Democrats are turning California into a third-world hellhole without electricity, water, and freedom.
Due to Democrats' love for trees, at least 800,000 Californians will be without power for several days. Instead of properly managing California forests to reduce the chances of big fires, Democrats are saying Californians have to go without lights, refrigerators, and air-conditioning. Democrats could also avoid this by not making the power company financially liable for all forest fire damages, but since PG&E is a company, not an illegal alien, the Democrats couldn't care less about doing what's best for California.
While they try to blame climate change and the infrastructure, the reality is that neither of those has caused any significant changes in the last ten years — but now, suddenly, due to Democrat policies, Californians have to start living in the 18th century.
The Democrats who run California also refuse to build more water storage capacity even though the state's population has dramatically increased, ensuring that water has to be rationed during droughts.
Democrats are turning California into a third-world country economically. The income inequality between the über-rich Silicon Valley workers and the rest of Californians is huge, just like in third-world countries, while the elites live in luxury and the rest live in squalor.
Democrats are doing a great job manufacturing poverty and homelessness even as they fail to instill hope in Californians.
California has four times more homeless per capita and three times more poor per capita than the rest of America. Half the homeless in America are in California, even though California has only 12% of the U.S. population. Also, blacks are six times more prevalent in the San Francisco homeless population than they are in California in general.
The homeless explosion has brought the return of third-world diseases like typhus to California — not to mention streets littered with human feces.
Democrats are trying to keep people from having cars, just like the people of the Third World. After all, a car gives people the freedom to move, and freedom is a bad thing in the minds of Democrats since it limits the power the government has over citizens.
Recently, Gavin Newsom, the Democrat governor, transferred millions of dollars that the voters had been ensured would go to improve the state's failing road infrastructure to a fund designed to convince Californians to give up their cars.
Democrats are also working to make cars unaffordable for any but the richest Californians.
Californians pay $1.53 more for a gallon for gasoline than the rest of America. That's $21 more for a tank of gasoline. Facebook employees won't notice it, but the poor in California who can't afford to live near their jobs are paying through the teeth.
Like all third-world tyrants, Democrats are doing everything they can to eliminate democracy in California.
The jungle primary, where the top two candidates in the primaries go against each other, has resulted in many races where two Democrats are running against each other, giving voters who don't agree with the Democrats' failed policies no one to vote for.
California is doing nothing to ensure that people who shouldn't vote don't vote. Instead, the people running the state are doing everything possible to let illegal aliens vote. When illegal aliens go pick up their driver's licenses, they're automatically enrolled to vote unless they say they're not citizens.
California is also trying to end democracy by keeping the Republican presidential candidate off the ballot. Democrats passed an unconstitutional law to keep any candidate who didn't release his tax returns off the ballot solely to keep Californians from voting for Trump.
Finally, the Democrats are going after freedom of the press. An undercover journalist revealed that Planned Parenthood was selling aborted baby parts. Instead of investigating that illegal practice, Democrat Kamala Harris decided to put the journalist on trial.
Democrats keep telling us California is the future if they get elected. That means that poverty, homelessness, the end of democracy, and a press that reports only what Democrats want heard are what Democrats are promising us.
If you're an immensely wealthy Google employee, California is Heaven. If you're not, it's becoming more and more like Hell.
You can read more of Tom's rants at his blog, Conversations about the obvious, and feel free to follow him on Twitter.
California passes same-day voter registration, rigging elections even bluer
As if ballot-harvesting by illegal aliens were not enough, California has come up with a new way to rig elections to ensure one-party permanent Democratic Party rule.
According to the Los Angeles Times:
SACRAMENTO — Californians will be able to register to vote on election day at local polling places and voting centers under legislation signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom on Tuesday, a potentially significant step toward boosting turnout in key contests next year.The new law provides for a significant expansion of so-called conditional voter registration, which allows a new voter to cast a ballot that is counted after eligibility is determined during the 30-day vote-counting period after an election. That process began in last year's statewide election, but registration was available only in county elections offices. Starting next year, voters can register on election day anywhere ballots are cast."This simply enfranchises more people to vote," said state Sen. Tom Umberg (D-Santa Ana), the author of the new law. "The presidential race is one thing, but this is going to make an even bigger difference in turnout for local races."
California's Gov. Gavin Newsom, who's been curiously silent on his Facebook page about the gargantuan blackouts slamming the Bay Area, proudly has this news right there at the top of his page as his signature achievement.
Suffice to say, this is a recipe for disaster. As voting tallies roll out in real time on election day, Democratic operatives, illegally here or not, will be right onto the matter, with lists of unregistered potential voters, going to their homes and signing them up to make the tally go their way. The political muscle used is going to be amazing.
With California already not checking who's legally allowed to vote, and often, through the Department of Motor Vehicles' automatic voter registration system, you can bet that a lot of those newly registered voters are not going to be here legally. The sanctuary state, after all, does not check.
Now that they've got a register-or-else system of political muscling for registrations in elections going the Republican way, you can bet they will muscle illegals to register — with a warning that they'll be reported to authorities as illegal if they don't.
They'll be additionally shielded from scrutiny based on the fact that the state has refused to cooperate with federal investigators about who's registered legally, so it's a perfect game for them.
What's stunning is why they did it at all. After all, haven't they already gotten the solid blue state they've wanted, based on their past rigging? They've even gotten deep red Orange County in their column, which has a whiff of fraud. They've enacted driver's licenses for illegal aliens and now automatic motor voter registration, which can be halted only on the honor system, if someone says he is not allowed to vote due to being a non-citizen. Plenty of "errors" have already happened.
They've also enacted automatic mail-in ballots, even if people do not ask for them, putting physical paper ballots on every kitchen table in the state if not in the mailboxes of people who have moved away. Based on that, they've enacted ballot-harvesting, where Democratic operatives break the chain of custody in first counting votes coming in and, once they see a result they don't like, fanning out and going to people's houses who still have not voted — and "collecting" those votes, once they've "helped" these indifferent or unwilling voters to fill them out. You can see how easy it would be to coerce an illegal alien in such conditions. Worse still, the fate of the ballot of someone who voted the "wrong" way is anyone's guess. No one knows if they turn all the ballots in.
Rest assured: there's more rigging. They've enacted a first-two-out-the-gate primary system, which keeps Republicans off the ballot entirely, forcing voters to choose between just two Democrats, one hideous and the second even worse. That was the nightmare Republicans faced when they were forced to choose between Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who'd just got caught employing a Chinese spy for 20 years, and a crazed leftist affiliated with what's unaffectionately known as the "Mexican mafia" of California's political machinery, named Kevin de León. The map here shows how bad it is.
With this kind of rigging, it's no wonder California, which still has a sizable conservative contingent, has nearly zero representation in any public office, state or national.
Yet the :eft still can't trust the good thing it's got and still doesn't trust those unreliable voters. This measure to stack the total with same-day registrations is just the latest scheme to ensure permanent power. It stinks to high heaven.
Image credit: MB298 via Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0.
“MORE
THAN 10 MILLION” ILLEGALS IN CALIFORNIA ALONE
Xavier Becerra breaks the
news, files suit against Trump administration public-charge rule.
August
19, 2019
More than 22 million
people are illegally present in the United States, according to a recent study
by scholars at MIT and Yale. Pew Research pegged the figure at 11 million, and for years
it stood as the official count for media and government. It now emerges that 11
million is more like the number illegally present in California alone.
“California is home to
over 10 million immigrants,” reads a chart displayed by California attorney
general Xavier Becerra and governor Gavin Newsom as they announced a lawsuit against the Trump administration’s public-charge rule.
“Immigrants,” is California code for “illegals,” a term the state’s ruling class
has banned. As Rachel Bovard notes at American Greatness, even a legal
immigrant’s ability “to stay off the welfare system must be taken into account
when considering qualifications for a green card.”
California heaps welfare
benefits on those illegally present, including nearly $100 million for health care in the recent budget. Many of those 10 million illegals
came to California specifically to get those taxpayer-funded benefits. It
disturbs Becerra and Newsom that this disqualifies the recipients from any
future legal status, but there’s more to it. As attorney Madison Gesiotto explains in The Hill, voting must also be taken
into account.
“Voting as an illegal
alien in federal elections is a crime punishable by fine, imprisonment,
deportation, or inadmissibility.” According to a State Department investigation, false-documented illegals have been voting in federal, state
and local elections for decades. In 1996, illegals cast 784 votes against Republican Robert Dornan in a congressional race
Democrat Loretta Sanchez won by only 984 votes.
If Newsom and Becerra are
certain that more than 10 million people illegally reside in the state, they
doubtless know how many voted in 2016. Trouble is, California Secretary of
State Alex Padilla refused to release any voter information to a federal
voter-fraud probe.
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,” with “new voters” code for ineligible voters. True to form, by
March, 2018, more than one million “undocumented” immigrants received driver’s licenses from the state Department of
Motor Vehicles, which automatically registered them to vote under the “Motor
Voter” program.
Padilla is now claiming
that only six “California residents” were erroneously added to voter rolls for 2018, that it
was all due to DMV errors, and that none was guilty of “fraudulently voting or
attempting to vote.” To paraphrase John Goodman in The Big Lebowski,
this is what happens when the governor’s own department of finance, not the
official state auditor, investigates the DMV.
In reality, California
officials know full well how many non-citizens voted in 2016 and 2018. With
more than 10 million illegals in the state, the ballpark figure of one million
illegal voters is probably low. In California, illegals are the Democrats’
electoral college, and the Democrats reward them with welfare benefits and
protection from deportation through sanctuary laws. This raises another issue.
Illegals’ use of welfare
benefits and practice of voting in federal elections disqualifies them from
legal residency and citizenship. This makes for a permanent group of more than
10 million foreign nationals in California alone. In these conditions, Congress
should start pushing back.
Public officials who
apportion taxpayer-funded benefits for foreign nationals should be required to
register as agents of the governments of those foreign nationals. The primary
candidates would be the governments of Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala and El
Salvador, which Gavin Newsom visited before he had even toured his own state.
State and federal
governments should also bill the foreign governments for welfare, medical,
education and incarceration costs. Some of this could be alleviated by a
tax on remissions, such as the 33.4 billion Mexicans
abroad sent back last year. That amount is impossible without massive
inputs from U.S. taxpayers. Legitimate citizens and legal immigrants have no
obligation to relieve foreign governments of responsibility for their own
citizens.
Meanwhile, as Rachel
Bovard also notes, the Trump administration’s new rule only updates a 1996 law
proclaiming “inadmissible” those aliens likely to become a public charge. The
law was supported by Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Joe Biden and other leading
Democrats. The Trump administration measure gives more definition to what
constitutes a welfare benefit, food stamps, Medicaid, public housing assistance
and such. Those benefits are all for legitimate citizens and legal immigrants
but Bovard cites Census data showing that 63 percent of non-citizens use the
welfare system.
Those who thought there
were only 11 million illegals nationwide were mistaken. Thanks to Jerry Brown
crony Gavin Newsom, and Xavier Becerra, once on Hillary Clinton’s short list as
a running mate, Americans now understand that “more than 10 million” illegally
reside in California alone, and that might understate the figure.
The MIT-Yale estimate
ranges as high as 29.1 million nationwide, more than the population of Australia, with 25,088,636 and a veritable occupation. To all but the willfully
blind, politicians have abandoned the rule of law, and made false-documented
illegals a protected, privileged class.
This is how a nation
loses its sovereignty.
Census Bureau:
Immigration Driving Half of
U.S. Population Growth
2:43
Immigration to
the United States is now driving nearly half of all population growth in the
country instead of increased birth rates, the U.S. Census Bureau finds.
The latest Census Bureau
estimates on the U.S. population reveal that about 48.5 percent of all
population growth is driven by the country’s mass illegal and legal immigration
policy, where more than 1.5 million foreign nationals are admitted to the
country every year.
(Axios)
Axios analysis by Stef Knight details the growing share to which
immigration is increasingly driving population growth across the U.S. Since
2011, for example, the level to which immigration has accounted for overall
population growth has increased more than 13 percent.
According to the Wall
Street Journal analysis, about nine percent of U.S. counties
are growing solely because of immigration.
This concludes that about nine percent of counties have regional birth rates
that do not exceed the annual number of deaths in the area.
Similarly, the Wall
Street Journal notes, more than half of all population growth in
states like Florida, Ohio, Virginia, Kansas, and Michigan, among others, is
because of immigration.
Though pundits have
claimed that the country’s admittance of 1.2 million legal immigrants a year is
necessary to increase birth rates, researchers have found that the growth of
the immigrant population has little impact on birth rates.
Center for Immigration
Studies Director of Research Steven Camarota discovered in his latest study this year that
“immigrant fertility has only a small impact on the nation’s overall birth
rate,” citing that immigrants in the U.S. raise the nation’s birth rate for all
women by two births per 1,000 women.
“Immigration has a minor
impact because the difference between immigrant and native fertility is too
small to significantly change the nation’s overall birth rate,” Camarota noted
in the study.
At current legal
immigration levels, the U.S. population is set to hit an unprecedented
404 million residents by 2060 — including a foreign-
born population of 69 million.
born population of 69 million.
The U.S. does not have
to rapidly increase its total resident population and foreign-born
population, as legal immigration moratoriums have been implemented in the past to give time for new arrivals to
properly assimilate to American life.
Halting all immigration to the country would stabilize the population to a comfortable 329 million residents in the next four decades.
OF COURSE,
THEY REALLY HAVE NO IDEA HOW MANY HAVE JUMPED OUR BORDERS!
“Between 2005 and 2017, chain
migration, alone, brought nearly 10 million foreign nationals to the U.S.”
DOJ: Federal Arrests of Foreigners More than Tripled in Last 20 Years
DOJ: Federal Arrests of Foreigners More Than
Tripled in Last 20 Years
As Breitbart News reported, though non-U.S.
citizens represent just seven percent of the total U.S. population, they
accounted for 15 percent of all federal arrests and 15 percent of all
prosecutions for non-immigration related crimes in 2018. This indicates that
non-U.S. citizens were about 2.3 times as likely to be arrested or prosecuted
for non-immigration related crimes.
For non-immigration offenses, the total of federal arrests for
non-U.S. citizens between 1998 and 2018 increased nearly eight percent, and
between 2017 and 2018 rose almost ten percent.
Non-U.S. citizens were most likely to be prosecuted for illegal
re-entry, that is illegal aliens who have been previously deported, drugs,
fraud, alien smuggling, and misuse of visas.
A 2018 Government Accountability
Office (GAO) report discovered nearly all
illegal and legal immigrants in U.S. federal prisons are from Mexico, Honduras,
El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Colombia, and Guatemala.
Between 2010 and 2015, the average annual cost to incarcerate
criminal illegal and legal immigrants slightly decreased — as the criminal
alien population slightly decreased as well — from $1.56 billion to about $1.42
billion. That cost is paid for by American taxpayers who are forced to offset
the costs of mass immigration to the country.
Every year, the U.S. admits more
than 1.5 million foreign nationals, with the overwhelming majority arriving
through the process known as “chain migration,” whereby newly
naturalized are able to bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the
country. Between 2005 and 2017, chain migration, alone,
brought nearly 10 million foreign nationals to the U.S.
OPEN BORDERS: IT’S ALL ABOUT KEEPING WAGES
DEPRESSED!
"In the decade following the
financial crisis of 2007-2008, the capitalist class has delivered powerful
blows to the social position of the working class. As a result, the working class
in the US, the world’s “richest country,” faces levels of economic hardship not
seen since the 1930s."
"Inequality has reached unprecedented
levels: the wealth of America’s three richest people now equals the net
worth of the poorest half of the US population."
Report:
California’s Middle-Class Wages Rise by 1 Percent in 40 Years
Justin
Sullivan/Getty Images
3 Sep 2019172
6:24
Middle-class wages in
progressive California have risen by 1 percent in the last 40 years, says a
study by the establishment California Budget and Policy Center.
“Earnings for California’s
workers at the low end and middle of the wage scale have generally declined or
stagnated for decades,” says the report, titled “California’s Workers Are
Increasingly Locked Out of the State’s Prosperity.” The report continued:
In
2018, the median hourly earnings for workers ages 25 to 64 was $21.79, just 1%
higher than in 1979, after adjusting for inflation ($21.50, in 2018 dollars)
(Figure 1). Inflation-adjusted hourly earnings for low-wage workers, those at
the 10th percentile, increased only slightly more, by 4%, from $10.71 in
1979 to $11.12 in 2018.
The report admits that the
state’s progressive economy is delivering more to investors and less to wage-earners.
“Since 2001, the share of state private-sector [annual new income] that has
gone to worker compensation has fallen by 5.6 percentage points — from 52.9% to
47.3%.”
In 2016, California’s Gross
Domestic Product was $2.6 trillion, so the 5.6 percent drop shifted $146
billion away from wages. That is roughly $3,625 per person in 2016.
The report notes that wages
finally exceeded 1979 levels around 2017, and it splits the credit between the
Democrats’ minimum-wage boosts and President Donald Trump’s go-go economy.
The 40 years of flat wages are
partly hidden by a wave of new products and services. They include almost-free
entertainment and information on the Internet, cheap imported coffee in
supermarkets, and reliable, low-pollution autos in garages.
But the impact of California’s
flat wages is made worse by California’s rising housing costs, the report says,
even though it also ignores the rent-spiking impact of the establishment’s
pro-immigration policies:
In just the last decade
alone, the increase in the typical household’s rent far outpaced the rise in
the typical full-time worker’s annual earnings, suggesting that working
families and individuals are finding it increasingly difficult to make ends
meet. In fact, the basic cost of living in many parts of the state is more
than many single individuals or families can expect to earn, even if all adults
are working full-time.
…
Specifically, inflation-adjusted
median household rent rose by 16% between 2006 and 2017, while
inflation-adjusted median annual earnings for individuals working at least 35
hours per week and 50 weeks per year rose by just 2%, according to a Budget
Center analysis of US Census Bureau, American Community Survey data.
Many workers are being paid
little more today than workers were in 1979 even as worker productivity has
risen. Fewer employees have access to retirement plans sponsored by their
employers, leaving individual workers on their own to stretch limited dollars
and resources to plan how they’ll spend their later years affording the high
cost of living and health care in California. And as union representation has
declined, most workers today cannot negotiate collectively for better working
conditions, higher pay, and benefits, such as retirement and health care, like
their parents and grandparents did. On top of all this, workers who take on
contingent and independent work (often referred to as “gig work”), which in
many cases appears to be motivated by the need to supplement their primary job
or fill gaps in their employment, are rarely granted the same rights and legal
protections as traditional employees.
The center’s report tries to
blame the four-decade stretch of flat wages on the declining clout of unions.
But unions’ decline was impacted by the bipartisan elites’ policy of
mass-migration and imposed diversity.
In
2018, Breitbart reported how Progressives for
Immigration Reform interviewed Blaine Taylor, a union carpenter, about the
economic impact of migration:
TAYLOR: If I hired a framer to do
a small addition [in 1988], his wage would have been $45 an hour. That was
the minimum for a framing contractor, a good carpenter. For a helper, it was
about $25 an hour, for a master who could run a complete job, it was about $45
an hour. That was the going wage for plumbers as well. His helpers typically
got $25 an hour.
…
Now, the average wage in Los
Angeles for construction workers is less than $11 an hour. They can’t go lower
than the minimum wage. And much of that, if they’re not being paid by the hour
at less than $11 an hour, they’re being paid per piece — per piece of plywood
that’s installed, per piece of drywall that’s installed. Now, the subcontractor
can circumvent paying them as an hourly wage and are now being paid by 1099,
which means that no taxes are being taken out. [Emphasis added]
Diversity
also damaged the unions by shredding California’s civic solidarity. In 2007,
the progressive Southern Poverty Law Center posted a report with the title
“Latino Gang Members in Southern California are Terrorizing and Killing
Blacks.” In the same year, an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times described another murder by Latino
gangs as “a manifestation of an increasingly common trend: Latino ethnic
cleansing of African Americans from multiracial neighborhoods.”
The center’s board members
include the executive director of the state’s SEIU union, a professor from the
Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and
the research director at the “Program for Environmental and Regional Equity” at
the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
Outside
California, President Donald Trump’s low-immigration policies are pressuring
employers to raise Americans’ wages in a hot economy. The Wall Street Journal reportedAugust 29:
Overall, median weekly earnings
rose 5% from the fourth quarter of 2017 to the same quarter in 2018, according
to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For workers between the ages of 25 and 34,
that increase was 7.6%.
Ben
Carson Warns of Potential ‘Epidemic’ Among Homeless in California Cities
18 Sep 2019173
2:50
LOS ANGELES, California — Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben
Carson warned that conditions among homeless people in many California cities
were so bad they could “foster an epidemic, if we’re not careful.”
Carson spoke
to reporters after touring the Union Rescue Mission, a homeless shelter and non-profit organization
on Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles, at the core of the city’s homeless population
of almost 60,000 individuals.
The streets
surrounding the mission are lined with tents and trash. Homeless families sat
on the sidewalks, some in chairs, as cars struggled to navigate the chaos: a
homeless pair of lovers quarreled in the middle of an intersection.
Union Rescue Mission, Skid Row, Los Angeles (Joel Pollak /
Breitbart News)
Homeless couple, L.A. Skid Row (Joel Pollak / Breitbart News)
Last
year, Los Angeles suffered a typhus outbreak that spread from the homeless
population to City Hall. Some, including Dr. Drew Pinsky, are now warning that
L.A. could see an outbreak of bubonic plague, which is endemic.
The
secretary focused his remarks on partnerships between the federal, state, and
local governments, as well as the private sector, in urging Americans to
cooperate to find housing solutions for those who had fallen on hard times.
But
Carson also address the ongoing homeless crisis in California — a crisis that has
led President Donald Trump, who is visiting the state, to suggest emergency
federal intervention, overriding state and local government authority.
The
president could invoke the National Emergencies Act of 1976 and
the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act of
1988 to intervene. Federal officials reportedly visited the
state last week to look at facilities that could be used to house homeless
people after they had been relocated from the center of the city.
“My
preference, obviously, is to work with the state,” Carson said. “But what we’re
concerned about are the conditions. And these are conditions that … can foster
an epidemic, if we’re not careful. And then, after that occurs, what will
everybody be saying? How come you guys didn’t do anything? You knew all this
was going on?”
Carson
also addressed questions about the eviction of illegal aliens from public
housing, telling reporters that the law not only barred illegal aliens from
living in public housing, but those giving shelter to illegal aliens. The only
solution, he said, was an act of Congress, which could change the law with
“comprehensive immigration reform.”
Update: Secretary Carson also rejected requests
for additional federal funds to the state, arguing that state and local
authorities had to revise zoning regulations that discouraged the building of
additional affordable housing units.
Joel B.
Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social
Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a
J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak
Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside
Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter
at @joelpollak.
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