In the 2003 recall election, Arnold and California’s terminally uninformed elctorate made a suicide pact to put him in office. He’d kill California’s income stream: they’d elect him.

Arnold ran for ofice promising to destroy 4 billion in annual revenue from recent increases in the state’s vehicle license fee. He won and slashed back the fee. Since the 2003 recall, annual lost revenue may have grown to exceed 6 billion.

Net cost in lost revenue: 20 billion to nearly 30 billion.

Size of California’s deficit?

Even the "mere" 20 billion would come in handy right about now: California’s looking at a 21.3 billion dollar budget deficit. Add in the subsequent fiscal year, and the total net deficit may be $40 bilion.

Thanks, Chub For Growth, Richard Scaife, and John and Ken.

And thanks, Arnold. California’s one of only two states with no state oil depletion tax. So this January when CA’s Legislature finally passed an oil severance tax fee that would bring California hundreds of millions (or more), what did Arnold do?

He vetoed it. Guess he couldn’t leave those Louisiana pols sleazing up to Big Oil all by themselves.

Now that the national Dem party caved to Big Oil and the Rethugs’ Mau-Mauing the eco-flack catcher and rescinded Federal prohibitions against offshore oil drilling, state opposition is the only remaining official power preventing oil rigs and their spills out of California’s waters. And for $100 million – merely a twentieth of the deficit he created for California – now Arnold wants to sell the state’s lock on that power. That’s not $100 million in payments, by the way. Nope: California has to pay it back. To Big Oil.

John Garamendi broke the news at Calitics:

What can $100 million buy you? Apparently California’s coastline if Big Oil has its way.

In late January, as chair of the California State Lands Commission, I joined State Controller John Chiang in a two-to-one vote to deny the first offshore oil lease off the coast of California in more than four decades. To permit more oil production off the coast of California, a state seen the world over as a leader in environmental stewardship, would have sent a terrible signal that California isn’t yet prepared to embrace a green economy. The risk of a major oil spill killing marine life, soiling the coast, and decimating marine-based industries and tourism is simply too high for a quick buck.

Sadly, as part of yesterday’s drastic state budget May Revision, California once again faces a renewed push to allow oil drilling off the coast of California. Big Oil has essentially offered to California $100 million dollars to seduce the state into granting the first new oil drilling lease in California since the Santa Barbara oil spill 41 years ago, a spill that covered hundreds of miles of ocean and over 30 miles of sandy beaches with more than three million gallons of crude oil. Learning from history means not blindly repeating the mistakes of the past.

Furthermore, the $100 million loan must be repaid by forgiving future royalty payments to California.

Lucky Big Oil – with patrons like Arnold and all the state pols they’ve purchased, they won’t even to pay oil depletion taxes to California…while the state’s repaying their generous "loan".

Big Oil will get the billions: California gets the spills.

Shock Doctrine gets the goods – but only if we let it.