Arnold isn’t tough, he’s a coward

By Steven T. Jones

I’ve had it with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s action hero bullshit, wherein he masks his cowardly failures with a tough-talking veneer. The latest example is his campaign’s (yes, the termed out governor’s Join Arnold campaign team is still quite active) latest missive on California’s $24 billion budget deficit deadlock titled "Tough Times, Tough Choices."

“To close California's budget gap, the Governor has proposed deep cuts to education, public safety, and health and human services. He has also made clear his commitment to making government more efficient and to finding innovative ways to stretch taxpayer dollars. Tough choices must be made to get the state through this crisis, but if these tough choices are not made, the state will again be on the brink of insolvency,” they write.

Ending public health programs, robbing schools, closing parks, letting infrastructure deteriorate, and weakening the state’s ability to keep citizens safe isn’t tough. It’s the act of a coward, a bully beating up on the weak to appear strong while cowering before the actual tough guys. Taking on his political base and advocating higher taxes on millionaires – which this state desperately needs to do – that would be tough.

Instead, Arnold chooses to push this once great state to the brink of collapse, just as rich conservatives have been trying to do for a generation or more, following the Milton Friedman playbook whose disastrous results Naomi Klein chronicled so thoroughly and chillingly in The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, which is one of the most important books of this new century.

Arnold is mindlessly following in the tradition of such murderers of civil society as Augusto Pinochet, Boris Yeltsin, Margaret Thatcher, George W. Bush, Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozado, Deng Xiaoping, Paul Bremer, and the countless neocon ideologues from the Chicago School of Economics, USAID, the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and other agencies that force radical “structural readjustments” on otherwise functional societies, making the rich richer and the desperately poor more numerous.

Our only hope at this point is a dysfunctional California Legislature, many members of which are trying to do the right thing, but are held hostage by the two-third vote rule and other voter-approved restrictions that big money interests using divisive scare tactics have tricked Californians into approving over the years. That, and the ever-present risk of popular revolt if they push too far and we sink too low. Because neither of these guys is inspiring much hope that there are actual leaders on the horizon.

Source: SFBG Politics RSS Feed