Dear Editor: This letter is in response to David Mathews letter, titled “Neel Kashkari” in the Thursday Sept. 18 edition of the Patriot.

Mr. Mathews argued that Gov. Brown is in part responsible for the drought, and refuses to “seed” the clouds in order to make it rain. Furthermore, Mr. Mathews seems to be under the impression that Mr. Kashkari has some special potion to make it rain. I love that on the same page as Mr. Mathews letter was published there is an article that reads, “Failures in Math and Science Education Beginning to Add Up”.

It is clear that Mr. Mathews does not understand that cloud seeding is not a reliable or effective way to make it rain. I would refer Mathews to the Wiki article on the internet about “cloud seeding”. Why wouldn’t Gov. Brown want to impress the voters by making it rain at the last minute just before the all-important November election? Can you imagine what a great trick that would be? Any politician who could pull that off would seem omnipotent and could probably rule the universe.

In fact, Kashkari loves to brag about being an aerospace engineer, I’d love to see this big mouth make it rain if he could. And I am so tired of hearing about the bullet train. Mr. Mathews sounds like he is reading directly from a Neel Kashkari script as he tries to disabuse the voter of his idea. Mr. Kashkari isn’t going to make our lives better. He’s a newb. He’s a greenhorn and a smarmy know-it-all, with a showman’s perfunctory charm. All of whose answers to any challenge in a debate or from the media is met with the greatest superficiality.

He’s a Washington insider with a nick name well earned, “The 700 Billion Dollar Man”, because he’s for corporate welfare like the now embattled governor of Texas, Rick Perry, who offered Toyota of Irvine a $40,000,000 incentive to switch states while neglecting the poorest people in his state. And he is against a living wage for the working class. He argues that it would create fewer jobs. He plays on the ignorance of people who don’t understand the benefits of a living wage, and don’t read the award-winning nationally renowned New Keynesian economist, Paul Krugman’s Op-ed piece in the New York Times.

He tries to portray himself as sympathetic to immigrants but clearly supports laws that would unnecessarily abuse them. We are a country that still has child labor on tobacco farms in North Carolina. And those workers are immigrants who get paid very little and are exploited for their desperation. There is no depth to this man. He is simply a political opportunist who expects Californians to let him come in an make us the guinea pigs for his experimental governorship and then move on to the presidential campaign for the White House.

He is the quintessential malignant narcissistic politician out for himself and nobody else.

While I am not satisfied with all of governor Brown’s policies, he is a man who has a well-defined agenda and experience that can’t be disregarded except by the most intellectually disingenuous. I would not venture to replace him with a swaggering cocksure Ivy league blow hard like Mr. Kashkari.

Lastly, Mr. Mathews is somewhat in error in his point that Kashkari is not supported by the GOP. Mario Guerra has endorsed Kashkari and the Republican old guard has endorsed Guerra for Senate.  And that is the sneaky way to make your candidate look like an outsider to a growing cynicism among voters in America.

Do not believe everything you think you see spun by the spin-doctors of professional political trickery.  It’s all a game to Karl Rove and the Koch Bros. The world is theirs to own. They just need the right suckers to believe. And the right cooperation from the right patsies in the media who do their bidding. Their antics should conjure the ghost of Edward R. Murrow to want to rise up from his grave and put his cigarette out in the collective eyes of all those newspaper editors that play the game of keeping its readers in the dark and stupid for all time sake.

Greta Campbell

Downey

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Published: Sept. 25, 2014 - Volume 13 - Issue 24