DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

We have seen the future, and it sucks.

The Other California: A Flyover State Within a State

9th April 2017

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California may never secede, or divide into different states, but it has effectively split into entities that could not be more different. On one side is the much-celebrated, post-industrial, coastal California, beneficiary of both the Tech Boom 2.0 and a relentlessly inflating property market. The other California, located in the state’s interior, is still tied to basic industries like homebuilding, manufacturing, energy and agriculture. It is populated largely by working- and middle-class people who, overall, earn roughly half that of those on the coast.

Over the past decade or two, interior California has lost virtually all influence, as Silicon Valley and Bay Area progressives have come to dominate both state politics and state policy. “We don’t have seats at the table,” laments Richard Chapman, president and CEO of the Kern Economic Development Corporation. “We are a flyover state within a state.”

Fresno, Bakersfield, Ontario and San Bernardino are rapidly becoming the Bantustans — the impoverished areas designed for Africans under the racist South African regime — in California’s geographic apartheid. Poverty rates in the Central Valley and Inland Empire reach over a third of the population, well above the share in the Bay Area. By some estimates, rural California counties suffer the highest unemployment rate in the country; six of the 10 metropolitan areas in the country with the highest percentage of jobless are located in the central and eastern parts of the state. The interior counties — from San Bernardino to Merced — also suffer the worst health conditions in the state.

2 Responses to “The Other California: A Flyover State Within a State”

  1. debby witt Says:

    Tim, the solution to this is the one that Lex Luthor cam up with in the 1978 Superman movie – blow up the San Andreas fault and everything west of it will fall into the Pacific ocean, making now-central California into the new coastline.

    https://youtu.be/WVLjkrWk_h8

  2. Tim of Angle Says:

    That works for me.