Costa Mesa, CA - ground zero for GOP's anti-government movement

[Liberal_in_LA]

In Costa Mesa, are extremists playing politics with people's lives?
Critics of the plan to slash half the city's staff say proponents are more concerned with taking an ideological stand than with saving money.

These are not the best of times to be a public employee in America. From coast to coast, their paychecks, their pensions and their benefits are under attack. To my knowledge, though, no one's being pummeled like the clock punchers who toil for Costa Mesa in Orange County.

If the City Council gets its way, half the town's employees will be fired. About 200 pink slips have gone out, and come September, private contractors may be brought in to replace maintenance workers, dispatchers, mechanics, firefighters and other workers providing essential city services.

Councilman Jim Righeimer, whose strafing of public employees helped get him elected last November, told me pensions are rising and revenues are shrinking.
"We have no money in our budget," he said.

But when I visited Costa Mesa this week, I heard a bit of a different story. Yes, people agreed, Costa Mesa has budget deficit problems like lots of communities. But critics of the outsourcing plan, including some Republicans, think the tough talk is about philosophy more than about numbers, and that extremists are playing politics with people's lives.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-lopez-costamesa-20110605,0,863526.column

[Newest Reality]

1. Government

was meant, in our Constitution, to be our collective representation, (power) in all things that are involved with our collective agreements as a culture and a society. That has been challenged, morphed and change over the decades, but we should not lose site of that amidst all the rhetoric, media, and distortions.

As we watch the inevitable rise of corporatism, (which ensues from Industrial Age Robber Barons) it is no wonder that their media has conspired and endeavored to influence, and thereby control, the masses as a way to avoid messy, bloody conflicts in their usurping of our wealth, power and rights. We all know that the messy, bloody conflicts are looming at the periphery and this is where we all stand when we know that the stakes are very high and our lives and futures are on the carpet. They know this and so, it is a mutual understanding.

So, we are either going to go with the program and accept the terms of our corporate/state occupation, and then, confer that surrender to our future generations, (possibly forever) or we are going to shake ourselves out of our media-induced stupor and allow ourselves to comprehend what is actually at stake for all classes, save the deadbeat rich. It is really getting to the unavoidable point that we are all in this together, or they turn us all into technologically controlled Serfs who will be given advanced drugs that make them either tolerate, or even love, being lifelong servants to a privileged few for decades or centuries to come.

No matter how impoverished or comfortable you are right now, where do you, as a thinking, feeling human being on a life supporting planet stand?