Thursday, November 1, 2018

THE INVASION OF AMERICA - Central American Population Explodes - Poverty and Welfare use are double of Legals

Central American Population Up 28-Fold Since 1970
Poverty and welfare use are double those of the U.S.-born

Washington, D.C. (November 1, 2018) – A new analysis by the Center for Immigration Studies shows that the number of Central American immigrants in the U.S. has grown six times faster than the overall immigrant population. The Center's analysis of the lastest Census Bureau data, which includes both legal and illegal immigrants, also shows that immigrants from the region (comprising Guatemala, El Salvador, Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama) have low average incomes, and thus struggle with high rates of poverty and welfare use. Their poverty and welfare use are due to a low average level of education, which has declined dramatically relative to natives even as their numbers have soared.

Steven Camarota, the Center's director of research and co-author of the analysis, stated, "The number of immigrants from Central America has grown enormously – from 118,000 in 1970 to nearly 3.3 million in 2018. Because most of these immigrants have little education, many live in or near poverty and use the welfare system, even while working, at great cost to the American taxpayer. It is simply not possible to allow in large numbers of less-educated immigrants – from any part of the world, whether legal or illegal – without adding enormously to poverty in America and imposing a significant burden on public budgets. "

View the complete analysis at https://cis.org/Report/Central-American-Population-Increased-Nearly-28Fold-1970

Among the findings:
  • The number of immigrants from Central America (legal and illegal) has grown 28-fold since 1970, from 118,000 to nearly 3.3 million in 2018 — six times faster than the overall immigrant population.
  • In 2018, 87 percent of Central American immigrants came from three countries — El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.
  • El Salvador is the largest sending country from the region, with 1.4 million immigrants in the United States, a 112-fold increase since 1970. Guatemala is second with 815,000, followed by Honduras with 623,000. 
  • Based on prior estimates by the Department of Homeland Security, slightly more than half of El Salvadorans are in the country illegally, as are about two-thirds of Guatemalans and Hondurans.
  • A large share of Central Americans struggle in the United States, but it is not because they are unwilling to work. In fact, 76 percent of working-age immigrants from the region had a job in the first part of 2018, compared to 73 percent of the native-born.
  • The primary reason so many Central Americans are poor and access welfare is that, as their population has grown in the United States, their education level relative to natives has declined dramatically: 
  • In 1970, 49 percent of Central Americans had not completed high school, compared to 42 percent of natives — a seven percentage-point gap. In 2018, 47 percent of Central Americans had not completed high school, compared to 6 percent of natives — a 41 percentage-point gap.
  • In 1970, 4 percent of Central Americans had at least a bachelor's degree, compared to 5 percent of natives — a one percentage-point gap. In 2018, 10 percent of Central Americans had at least a bachelor's degree, compared to 38 percent of natives — a 28 percentage-point gap.
  • Because such a large share of Central Americans have modest levels of education, the share of immigrants and their young children from the region who live in poverty is twice that of natives — 22 percent vs. 11 percent.
  • Perhaps most troubling, 31 percent of the children (under age 18) of Central Americans live in poverty, roughly double the 16 percent rate for the children of natives. Also, 66 percent of the young children of Central Americans live in or near poverty. 
  • On average, Central Americans make only 61 percent as much as the average native-born American. Even Central Americans who have lived in the country for more than 10 years still only have 65 percent of the average income of the native-born.
  • Given the large share of Central Americans with low incomes, it is not surprising that so many access the welfare system. In 2018, 56 percent of households headed by Central American immigrants used one or more major welfare programs, more than double the 26 percent of native households.
  • The welfare figures for 2018 come from the Current Population Survey (CPS), which understates welfare use, particularly among immigrants. So the actual welfare use rates are even higher than those reported here.

ANOTHER DEMOCRAT STATE IN MELTDOWN - IS SENATOR BOB MENENDEZ' STATE OF NEW JERSEY THE NEXT MEXIFORNIA

2018 MIDTERMS: ALL ABOUT OBAMA

The Narcissist-in-Chief’s miserable legacy of failure and deceit.




Former President Selfie Stick is back in action, firing up Democrats before the midterms with his signature rallying cries:
I, I, I, I! Me, me, me! My, my, my!
According to a tally by The American Mirror's Kyle Olson, Barack Obama's campaign speech Monday for Nevada Senate Democratic candidate Jacky Rosen referred to himself 92 times in 38 minutes — or an average self-allusion every 24.7 seconds.
When he wasn't "I"-ing, the former narcissist-in-chief was lying.
"Unlike some, I actually try to state facts," Obama snarked passive-aggressively in a swipe at President Donald Trump. "I don't believe in just making stuff up. I think you should actually say to people what's true."
Sit down, Mister "If you like your plan, you can keep your plan."
Thanks to you, my husband, children and I lost not one, not two, not three but four private individual market health plans killed directly by Obamacare. Reminder: When the health insurance cancellation notice tsunami hit in 2013, liberal Mother Jones magazine sneered that the phenomenon was "phony." But after 4 million American families received cancellation letters at the end of 2013, Obama's health care prevarication was finally deemed the "Lie of the Year" by left-leaning PolitiFact.
And five years after promising Americans they could "keep their doctor" along with their health plan "no matter what," Obama belatedly 'fessed up that "the average person" would be forced "to have to make some choices, and they might end up having to switch doctors."
Facts, schmacts.
Moving on, Obama tried to galvanize voters this week by trashing Trump's jobs boom: "When you hear all this talk about economic miracles right now, remember who started it."
Hold up, Mister "Jobs are not coming back." I remember you taunting Trump for needing a "magic wand" to achieve what you claimed was an unachievable manufacturing industry renaissance — for which you are now claiming unadulterated credit!
I remember you, Mister Multitrillion-Dollar-Stimulus, promising the sun, moon and stars with the "most sweeping economic recovery package in our history" that was supposed to lift two million people out of poverty.
I recall sky-high unemployment rates for black Americans, nearly double the national rate, and 90 million-plus able-bodied citizens of all colors simply giving up looking for work while wasted billions went to fund crony green energy boondoggles, bridges to nowhere, renovations to Joe Biden's favorite Amtrak train station in Delaware, General Services Administrations junkets in Las Vegas and Hawaii, ghost congressional districts and stimulus propaganda road signs planted nationwide and stamped with the shovel-ready logo.
Speaking of which, I won't forget you smirking while you admitted at one of your phony Jobs and Competitiveness Council meetings that "Shovel-ready was not as, uh, shovel-ready as we expected." Yukkity-yuk-yuk.
Nor will it go down the memory hole how the Obama administration's wreckovery lies were enabled by slavering "journalists" like New York Times columnist David Brooks. He giggled on Jim Lehrer's PBS show that Obama had told him off the record that the shovel-ready promise was a crock, yet he sat on the truth until his Times' colleague Peter Baker reported the admission more than a year later.
Wait, we're not done yet. Astonishingly, Obama is now on the campaign trail comparing the Trump White House to a "tin-pot dictatorship" and calling for a return to "decency" and "lawfulness."
Yes, this is the same man who sicced the IRS on tea party conservatives, evangelicals and pro-life citizens, amnestied millions of illegal immigrants through executive fiat, appointed dozens of unaccountable and unvetted policy czars, used his Justice Department to spy on journalists, deceived the country over the Benghazi massacre and the Iran deal, demonized his political opponents, and mastered the very social justice agitation techniques now wielded by left-wing mobs targeting Republicans in every corner of the public square.
Thanks, Obama, for reminding America of your miserable legacy of deceit, division, persecution and redistribution as voters head to the polls. You wanna make the 2018 midterms all about you? It's on.



Endorsing Decline

A New Jersey newspaper’s backing of Bob Menendez illuminates the Garden State’s long economic slide.
October 31, 2018
Politics and law
Economy, finance, and budgets

New Jersey’s largest newspaper, the Star-Ledger, is facing intense criticism for its reelection endorsement of New Jersey senator Bob Menendez, who was “severely admonished” by a bipartisan Senate ethics panel for accepting gifts from a donor and advocating for the donor’s personal interests. Menendez’s actions “reflected discredit upon the Senate,” the committee wrote. Nonetheless, the Star-Ledger said that voters should “Choke it down, and vote for Menendez” because he’s a reliable opponent of President Trump’s agenda. The paper itself has been a reliable, if somewhat shrill, opponent of Trump policies on immigration, Obamacare, and the appointment of federal judges. It opposed Trump’s tax reform, though 80 percent of Jersey residents will see a tax cut, and even as the national economy’s growth spurt in the wake of that legislation has increased tax collections in the perpetually budget-challenged Garden State.
But appearances aside, the paper’s editorial decision is not all about Trump. Like many local newspapers, the Star-Ledger has a reliably left-leaning editorial board that has consistently supported big-government Democrats who spend their state and local governments into economic oblivion. It’s convenient to justify the Menendez endorsement as an effort to resist Trump, but even critics of the president (like myself) have no doubt that the paper would have made the same move had Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio been in the White House.
Many left-leaning newspapers lament the economic forces shrinking their industry, gobbling up jobs and newspapers with startling speed. But few see a link between the corrosive economic impact of big government and their own troubles. Their faith in taxing-and-spending blinds them to the inevitable consequences of that policy.
An episode in recent New Jersey history illustrates this point. Advance Publications, which owns the Star-Ledger, announced that the paper might shut down in 2008 because it was bleeding $30 million a year; the publisher cited declining ad revenues from department stores as one of its big problems. What the publisher didn’t mention: when Governor Jim McGreevey raised corporate taxes in New Jersey in 2002, the Star-Ledger editorial board praised the increase as a necessary “compromise” for a state government that had taken in “only” $22.4 billion in revenues but had allocated $23.4 billion in projected spending. Apparently, it hadn’t occurred to the paper that Trenton, which even then collected more revenue per resident than almost any other state government, had alternatives to raising taxes on local companies as a means of dealing with its budget shortfall. 
A few days after the budget passed, the CEO of Federated Department Stores, which operated Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s in New Jersey, said that the new tax was so onerous that it threatened local profitability, and that the company would probably open no more stores in the state—and might actually close some. Critics pilloried him, pointing out his own high compensation, and asking why a profitable company couldn’t afford to pay more to support state government. But department stores, like newspapers, were under intensifying economic pressures at the time. Since the tax increase was instituted, Federated has continued to cut back in Jersey, from 32 Macy’s stores to 24 today, and from 10,000 employees to 6,300. Other retailers, facing a difficult selling environment, have also shrunk.
Newspapers have retreated even more rapidly. Since 2008, the Star-Ledger has downsized several times, and it continues to rack up big losses. Despite deep concessions by workers in 2008, for instance, the paper was still losing $20 million some six years later, when it laid off newsroom staff, sold its headquarters, and moved to smaller offices. It hasn’t helped the newspaper or the state’s retailers that, since McGreevey’s tax increases (he raised taxes 33 times, and his successor, Jon Corzine, added billions of dollars in sales and income-tax increases), New Jersey’s economy, once a model of growth and productivity, has consistently lagged the national economy, creating an almost perpetual state of budgetary crisis in Trenton.
It's easy for a left-leaning paper to attribute its own retrenchment to the powerful forces undermining local newspapers, without drawing any connection between the kind of big government it embraces and the decline of the area economy. This is why it’s hard for small-government advocates to feel much sympathy for the decline of papers like the Ledger. But it’s also hard to feel a sense of schadenfreude over the economic conditions that exacerbate the problems for newspapers, because those same conditions hurt many other businesses, including some in vibrant industries that should be thriving.
The Menendez endorsement might be the story today, but in New Jersey and elsewhere, there’s an older, more telling story—about economic decline.


Nearly 40 percent of New Jersey households struggle to make ends meet

By Erik Schreiber 
31 October 2018
The proportion of households in New Jersey that cannot afford daily necessities reached 38.5 percent in 2016, according to a report published by the non-profit charity United Way. These necessities include food, housing, transportation, medical care, child care, and a smartphone. The percentage of these households falling into this category has increased by 15 percent since 2010, the year that the recovery from the recession of 2008 is alleged to have begun.
This proportion of struggling households includes 10.5 percent who lived in poverty in 2016, along with an additional 28 percent in a category that the report calls “Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed” (ALICE). ALICE households, sometimes called the working poor, earn more than the federal poverty level. This official figure is absurdly low, especially in a state with a cost of living as high as New Jersey’s. Although not classed as poor, members of these households find themselves skipping meals, sharing rooms with friends or relatives, and forgoing regular doctor’s appointments.
United Way has tracked households in poverty and ALICE households every two years since 2010. The percentage of households in poverty has remained relatively stable, at 10.5 percent. The proportion of ALICE households, however, has increased steadily from 23.8 percent in 2010 to 28 percent in 2016. Rather than sharing in the much-touted economic recovery, these families have seen their situations worsen.
People aged 65 and older account for much of the growth in the number of ALICE households. From 2010 to 2016, the growth rate in the number of senior households (15 percent) and that in the number of senior ALICE households (12 percent) have been almost identical. “Even with Social Security benefits, 46 percent of New Jersey seniors have income below the ALICE Threshold,” according to the report.
People between ages 45 and 64 also have contributed to the growth in ALICE households overall. Although the number of households in this age group did not change significantly between 2010 and 2016, the number that earned less than the ALICE Threshold increased by 22 percent. “For a group in their prime earning years, it is surprising to see one-third (33 percent) with income below the ALICE Threshold,” said the researchers.
The percentage of households below the ALICE threshold increased from 2010 to 2016 in nearly all of the 20 largest cities in New Jersey. Clifton and Passaic are the two exceptions. Some of the greatest increases occurred in two of the towns that suffered most during and after Superstorm Sandy. In Toms River, ALICE households increased by 66 percent. In Sayreville, the increase was 31 percent.
But the factor that unites ALICE households is not gender, race, age, or location. “The data on ALICE households show that hardship in New Jersey exists across boundaries of race, age, and geography,” said the researchers. Rather, ALICE status is a problem of every section of the working class. “Today, ALICE workers primarily hold jobs in occupations that build and repair our infrastructure and educate and care for the workforce,” in the words of the report.
The report provides a detailed picture of the situation that workers face in New Jersey, which in turn reflects national trends. Low-wage jobs are the rule, rather than the exception. Approximately 51 percent of jobs in the state pay less than $20 per hour. What is worse, more than two-thirds of such jobs pay less than $15 per hour. About 36 percent of jobs pay between $20 and $40 per hour, a wage that is itself insufficient, in a state with housing that is among the most expensive in the country—to say nothing of New Jersey’s notoriously high property taxes.
Since 2010, the unemployment rate has fallen. Although capitalist economists would predict that wages would therefore rise, they have stayed low for most workers. In addition, job stability has decreased following companies’ growing reliance on contract work and on-demand jobs. Under these conditions, it is no surprise that many households are unable to meet expenses. The idea of saving money to establish even a modest financial cushion is unimaginable.
While wages have stayed low, the prices of everyday necessities in New Jersey have increased. From 2010 to 2016, the monthly cost of housing increased by 9 percent for a family of two adults, one infant, and one preschooler. The cost of childcare increased by 14 percent, the cost of food by 10 percent, the cost of transportation by 25 percent, and the cost of health care by an enormous 99 percent.
The cost of the family budget overall rose by 28 percent from 2010 to 2016, and by 16 percent for a single adult. These increases have occurred despite low national inflation (9 percent). In 2016, basic household expenses in New Jersey cost $74,748 for a family of four and $26,640 for a single adult. In contrast, the federal poverty level is a derisory $24,300 for a family of four and $11,880 for a single adult.
The data in the United Way report lay bare the ruling class’s intensified post-recession efforts to suppress wages and increase the rate of exploitation to produce greater profits. Construction workers and public employees such as teachers have been among the main victims in New Jersey. As the researchers themselves note, companies have transferred ever more risk to their workers, keeping wages low and schedules irregular, and making it difficult for workers to arrange for child care, let alone pay their bills.
The report also singles out “the increasing importance of short-term productivity gains” as a reason for the increase in ALICE households. On this subject, it is worth quoting the report at length:
Instead of sharing gains in productivity with employees, companies have chosen to spend more on capital and, more recently, on profits and dividends to increase stock prices. Since most corporate leaders’ compensation is directly linked to stock prices, they have benefited hugely from this practice; the compensation of top US executives has doubled or tripled since the first half of the 1990s, while workers’ wages have remained flat.
The report thus documents the shift to an economy dominated by financial parasitism. This is not a simple matter of “choice” by companies opting for greed, however. It is part of the structure of global capitalism. Far from being unique to New Jersey, this shift can be observed throughout the country and the world.

San Francisco: Now so bad, it'll make you cry



Twentieth-century San Francisco, Herb Caen's beloved Baghdad by the Bay, has ceased to exist.  It has been replaced by a city where the sidewalks around Market Street are, in places, caked in feces, urine, and vomit.  The stink as you emerge from the BART batters you like frozen sleet, shocking and overwhelming.  The hordes of homeless, sprawled in doorways and sleeping on the sidewalks, are a bitterly eclectic mixture of the mentally deranged; burnt out druggies; dead-eyed hippies; con artists; pickpockets; and hundreds of simply lost, forgotten souls.
I had occasion to visit downtown San Francisco this afternoon, the first time in over seven years, though I reside only thirty miles away in the East Bay suburbs.  During my working life, I have commuted to San Francisco as a bushy-tailed junior executive in the '70s, as a small business-owner in the early '80s, and as a corporate executive in the '90s.  Thankfully, "Old" San Francisco really was a wonderful place to work, eat, and play.
As I walked the three blocks back to the BART, I was panhandled four times, plus two clumsy pickpocket attempts.  I didn't see a single cop in a car or on foot.  What could they do? 
What finally broke my heart were the kids and women, also lying in the streets, drugged, shell-shocked, begging for food.  I found an ATM, took out some cash, and bought twenty five-dollar "Arch Cards" from McDonald's and passed them out.  The salty tears flowed gently down my face and onto my lips.  My soul, my humanity was abused, sickened, and disgusted.
Today I observed a city that carefully and deliberately schemed to become an open sewer.  This is far beyond simple incompetence.  The magnitude and pervasiveness of this horror remains indescribable.  No rational, thinking person, or board, or mayor could allow this societal abomination to continue unabated in a first-world country.
Yet it does.
San Francisco willingly hosts a malignant cancer that has metastasized and destroyed all aspects of a civilized, compassionate society.
While skyscrapers still fill the skyline, and tankers and giant container ships still prowl the bay, the City-by-the-Bay soul has begun its death rattle.




The Hollowing-Out of the California Dream

For minorities in the Golden State, opportunity and upward mobility are hard to come by.
July 26, 2018
California

Economy, finance, and budgets

Progressives praise California as the harbinger of the political future, the home of a new, enlightened, multicultural America. Missouri Senator Claire McCaskillhas identified California Senator Kamala Harris as the party leader on issues of immigration and race. Harris wants a moratorium on construction of new immigration-detention facilities in favor of the old “catch and release” policy for illegal aliens, and has urged a shutdown of the government rather than compromise on mass amnesty.
Its political leaders and a credulous national media present California as the “woke” state, creating an economically just, post-racial reality. Yet in terms of opportunity, California is evolving into something more like apartheid South Africa or the pre-civil rights South. California simply does not measure up in delivering educational attainment, income growth, homeownership, and social mobility for traditionally disadvantaged minorities. All this bodes ill for a state already three-fifths non-white and trending further in that direction in the years ahead. In the past decade, the state has added 1.8 million Latinos, who will account by 2060 for almost half the state’s population. The black population has plateaued, while the number of white Californians is down some 700,000 over the past decade.
Minorities and immigrants have brought much entrepreneurial energy and a powerful work ethic to California. Yet, to a remarkable extent, their efforts have reaped only meager returns during California’s recent boom. California, suggests gubernatorial candidate and environmental activist Michael Shellenberger, is not “the most progressive state” but “the most racist” one. Chapman University reports that 28 percent of California’s blacks are impoverished, compared with 22 percent nationally. Fully one-third of California Latinos—now the state’s largest ethnic group—live in poverty, compared with 21 percent outside the state. Half of Latino households earn under $50,000 annually, which, in a high-cost state, means that they barely make enough to make ends meet. Over two-thirds of non-citizen Latinos, the group most loudly defended by the state’s progressive leadership, live at or below the poverty line, according to a recent United Way study.
This stagnation reflects the reality of the most recent California “miracle.” Historically, economic growth extended throughout the state, and produced many high-paying blue-collar jobs. In contrast, the post-2010 boom has been inordinately dependent on the high valuations of a handful of tech firms and coastal real estate speculation. Relatively few blacks or Latinos participate at the upper reaches of the tech economy—and a recent study suggests that their percentages in that sector are declining—and generally lack the family resources to compete in the real estate market. Instead, many are stuck with rents they can’t afford.
Even as incomes soared in the Silicon Valley and San Francisco after 2010, wages for African-Americans and Latinos in the Bay Area declined. The shift of employment from industrial to software industries, as well as the extraordinary presence—as much as 40 percent—of noncitizens in the tech industry, has meant fewer opportunities for assemblers and other blue-collar workers. Many nonwhite Americans labor in the service sector as security guards or janitors, making about $25,000 annually, working for contractors who offer no job security and only limited benefits. In high-priced Silicon Valley, these are essentially poverty wages. Some workers live in their cars, converted garages, or even on the streets, largely ignored by California’s famously enlightened oligarchs.
CityLab has described the Bay Area as “a region of segregated innovation.” TheGiving Code, which reports on charitable trends among the ultra-rich, found that between 2006 and 2013, 93 percent of all private foundation-giving in Silicon Valley went to causes outside of Silicon Valley. Better to be a whale, or a distressed child in Africa or Central America, than a worker living in his car outside Google headquarters.
For generations, California’s racial minorities, like their Caucasian counterparts, embraced the notion of an American Dream that included owning a house. Unlike kids from wealthy families—primarily white—who can afford elite educations and can sometimes purchase  houses with parental help, Latinos and blacks, usually without much in the way of family resources,  are increasingly priced out of the market. In California, Hispanics and blacks face housing prices that are approximately twice the national average, relative to income. Unsurprisingly, African-American and Hispanic homeownership rates have dropped considerably more than those of Asians and whites—four times the rate in the rest of the country. California’s white homeownership rate remains above 62 percent, but just 42 percent of all Latino households, and only 33 percent of all black households, own their own homes.
In contrast, African-Americans do far better, in terms of income and homeownership, in places like Dallas-Fort Worth or greater Houston than in socially enlightened locales such as Los Angeles or San Francisco. Houston and Dallas boast black homeownership rates of 40 to 50 percent; in deep blue but much costlier Los Angeles and New York, the rate is about 10 percentage points lower.
Rather than achieving upward class mobility, many minorities in California have fallen down the class ladder. This can be seen in California’s overcrowding rate, the nation’s second-worst. Of the 331 zip codes making up the top 1 percent of overcrowded zip codes in the U.S., 134 are found in Southern California, primarily in greater Los Angeles and San Diego, mostly concentrated around heavily Latino areas such as Pico-Union, East Los Angeles, and Santa Ana, in Orange County.
The lack of affordable housing and the disappearance of upward mobility could create a toxic racial environment for California. By the 2030s, large swaths of the state, particularly along the coast, could evolve into a geriatric belt, with an affluent, older boomer population served by a largely minority service-worker class. As white and Asian boomers age, California increasingly will have to depend on children from mainly poorer families with fewer educational resources, living in crowded and even unsanitary conditions, often far from their place of employment,  to work for low wages.
Historically, education has been the lever that gives minorities and the poor access to opportunity. But in California, a state that often identifies itself as “smart,” the educational system is deeply flawed, especially for minority populations. Once a model of educational success, California now ranks 36th in the country in educational performance, according to a 2018 Education Weekreport. The state does have a strong sector of “gold and silver” public schools, mostly located in wealthy suburban locations such as Orange County, the interior East Bay, and across the San Francisco Peninsula. But the performance of schools in heavily minority, working-class areas is scandalously poor. The state’s powerful teachers’ union and the Democratic legislature have added $31.2 billion since 2013 in new school funding, but California’s poor students ranked 49th on National Assessment of Education Progress tests. In Silicon Valley, half of local public school students, and barely one in five blacks or Latinos, are proficient in basic math.
Clearly, California’s progressive ideology and spending priorities are not serving minority students well. High-poverty schools are so poorly run that disruptions from students and administrative interruptions, according to a UCLA study, account for 30 minutes a day of class time. Teachers in these schools often promote “progressive values,” spending much of their time, according to one writer, “discussing community problems and societal inequities.” Other priorities include transgender and other gender-relatededucation, from which parents, in some school districts, cannot opt out. This ideological instruction is doing little for minority youngsters. San Francisco, which the nonprofit journalism site Calmatters refers to as “a progressive enclave and beacon for technological innovation,” also had “the lowest black student achievement of any county in California,” as well as the highest gap between black and white scores.
Ultimately, any reversal of this pattern must come from minorities demanding a restoration of opportunity. Some now see the linkage between state policy and impoverishment, which has led some 200 civil rights leaders to sue the state Air Resources Board, the group that enforces the Greenhouse Gas edicts of the state bureaucracy. But perhaps the ultimate wakeup call will come from a slowing economy. After an extraordinary period of growth post-recession, California’s economy is clearly weakening, as companies and people move elsewhere. Texas and other states are now experiencing faster GDP growth than the Golden State. Perhaps more telling, the latest BEA numbers suggest that California—which created barely 800 jobs last month—is now experiencing far lower income growth than the national average, and scarcely half that of Texas, Colorado, Michigan, Arizona, Missouri, or Florida. Out-migration of skilled and younger workers, reacting to long commutes and high prices, seems to be accelerating, both in Southern California and the Bay Area.
One has to wonder what will happen when the California economy, burdened by regulations, high costs, and taxes, slows even more. Generous welfare benefits, made possible by taxing the rich, could be threatened; conversely, the Left might get traction by pushing to raise taxes even higher. The pain will be relatively minor in Palo Alto, Malibu, or Marin County, the habitations of the ruling gentry rich—but for those Californians who have already been left behind, and for a diminishing middle class,  it might be just beginning.



CALIFORNIA DMV GIVES ILLEGAL VOTERS A SURGE


“New” and “underrepresented” voters could spell victory for leftist Democrats in November.

September 12, 2018


Last week California’s Department of Motor Vehicles sent 23,000 “erroneous” voter registrations to the office of Secretary of State Alex Padilla, who maintains the list of registered voters. The DMV blamed it technical errors and said none of the erroneous registrations involved undocumented immigrants. Padilla was “extremely disappointed and deeply frustrated” and the DMV assured him it wouldn’t happen again.
Legitimate voters have good reason to believe Padilla was not disappointed but delighted. The odds are strong that illegals make up most if not all of the newly registered voters. The registrations of illegals will be happening again, in greater numbers, as the November election approaches.
The day after the 23,000 registrations made news, it emerged that from late April to early August, the DMV registered 182,000 “new voters,” with the largest number, 112,000, choosing “no party.” Neither the DMV nor Padilla would explain the numbers but the trend is evident and all by design.
Under a 2015 voter registration law, the DMV automatically registered to vote those who obtain or renew a California driver’s license. As Padilla told the Los Angeles Times, “We’ve built the protocols and the firewalls to not register people that aren’t eligible. We’re going to keep those firewalls in place.” The Democrats’ Secretary of State did not explain how the firewalls worked and if any ineligibles had managed to vote.  
After the 2016 election in which Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton, Padilla refused to release any voter information to a federal probe that he claimed “has already inaccurately passed judgment that millions of Californians voted illegally.” California’s participation, Padilla said in a statement, “would only serve to legitimize the false and already debunked claims of massive voter fraud made by the president.”
Back in 2015, Padilla told the Los Angeles Times, “At the latest, for the 2018 election cycle, I expect millions of new voters on the rolls in the state of California.” True to form, by March, 2018, more than one million “undocumented” immigrants received licenses.
The DMV has been under fire for incompetence, with wait times up to six hours and retention of state employees who sleep on the job. Legislators resisted calls for an audit and gave DMV boss Jean Shiomoto another $16 million to hire new employees. Thus equipped, the massive state agency is cranking out “new voters” for November. The DMV claim that “none” of them is ineligible fits the pattern of leading Democrats who believe everybody in the state is a legal resident.
Governor Jerry Brown, who three times ran for president, calls Californians “the citizens of the fifth largest economy in the world,” and the sanctuary state law protects even violent criminal illegals. The ruling Democrats protect illegals while promising them “free” health care and other benefits. In return, the illegals vote for Democrats.
“Palestinian-Mexican American” candidate Ammar Campa-Najjar, is the grandson of Black September terrorist Muhammad Yusuf al-Najjar, who masterminded the murder and mutilation of 11 Israelis at the Munich Olympics in 1972. The Democrat, 29, is depending on “underrepresented voters,” to unseat Rep. Duncan Hunter in San Diego.
Legitimate voters have good reason to consider “underrepresented” as code for “ineligible” or “illegal.” For their part, legal citizens and immigrants might wonder how the Munichian candidate’s father managed to enter the United States and what the family was doing in Gaza for several years. Ammar isn’t telling and establishment journalists look the other way.
Senate boss Kevin de León, whose name on his birth certificate voter rolls is Kevin Alexander Leon, claims his father is a Chinese cook born in Guatemala. The author of the state’s sanctuary law spent time on both sides of the border and “identifies strongly with Mexican culture.” The story defies belief but as with Najjar the establishment media mounted no investigation.
Kevin Alexander Leon seeks to replace Dianne Feinstein in the U.S. Senate. He has narrowed Feinstein’s lead to single digits and that stream of “new” voters from the DMV could push him over the line.
POTUS 44 has endorsed Campa-Najjar, who worked on his reelection campaign in 2012. The president formerly known as Barry Soetoro has been campaigning openly for Democrat Gil Cedillo, who is running for Congress in California’s 39th district. Cedillo has been accused of sexual harassment by fellow Democrat and documentary filmmaker Melissa Fazli. That does not trouble the former president, and Cedillo could also benefit from those “new” voters.
As a State Department investigation discovered, false-documented illegals have been voting in local, state and federal elections for decades. That may explain how a state that twice voted for Ronald Reagan and booted out three of Jerry Brown’s state supreme court picks, including chief justice Rose Bird, became a Democrat stronghold.
Back in 1996 in Orange County, 442 illegals voted for Loretta Sanchez, the Democrat who narrowly defeated Republican Robert Dornan. He was the target of Hermandad Mexicana Nacional founder Bert Corona, a violent Stalinist who opposed Dornan’s strong anti-Communist stance.
Despite Democrat denials, voter fraud was going strong in California long before the DMV registered more than one million false-documented illegals. It’s a safe bet that most if not all those ineligibles will be showing up at the polls in November.

 

 

 

The Once 'Golden State' Is Badly Tarnished



With crime soaring, rampant homelessness, sanctuary state status attracting the highest illegal immigrant population in the country and its “worst state in the U.S. to do business” ranking for more than a decade, California and its expansive, debt-ridden, progressive government is devolving into a third-world country. In cities such as San Francisco, public defecation is legal, drug use is flagrant, and tent cities are designated biohazards. In once pristine San Diego, contractors have been spraying down homeless encampments with household bleach to stave off a hepatitis A epidemic. The so-called “Golden State,” which now has the highest poverty rate in the nation, is tarnished beyond recognition with such serious problems that the sublime climate and striking coastline may no longer be enough to sustain its reputation and cachet. With laws that benefit criminals and illegals, big government that endeavors to control every aspect of residents’ lives from plastic bags to straws; sanctioned street, tent, and vehicle dwelling; and an unaffordable overhyped bullet train boondoggle that will cost taxpayers almost $100 billion, California is headed for economic disaster.
Rising Crime
In the past few years, California has instituted criminal justice reform legislation and initiatives, ostensibly to reduce budget expenditures and prison overcrowding, which has led invariably to the release of more criminals into the state’s population.
  • Proposition 47, a referendum passed in 2014, reclassified certain drug possession felonies to misdemeanors and required misdemeanor sentencing for theft when the amount involved is $950 or less. Drug possession for personal use is now considered a misdemeanor.
  • Proposition 57, a statewide ballot proposition passed in 2016, changed parole policies for those convicted of nonviolent felonies. But the proposition failed to define “nonviolent crimes”. The result was that those committing “nonviolent” crimes such as rape of an unconscious or intoxicated person, assault of a police office, domestic violence, hostage taking, drive-by shootings, and human trafficking of a child became eligible for early parole based on a paper review in lieu of a parole hearing.
  • Assembly Bill 1448 and Assembly Bill 1308 allow for the early release of prisoners who are 60 years or older who have served at least 25 years of their sentence and prisoners who committed crimes at least 25 years or younger who have served at least 15 years, respectively. Both were signed into law by Governor Jerry Brown in 2017.
  • In June this year, Gov. Brown signed into law AB 1810, that gives defendants a chance to have their charges dismissed and evidence of their arrest erased from the record if they can convince a judge that they suffer from a treatable mental disorder. Such defendants could be offered a pretrial diversion of two years to undergo mental health treatment.
As may have been expected with lenient policies, violent crime and property crime rates in the state increased and will mostly likely soar in the aftermath of some of the newly implemented measures.  An FBI study of crime rates from 2014 to 2015 found that 48 California cities saw overall increases with 24 experiencing increases in the double digits for property crime, an increase directly attributable to Prop. 47, according to Marc Debbaudt, past president of the Association of Los Angeles Deputy District Attorneys.
Homelessness
As of 2017, California had a homeless population of over 134,000, or one quarter of the nation’s homeless. UCLA researcherWilliam Yu notedthat 26% of California’s homeless are severely mentally ill, 18% are chronic drug abusers, 9% are veterans and 24% are victims of domestic abuse. Orange County Supervisor, Tod Spitzer attributes much of the problem to legislation signed by Governor Jerry Brown over the past few years that markedly decreased the penalties for drug use, possession, and petty crimes, thereby reducing arrests and eliminating mandatory treatment for drug abuse and mental health treatment.
Where other states have successfully instituted welfare-to-work programs, California’s liberal government has resisted pro-work reforms and retained a system of cash disbursements with no strings attached. This has led to a state bureaucracy that continues to grow and expand its budget, staffing, and client base. Inordinately high housing prices, somewhat driven by restrictive land use and environmental regulations, have exacerbated the problem.
Civil rights organizations such as the ACLU have made the homelessness issue a difficult one to tackle. In 2003, the ACLU filed a lawsuitJones v. City of Los Angeles, on behalf of homeless people who were ticketed and arrested for sleeping on public sidewalks at night. In 2006, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on the lawsuit by striking down the Los Angeles ordinance that made it a crime for homeless people to sleep on the streets when no shelter is available. Not only is it permissible to pitch a tent in many areas in the state but also vehicle dwelling is allowed in Los Angeles residential areas from 6:00 a.m. to 9 p.m. and in business and industrial areas from 9:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m.
Illegal Immigration
California, a sanctuary state, is home to at least 4 million illegal immigrants and their children. National Economics Editorial, a website that covers economic issues, has estimated that those in the state illegally contribute $3.5 billion in taxes while costing California approximately $30.3 billion annually, or 17.7% of the state budget. According to the Migration Policy Institute (MPI), more than half are unskilled, uneducated, and lack English proficiency.
Services to illegals include welfare, food stamps, meal programs, free immunizations, low-cost housing and in-state tuition rates. In addition, children of illegals make up 18% of the public-school population, straining the already burdened school system by increasing student-to-teacher ratios and by impeding the learning process with supplemental, English-language instruction.
Unchecked illegal immigration comes with a marked increase in crime rates. Those who have broken the law to come to the United States are overrepresented in murder charges, drug trafficking, and gang violence. Increased policing, court, and incarceration costs put additional strain on the justice syste. In 2014, the U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. Sentencing Commission reported that illegal immigrants committed over 13% of all U.S. crime, and a particularly high level of violent and drug-related crimes, according to criminologist and law enforcement expert Ron Martinelli. A substantial illegal immigrant population coupled with a policy signed by Governor Jerry Brown in 2014 that protects criminal illegal immigrants by reducing their sentences to fall below federal standards for deportation further aggravates the problem. This, at a time when59% of Californians want to increase deportations of illegals.
In a measure that would add to costs and incentivize illegal entry, California gubernatorial candidate, Gavin Newsom, plans to issue an Executive Order to grant universal healthcare, if elected. Former governor Pete Wilson warns that a system that removes all market-based competition could produce annual budget shortfalls of $40 billion, add six million illegals to the healthcare rolls, encourage medical tourism, and restrict the range of care and increase waiting times for California citizens. The resulting elimination of competitive private sector health care options would mean that more businesses and sources of tax revenue will leave the state.
Poor Business Climate
In 2014, Chief Executive magazine quoted CEO comments like  “California goes out of its way to be anti-business,” “California continues to lead in disincentives for growth businesses to stay,” and “The regulatory, tax and political environment are crushing.” California’s reputation as the worst state to do business has a lot to do with its high tax rates.  In addition to having the highest state income tax in the nation, it has the highest sales tax rate, the 9th highest corporate income tax rate, one of the highest property tax rates and the highest gasoline tax rate. Yet, with a shortfall of $612 billion when future pensions, bond repayments and other debts are added to the budget shortfall, the state is drowning in debt, more than twice as much debt as any other state. In addition, the cost of living is 36% higher than the national rate, and, at 23.4%, California has the highest poverty rate in the nation, according to former California Assemblyman Steve Baldwin. 
California, a world leader in technology, entertainment, agriculture, and a past global trendsetter in culture and innovation, has been dominated for decades by a government made up of far-left ideologues. These so-called "progressives" have supported an ever-growing and onerous regulatory climate that effectively redistributes wealth by adding to an already burdensome rate of taxation and expanding entitlement programs. Given the current business environment and policies on crime, homelessness, and illegal entry that are likely to continue, the once “Golden State” could become a failed state in short order if left unchecked.  In the words of Steve Baldwin, “A state cannot chase away the producers and attract the takers year after year without economic consequences.” 



No Justice for Taxpaying Americans 
By Howie Carr 
The Boston Herald, August 08, 2018 

But the real double standard kicks in when the undocumented Democrat gets to the courtroom. A taxpaying American can only dream of the kid-gloves treatment these Third World fiends get. 
Here’s a 2016 headline: “If Springfield market owner illegally cashing food stamps had been U.S. citizen punishment would have been greater, judge says.” 

This one involved a 56-year-old Dominican bodega owner who was running an EBT-card scam for illegal immigrants in Springfield — stop me if you’ve heard this one before. He stole $38,000 and didn’t do a day in jail. As Judge Tina Page said, “Had he been a citizen of the U.S. he would in all likelihood be serving a substantial sentence.” 

But if he’d been imprisoned he’d have been deported, and God knows we don’t want to deport Dominican welfare fraudsters — or Dominican heroin dealers. 

Freeing Dominican heroin dealers (and future cop killers) is the specialty of Superior Court Judge Timothy Feeley, who cut loose a Dominican heroin dealer with no prison time, as the prosecutor put it, “to help him avoid deportation.” 

Are you starting to notice a pattern here? Sometimes law-abiding taxpayers get murdered because of this double standard of justice for welfare-collecting noncitizens. 

http://www.bostonherald.com/news/columnists/howie_carr/2018/08/carr_no_justice_for_taxpaying_americans 

Get rid of 40 million looting Mexicans and we resolve our housing and jobs crisis and end the $150 billion Mex welfare state in our open borders!
Our government is too busy easing illegals over the borders!

THE NEW PRIVILEGED CLASS: Illegals!

This is why you work From Jan - May paying taxes to the government ....with the rest of the calendar year is money for you and your family.
Take, for example, an illegal alien with a wife and five children. He takes a job for
$5.00 or 6.00/hour. At that wage, with six dependents, he pays no income tax, yet at the end of the year, if he files an Income Tax Return, with his fake Social Security number, he gets an "earned income credit" of up to $3,200..... free.

He qualifies for Section 8 housing and subsidized rent.

He qualifies for food stamps.

He qualifies for free (no deductible, no  co-pay) health care.

His children get free breakfasts and lunches at school.

He requires bilingual teachers and books.

He qualifies for relief from high energy bills.

If they are or become, aged, blind or disabled, they qualify for SSI.

Once qualified for SSI they can qualify for Medicare. All of this is at (our) taxpayer's expense.

He doesn't worry about car insurance, life insurance, or homeowners insurance.

Taxpayers provide Spanish language signs, bulletins and printed material.

He and his family receive the equivalent of $20.00 to $30.00/hour in benefits.

Working Americans are lucky to have $5.00 or $6.00/hour left after Paying their bills and his.

The American taxpayers also pay for increased crime, graffiti and trash clean-up.


Cheap labor? YEAH RIGHT! Wake up people! 



July 27, 2018

The Blue-State Housing Bubble



Another housing bubble is beginning to burst.  Its financial characteristics are different from the 2007-8 housing bubble but it shares one thing in common -- that it is caused by government policies.
The 2007 bubble was caused by the Federal government insisting on home loan qualification standards changes.  Buyers who were not qualified to obtain traditional home loans were encouraged and even subsidized to get loans in states such as IL, CA, NJ, PA, and all other areas.  The details of these changes were documented by Pinto and Wallison.
The bubble burst because the easy money home loan qualification changes created two prongs of financial instability: 1) persons who were not qualified were allowed to obtain mortgages and 2) the easy money policies rapidly escalated home prices and placed many mortgage holders underwater when the artificially high housing prices crashed.
This bubble now being created in the biggest Blue states, while being driven by government policy, has a completely different financial dynamic.  This dynamic is best understood by looking at the financial condition of Illinois.
The financial insolvency of Illinois is directly linked to its public-sector pension system.  The unfunded public pension liability of the state is $251 billion.  But that one fact is only part of the story.  In addition to having this unfunded pension liability, the state now dedicates one-fourth of its annual state budget to pension costs. In order to finance the ongoing demands of the public pension system (Illinois has 650 pension plans throughout the state) the state seizes state grant money and state funds lawfully appropriated to pay for public services throughout the state and puts those into the pension fund located in the state capital, Springfield.  Since there are 4.8 million households in Illinois the average household owes $52,269 to the unfunded pension costs, and these go up every hour.  And in addition to that one-fourth of the Illinois state budget goes to pensions.
The amount of money the state has seized from public services can be seen by the fact that in 2016 the state owed vendors $15.9 billion and another $2.8 billionwas seized from funds allocated to pay for health care vendors.  This means the state literally seizes lawfully appropriated funds from state-mandated health care programs such as nursing homes and medication and places them in its pension fund.
Illinois has two state statutes that allow the state to seize both state grant money passed by the General Assembly allocated for state grants and another statute that allows the pension fund to seize state funds. 
In addition to these seized state funds, the Illinois Policy Institute, a watchdog group in Illinois, audited all 110-plus cities of Illinois and found that in the ten biggest cities, including Chicago, all the property taxes people pay go only to pay pensions, not to fund public services such as water and sewer, police and fire protection, and other essential services.
The core issue then is whether the demand for property-tax revenue made by the public pension plans will have an effect on housing values, and if this effect will be strong enough to create a housing bubble.
The best illustration of the current housing bubble can be seen with a specific example.  I know a person on the northwest side of Chicago, a middle-class neighborhood, who recently received, in his July 2018 property tax bill, a raise of $10,000 on his annual tax payment.  This was not a raise in the assessed value of his house, this was a raise in the tax that is due.  The house is 2,200 square feet and since the owner now wants to sell the house, it was recently assessed as having a fair market value of $348,000.  Before this $10K property tax increase, the property tax bill of the house was already at $13,800.  So if anyone wants to buy a house worth $348,000 they have to pay $1,983 per month in property taxes.  The mortgage will be about $1,350. per month, so the total payment will be $3,333 a month for a house worth $348K.  And each year the property tax will only go up.
What this means is that anyone who buys this house will already be paying a 7% property tax rate on the market value of the house.  That monthly property tax bill normally is for a house worth $1.2 million dollars at a 2% property tax rate.  No matter how one looks at this, it is foolish for a person to pay a property tax bill for a $348K house when at a 2% tax rate they could have a house worth $1.2 million.  While this is a quick back-of-the-envelope financial analysis, the trend is clear: Illinois has the highest tax burden of any state.
The Chicago Federal Reserve bank should be doing a precise analysis of this impending housing crisis, but instead recently suggested a 43% property tax hike. 
This is the bubble: homeowners are losing most, if not all, of the equity they have in their homes.  And once again it is being done by government.  This time it is not the federal government that is changing home mortgage loan lending standards but the Illinois state pension fund that is literally seizing home equity value to pay their pension demands.  And while this is happening, Illinois wastes over one billion dollars on interest needed to service what they've borrowed.
To understand how great the demand for tax revenue is in Illinois consider the fact that the largest pensions go to retirees from SURS the State University Retirement System.  The actual facts from Taxpayers United show that of the 200 top pensions going to university retirees, the lowest is $199,000 per year and the highest is $581,000 a year. This is not a projection, this is the information from 2017. To finance these pensions, young people who take out student loans are also seeing a drop in their long-term incomes. The Illinois Policy Institute reported that in Illinois public universities, half of the tuition goes to pensions.  So when students graduate from an Illinois public university, half their monthly student loan payment will go to extravagant pensions, and the voters of Illinois have no say in these pensions. 
This means these graduates have less money to purchase a home.  As a result, the young people in Illinois are the largest age group that is fleeing the state. They see the writing on the wall and cannot imagine they could ever afford a home and family in Illinois. More than 80% of Illinois counties saw population losses in 2017.
The bubble is bursting right now in Illinois and in CA, PA, MA, CT, NJ, NY, and all other big Blue states. California alone has a half-trillion-dollar unfunded pension liability. The financial mechanics are the same and cannot be stopped.
Image courtesy of Pixabay.

 

U.S. Election Meddling: Nationwide Voter Fraud, Importation of 15M Foreign-Born Voters

Shelby Lum, Richmond Times-Dispatch via The Associated Press

19 Jul 2018Washington, D.C.

As the establishment media, GOP, and Democrats fret over the influence foreign countries have on U.S. elections, the leading threats to the American electorate remain nationwide voter fraud and mass immigration.

Though President Trump’s administration sought to thoroughly investigate voter fraud through the Presidential Commission on Election Integrity, the board was handed off to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in order to bypass obstruction from national Democrats who refused to turn over voter data.
Voter Fraud
The number of convictions against voter fraud continues to rise, with now nearly 940 criminal convictions on the books across the U.S., according to the latest data from the Heritage Foundation.
Likewise, the number of cases of voter fraud has risen. Heritage’s Voter Fraud Database now features 1,071 cases of voter fraud that spans across 47 states.
In the most recent study by the Government Accountability Institute (GAI) on voter fraud, the think tank found 8,471 high likely cases of double voting. About 7,271 of those cases were inter-state double voting, while the remaining 1,200 cases were of intra-state double voting.
“The probability of correctly matching two records with the same name, birthdate, and social security number is close to 100 percent,” the GAI report noted.
Kansas Secretary of State and gubernatorial candidate Kris Kobach is fighting in his state to enforce voting laws that would mandate voters  prove their U.S. citizenship. This effort has currently been halted by the left-wing ACLU organization and a circuit judge who recently claimed that it was unconstitutional for a state to demand voters provide their U.S. citizenship records. Years ago, proof of citizenship voting laws were upheld as fully constitutional.
“Compare [Russia meddling in the 2016 presidential campaigns] to the kind of foreign influence in the actual election numbers in foreign nationals voting,” Kobach told Breitbart News. “That’s real and much more consequential and it’s happening all over the country.”
Kobach said his expert witness in the suit with the ACLU over the proof of citizenship law revealed that as many as 33,000 foreign nationals are on the voter rolls in Kansas. For states like California, with the largest foreign-born population in the country, the number of foreign nationals on the voter rolls is likely in the hundreds of thousands or even the millions, Kobach says.
Mass Immigration
Similarly, mass legal and illegal immigration to the U.S. continues to be the largest driver of population increases and demographic shifts in the country. Every year, more than 1.5 million immigrants are admitted to the country. The U.S. has imported more than ten million immigrants in the last decade.
The vast majority of foreign nationals arrive through the process known as “chain migration,” where newly naturalized citizens can bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the U.S. Every two new immigrants to the country bring an additional seven foreign relatives with them.
As Breitbart News has extensively reported, the U.S. is on track to import about 15 million foreign-born voters by the year 2038. That is nearly quadruple the size of the annual number of U.S. births; about four million American babies are born every year.
Through chain migration alone, the U.S. will import about eight million foreign-born voters in the next two decades.
The country’s continued mass immigration policies are likely to hand over electoral dominance to Democrats in statewide and national elections, Breitbart News has noted.
Analysis conducted by Axios’s Chris Canipe and Andrew Witherspoon shows the overwhelming trend of foreign-born populations voting Democrats into office over Republicans.
The victory of socialist Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York’s 14th District is the latest case where a booming foreign-born voting population pushed the far-left activist over the edge to beat out establishment, high ranking Democrat Rep. Joe Crowley.
Ocasio-Cortez’s district is close to 50 percent foreign-born, a drastic shift of an area that was once populated primarily by native-born Americans. Ocasio-Cortez ran her congressional campaign on abolishing all immigration enforcement across the U.S.
In California, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) is facing a challenge from State Senator Kevin de León (D-Los Angeles), and the California Democratic Party has endorsed León. The far-left challenger was the key proponent of California’s sanctuary state law that protects criminal illegal aliens from being deported.
University of Maryland, College Park researcher James Gimpel has found in recent years that more immigrants to the U.S. inevitably means more Democrat voters and thus, increasing electoral victories for the Democratic Party.
In 2014, Gimpel’s research concluded with three major findings:

·         Immigrants, particularly Hispanics and Asians, have policy preferences when it comes to the size and scope of government that are more closely aligned with progressives than with conservatives. As a result, survey data show a two-to-one party identification with Democrats over Republicans.

·         By increasing income inequality and adding to the low-income population (e.g. immigrants and their minor children account for one-fourth of those in poverty and one-third of the uninsured) immigration likely makes all voters more supportive of redistributive policies championed by Democrats to support disadvantaged populations.

·         There is evidence that immigration may cause more Republican-oriented voters to move away from areas of high immigrant settlement leaving behind a more lopsided Democrat majority.

Years ago, only a handful of elected Democrats would mention how the demographic shift spurred by mass immigration was a benefit to Democrats electorally. Today, it is a widely used talking point of elected Democrats.
Take San Antonio, Texas Mayor Julian Castro, for example. Months ago, Castro admitted that immigration could potentially turn the state of Texas, Florida, and Arizona into Democrat strongholds, like California.

Julián Castro

@JulianCastro

 

 

The Hispanic vote in Texas will continue to increase. By 2024 Democrats can win Texas, Arizona and Florida. A big blue wall of 78 electoral votes.

Kyle Griffin

@kylegriffin1

 

10:28 PM - Jan 22, 2018

·        
·        

Twitter Ads info and privacy

“The Democrats have now become very open about what they are doing and they state it very clearly,” Kobach said of the Democrats’ use of immigration for shifting the electorate.
“Now, multiple Democrats are saying their plan is to import new voters to change elections,” Kobach said.
In an analysis from Georgetown University, the University of California, and Banque de France, researchers discovered that immigration to the country continuously increases Democrats’ chances of winning elections:
On average across election types, immigration to the U.S. has a significant and negative impact on the Republican vote share, consistent with the typical view of political analysts in the U.S. [Emphasis added]
This average effect – which is driven by elections in the House – works through two main channels. The impact of immigration on Republican votes in the House is negative when the share of naturalized migrants in the voting population increases. Yet, it can be positive when the share of non-citizen migrants out of the population goes up and the size of migration makes it a salient policy issue in voters’ minds. [Emphasis added]
These results are consistent with naturalized migrants being less likely to vote for the Republican Party than native voters and with native voters’ political preferences moving towards the Republican Party because of high immigration of non-citizens. This second effect, however, is significant only for very high levels of immigrant presence. [Emphasis added]
In 2016, the legal and illegal immigrant population reached a record high of 44 million. By 2023, the Center for Immigration Studies estimates that the legal and illegal immigrant population of the U.S. will make up nearly 15 percent of the entire U.S. population.
Mexico has the largest group of legal and illegal foreign nationals in the U.S., with 1.1 million immigrants from the country arriving in the U.S. between 2010 and 2016. Mexican nationals make up roughly one in eight new arrivals to the U.S. On average, every one Mexican immigrant brings six foreign relatives with them to the country through chain migration.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CRIMINALS WIN BIG IN CALIFORNIA SANCTUARY RULING

Bush appointee upholds protections for false-documented illegals.


July 9, 2018



California beats Trump in sanctuary state battle’s first round,” read the page-one Sacramento Bee headline last Friday. As readers discovered, it was actually a split decision and Trump scored a big hit. 
U.S. District Court Judge John Mendez, an appointee of George W. Bush, ruled that the state could not prevent private employers from denying federal immigration authorities from worksites. Mendez found that AB 450 “which imposes monetary penalties on an employer solely because that employer voluntarily consents to federal immigration enforcement’s entry into nonpublic areas of their place of business or access to their employment records impermissibly discriminates against those who choose to deal with the federal government.” 
On the other hand, Mendez upheld the law’s requirement that companies inform workers within 72 hours of any federal request to examine employment records. So in the style of Oakland mayor Libby Schaaf, employers can still provide lookout services for false-documented illegals.
Mendez denied the federal request against SB 54, the state’s sanctuary law. As author Kevin de Leon told reporters, “today, a federal judge made clear what I’ve known all along, that SB 54, the California Values Act is constitutional and does not conflict with federal law. California is under no obligation to assist Trump tear apart families. We cannot stop his mean-spirited immigration policies, but we don’t have to help him, and we won’t.”
As Mendez ruled, “refusing to help is not the same as impeding.” The federal judge also upheld AB 103, allowing the state attorney general to inspect detention facilities. Current attorney general Xavier Becerra, once on Hillary Clinton’s short list as a running mate and a key player in the Democrats’ IT scandal, proclaimed, “The Constitution gives the people of California, not the Trump Administration, the power to decide how we will provide for our public safety and general welfare.” 
Californians had a right to wonder about the “safety” part. In this 2-1 split decision the biggest winners are criminal illegals. 
Senate Bill 54, the Bee report noted,  “has eliminated much of the discretionary power that local law enforcement previously had to privately share information with federal immigration agents about people who have been arrested and put in county jails.” So despite the protestations of hereditary, recurring governor Jerry Brown, California is protecting criminal illegals. With that in mind, legitimate citizens might look ahead to the November election. 
Brown, a three-time presidential loser, recently signed off on a budget that spends tens of millions of dollars to help illegals fight efforts to deport them. This includes some $45 million in legal services steered to state colleges, and $10 million to help younger illegals, including “undocumented migrants.” This outlandish spending is hardly the state’s only way to privilege false-document illegals.
A 2015 law, “streamlines” the process of voter registration and kicks in when someone gets a driver’s license at the DMV. As of March, 2018, more than one million illegals have received licenses. Secretary of state Alex Padilla touts “firewall” protections against ineligible voters.  This is the same official who refused to cooperate with a federal probe of voter fraud, so legal residents and taxpayers have good reason to wonder what he is hiding. 
Senate boss Kevin de Leon, author of SB 54, is on record that half his family would be eligible for deportation under Trump’s executive order because they used false Social Security cards and other bogus identification. In his own case, as Christopher Cadelago of the Sacramento Bee explains, “The name on his birth certificate isn’t Kevin de León.” 
On his birth certificate and voter rolls, “the 50-year-old politician is Kevin Alexander Leon,” born on December 10, 1966 at California Hospital on South Hope Street in Los Angeles. The birth certificate “describes his father, Andres Leon, as a 40-year-old cook whose race was Chinese and whose birthplace was Guatemala. De León’s mother, Carmen Osorio, was also born in Guatemala, the document states.” As a child, “de León spent time on both sides of the border,” but he “identifies strongly with Mexican culture.” 
Around Sacramento many found the story incredible but it now takes on new significance. Senate boss de Leon spearheaded the smackdown of Sen. Janet Nguyen’s free-speech rights and ordered the Republican, a refugee from Communist Vietnam, carted off the senate floor. The senate boss also appointed a false-documented Mexican national to a state position, a violation of Proposition 209, a voter-approved law that forbids racial and ethnic preferences in state employment, education and contracting. 
The public never voted on de Leon’s sanctuary bill, but the author is now on the November ballot contending with fellow Democrat Dianne Feinstein for a seat in the U.S. Senate. Republicans are again shut out of the senate race because in California primaries the top two vote-getters advance regardless of party. 
As a State Department investigation confirms, false-documented illegals have been voting in local, state and federal elections for decades. Legitimate citizens and legal immigrants now have a stronger case for ID checks on voters and candidates alike. Under the Mendez ruling many more illegals, including criminals, will be seeking protected, privileged status in California. 

 

 

California Gets ‘F’ Grade from ‘Truth in Accounting’




 19 Jun 2018Newport Beach, CA18




The non-partisan “Truth in Accounting” project, which analyzes government financial reports, has awarded California an “F” grade for claiming surpluses instead of a $269.9 billion deficit.

The Chicago-based organization has been providing in-depth accounting reviews of the audited financial statements for America’s fifty states, as well as most major counties and major cities, in the United States since 2002.
The group’s mission is to educate and empower citizens with understandable, reliable, and transparent government financial information.
California received the lowest score of “F” on Truth in Accounting’s grading scale because despite Gov. Jerry Brown touting several years of surpluses, California actually faces a $269.9 billion shortfall in terms of its overall obligations, which equates to $22,000 burden for each of the 12.3 million taxpayers in the state.
California’s financial burden is primarily associated with the rapidly deteriorating condition of the state’s current $461.3 billion in promised public employee retirement benefits –which are $102.5 billion under-funded by the pension plan — and $107 billion for unfunded retiree health care benefits.
The State of California faced a near financial death experience in Great Recession, when the average taxpayer burden jumped from $15,000 to $23,500. Newly elected Gov. Brown, facing a $25 billion deficit in 2011, passed an array of income and sales tax hikes, including a 29 percent increase for Californians with taxable income over $1 million.
Gov. Brown has touted the “California Comeback.” But the data demonstrate that despite the gusher of tax revenue the flooded into Sacramento from the economic recovery and the substantially higher tax rates Gov. Brown passed, the state’s taxpayer burden only fell modestly to $20,900 by 2015. The taxpayer burden rose to $21,600 in 2016 and hit $22,000 in 2017, the second-highest in the history of the state.
Truth in Accounting Founder Sheila Weinberg warns that California is a giant “Sinkhole Sate.” Ms. Weinberg is especially critical of Gov. Brown  claiming an $8.8 billion surplus this year, while avoiding the fact that California has only $100.1 billion in available assets to pay $369.9 billion worth of bills.
Weinberg emphasized to Breitbart News that California’s rising “taxpayer burden” is only for net state liabilities. Her organization intends to begin publishing consolidated reports this summer for all the states that will also capture the liabilities of counties and cities. Ms. Weinberg expects that the combined taxpayer burden for California to be a much higher number.



June 16, 2018

Skyrocketing crime rate in California called 'good progress' after jails emptied





Here's a thought experiment: what happens if you release criminals, a lot of them, from jail?
If you asked a liberal in California, he would tell you these criminals were unjustly jailed in the first place (think racism on the part of liberal inner-city judges, juries, and prosecutors) and that these unjustly imprisoned would return to become productive parts of society.
Imagine their surprise to learn, then, that after reducing or eliminating sentences for certain property crimes, the rate of property crimes has only increased!
California voters' decision to reduce penalties for drug and property crimes in 2014 contributed to a jump in car burglaries, shoplifting and other theft, researchers reported.
Larcenies increased about 9% by 2016, or about 135 more thefts per 100,000 residents than if tougher penalties had remained, according to results of a study by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California released Tuesday.
Thefts from motor vehicles accounted for about three-quarters of the increase.  San Francisco alone recorded more than 30,000 auto burglaries last year, which authorities largely blamed on gangs.
Proposition 47 lowered criminal sentences for drug possession, theft, shoplifting, identity theft, receiving stolen property, writing bad checks and check forgery from felonies that can carry prison terms to misdemeanors that often bring minimal jail sentences.
Do you think liberals have learned anything from this?  Think again:
California still has historically low crime rates despite recent changes in the criminal justice system aimed at reducing mass incarceration and increasing rehabilitation and treatment programs, said Lenore Anderson, the executive director of Californians for Safety and Justice and a leader in the drive to pass Proposition 47.
"This report shows we are making progress," she said in a statement calling for less spending on prisons and more on programs to help reduce the cycle of crime.
The ballot measure led to the lowest arrest rate in state history in 2015 as experts said police frequently ignored crimes that brought minimal punishment.
They say a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged.  If that's true, then it must also be true in California that a liberal is a liberal who has had his car or home broken into.  Indeed, people in San Francisco have had their cars broken into so frequently that they think this is the "new normal," and people talk laughingly to each other about how often their cars have been broken into, as if it's a subject of conversation as common as the doings of the local sports team.
Reality will never intrude on a liberal's ideology.  An illegal alien could shoot a woman dead on Fisherman's Wharf, and liberals would still never see a problem with sanctuary cities.  Homeless people can roam the streets like swarms of giant rats, leaving fetid excrement and bloody hypodermic needles in their wake, and people would accept it, because it is part of their ideology.
That's how they can call this abomination "progress."
Ed Straker is the senior writer at Newsmachete.com.
Image via Flickr.

 

 

 

Cal 3: ‘Three Californias’ Referendum to Appear on November 2018 Ballot



 12 Jun 2018485


“Cal 3,” a proposal to split California into three states will likely appear on the November 2018 ballot after gathering far more than the minimum number of signatures required, organizers announced Tuesday.

“Thanks to Californians from every corner of the state, the Cal 3 initiative will be on the statewide ballot this November for the first time ever,” read a statement on the initiative’s website.
As Los Angeles ABC News affiliate KABC-7 reported Tuesday evening, the campaign, led by Silicon Valley billionaire venture capitalist Tim Draper, turned in 600,000 signatures, nearly twice the 365,000 that were required.
The three new states would consist of Northern California, extending from the San Francisco Bay Area north to the Oregon border and east to the Nevada border; California, including Los Angeles County and extending northwest along the Central Coast; and Southern California, including San Diego and the rest of the southern part of the state.
This is not Draper’s first attempt to break up the Golden State. In 2016, he produced an even more ambitious plan called “Six Californias.” However, it failed to gain enough signatures to qualify for the ballot that year.
Draper believes that California has become virtually ungovernable, with a state government that is too remote from its citizens.
Similar sentiments have fueled the “State of Jefferson” movement in the conservative northeast portion of California. However, some conservatives fear that the state has become so liberal that breaking it up into new states would simply elect more Democrats to the U.S. Senate.
Regardless, the “Three Californias” referendum could boost turnout — especially among Republicans — in November, making the state more competitive.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He was named to Forward’s 50 “most influential” Jews in 2017. He is the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

Will Californians Prevail Against the Little Picture of Hell?

https://townhall.com/columnists/arthurschaper/2018/06/05/draft-n2487359

 

The state of California has descended into a modern-day version of Dante’s Inferno, where treachery of all kinds occupies the bottom circle. Public sector unions are running (or rather ruining) the state into bankruptcy, betraying the public trust while charging the taxpayers for the perverse privilege. Republicans collude with the supermajority of Democrats to raise taxes, fees, and unrelenting regulatory burdens.
The public schools indoctrinate their young charges to hate this country and the rule of law. Illegal aliens continue overwhelming the state, draining California’s already depleted public services while endangering our lives, the rule of law, and public safety for all citizens. The federal government has filed lawsuits against Sanctuary California, and ICE is rounding up illegals in their homes and in workplaces. However, demonic pro-illegal forces still parade in the streets and cross our borders, defying American sovereignty. Larger cities have more homeless than homes for citizens.
The natural disasters are hitting crisis level, too. The Bible depicts torturous flames with respite in hell without respite, (Luke 16: 24). So too parched conditions have engulfed California. Wildfires have become a year-round terror, yet the state’s leadership refuses to prepare emergency water storage. This past week, two hundred firefighters had to quell another massive conflagration in south Orange County, and summer hasn’t even begun yet. To make matters legislation to make the current drastic water rationing permanent!
Even wealthy coastal elites have found that the cost of living in California is slowly exceeding its value. Money can’t create water, and financial gain provided nothing for West Los Angeles socialites when a few homeless transients set a blaze along the 405 Freeway overpass along the Santa Monica mountains.
All of this is a testimony to the damage wrought by progressive policies which have transformed California into a picture of hell. That’s precisely what Evangelical preacher Franklin Graham called California … or at least that’s what he called the sanctuary cities. During an interview on the Todd Starnes Show, Graham commented:
"People are leaving the state. The tax base is eroding. They are turning their once beautiful cities into sanctuary cities, which are just a little picture of Hell," Graham said. "Just go to San Francisco and go to this once-beautiful city and see what has happened to it."
But why did the son of the renowned Reverend Billy Graham take time to comment on the harrowing horrors of California? For his latest Gospel Crusade, he visited ten cities in the once-Golden State. Starting on May 20 in Escondido (one of several cities to challenge SB 54, aka the Sanctuary State law over the past three month), Graham is bringing the message of the Good News to the dispirited wasteland along the Left Coast. 
Returning to Pastor Graham’s signature statement from the Starnes interview, finally a pastor of stature and renown is condemning sanctuary city policies, and a welcome response from the all-too-quiet church leadership in California and across the country. Pastors should be the first to denounce this misnamed, misleading agenda. The concept of sanctuary comes from the Bible, better known as “cities of refuge” (cf. Numbers 35:11-28), locations reserved for those who had accidentally killed someone. To avoid retribution, they would flee to those cities.
In California, sanctuary policies bar local and state law enforcement from cooperating with federal immigration officials to arrest and deport illegal aliens. These cities are not safeguarding otherwise innocent people, but are protecting criminals who have broken into the United States and reside illegally to this day. Pundits left and right contend that these policies actually protect otherwise law-abiding residents to seek help and report crimes. Nothing could be further from the truth.
However, is it fair to tie the long list of hellish outcomes from these left-wing enclaves to their refusal to enforce federal immigration laws?
Yes.
What has happened to sanctuary city San Francisco, for example? The progressivism that made God nothing and man’s “ideas” everything created the s***-hole dystopia that resides there today. It’s an overpriced progressive utopia, to put it charitably. For the vast-majority of residents, even for those who can afford it, a salary of $100,000 a year barely pays the rent. Roommates doubling up is the norm, especially among the Big Tech interns who take the bus to Silicon Valley to work all day on the latest app for the Google, Facebook, EBay overlords. 
For the price they pay to live in the city, San Franciscans aren’t getting their money’s worth. Intravenous drug needles litter the streets everywhere. Homelessness is more common than homeownership. “S***hole” better describes the streets of the city, where the feces piles have so overwhelmed the streets, that visitors receive maps on how best to navigate away from the crap and corruption. Street fights among transients and the mentally ill have exploded, rampant moral decline has overshadowed the once great city. Tourists find enough to see, then flee.
Freedom of speech and freedom of religion have lost their place, even though Graham’s latest crusades have succeeded in otherwise unfriendly territory, like Berkeley. Last year, the Patriot Prayer movement, headed by Joey Gibson, attempted to throw two rallies for freedom of speech and thought. The elected officials of San Francisco (including Nancy Pelosi) and the now-deceased mayor Ed Lee, smeared the peaceful program as a “White supremacy rally.” Gibson is half Japanese, by the way. 
Where Gibson had tried and failed, Graham’s message of hope accomplished peaceful gatherings with a call to action to California’s Christians. And I say it’s about time. There have been flickers of hope in spite of the deranged left-wing agenda ravaging my home state. Californians in general, and Christians in particular, need to step up. They are called to be light in a dark, hellish world, but nothing good will happen if they don’t vote for their values, then educate the public how to fight against the devilish lawlessness foisted upon us by our political leaders and the cultural elites running—or rather ruining—the state.





June 5, 2018

The one topic Democrats don't dare bring up in today's SoCal primary



The airwaves in Southern California are flooded with Democratic candidate ads, with most openly touting extremely loony far-left positions – promises of free health care for all, free college for all, beefed up public funding for Planned Parenthood, full gun control, pretty much the full Bernie Sanders plate of pie-in-the-sky goodies.  Democrats, whether in the House, Senate, governor, or assembly races, are all openly offering all the free stuff on the far left's wish list, not holding back at all.  Fiscal discipline isn't in fashion with this bunch.  If I had to speculate, I'd say it's because at the time these platforms were formulated, Democrats were convinced that a blue wave was upon them.  In a crowded field, and at primary time, where only the most committed voters show up, extremism seems to be the way to stand out and get ahead of the pack.
There's one topic among these offerings that isn't being touched – not even in one campaign ad:
Illegal immigration.
As the sign says: "Caution."
We all know that Democrats favor open borders, given the potential for muscling mendicant votes in the state's poorest cities from their well oiled political machines.  Democrats favor DACA, DAPA for the parents, amnesty, state benefits for illegals – from driver's licenses to free health care – an end to deportations, and no border wall, let alone National Guardsmen at the borders.  You can find vague admissions of these stances on candidates' websites, buried deep.
But somehow, this topic isn't one they want to bring up in the heat of the primaries, at least not in ads, where they have an overcrowded slate of candidates on the June ballot, and face the real prospect of seeing no Democrats making it to the slate in November.
Illegal immigration seems to be the electric third rail.
That says a lot about the sentiment of the voters in illegal alien-filled California, which houses one quarter of the nation's illegals.  Nobody's brought up the Democratic plan for free health care for illegals, now wending its way through the California statehouse.  Nobody's asked Gavin Newsom, the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination for governor, what he thinks of the state's inundation of illegals, and he's certainly said nothing to the broad public about it in his ads.  The costs of illegal immigration are being carefully hidden by Democrats.
Meanwhile, city after city and county after county in Southern California has joined the lawsuit against the state for its "sanctuary state" laws, which require them to house and feed illegals instead of turn them over to the feds for breaking the law.  It's probably significant that increasingly blue San Diego and Orange Counties, the two areas Democrats have placed all their hopes and cash on for winning the House back, have joined this movement.
It all suggests that this topic is dry tinder among voters, the internal polls look bad for Democrats on their free everything for illegals, and the Democratic Party line is far more unpopular than anyone on the left is willing to admit.
President Trump should have a field day enacting his orderly immigration agenda, even in California, when crunch time comes at the November midterms.

 

 

It Pays to be Illegal in California

 By JENNIFER G. HICKEY  May 10, 2018 
It certainly is a good time to be an illegal alien in California. Democratic State Sen. Ricardo Lara last week pitched a bill to permit illegal immigrants to serve on all state and local boards and commissions. This week, lawmakers unveiled a $1 billion health care plan that would include spending $250 million to extend health care coverage to all illegal alien adults.
“Currently, undocumented adults are explicitly and unjustly locked out of healthcare due to their immigration status. In a matter of weeks, California legislators will have a decisive opportunity to reverse that cruel and counterproductive fact,” Assemblyman Joaquin Arambula said in Monday’s Sacramento Bee.
His legislation, Assembly Bill 2965, would give as many as 114,000 uninsured illegal aliens access to Medi-Cal programs. A companion bill has been sponsored by State Sen. Richard Lara.
But that could just be a drop in the bucket. The Democrats’ plan covers more than 100,000 illegal aliens with annual incomes bless than $25,000, however an estimated 1.3 million might be eligible based on their earnings.
In addition, it is estimated that 20 percent of those living in California illegally are uninsured – the $250 million covers just 11 percent.
So, will politicians soon be asking California taxpayers once again to dip into their pockets to pay for the remaining 9 percent?
Before they ask for more, Democrats have to win the approval of Gov. Jerry Brown, who cautioned against spending away the state’s surplus when he introduced his $190 billion budget proposal in January.
Given Brown’s openness to expanding Medi-Cal expansions in recent years, not to mention his proclivity for blindly supporting any measure benefitting lawbreaking immigrants, the latest fiscal irresponsibility may win approval.
And if he takes a pass, the two Democrats most likely to succeed Brown – Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa – favor excessive social spending and are actively courting illegal immigrant support.

 

 

Look how the liberal drug culture has destroyed Eureka, California



In normal circumstances, Eureka, California, would be a paradise.  It's situated in northern California on the Pacific Coast and is simply beautiful, sandwiched between rugged redwood forests and an implacable open sea.  The weather is perfect, constantly between 50 and 75 degrees year round.  It's isolated from other major cities, but some find value in the quiet of a more secluded lifestyle.
Unfortunately, Eureka, in Humboldt County, is in the center of a narco-state where marijuana is grown industrial-scale and drug use is rampant.  The situation has gotten so bad that even tourists avoid it.  Here's one telling review from TripAdvisor. It's a little long but well worth the read:
Just back from 5 days in Eureka CA. Had not been there for a few years so decided to visit north coast area, see some redwoods, great coastal scenery and victorian homes along the way. We were quite impressed that someone is trying to make Eureka a tourist destination (murals, town gazebo, festival, arts and a wonderful visitors center),. At the same time, we witnessed what appeared to be several dozen (at least!!) drunken and/or drugged human beings lying on curbs, in doorways, against fences, behind stores, camping out in parking lots, stumbling onto HWY 101 etc etc. Old motels (The Serenity for one) were overflowing with people outside at all hours of the day and night. A poor pit bull was chained to a fence next to highway all day Saturday w/ cops driving back and forth. Drug deals appeared to be taking place right out in the open within sight of traffic on 101. We stopped to take a picture of a cute mural downtown and a wild-eyed woman came screaming out of the shrubs-screaming at us for "taking her picture". She had something in her raised hand and we got out of there fast. This was across the street from the jail and near an area of lovely victorian homes on 3rd. Doesn't really matter where in town it was because it was all over. Mixed in with great businesses, lovely scenery, restaurants and historic places, we dodged crazies screaming at the top of their lungs. Panhandlers followed people around from store to store. We were in one cafe when a man sat down in filthy urine soaked clothes and reeking of alcohol. He wasn't ordering anything but just came to talk-however, most of the other customers had to get up and leave as the smell was so overpowering. And although we felt bad that these people have such problems...well...Eureka has a big problem too. A split-image. 
Later, at [a bookrestore] in the Bayshore Mall, we found several prominent displays on growing and/or manufacturing drugs. Umm...from the looks of Eureka's streets, that information has already been put to use. I hope that this once lovely town can come to grips with this problem.
The above review is a few years old, but be assured that nothing has changed for the better in Eureka, as The New York Times reports:
California's North Coast is known for its natural beauty and magnificent redwoods, but Eureka, the Humboldt County seat, is increasingly known for something else: the prevalence of dirty needles littering parks and public areas, crude remains of a heroin scourge that is afflicting the region.
Drug use in Humboldt County has many layers.  Meth has been a scourge in rural California for many years, and because it is often shot intravenously, the transition to heroin has been too easy for many.  Eureka's large homeless population has been especially vulnerable to addiction in recent years.
Discarded syringes have become a significant concern for the town's residents, who worry that the needles pose a threat to children and tourists.
As for the cause of all this:
OK, so why do so many people here use drugs? Theories abound, with the most common explanations tending to involve the marijuana industry and its associated culture of permissiveness and experimentation. Michael Goldsby [an addiction studies instructor at College of the Redwoods since 1987] thinks that theory makes sense.
"Risk factors for drug problems include availability of drugs, positive peer attitudes towards drug use [and] community norms that accept drug misuse," he explained. "Drug and alcohol use is accepted and even encouraged in our community."
Legalized drug use has destroyed some of the most beautiful places in California and is now doing the same in Colorado and elsewhere, where "harmless" marijuana, the gateway to even worse narcotics, has been legalized.  It's just a shame that immorality seems to go hand in hand with some of the prettiest places in America.
Ed Straker is the senior writer at Newsmachete.com.

 

 

"Particularly since the 2008 economic crisis, 

the ruling class and its two parties have slashed

social spending while cutting taxes for 

corporations and the rich."


"Between 2005 and 2015, the total payroll cost for the top 10 percent of UC wages grew from 22 to 31 percent, while that of the bottom 50 percent dropped from 24 to 22 percent."

More than 50,000 UC workers on strike


For a political movement of the entire working class against inequality and capitalism!

By David Moore
9 May 2018
David Moore is the Socialist Equality Party’s candidate for senate in the California June 5 mid-term elections. You can find out more and get involved in the campaign at socialequality.com/2018.
Tens of thousands of service workers at the University of California (UC) are concluding their three-day strike against deteriorating pay and conditions today.
The widespread support for the strike of services workers, including from nurses and technical workers who have engaged in sympathy strikes, is part of a growing wave of opposition from workers throughout the United States and internationally. However, the unions involved have worked to limit and contain the struggle and ensure its defeat.
In April, the UC system unilaterally imposed a contract on service workers that increased the retirement age by five years, included a paltry two percent wage increase, and allowed the university to outsource more jobs as well as raise health care premiums.
The UC system is the state’s third largest employer, and the conditions there are immediately familiar to workers across the country. Just in the past two months there have been strikes of public school teachers and support staff in West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona.
In each of these strikes, the role of the unions—the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association—was to smother opposition and shut it down. The strikes were not initiated by the unions, but by rank-and-file teachers. The unions intervened to end the strikes and prevent them from developing into a nationwide movement against the Democratic and Republican parties and the capitalist system.
The teachers unions were operating under the principle articulated by a lawyer for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) in the pending case of Janus vs. AFSCME on union agency fees: “Union security is the tradeoff for no strikes.” The AFSMCE lawyer was telling the high court justices: You need us, because without us there will be “an untold specter of labor unrest throughout the country.”
The main union involved in the UC strike is AFSCME, and it—along with the University Professional and Technical Employees and California Nurses Association—is putting this statement into practice. The three-day strike is intended to let off steam, while doing nothing to resolve the conditions facing service and other workers in the UC system.
AFSCME has a long history of calling short-term strikes and making empty strike threats to demoralize members and force through sellout contracts. In 2014, it cancelled planned strikes of two different sections of workers and imposed contracts that included increases in pension contributions from workers. In this strike, AFSCME is seeking to block widespread opposition to the bipartisan attack on public education and workers compensation by focusing almost entirely on racial and gender pay discrepancies that they claim can be fixed at the university level.
The unions want to prevent any discussion of the political background to the conditions facing UC workers. Particularly since the 2008 economic crisis, the ruling class and its two parties have slashed social spending while cutting taxes for corporations and the rich. 
BLOG: CA IS A STATE THAT HANDS OUT $30 BILLION FOR SOCIAL SERVICES AND WELFARE FOR ILLEGALS BUT CUTS EVERYTHING HAVING TO DO WITH LEGALS!
Within California, the UC system’s budget has been cut by Democratic Governor Jerry Brown and the former Republican Governor Schwarzenegger.
In 2017 the state of California provided nearly two-thirds less in per pupil funding than it did in 1990, from $19,100 down to $7,160, after inflation. State funding now only accounts for roughly 10 percent of the UC budget. More than three times that amount comes from UC-run medical centers.
Those cuts have increasingly shaped every aspect of work and study in the UC system. Custodians, groundskeepers and office staff workers are overworked, and their departments are understaffed. University lecturers find themselves on food stamps with no prospect of advancement. Students have seen their tuition and debts soar.
As part of the UC’s transformation from being funded by the state to making profits from medical and research businesses, well-heeled administrators were brought in. Between 2005 and 2015, the total payroll cost for the top 10 percent of UC wages grew from 22 to 31 percent, while that of the bottom 50 percent dropped from 24 to 22 percent.
UC workers in the medical centers are doubly squeezed by the attacks on health care that were carried out under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), or Obamacare. Hailed by the unions and Democrats as a great reform, the ACA has provided record profits to insurance companies while forcing low-income workers to ration their care in overpriced plans with prohibitively high deductibles and co-pays.
Within the medical centers and hospitals, health care workers have been subjected to particularly sharp understaffing and speedup.
These attacks on the working class have been combined with tax breaks, bailouts and giveaways to the ultra-rich. Nationwide, the three richest billionaires have as much wealth as the poorest half of Americans combined. This immense social gulf grew precipitously under the Obama administration and continues to accelerate with the Trump tax cuts.
BLOG: THE ENTIRE REASON FOR OPEN BORDERS IS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED. THERE IS NO BILLIONAIRE THAT DOES NOT PUSH FOR WIDER OPEN BORDERS, AMNESTY and NO E-VERIFY!
Both parties of big business have worked closely to funnel money from the working class to the rich. While being run by Democrats from top to bottom, California has grown to be the fourth most unequal state in the US, with the largest number of billionaires and the largest homeless population. When the cost of living is taken into account, California has the highest poverty rate in the country, at just over 20 percent.
The unions promote the lie that Democrats are allies of workers. Yet the Democrats voted for a record $700 billion military budget, found room in the budget for Trump’s border wall and bailed out the banks in 2008, but claim there is no money for education, health care and retirement.
The three-day strike will resolve nothing. I call on UC workers to form rank-and-file committees, independent of the unions, to unite their fight for wages and benefits with the struggles of the entire working class against inequality and war. The conditions facing striking workers are the same as those facing teachers, auto workers, Amazon workers, telecommunication workers, and all sections of the working class—in the United States and internationally.
The building of rank-and-file factory and workplace committees must be connected to a political counteroffensive against the two big-business parties and the entire capitalist system. The resources exist to ensure everyone the right to a high-paying job, quality health care and a secure retirement. The problem is capitalism, a social and economic system based on the exploitation of the working class to secure the profits of the ruling class.



Maybe if California and New York Cared as Much about the Middle Class as They Do About Illegal Alien…

 By IRA MEHLMAN   


TWEET


Economists Arthur Laffer (the guy with the famous curve) and Stephen Moore, a leading libertarian voice for mass immigration, predict that some 800,000 people will pack up and leave California and New York over the next three years. The reason they cite for the exodus in their Wall Street Journal op-ed is that the new federal tax law, which eliminates deductions for state income taxes, will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
Implicit in their assignment of blame to the federal tax overhaul is that the people who will be leaving are the ones who pay taxes – the sort of folks that state and local governments rely to provide a revenue stream. As such, one would think that these would be the people whose concerns would get a lot of interest in Sacramento and Albany. But clearly that is not the case.
For the privilege of living in places like the Bay Area, Los Angeles, or New York City, you must bear some of the most ridiculous housing costs in the nation, along with crushing state and local taxes. In California, be prepared to turn over as much as 13.3 percent of your income to the state. High-earning New Yorkers fork over a more modest 8.82 percent, but if you live in the five boroughs you can tack on an additional 3.87 percent in city income taxes. California and New York also have some of the highest sales tax rates in the country at 8.54 percent and 8.49 percent respectively (and higher in many cities). And now, as Laffer and Moore point out, you can’t even deduct those costs on your federal taxes.
One might also think that for all these state and local taxes, residents could expect the most modern infrastructure, efficient public transportation, world class public schools, affordable housing, and other amenities. Ha. No, in Sacramento and Albany they prioritize an ever-growing list of public benefits and services to immigration law violators; subsidies and grants to go to college, and legal aid for illegal aliens in deportation proceedings. In New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo is even threatening to sue the federal government (with taxpayer money, of course) for even trying to enforce immigration laws.
Some $23 billion of California taxpayers’ money and $7.5 billion of New York taxpayers’ money is expended on illegal aliens and their dependent children. For the benefit of the trolls at the Southern Poverty Law Center, the problems of California and New York cannot entirely be blamed on illegal aliens. Many, many factors have led to the middle class flight from these states. But one has to wonder why states wouldn’t want to do as much to woo their tax base into staying as they are doing to attract, protect, and reward illegal aliens.
Cutting back on benefits and protections for illegal aliens would not solve all of these states’ problems, but it certainly wouldn’t hurt. In the meantime, every U-Haul packing up a middle or upper-middle class family headed out of California and New York represents a loss of vital revenue necessary to address myriad needs of both citizens and legal immigrants.

Steinle’s murderer, Jose Zarate and been deported 5xs!

By Mark Krikorian 

National Review Online, April 26, 2018 


How the Golden State defies immigration law 

‘I will hang the first man I can lay my hand on engaged in such treasonable conduct, upon the first tree I can reach.” That was President Andrew Jackson’s response to South Carolina’s intention to prevent enforcement of a federal law within the state. Despite his admiration for Jackson, President Trump hasn’t yet threatened to start hanging California politicians. But that state’s “sanctuary” policies protecting illegal immigrants and obstructing enforcement of federal immigration law echo the long-ago fight over nullification and states’ rights. 

The passage of three sanctuary bills last year by the state legislature in Sacramento is now the subject of a lawsuit brought by the U.S. Department of Justice. It was the culmination of a decades-long process, as mass immigration transformed California’s politics from reddish purple to deep blue. 

The first measure that could be described as a sanctuary provision was the Los Angeles Police Department’s Special Order 40, enacted in 1979, which prohibited officers from arresting a person for the federal crime of illegal entry and, unless he was arrested for another crime, from even inquiring as to legal status. But that order merely instructed police to abstain from involving themselves in immigration enforcement. In the 1980s, a more proactive conception of illegal-alien sanctuary spread, as Central Americans fleeing war in their homelands snuck into the U.S. but did not qualify for asylum. 

At first, only some pro-Sandinista churches postured as sanctuaries for these illegal aliens. But in late 1985, Mayor (now Senator) Dianne Feinstein signed a resolution declaring San Francisco a “city of refuge” for illegals. She ordered that “City Departments shall not discriminate against Salvadorans and Guatemalan refugees because of their immigration status, and shall not jeopardize the safety and welfare of law-abiding refugees by acting in a way that may cause their deportation.” The declaration was followed four years later by a city law formally prohibiting city employees from assisting federal immigration authorities. 

Even measures such as this, which were adopted by other big cities over the years, were of largely local interest until a new system, developed at the end of the Bush administration and completed in 2013, went online. The fingerprints of every person booked by police throughout the country have long been sent to the FBI. But under the new system, dubbed Secure Communities, those fingerprints now also go to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). So while in the past the feds didn’t necessarily know whether cops in San Francisco arrested an illegal alien for, say, a drug offense, now they do. Every time.

There will still be some illegal aliens who elude detection if ICE has no record of them because they’ve never interacted with the immigration authorities. But if police arrest anyone who’s in the Department of Homeland Security database — who was deported previously, got turned down for asylum, was picked up by the Border Patrol, overstayed a visa, or appeared before an immigration judge — ICE learns about it. 

There are only so many hours in the day, so not every arrested illegal alien can be taken into custody. But if ICE wants the alien because, for instance, he has previously been deported or is a fugitive from a deportation order, it notifies the local authorities to hold him, as they would for any other state or federal law-enforcement agency, up to 48 hours after they would otherwise have released him, so that agents can collect and deport him. 

With this new fingerprint-matching system in place, instead of receiving the occasional hold notice, or “detainer,” cities and counties with large numbers of immigrants started hearing from ICE constantly. In some states where large-scale immigration was a recent development, the political culture had not yet shifted to the left to such a degree that this new level of cooperation with ICE met objections. But immigration, legal and illegal, has transformed California’s population and political culture so profoundly that the pushback there was inevitable. 

Of California’s 40 million people, about 15 million are in immigrant households (immigrants and their children under 18), accounting for more than 37 percent of the state’s population. Not only is that by far the highest percentage in any state, but the increase in people in immigrant households in California from 1970 to today — just the increase — is nearly twice as large as today’s total population in immigrant households in Texas, the state in second place. 

Survey after survey shows that immigrants are disproportionately big-government liberals. As one overview of the data concluded, “solid and persistent majorities of Hispanic and Asian immigrants and their children share the policy preferences of the modern American Left.” As a result, as University of Maryland political scientist James Gimpel has demonstrated, in the nation’s largest counties (which are where immigrants tend to settle), “Republicans have lost 0.58 percentage points in presidential elections for every one percentage-point increase in the size of the local immigrant population.” 

The results in California are plain to see. There hasn’t been a Republican in statewide or federal office since Arnold Schwarzenegger (and he was only nominally Republican). Only 13 of 40 state senators and 25 of 80 state assemblymen are Republicans. This has enabled leftist maximalism on a wide range of issues, including immigration. 

Even in this environment, the effects of Secure Communities in identifying deportable aliens were blunted for a time by the Obama administration’s lax policies. Despite the anti-borders Left and its kabuki protests that Obama was the deporter in chief, his administration effectively exempted most of the resident illegal population from immigration law. Even though ICE continued to be notified of arrested illegals, administration policy was to ignore all but the worst cases. In the words of John Sandweg, who headed ICE during part of Obama’s term, “If you are a run-of-the-mill immigrant here illegally, your odds of getting deported are close to zero — it’s just highly unlikely to happen.” 

Then came Donald Trump. 

It wasn’t just that Trump pledged tough immigration enforcement in his raw and often coarse manner. It wasn’t just that Hillary Clinton, who said publicly that she would not deport anyone who hadn’t first been convicted of a violent felony, won California by 30 points. It was the whiplash from Obama to Trump that supercharged the sanctuary push in the state legislature. Democratic politicians, their activist allies, and illegal aliens themselves had gotten used to Obama’s arrangements and had come to think that was the way things were going to be from now on. Trump’s reversal of Obama’s laxity fell on them like a bucket of ice water. 

The state took a variety of steps in response to the return of immigration enforcement. Lawmakers appropriated $45 million for a fund to help illegals fight deportation. And the state senate appointed an illegal alien to a state education commission. 

But most consequential were three laws designed to limit the federal government’s ability to enforce immigration law. The best known is Senate Bill 54, the California Values Act, the most sweeping measure of its kind in the nation, making the entire state a sanctuary for illegal aliens. It prohibits state and local law enforcement from complying with ICE detainers in most cases. It prohibits notification to ICE about an alien unless in the past 15 years he’s been convicted of one of a list of the most serious crimes. It prohibits state and local authorities from allowing ICE to use space in their jails and from providing ICE any non-public information on suspects. It restricts state and local participation in any multi-agency task force that includes ICE. 

The second of the three measures attempts to impose state oversight on any facility ICE uses to detain deportable aliens. And the final law seeks to shield illegal-alien workers from detection by, among other things, prohibiting private employers from voluntarily allowing ICE agents into any non-public area of their business. 

The Trump administration has pushed back. The first step was to threaten to cut off certain Justice Department grants to sanctuary jurisdictions nationwide; longstanding doctrine limiting the withholding of federal funds to coerce states makes a broader cutoff unlikely. A few jurisdictions outside California have changed their sanctuary policies in response to the funding threat, but the administration’s initiative is tied up in litigation and, in any case, is unlikely to hurt sufficiently to persuade hard cases such as California to mend their ways. 

That’s why in March the Justice Department filed suit against California to strike down all or parts of the three sanctuary laws, claiming that they were preempted by federal law and that they violate the supremacy clause of the Constitution. (Interestingly, the complaint cites, among other things, the Supreme Court ruling overturning parts of Arizona’s SB 1070, which was intended to assist in enforcement of federal immigration laws, on the same grounds of federal preemption.) But it will be a long time before the case reaches the Supreme Court; the defendants no doubt hope to drag things out long enough that President Maxine Waters or Dennis Kucinich can reverse the policy. 

But change may come sooner than that. The legislature’s overreach has sparked a rebellion of communities seeking sanctuary from the sanctuary law. The small Orange County city of Los Alamitos got things rolling by voting to opt out of SB 54 and join the federal lawsuit. A growing list of other cities has joined the suit as well, as have Orange and San Diego counties. More cities and counties are likely to join them. 

In an attempt to harness this political energy, two people whose children were killed by illegal aliens have launched a ballot initiative to repeal the sanctuary laws. Don Rosenberg, one of the parents, told the Washington Times , “This will be David versus Goliath. We’re clearly David on this side. But there are millions of Davids here.” 

While the steady stream of preventable crimes by illegal immigrants protected by sanctuary policies keeps the issue before the public, the very extremism of the Left may supply the five smooth stones this army of Davids will need to slay the sanctuary Goliath. In February, for example, Oakland mayor Libby Schaaf warned illegals that an ICE raid was planned for the Bay Area. Such brazen acts delegitimize sanctuary policies in the eyes even of moderate voters. 

South Carolina eventually repealed its Ordinance of Nullification. The state’s subsequent acts of resistance against legitimate federal authority also failed. It’s too early to tell whether California will succeed where South Carolina did not. 


Coming soon: Mass exodus from NY, CA due to high taxes


Arthur Laffer and Steven Moore have penned an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal that gauges the impact of the cap on state tax deductions in high tax states.
Their conclusions should frighten high-tax, big-spending liberals in blue states across the country.
In the years to come, millions of people, thousands of businesses, and tens of billions of dollars of net income will flee high-tax blue states for low-tax red states.  This migration has been happening for years.  But the Trump tax bill's cap on the deduction for state and local taxes, or SALT, will accelerate the pace.  The losers will be most of the Northeast, along with California.  The winners are likely to be states like Arizona, Nevada, Tennessee, Texas and Utah.
For years blue states have exported a third or more of their tax burden to residents of other states.  In places like California, where the top income-tax rate exceeds 13%, that tax could be deducted on a federal return.  Now that deduction for state and local taxes will be capped at $10,000 per family.
Consider what this means if you're a high-income earner in Silicon Valley or Hollywood.  The top tax rate that you actually pay just jumped from about 8.5% to 13%.  Similar figures hold if you live in Manhattan, once New York City's income tax is factored in.  If you earn $10 million or more, your taxes might increase a whopping 50%.
About 90% of taxpayers are unaffected by the change.  But high earners in places with hefty income taxes – not just California and New York, but also Minnesota and New Jersey – will bear more of the true cost of their state government.  Also in big trouble are Connecticut and Illinois, where the overall state and local tax burden (especially property taxes) is so onerous that high-income residents will feel the burn now that they can't deduct these costs on their federal returns.  On the other side are nine states – including Florida, Nevada, Texas and Washington – that impose no tax at all on earned income.
The authors put their finger on the real meaning of SALT: it prevents the rest of us from subsidizing the blue state model.  By making rich taxpayers in blue states bear the true cost of all those goodies given out by their state governments, those living in low-tax red states will no longer subsidize the irresponsible spending habits in blue states.
Now that the SALT subsidy is gone, how bad will it get for high-tax blue states?  Very bad.  We estimate, based on the historical relationship between tax rates and migration patterns, that both California and New York will lose on net about 800,000 residents over the next three years – roughly twice the number that left from 2014-16.  Our calculations suggest that Connecticut, New Jersey and Minnesota combined will hemorrhage another roughly 500,000 people in the same period.
Red states ought to brace themselves: The Yankees are coming, and they are bringing their money with them.  Meanwhile, the exodus could puncture large and unexpected holes in blue-state budgets.  Lawmakers in Hartford and Trenton have gotten a small taste of this in recent years as billionaire financiers have flown the coop and relocated to Florida.  As the migration speeds up, it will raise real-estate values in low-tax states and hurt them in high-tax states.
We are the most mobile society in the history of industrialized civilization. The fact that we are a federal republic with fifty individual state governments makes choosing a place to live more than just a preference for climate or scenery.  High taxes generally bring with them a higher cost of living, urban decay, crime, and a lack of economic opportunity.
So Americans are voting with their feet.  And in this competition, it's no contest.



California’s Rich May Leave to Avoid $12 Billion in SALT Tax Hit

by CHRISS W. STREET24 Apr 2018Newport Beach, CA19

President Donald Trump’s new tax cut, which limiting state and local tax deductions, will cost rich Californians $12 billion more in federal taxes, with $9 billion coming from those making $1 million or more.

Recently, the California Department of Finance reported good news for Sacramento politicians: thanks largely to having the top state income tax bracket in the nation at 13.3 percent, California collected about $3.3 billion more in state taxes than forecast in the first three months of 2018, with 67 percent coming from higher than expected personal income taxes.
But the California Franchise Tax Board also warned that the Trump tax cut, which limits state and local tax (SALT) deductions to a maximum of $10,000, will cost same high income earners $12 billion a year more in federal tax.
The bigger tax bite could also be strong motivation for California’s highest income earners to vote with their feet and leave California to save big bucks in a low tax state.
Maine is second to California with a top income tax rate of 10.15 percent, followed by Oregon’s 9.9 percent. But Nevada, Washington, Texas and Florida have no state income tax.
Only about 61,000 households, or 0.4 percent, of the 16 million households in California reported an income of more than $1 million in 2014. But the CalMatters blog commented that of the 40 million residents in California, the top 150,000 that are in the  top 1 percent of income earners pay about half of all state income taxes.
California taxpayers may already be voting with their feet, according to an analysis by CNBC. The business news team found that from 2016 to 2017, California saw a net 138,000 people leave the state, while Texas grew by 79,000 people, Arizona added 63,000 residents, and Nevada saw a 38,000 gain.
The Republican Governors’ Association was quick to observe: “California Democrats imposing massive tax hikes on middle-class families, driving up their state’s cost of living, residents are packing their bags and leaving for states run by GOP governors like Arizona, Nevada, and Texas with lower tax burdens and friendlier business climates.”

Adios, Sanctuary La Raza Welfare State of California  
A fifth-generation Californian laments his state’s ongoing economic collapse.
By Steve Baldwin
American Spectator, October 19, 2017
What’s clear is that the producers are leaving the state and the takers are coming in. Many of the takers are illegal aliens, now estimated to number over 2.6 million. 
The Federation for American Immigration Reform estimates that California spends $22 billion on government services for illegal aliens, including welfare, education, Medicaid, and criminal justice system costs. 
                                                                                                                
BLOG: MANY DISPUTE CALIFORNIA’S EXPENDITURES FOR THE LA RAZA WELFARE STATE IN MEXIFORNIA JUST AS THEY DISPUTE THE NUMBER OF ILLEGALS. APPROXIMATELY HALF THE POPULATION OF CA IS NOW MEXICAN AND BREEDING ANCHOR BABIES FOR WELFARE LIKE BUNNIES. THE $22 BILLION IS STATE EXPENDITURE ONLY. COUNTIES PAY OUT MORE WITH LOS ANGELES COUNTY LEADING AT OVER A BILLION DOLLARS PAID OUT YEARLY TO MEXICO’S ANCHOR BABY BREEDERS. NOW MULTIPLY THAT BY THE NUMBER OF COUNTIES IN CA AND YOU START TO GET AN IDEA OF THE STAGGERING WELFARE STATE MEXICO AND THE DEMOCRAT PARTY HAVE ERECTED SANS ANY LEGALS VOTES. ADD TO THIS THE FREE ENTERPRISE HOSPITAL AND CLINIC COST FOR LA RAZA’S “FREE” MEDICAL WHICH IS ESTIMATED TO BE ABOUT $1.5 BILLION PER YEAR.

Liberals claim they more than make that up with taxes paid, but that’s simply not true. It’s not even close. FAIR estimates illegal aliens in California contribute only $1.21 billion in tax revenue, which means they cost California $20.6 billion, or at least $1,800 per household.

Nonetheless, open border advocates, such as Facebook Chairman Mark Zuckerberg, claim illegal aliens are a net benefit to California with little evidence to support such an assertion. As the Center for Immigration Studies has documented, the vast majority of illegals are poor, uneducated, and with few skills. How does accepting millions of illegal aliens and then granting them access to dozens of welfare programs benefit California’s economy? If illegal aliens were contributing to the economy in any meaningful way, California, with its 2.6 million illegal aliens, would be booming.
Furthermore, the complexion of illegal aliens has changed with far more on welfare and committing crimes than those who entered the country in the 1980s. 
Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute has testified before a Congressional committee that in 2004, 95% of all outstanding warrants for murder in Los Angeles were for illegal aliens; in 2000, 23% of all Los Angeles County jail inmates were illegal aliens and that in 1995, 60% of Los Angeles’s largest street gang, the 18th Street gang, were illegal aliens. Granted, those statistics are old, but if you talk to any California law enforcement officer, they will tell you it’s much worse today. The problem is that the Brown administration will not release any statewide data on illegal alien crimes. That would be insensitive. And now that California has declared itself a “sanctuary state,” there is little doubt this sends a message south of the border that will further escalate illegal immigration into the state.
"If the racist "Sensenbrenner Legislation" passes the US Senate, there is no doubt that a massive civil disobedience movement will emerge. Eventually labor union power can merge with the immigrant civil rights and "Immigrant Sanctuary" movements to enable us to either form a new political party or to do heavy duty reforming of the existing Democratic Party. The next and final steps would follow and that is to elect our own governors of all the states within Aztlan." 
Indeed, California goes out of its way to attract illegal aliens. The state has even created government programs that cater exclusively to illegal aliens. For example, the State Department of Motor Vehicles has offices that only process driver licenses for illegal aliens. With over a million illegal aliens now driving in California, the state felt compelled to help them avoid the long lines the rest of us must endure at the DMV. 
And just recently, the state-funded University of California system announced it will spend $27 million on financial aid for illegal aliens. They’ve even taken out radio spots on stations all along the border, just to make sure other potential illegal border crossers hear about this program. I can’t afford college education for all my four sons, but my taxes will pay for illegals to get a college education.



If Immigration Creates Wealth, Why Is California America's Poverty Capital?




California used to be home to America's largest and most affluent middle class.  Today, it is America's poverty capital.  What went wrong?  In a word: immigration.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau's Official Poverty Measure, California's poverty rate hovers around 15 percent.  But this figure is misleading: the Census Bureau measures poverty relative to a uniform national standard, which doesn't account for differences in living costs between states – the cost of taxes, housing, and health care are higher in California than in Oklahoma, for example.  Accounting for these differences reveals that California's real poverty rate is 20.6 percent – the highest in America, and nearly twice the national average of 12.7 percent.

Likewise, income inequality in California is the second-highest in America, behind only New York.  In fact, if California were an independent country, it would be the 17th most unequal country on Earth, nestled comfortably between Honduras and Guatemala.  Mexico is slightly more egalitarian.  California is far more unequal than the "social democracies" it emulates: Canada is the 111th most unequal nation, while Norway is far down the list at number 153 (out of 176 countries).  In terms of income inequality, California has more in common with banana republics than other "social democracies."

More Government, More Poverty
High taxes, excessive regulations, and a lavish welfare state – these are the standard explanations for California's poverty epidemic.  They have some merit.  For example, California has both the highest personal income tax rate and the highest sales tax in America, according to Politifact.

Not only are California's taxes high, but successive "progressive" governments have swamped the state in a sea of red tape.  Onerous regulations cripple small businesses and retard economic growth.  Kerry Jackson, a fellow with the Pacific Research Institute, gives a few specific examples of how excessive government regulation hurts California's poor.  He writes in a recent op-ed for the Los Angeles Times:
Extensive environmental regulations aimed at reducing carbon dioxide emissions make energy more expensive, also hurting the poor.  By some estimates, California energy costs are as much as 50% higher than the national average.  Jonathan A. Lesser of Continental Economics ... found that "in 2012, nearly 1 million California households faced ... energy expenditures exceeding 10% of household income."
Some government regulation is necessary and desirable, but most of California's is not.  There is virtue in governing with a "light touch."
Finally, California's welfare state is, perhaps paradoxically, a source of poverty in the state.  The Orange Country Register reports that California's social safety net is comparable in scale to those found in Europe:
In California a mother with two children under the age of 5 who participates in these major welfare programs – Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps), housing assistance, home energy assistance, Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children – would receive a benefits package worth $30,828 per year.
... [Similar] benefits in Europe ranged from $38,588 per year in Denmark to just $1,112 in Romania.  The California benefits package is higher than in well-known welfare states as France ($17,324), Germany ($23,257) and even Sweden ($22,111).
Although welfare states ideally help the poor, reality is messy.  There are three main problems with the welfare state.  First, it incentivizes poverty by rewardingthe poor with government handouts that are often far more valuable than a job.  This can be ameliorated to some degree by imposing work requirements on welfare recipients, but in practice, such requirements are rarely imposed.  Second, welfare states are expensive.  This means higher taxes and therefore slower economic growth and fewer job opportunities for everyone – including the poor.
Finally, welfare states are magnets for the poor.  Whether through domestic migration or foreign immigration, poor people flock to places with generous welfare states.  This is logical from the immigrant's perspective, but it makes little sense from the taxpayer's.  This fact is why socialism and open borders arefundamentally incompatible.

Why Big Government?
Since 1960, California's population exploded from 15.9 to 39 million people.  The growth was almost entirely due to immigration – many people came from other states, but the majority came from abroad.  The Public Policy Institute of California estimates that 10 million immigrants currently reside in California.  This works out to 26 percent of the state's population.

This figure includes 2.4 million illegal aliens, although a recent study from Yale University suggests that the true number of aliens is at least double that.  Modifying the initial figure implies that nearly one in three Californians is an immigrant.  This is not to disparage California's immigrant population, but it is madness to deny that such a large influx of people has changed California's society and economy.

Importantly, immigrants vote Democrat by a ratio higher than 2:1, according to a report from the Center for Immigration Studies.  In California, immigration has increased the pool of likely Democrat voters by nearly 5 million people, compared to just 2.4 million additional likely Republican voters.  Not only does this almost guarantee Democratic victories, but it also shifts California's political midpoint to the left.  This means that to remain competitive in elections, the Republicans must abandon or soften many conservative positions so as to cater to the center.
California became a Democratic stronghold not because Californians became socialists, but because millions of socialists moved there.  Immigration turned California blue, and immigration is ultimately to blame for California's high poverty level.

REALITIES OF A STATE IN MELTDOWN:


THE INVISIBLE CALIFORNIA

De facto apartheid world in the Golden State.


https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270265/invisible-california-bruce-thornton


Reprinted from Hoover.org.
In 1973, as I was going through customs in New York, the customs agent rifling my bag looked at my passport and said, with a Bronx sneer, “Bruce Thornton, huh. Must be one of them Hollywood names.”
Hearing that astonishing statement, I realized for the first time that California is as much an idea as a place. There were few regions in America more distant from Hollywood than the rural, mostly poor, multiethnic San Joaquin Valley where my family lived and ranched. Yet to this New Yorker, the Valley was invisible.

BLOG: FEINSTEIN & BOXER THREE TIMES ATTEMPTED TO INSERT IN VARIOUS BILLS AN AMNESTY FOR FARM WORKERS TO REPAY THEIR BIG AG BIG DONORS.
ONE-THIRD OF ALL FARM WORKERS END UP ON WELFARE AS SOON AS THE ANCHOR BABIES START COMING
Coastal Californians are sometimes just as blind to the world on the other side of the Coast Range, even though its farms, orchards, vineyards, dairies, and ranches comprise more than half the state’s $46 billion agriculture industry, which grows over 400 commodities, including over a third of the country’s vegetables and two-thirds of its fruits and nuts.
Granted, Silicon Valley is an economic colossus compared to the ag industry, but agriculture’s importance can’t be measured just in dollars and cents. Tech, movies, and every other industry tends to forget that their lives and businesses, indeed civilization itself, all rest on the shoulders of those who produce the food. You can live without your iPhone or your Mac or the latest Marvel Studios blockbuster. But you can’t live without the food grown by the one out of a 100 people who work to feed the other 99.
A Politically Invisible Valley
Living in the most conservative counties in the 
deepest-blue state, Valley residents constantly see 
their concerns, beliefs, and needs seldom taken 
into account at the state or federal level.
Registered Democrats in California outnumber registered Republicans by over 19%, and the State Legislature seats about twice as many Democrats as Republicans (California’s one of only eight states nationwide with a trifecta of a Democratic and two Democratic controlled legislative bodies).
California’s Congressional delegation is even more unbalanced: in the House of Representatives, currently there are fourteen Republicans compared to thirty-nine House Democrats (at least half of those GOP districts are in danger of turning blue this fall); half the Republicans represent Central Valley districts, none bordering the Pacific Ocean. The last elected Republican US Senator left office in 1991. The last Republican governor was the politically light-pink action-movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose second term ended in 2011.
This progressive dominance of the state has led to policies and priorities that has damaged its agricultural economy and seriously degraded the quality of life in the Valley.
Despite a long drought that has diminished the run-off of snow from the Sierra Nevada, projects for dams and reservoirs are on hold, seriously impacting the ag industry that relies on the snowmelt for most of its water. Worse yet, since 2008, a period including the height of the drought, 1.4 trillion gallons of water have been dumped into the Pacific Ocean to protect the endangered Delta Smelt, a two-inch bait-fish. Thousands of agricultural jobs have been lost and farmland left uncultivated, all to satisfy the sensibilities of affluent urban environmentalists. And even after a few years of abundant rain, Valley farmers this year are receiving just 20% of their South-of-the-Delta water allocation.
Or take California’s high-speed rail project, currently moribund and $10 billion over budget just for construction of the easiest section, through the flat center of the Valley. Meanwhile, State Highway 99, which bisects the Valley from north to south for 500 miles, is pot-holed, inefficient, and crammed with 18-wheel semis. It is the bloodiest highway in the country, in dire need of widening and repair. Yet to gratify our Democratic governor’s
high-tech green obsession, billions of dollars are 
being squandered to create an unnecessary link 
between the Bay Area and Los Angeles. That’s $10 billion that could have been spent building more reservoirs instead of dumping water into the ocean because there’s no place to store it.
The common thread of these two examples of 
mismanagement and waste is the romantic 
environmentalism of the well-heeled coastal left. 
They serially support government projects and 
regulations that impact the poor and the aged, who
are left to bear their costs.
The same idealized nature-love has led to regulations and taxes on energy that have made California home of the third-worst energy poverty in the country. In sweltering San Joaquin Valley counties like Madera and Tulare, energy poverty rates are 15% compared to 3–4% in cool, deep-blue coastal enclaves. Impoverished Kings County averages over $500 a month in electric bills, while tony Marin Country, with an average income twice that of Kings County, averages $200. Again, it’s the poor, aged, and working class who bear the brunt of these costs, especially in the Valley where temperatures regularly reach triple digits in the summer; unlike the coast, where the clement climate makes expensive air-conditioning unnecessary.
Deteriorating Quality of Life
It’s no wonder then that Fresno, in the heart of the 
Valley, is the second most impoverished city in the
poorest region of a state that has the highest 
poverty levels in the country and one of the 
highest rates of income inequality. Over one-fifth 
of its residents live below the poverty line, and it 
The greatest impact on the Valley’s 
deteriorating quality of life, however, has been 
the influx of illegal aliens. Some are attracted by 
plentiful agriculture and construction work, and 
others by California’s generous welfare transfers
— California is home to one in three of the 
country’s welfare recipients— all facilitated by 
California’s status as a “sanctuary state” that 
regularly releases felons rather than cooperate 
with Immigration and Customs Enforcement 
(ICE). As a result, one-quarter of the country’s 
illegal alien population lives in California, many 
from underdeveloped regions of Mexico and Latin
America that have different social and cultural 
mores and attitudes to the law and civic 
responsibility.
The consequences of these feckless policies are 
found throughout the state. But they are 
especially noticeable in rural California. There 
high levels of crime and daily disorder—from 
murders, assaults, and drug trafficking, to 
driving without insurance, DUIs, hit-and-runs, 
and ignoring building and sanitation codes—
have degraded or, in some cases, destroyed the 
once-orderly farming towns that used to be 
populated by earlier immigrants, including 
many legal immigrants from Mexico, who over 
a few generations of sometimes rocky 
coexistence assimilated to American culture 
and society.
Marginalized Cultural Minorities
More broadly, the dominant cultures and mores of the dot.com north and the Hollywood south are inimical to those of the Valley. Whether it is gun-ownership, hunting, church-going, or military service, many people in the San Joaquin Valley of all races are quickly becoming cultural minorities marginalized by the increasingly radical positions on issues such as abortion, guns, and religion.
Despite the liberal assumption that all Hispanics favor progressive policies, many Latino immigrants and their children find more in common with Valley farmers and natives with whom they live and work than they do with distant urban elites.
Indeed, as a vocal conservative professor in the local university (Fresno State), I have survived mainly because my students, now more than half Latino and Mexican immigrants or children of immigrants, are traditional and practical in a way that makes them impatient with the patronizing victim-politics of more affluent professors. They have more experience with physical labor, they are more religious and, like me, they are often the first in their families to graduate from college. As I did with the rural Mexican Americans I grew up with, I usually have more in common with my students than I do with many of my colleagues.
And this is the great irony of the invisibility of the “other” California: the blue-coast policies that suit the prejudices and sensibilities of the affluent have damaged the prospects of the “others of color” they claim they want to help. Over-
represented on the poverty and welfare rolls, many
migrants both legal and illegal have seen water 
policies that destroy agricultural jobs, building 
restrictions that drive up the cost of housing, 
energy policies that increase their cost of living, “sanctuary city” policies that put back on the 
streets thugs and criminals who prey mainly on 
their ethnic fellows, and economic policies that 
favor the redistribution rather than the creation of wealth and jobs.
Meanwhile, the coastal liberals who tout a cosmetic diversity live in a de facto apartheid world, surrounded by those of similar income, taste, and politics. Many look down on the people whom they view as racists and xenophobes at worst, and intellectually challenged rubes at best. This disdain has been evident in the way the media regularly sneer that House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes is a “former dairy-farmer” from Tulare County, an origin that makes “the match between his backstory and his prominence” seem “wholly incongruous,” per Roll Call's David Hawkings.
Finally, those of us who grew up and live in the rural Valley did so among a genuine diversity, one that reflected the more complex identities beyond the crude categories of “white” or “black” or “Hispanic.”
Italians, Basques, Portuguese, Armenians, Swedes, Mexicans, Filipinos, Southern blacks, Chinese, Japanese, Volga Germans, Scotch-Irish Dust Bowl migrants—all migrated to the Valley to work the fields and better their lives. Their children and grandchildren went to the same schools, danced together and drank together, helped round up each other’s animals when they got loose, were best friends or deadly enemies, dated and intermarried, got drafted into the Army or joined the Marines—all of them Americans who managed to honor their diverse heritages and faiths, but still be a community. Their most important distinctions were not so much between races and ethnicities, though those of course often collided, but between the respectable people––those who obeyed the law, went to church, and raised their kids right––­ and those we all called “no damned good.” Skin-color or accents couldn’t sort one from the other.  
What most of us learned from living in real diversity in the Valley is that being an American means taking people one at a time.
That world still exists, but it is slowly fading away—in part because of the policies and politics of those to our west, who can see nothing on the other side of the Coast Range.

ABOUT BRUCE THORNTON

Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, a Research Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, and a Professor of Classics and Humanities at the California State University. He is the author of nine books and numerous essays on classical culture and its influence on Western Civilization. His most recent book, Democracy's Dangers and Discontents (Hoover Institution Press), is now available for purchase.




March 23, 2018

Is California Governor Jerry Brown Mentally Ill?



Leftists are relentlessly selling their bogus narrative that Trump is insane.  Here are samples of leftists' headlines: "Lawmakers Met With Psychiatrist About Trump's Mental Health," "President Trump's Mental State An 'Enormous Present Danger,'" "The Awkward Debate Around Trump's Mental Fitness," "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists Assess."
So what has Trump done to convince leftists that he must be crazy?  Unlike Republicans, Trump fearlessly confronts fake news media, calling them out when they lie.  Unlike Obama's punish-evil-America-first presidency, Trump has America's best interest at heart.  Unlike leftists seeking to dissolve our borders, Trump plans to build a wall to protect our people and our economy.  Insanely, leftists cheered when Obama allowed Ebola into America, claiming it was racist and unfair for Americans not to be subjected to the disease.  Unlike Obama, Hillary, Democrats, and fake news media's war on Christianity (forcing a 100-year-old order of Catholic nuns to fund contraception and forcing Christian businesses to service same-sex ceremonies), Trump vows to defend religious liberty.
So I guess, according to leftists' perverse way of thinking, that Trump must be crazy, along with the 63 million Americans who voted for him.
Meanwhile, leftists are ignoring glaring reasons to question the sanity of California's governor, Jerry Brown.  The entire country is talking about the collapse of California due to decades of insane liberal policies.  And what is Governor Brown's response?  He implemented hundreds more destructive liberal rules, regulations, and giveaways to illegals.  An article listing the top ten stupidest new California laws includes "Single-User Restrooms," "Controlling Cow Flatulence," "Legalizing Child Prostitution," and "Felons Voting." 
Governor Brown signed a new law making California a sanctuary state, doubling down on his bizarre quest to undermine American citizens.  In essence, Brown gave federal law, President Trump, and legal California residents his middle finger.  Numerous California families have suffered devastating losses of family members killed by illegals with long felony records who have been deported several times and welcomed back with open arms by Brown.  One mom whose son was killed by an illegal with two DUIs and two felonies said Brown should be arrested for treason.  Isn't it reasonable to question Brown's sanity?
Liberal governing has transformed beautiful California into the poverty capital of America with the worst quality of life.  Crazy taxes, crazy high cost of living, and crazy overreaching regulations have crushed the middle class, forcing the middle class to exit the Sunshine State.  All that is left in California are illegals feeding at the breast of the state, rapidly growing massive homeless tent cities, and the mega-rich.  Would a sane governor take pride in causing this to happen to his state?
Headline: "San Francisco Is A Literal [s-]hole, Public Defecation Map Reveals."  Can you imagine homeless people pooping on the streets being so pervasive that an interactive map was created to help citizens avoid the piles of poop?  Human feces carries infectious diseases.  What kind of irrational logic deems posing such health risks to constituents an act of compassion?  Is Governor Brown crazy?
Insanely, three fourths of California's taxpayer dollars – more than $30 billion – is spent on illegal aliens.  Meanwhile, despite the highest taxes in the nation, California is $1.3 trillion in debt – unemployment is at a staggering 11%.  California's wacko giveaways to illegals include in-state tuition, amounting to $25 million of financial aid.  Nearly a million illegals have California driver's licenses.  L.A. County has 144% more registered voters than there are residents of legal voting age.  Clearly, illegals are illegally voting
Get this, folks: Americans are spending almost a billion dollars a year on auto insurance for illegals.  Brown is gifting illegals billions in welfare and housing while his constituents cannot find a place to live.
Ten years ago, a buddy of mine excitedly moved his family from Maryland to California to accept the highest-paying job of his career.  Despite his lucrative salary, he was forced to move back east due to the outrageously high cost of living.  My buddy said if he were an illegal, practically everything would be free.  His story inspired me to write and record a Beach Boys-style song titled "Can't Afford the Sunshine." 
Once again, I ask you, folks: would a rational governor do what Brown is doing to his constituents?  Is Governor Jerry Brown mentally ill?
Lloyd Marcus, The Unhyphenated American
Help Lloyd spread the Truth
http://LloydMarcus.com


Laura Ingraham: ‘California Is Almost Acting Like It’s a Separate Country’


by
 JEFF POOR10 Mar 201877
Earlier this week on Fox News Channel’s “The Ingraham Angle,” host Laura Ingraham slammed California and its leaders for its sanctuary city policies and its open defiance of the federal government seeking to uphold existing immigration law.
Transcript as follows:

INGRAHAM: The radical takeover of California, that’s the focus of tonight’s ANGLE.
I still remember the first time I traveled to Southern California, it was the summer of 1984 and Los Angeles is hosting the Olympics. Reagan was president and Republican George (inaudible) was the state’s governor. Now, he was a moderate conservative, a law and order kind of guy.
The whole place, to me at least, felt like a Beach Boy song, the weather, the people, the lifestyle was all, you know, beautiful stuff. But today, the sunshine not with understanding, California is a very different place. It’s now a place where state officials actively thwart federal authorities trying to stop violent criminal offenders.