinessInsider.com. This, in an attempt to prevent cash-strapped farmers from selling off more cattle to slaughterhouses.

Germany is drier than is has been since 1893; England, since 1910.

According to the USDA, a wet spring, plus raging floods in the U.S., will increase food prices by 3 to 4 percent.

Add to this Greenpeace's research about Japan’s radioactive ocean waters (after the Fukushima Nuclear plant meltdown), the globe’s depleted fish supplies, and widespread water pollution (especially in China, where they polluted their way to prosperity) and California looks golden again.

Maximize the advantage. We have resources. Leverage them! 

California has been the No. 1 food and agricultural producer in the United States for 50 consecutive years!

According to the California Department of Food and Agriculture, the state is No. 1 in dairy production; No. 2 in grape production; No. 1 in strawberries (1.4 billion pounds a year); and the producer of more than half of the nation’s fruits, nuts and vegetables.

Our farm exports feed the world. And we have had a fabulous snowpack this year. No way to save it? No way to profit from it (except through tourism)?

As any genuine survivalist, or disaster responder will explain, “you can live three minutes without air, three days without water, three weeks without food.”

That is the mantra that should haunt Gov. Brown—“three days without water, three weeks without food.”

Then position California as a robust nation and as a fierce competitor with China.

Protect, save, support, preserve, export, maintain, grow—whatever works to protect, promote and grown our precious farmlands and water supplies.

The governor’s time is better spent visiting the Central Valley, enjoying the waterfalls at Yosemite, and “California Dreamin’ ” on how to maximize the returns (and, yes, the precious income stream) from California’s new earthly gold rush—safe food and clean water. How better to balance the budget than to protect, produce, export and tax what every human being on the planet needs—food and drinkable water!

Pick a side, either side, then help them all. Local co-ops; organic farmers markets; backyard or community gardens; family farmers; Central Valley growers; vintners; farm workers; land grant trusts; water shed combatants.

California needs a governor just like Brown—a native, with four decades of political experience, superior education, an ability to see the possibilities, and, hopefully, a willingness to pivot toward a richer future for the state.

Surely, the Republicans and the Democrats can agree on this simple survivalist strategy that can produce even more fruits and nuts for the world’s hungry—while simultaneously filling up the state’s depleted coffers with the “gold in them thar hills” and valleys.

Today's riots in China (mostly over food and inflation) and the latest field poll showing a steep decline in voter approval for any tax, suggests that the governor needs to change course quickly.

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