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Fresno Bee (California), July 19, 2008: Opinion: Feds, state won’t pull Valley out of poverty

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07/19/08 23:19:20

The business of the San Joaquin Valley certainly isn’t business.

It isn’t even farming, although we pretend that it is.

No sir. The business of the Valley is poverty. Study after study confirms it. Last week brought another one, this one showing that Jim Costa’s 20th Congressional District ranks last on a national scorecard measuring income, education and life expectancy.

A Brookings Institution study concluded in 2005 that Fresno had the highest concentration of poverty of America’s 50 biggest cities. That year, a congressional study described the Valley as one of the most economically depressed regions in the nation. Each time the grim news is delivered, somebody — Costa this time, Rep. Dennis Cardoza three years ago — says the Valley isn’t getting its fair share of federal help.

Know what? We’ll never get what we need from Washington or Sacramento, because keeping us poor suits their purpose. Concentrating poverty in a geographically isolated region such as the Valley or Appalachia enables power brokers in power centers to go about their business without seeing the despair. Let’s be candid: Few people outside the Valley have ever cared about conditions here. And now they’ve got bigger problems — a troubled economy, soaring gas prices, global warming and wars on two fronts.

Moreover, the Valley has borne the brunt of welfare cuts pushed by Republicans and signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1996. What was touted as reform really was the unstringing of the social safety net. More than a decade later, half of the households in Costa’s district are trying to survive on $322.44 a week — or less. That’s not progress. It’s calculus for a human train wreck.

Education is the path to success, and it can be the Valley’s salvation. But only if we provide college graduates jobs to match their skills and a first-class place to live. Young people finish college and seek their fortunes elsewhere because the business of the Valley is poverty.

Middle-class jobs mostly are tied to government. The rest of the state imports our crops and water and ships its goods through here. We get its garbage, sludge, diesel fumes and prisoners. What a deal.

We constantly sell ourselves short because we’re desperate for jobs. The desperation shows in our sprawl-inducing planning and our constantly advertising the Valley as a cheap place to live. The result: We’re the preferred refuge for the poor, the uneducated and the stressed. And we’re left to pick up the tab while Sacramento and Washington only pretend to care.

Businesses struggle because families are broke. Families move because Mom can’t pay the rent. Thousands turn to drugs for comfort or profit. Taxes that are supposed to provide amenities are used to prop up our enormous poverty industrial complex.

If you don’t believe that education, quality of life and earnings are closely linked, consider this: George Radanovich’s 19th District and Kevin McCarthy’s 22nd District ranked considerably higher in the most recent study. Radanovich’s district includes Fresno’s River Park area, Yosemite National Park and both Fresno State and California State University, Stanislaus. The district’s foothills and mountains are home to thousands of equity refugees and retirees enjoying the good life. McCarthy’s district includes Kern County — a leader in wind, solar and geothermal technologies — and San Luis Obispo County, a haven for tourists and retirees on the Central Coast.

It was in the mid-1990s that the Valley was labeled “the Appalachia of the West.” The term should’ve been a wake-up call to address our problems and build a region appealing to successful, educated people. Instead, we’ve cried for help that isn’t coming and continued a business plan reliant on cheap, uneducated labor and environmental destruction.

Unless we make big changes, the world’s problems will keep on rolling downhill — until they finally and unmercifully come to rest here.

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