From San Francisco's KRON-4 TV, August 15:
California’s unemployment rate increased slightly in July and is now the highest of any state in the nation. California added 15,000 nonfarm jobs in July, according to the Employment Development Department, pushing the unemployment rate up 0.1% to 5.5%, which is higher than that of any other state and higher than the national average of 4.2%.
July’s job gains follow a downward-revised job loss of 9,500 for June, the EDD said.
California’s 15,000 job gains accounted for 20.5% of the 73,000 total jobs gained nationally last month, notably stronger than the state’s 11.3% share of jobs nationally. California also saw its unemployment rate increase 0.1 percent in July, mirroring the national increase of 0.1%....
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Bringing to mind the outro from an April 2022 post, "California has the lowest literacy rate of any state, data suggests" which was a link to one of the most bizarre, triumphalist, eliminationist misreadings of policy and politics that you are likely to find anywhere. And for some reason investment advisors were recommending it and passing it around:
....I bring up all this history because the use of eliminationist talk is a direct precursor to genocide. Which makes the series of Medium posts by Peter Leyden and Ruy Teixeira back in 2017-2018 so interesting.
The Great Lesson of California in America’s New Civil War
Why there’s no bipartisan way forward at this juncture in our history — one side must win
By Peter Leyden and Ruy Teixeira
The next time you call for bipartisan cooperation in America and long for Republicans and Democrats to work side by side, stop it. Remember the great lesson of California, the harbinger of America’s political future, and realize that today such bipartisan cooperation simply can’t get done.
In this current period of American politics, at this juncture in our history, there’s no way that a bipartisan path provides the way forward. The way forward is on the path California blazed about 15 years ago.
In the early 2000s, California faced a similar situation to the one America faces today. Its state politics were severely polarized, and state government was largely paralyzed. The Republican Party was trapped in the brain-dead orthodoxies of an ideology stuck in the past. The party was controlled by zealous activists and corrupt special interests who refused to face up to the reality of the new century. It was a party that refused to work with the Democrats in good faith or compromise in any way.
The solution for the people of California was to reconfigure the political landscape and shift a supermajority of citizens — and by extension their elected officials — under the Democratic Party’s big tent. The natural continuum of more progressive to more moderate solutions then got worked out within the context of the only remaining functioning party. The California Democrats actually cared about average citizens, embraced the inevitable diversity of 21st-century society, weren’t afraid of real innovation, and were ready to start solving the many challenges of our time, including climate change.
California today provides a model for America as a whole. This model of politics and government is by no means perfect, but it is far ahead of the nation in coming to terms with the inexorable digital, global, sustainable transformation of our era. It is a thriving work in progress that gives hope that America can pull out of the political mess we’re in. California today provides a playbook for America’s new way forward. It’s worth contemplating as we enter 2018, which will be a critical election year.....
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