Fred Dicker is the point man for reporting on New York State’s government in America’s Newspaper of Record. He’s a great bread-and-butter journalist, with a calm and deeply well-informed voice about state affairs.

When a guy like that throws up his hands in despair at the condition of government, you know things are really bad. Throw up his hands is what Fred did this weekend, in a scalding piece about the utter, irresponsible misgovernment of the public affairs of 20 million people.

After three decades as a journalist covering state government, if I had to do it all over again, I’d find another job … for New York to wind up like this after 35 years of modern leadership, it’s clear to me that my real job has been to chronicle the devolution — the decay and decline — of New York state.

Public-sector unions are the main culprit, of course. (New York city workers are getting a four percent pay raise this year as per contract. The Mayor is raising taxes to pay for it. In a deep recession.) And if “public sector union” isn’t the stupidest idea the human race has yet come up with, it’s running a close second to the Diversity ideology — the doctrine, I mean, that you should strive to extract as much as possible from the public fisc for your people without any regard to the good of the citizenry at large. You know, via “community organizing” and such.

During the first five months of this year, with the Senate under the control of its first African-American majority leader, Smith, top Democrats bemoaned the lack of minority Senate staffers.
But instead of trying to recruit new hires, they fired nearly 200 almost exclusively white workers and replaced them with a large number of minority employees, many of whom were seen by their fellow workers to be unskilled at their new jobs.
The move produced severe racial tensions, made worse by the fact that, as a high-level Democratic staffer confided, “We’ve been told to only hire minorities.”

Organizations are said to rot from the head downward, like fish. In a federal republic things may be different. To judge from New York, New Jersey, and California — the 3rd, 11th, and 1st most populous states — the U.S.A. may rot from the state governments up.

The Empire State — once a beacon of progressive state government to the nation — is on the brink of ruin. And it doesn’t look like anything can be done to stop it.
In two words: We’re doomed.

Yes, Fred! Yes, yes!