California's Gavin Newsom, now running scared
Impervious as ever to the impact of centrally planned greenie socialism on the reliability of electricity in California, Gov. Gavin Newsom is running scared.
He's threatening the Hugo Chavez solution to the new-normal of blackouts in his state, which is to say, nationalizing Pacific Gas & Electric. Nationalization? Boy is that a cop-out.
Yet look at how he couches the language so soothingly, according to the Sacramento Bee:
California Gov. Gavin Newsom designated a top aide as his “energy czar” in the wake of Pacific Gas & Electric Company’s prolonged power outages and on Friday suggested the state could take charge of the bankrupt utility.“The entire system needs to be reimagined,” Newsom said at a press conference.Ana Matosantos will continue to serve as Newsom’s cabinet secretary while also working as the state’s energy czar, where she will be charged with helping fix the state’s utility problems.
He also sounds like his governor's office is in turmoil. Get a load of this:
During the news conference, Newsom initially indicated Matosantos would step down as cabinet secretary — the second-highest-ranking cabinet member — to take the position, but his office later said he misspoke.
Obviously, he feels he needs this person, who did such a bang-up job on Puerto Rico's finances during its bankruptcy, the impressiveness of that visible in the wake of Hurricane Maria, /sarc.
It sounds like she got mad when he said she would step down from her more secure or prestigious position as cabinet secretary for the lousy czar position, which is rather signals she thinks this bid is going to fail. She probably knows she can't command economics and the whole thing is going to fail. (She'll keep her fancy position and lifetime bennies, though).
And of course it will fail. PG&E has no money to put its electrical wires under the ground after all the "green mandates" the socialists in the California state assembly have foisted on them, forcing them to convert to pricey, unreliable and wire-transmitted solar and wind power instead of efficient, reliable, cheap fossil fuels. That's a money pit right there.
Now PG&E has even less money to make even that happen and still supply reliable electricity what with all the billions in lawsuit payouts it must make to residents who have lost their homes in past wildfires based on this lack of investment. Why did that happen? Not just the greenie mandates for wind and solar power from the state central planners, the company also was forbidden to clear brush from its electrical lines. Another greenie diktat from the top that didn't end well.
Combine it with the highest state taxes in the nation to bankroll the plethora of freebies for illegal aliens, greenie boondoggles, and bloated salaries for public employee unions, and the company hasn't got a snowball's chance in a wildfire chance of succeeding in its basic function of providing electricity. But it's green as heck...
Now that the results of those priorities are clear, Newsom would have you think he's more competent to run the electrical company and make its decisions for it than the electrical company itself. He'll deliver the electricity, he'll command it so, mandates and all. He's not talking scrapping the hellish greenie mandates, cutting taxes, giving it legal relief to the company, or putting consumers first. His idea is to command the economics killing this company ... to go away. He's going to be Moses commanding the Greenie Sea. We all know how well that worked out when Hugo Chavez did it. Now with prettyboy Newsom's hands on the electrical levers, what could go wrong?
His talk is wild talk, desperate talk, and this being a one-party blue state, he may actually get his way.
But it's also the sort of desperation we saw - if you read, say, history of the Castro era in Cuba, that Castro undertook in the mid-1960s after the failure of his socialist central planning -- he used that as an excuse to collectivize further. It's also redolent of what went on in the Soviet Union in the 1920s when Vladimir Lenin was threatened with his loss of power after the disastrous early failures of socialism led to famine (electrical shortages, food shortages, socialism is always all about shortages), and then announced his New Economic Plan. As that threatened the communist grip on power, Josef Stalin's collectivization of farms followed. Nasty, nasty precedents there, and Newsom, ignorant as hell about it, yet fully socialist, is pretty well following in their footsteps -- lemmings-like, off the cliff.
He's refusing to put the blame for the blackouts on himself, where it belongs, and now trying to crack the whip even harder on the already abused PG&E.
Why he's worried is strange stuff, given his stranglehold on power in his one-party state, what with ballot-harvesting, the ease with which illegals can now vote in the state, and gerrymandering. Yet he's clearly running scared, so he's going Stalin.
Let me handle it, he says. This won't end well.
Illegal Immigration Is the Reason California Is Burning
By Wayne Allyn Root
Newsmax.com, October 31, 2019
. . .
https://www.newsmax.com/wayneallynroot/california-fires-power-outage-immigration/2019/10/31/id/939607/
Thursday, 31 October 2019 01:12 PM
Illegal Immigration Is the Reason California Is Burning
By Wayne Allyn Root
Newsmax.com, October 31, 2019
. . .
https://www.newsmax.com/wayneallynroot/california-fires-power-outage-immigration/2019/10/31/id/939607/
Illegal Immigration Is the Reason California Is Burning
A firefighting helicopter makes a water drop over the Easy Fire on October 30, 2019, near Simi Valley, California. (David McNew/Getty Images)
California is collapsing in front of our eyes. Everyone with the money and common sense is running for their lives. The question is why is this happening to such a rich and beautiful state?
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/victor-davis-hanson-california-premodern
Victor Davis
Hanson: Democrats have turned California into a problem-plagued burning
nightmare
By Victor Davis Hanson
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/victor-davis-hanson-california-premodern
Consumers blame the state for not cleaning up dead
trees and brush, along with the utility companies for not updating their
ossified equipment. The power companies in turn fault the state for so
over-regulating utilities that they had no resources to modernize their grids.
Californians know that having tens of thousands of
homeless in their major cities is untenable. In some places, municipal
sidewalks have become open sewers of garbage, used needles, rodents and
infectious diseases. Yet no one dares question progressive orthodoxy by
enforcing drug and vagrancy laws, moving the homeless out of cities to suburban
or rural facilities, or increasing the number of mental hospitals.
Taxpayers in California, whose basket of sales,
gasoline and income taxes is the highest in the nation, quietly seethe while
immobile on antiquated freeways that are crowded, dangerous and under nonstop
makeshift repair.
Gas prices of $4 to $5 a gallon — the result of high
taxes, hyper-regulation and green mandates — add insult to the injury of
stalled commuters. Gas tax increases ostensibly intended to fund freeway
expansion and repair continue to be diverted to the state’s failing high-speed
rail project.
Residents shrug that the state’s public schools are
among weakest in the nation, often ranking in the bottom quadrant in
standardized test scores. Elites publicly oppose charter schools but often put
their own kids in private academies.
Californians know that to venture into a typical
municipal emergency room is to descend into a modern Dante’s Inferno. Medical
facilities are overcrowded. They can be as unpleasant as they are bankrupting
to the vanishing middle class that must face exorbitant charges to bring in an
injured or sick child.
No one would dare to connect the crumbling
infrastructure, poor schools and failing public health care with the
non-enforcement of immigration laws, which has led to a massive influx of
undocumented immigrants from the poorest regions of the world, who often arrive
without fluency in English or a high-school education.
Stores are occasionally hit by swarming looters. Such
Wild West criminals know how to keep their thefts under $950, ensuring that
such “misdemeanors” do not warrant police attention. California’s permissive
laws have decriminalized thefts and break-ins. The result is that San Francisco
now has the highest property crime rate per capita in the nation.
Has California become premodern?
Millions of fed-up middle-class taxpayers have fled
the state. Their presence as a stabilizing influence is sorely missed. About
one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients live in California. Millions of
poor newcomers require enormously expensive state health, housing, education,
legal and law-enforcement services.
California is now a one-party state. Democrats have
supermajorities in both houses of the Legislature. Only seven of the state’s 53
congressional seats are held by Republicans. The result is that there is no
credible check on a mostly coastal majority.
Huge global wealth in high-tech, finance, trade and
academia poured into the coastal corridor, creating a new nobility with unprecedented
riches. Unfortunately, the new aristocracy adopted mindsets antithetical to the
general welfare of Californians living outside their coastal enclaves. The
nobodies have struggled to buy high-priced gas, pay exorbitant power bills and
deal with shoddy infrastructure — all of which resulted from the policies of
the distant somebodies.
BLOG: MUCH OF THE WEATLH ACCUMULATED OFF OF ELECTED
OFFICE BY FEINSTEIN, PELOSI (FORMER SENATOR BARABARA “BRIBES” BOXER), NANCY
PELOSI COMES FROM SIPHONING OFF BRIBES TO MEMBERS OF THEIR FAMILY IN THE FORM
OF “CONSULTATANT” FEES AND OTHER DEVICES.
FEINSTEIN AND BOXER VOTED ! NO ! WHEN THE SENATE
ATTEMPTED TO END THIS CORRUPTION. FEINSTEIN’S HUSBAND RICHARD BLUM HAS LONG
HANDED OUT BRIBES TO DEMS SO THEY TURN A BLIND EYE ON THE FEINSTEIN-BLUM WAR
PROFITEER OR BACKROOM DEALS WITH RED CHINA. GOOGLE FEINSTEIN ON THESE MATTERS.
California’s three most powerful politicians — House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Gov. Gavin Newsom — are all
multimillionaires. Their lives, homes and privileges bear no resemblance to
those of other Californians living with the consequences of their misguided
policies and agendas.
The state’s elite took revolving-door entries and
exits for granted. They assumed that California was so naturally rich,
beautiful and well-endowed that there would always be thousands of newcomers
who would queue up for the weather, the shore, the mountains and the hip
culture.
Yet California is nearing the logical limits of
progressive adventurism in policy and politics.
Residents carefully plan long highway trips as if
they were ancient explorers charting dangerous routes. Tourists warily enter
downtown Los Angeles or San Francisco as if visiting a politically unstable
nation.
Insatiable state tax collectors and agencies are
viewed by the public as if they were corrupt officials of Third World countries
seeking bribes. Californians flip their switches unsure of whether the lights
will go on. Many are careful about what they say, terrified of progressive
thought police who seem more worried about critics than criminals.
Our resolute ancestors took a century to turn a wilderness
into California. Our irresolute generation in just a decade or two has been
turning California into a wilderness.
Let's start with a comparison of the taxes in California with my state of Nevada (right next door to California). While California was burying its citizens with among the nation’s highest personal income taxes, highest corporate income taxes, highest sales taxes, and highest gas taxes, Nevada’s citizens have enjoyed among the lowest taxes in the country.
That could be why millions of people have left California in the past decade — almost all for the low tax states like Nevada, Texas, Florida, Utah, Colorado, Washington, and Arizona. Those states lead the nation in population growth, while California and other high tax, blue states lead the nation in population loss.
Keep in mind this was all before the nonstop blackouts and $6 per gallon gas in California.
Who can live in a place where the electric utility company shuts off the power to homes and businesses for days on end, multiple times per year? Because the wind is blowing hard? California has truly become a Third World Nation.
Keep in mind, this is what you got for all those high taxes.
So why is this happening? I lived in California for 15 wonderful years. The winds howled back then too. We had 80 MPH Santa Ana winds. And plenty of fires, floods, mudslides, and earthquakes. I lived through all of them. My home almost burned three times. My car was almost carried away by a massive mudslide.
Yet in my 15 years in California, no one shut off electricity because the wind was blowing. No one shut off electricity because there was the threat of a fire.
I’m not a California hater. I loved my time in California. It is the most beautiful state in America, with the greatest weather. But something has dramatically changed since I left. Today I wouldn’t live there if you gave me a $5 million oceanfront mansion for free.
What’s changed is disastrous liberal policy.
Lots of liberal ideas ruined California: high taxes, stifling regulations, climate change policy, permissive policies towards homeless encampments, the highest welfare benefits in the nation, a $15 minimum wage. It’s impossible to run a business in California. Restaurants are closing by the hundreds.
And did I mention poop, pee, and drug needles in the streets? And homeless camps everywhere.
Now add in blackouts that make life
miserable and bankrupt businesses.
California has become an unlivable third-
world hellhole.
But despite all those liberal policies that have contributed to the rot of California, one issue is at the root of California’s current problems. One issue stands heads and tails above all the rest.
First and foremost, illegal immigration is the problem. Since I left two decades ago, California has collectively spent hundreds of billions of dollars on illegal aliens and their bills — public schools, free meals at school, special bi-lingual teachers, healthcare, housing allowances, low income energy assistance, aid to families with dependent children, prisons, cops, courts, public defenders, welfare, food stamps, and a hundred other government handouts. And don’t forget special lower college tuition for illegal immigrants.
Can you imagine if all those billions of dollars were instead spent on new infrastructure, moving power poles underground, upgraded electrical equipment, modernized electrical systems, homeless vets, more cops, and better schools for children born in California. Can you imagine what a better place California would be for its own citizens?
Think about it in personal terms. What if a husband and father has a drug problem. He's addicted to cocaine or heroin. He spends $20,000 a year on his drug addiction for 20 years. That's $400,000. But his life remains in control. Until one day he finds out his child has cancer. The bill is $100,000 (after insurance pays). But he doesn't have the $100,000. His child is dying. If only he had the $400,000 back that he wasted on drugs.
That's California and illegal immigration. The state has squandered hundreds of billions on illegal immigration in the 20 years since I've been gone. They could use that money today. They desperately need it back to pay for the hundred billion dollar job of upgrading and modernizing their electric grid.
But they don't have the money. It's all
been wasted on illegal aliens. And it's
gone forever.
I guarantee you one thing Californians: if you had all that money back, you wouldn’t be sitting in the dark.
In my next column, I’ll get to Part II of the disastrous mistakes of liberalism that have destroyed California. Think idiotic environmental policies and climate change fraud.
That's another few hundred billion dollars wasted — and gone forever. Think about that, as you sit in the dark, shivering or sizzling, with your food spoiling.
Think about that as you fill up your gas tank with $5 our $6 per gallon gas, driving on crumbling highways, in massive traffic jams.
All the money to fix your misery was spent
on illegal aliens, not you. How does that
make you feel?
Trust me, if you impeach President Trump and elect Democrats to run the country, Democrats will turn the whole America into one big crappy, miserable, unlivable California.
Except you won't even get the sunshine and perfect 75 degree days.
Wayne Allyn Root is the host of "The Wayne Allyn Root Show" on Newsmax TV, nightly at 8 p.m. ET, found on DirecTV channel 349, Dish TV channel 216, or at NewsmaxTV.com. He is also a nationally syndicated radio host. Wayne Allyn Root is a former libertarian vice presidential nominee. He is the best-selling author of "The Power of Relentless." Read more reports from Wayne Allyn Root — Click Here Now.
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