Rosalea Barker: Pigs vs ponies

Excuse me while I wipe a tear from my eye. In his final State of the State address, the CA Governor has just delivered a heartfelt plea for us to feel sorry for the 144k Californians who contribute 50 percent of the state’s taxes for the benefit of the other 37 million of us.

And excuse me, also, while I congratulate myself for my dumbfounded incredulousness as I listened to Schwarzenegger rail against how the state spends 35 percent more on prisons than it does on education. Could I believe my ears? Here he was saying that he’s going to propose an amendment to the CA Constitution so that “never again do we spend more on prisons than on higher education.”

I was right to be incredulous; the concomitant to passing that constitutional amendment is that California privatizes its prisons.

Talk about pigs vs ponies!

The address to both houses of the CA legislature was carried live on a local TV station at 10am this morning. I was able to watch it because I’m on two weeks unpaid leave from my job at a place of higher education due to the cuts that have previously been made to California’s education budget. For thousands of people like myself, who didn’t lose their jobs in the first round of job cuts but faced uncertainty about the future, the possibility that they might not lose their incomes further down the line would obviously be a welcome one.

But to tie it to the privatization of prisons is a low blow to the research produced by those very universities which shows that prison privatization results in more incarceration and more recidivism, not less. What possible interest would a private company have in reducing the need for its services?

The pigs and ponies analogy that Schwarzenegger opened his address with refers to the cooperation and teamwork of two animals that his family has. The pony knocks a can of food off the top of a dog’s kennel and then the pot belly pig uses its snout to pry off the lid. The speech was written so that the first thought that came to mind when Schwarzenegger referred to the pony and pig was that he was going to compare them to the legislature in a bad way. Instead he used it as an example of what teamwork can do.

But there are other ways of looking at that analogy. “Pig” is almost a universal symbol for law enforcement officers; “pony” suggests something that lower-income parents might wish they could give their children. The incessant theme used by the promoters of higher education is that if your children get a college education they’ll be able to get well-paying jobs and buy their children the things you could not buy them. Yeah, right!

Astoundingly, Schwarzenegger also said that there will be funding in his new budget to train 140,000 Californians and to create or retain 100,000 jobs, seemingly oblivious to simple arithmetic. What will the other 40k newly trained workers do? Turn to crime to put bread on their table and end up shoveling out the stables of the 50-percenters as agreed in the state’s contract with Prisons’R’Us?

And let’s not even get onto the subject of the proposed water bond, except to say that river diversion has never ended well. Just ask Hercules.

--PEACE—

rosalea.barker@gmail.com

© Scoop Media