Analysis conducted last year reveal that 71 percent of tech workers in Silicon Valley are foreign-born, while the tech industry in the San Francisco, Oakland, and Hayward area is made up of 50 percent foreign-born tech workers.
Ted Cruz vs. Big Tech
By Elise Cooper
Yahoo, Google, Twitter, and Facebook, as well as other social media sites, are extremely biased against conservatives, Republicans, and President Trump. A Pew Research Center survey conducted in June finds that about three-quarters of U.S. adults say it is very (37%) or somewhat (36%) likely that social media sites intentionally censor political viewpoints that they find objectionable. Just 25% believe this is not likely the case. Americans are divided over whether social media companies should label posts on their sites as inaccurate or misleading, with most being skeptical that these sites can accurately determine what content should be flagged.
Take Twitter, for example. A tweet included a picture of the viral “Moscow Mitch” meme, which took the internet by storm in mid-2019 when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) rejected an election security bill. Yet, these social media sites censor President Trump. Another example, after President Trump met with the residents of Kenosha, Wisconsin, there were no favorable articles on Yahoo news for hours, and then only one. Compare that to when VP Joe Biden went there, many media articles touted what a great move that was.
One person who is trying to remove the political bias is Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX). American Thinker had the privilege of interviewing him. “More and more, big tech is trying to abuse their power and censor speech they disagree with. They are actually silencing the voices of conservatives, especially this year as the election approaches. They are getting more and more brazen as they exercise a monopoly power. By doing this they are silently having dissent disappear. In my view, big tech censorship is the greatest threat to freedom of speech and to democracy in America.”
These social media companies censor conservatives through invisible means. For example, Yahoo constantly publishes anti-Trump articles that are very misleading. His supporters were pointing out the errors of the article in the comments section. But Yahoo would have no part of that, so they eliminated the comments. But to allow the leftists to have their say, they referenced tweets by individuals. There was a recent article about the California fires that criticized President Trump that included tweets by Governor Gavin Newsome (D-CA) and former VP Joe Biden. Another article’s headline on Yahoo says it all: “Yes, Sarah Sanders has a book, and if you believe in common decency you won't read it.”
Senator Cruz explained, “If Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or Yahoo decides a particular political view is unacceptable they can simply shadow bag it. Putting out a post or tweet strays into the ether and nobody knows. Likewise, they can do what you just referenced. Someone’s feed is collated so that the only voices being heard are the voices of the left, the views Silicon Valley favors.”
What can be done? Senator Cruz says there a number of remedies. “First, Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act provides tech companies with liability protections against illegal content posted by third-party users. At the time Congress passed this provision they believed big tech would be neutral. Since big tech has actively and aggressively abandoned this commitment, there is no reason to keep it. Why should they get special immunity that no other industry gets?”
He has also urged the DoJ to use anti-trust laws as a basis of investigation because these companies are abusing their monopoly power. He seems to be getting through, because recently the DoJ published a 25-page proposal on its website in which they suggested restraining protections that most of the social media platforms have enjoyed since 1996. This proposal will put an end to the social media administrators who control politics over their platforms, which basically takes away freedom of thought and expression.
To demonstrate the power of Big Tech, the senator points to the Senate hearings that he chaired. “At one of them there was testimony by Dr. [Robert] Epstein, who is not a conservative, Republican, and even voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, openly supporting her. Dr. Epstein, a psychologist, said 2.6 million votes could have been shifted in favor of Clinton because of a bias in Google's search results. What Google has done: when someone types ‘Trump’ the auto feed goes to anything negative and for Democrats like Hillary Clinton it goes to anything positive. Whatever article is listed first has enormous influence on what consumers believe. In the wake of 2016, it is getting much worse.”
Try it. American Thinker googled “Donald Trump is gaining in the polls.” What came up are two articles that were even boxed. In order, “Election update. Polls are pretty much good for Biden except Florida;” and “Biden Takes Lead in Six Swing States.” Senator Cruz feels “There is power on shining a light and exposing the problem. During a hearing I asked how many posts from Democratic candidates have been blocked compared to Republican candidates? Every one of the big tech companies refused to answer this simple question. They argue there is no evidence of political bias or discrimination. Mind you, they are the only people who possess the evidence and they refuse to give it up.”
Senator Mike Lee is also involved. He told American Thinker, “Apple, Facebook, Google, and Yahoo have all demonstrated a clear anti-conservative bias. That is why I recently sent a letter to the CEOs of the nation’s largest tech companies demanding answers to 11 questions including, ‘How do you ensure that a content-moderation decision is not influenced by the personal beliefs or political views of the moderator?’ As I said in the letter, ‘I am specifically concerned about corporations using their power unilaterally to silence opinions they dislike and thus warp the public debates their platforms present to the American people.’ The technology sector is completely dependent on the government-created patent and copyright monopolies given to them by Congress. Considering the power these monopoly rights have given to the tech sector, Congress has every right to make sure that they are being used to promote the progress of science and useful arts.”
What Americans need to do is hold the big tech companies accountable and take away their monopoly powers so they no longer have the opportunity to abuse them. The 2020 election is very important. More Republicans of the same mind as Senator Cruz need to be elected along with President Trump. As the President wrote, “Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube wield immense, if not unprecedented, power to shape the interpretation of public events; to censor, delete, or disappear information; and to control what people see or do not see. We must seek transparency and accountability from online platforms and encourage standards and tools to protect and preserve the integrity and openness of American discourse and freedom of expression.”
The author writes for American Thinker. She has done book reviews and author interviews and has written a number of national security, political, and foreign policy articles.
While America’s working and middle class have been
subjected to compete for jobs against a constant flow of
cheaper foreign workers — where more than 1.2 million
mostly low-skilled immigrants are admitted to the country
annually — the billionaire class has experienced historic
salary gains." Sen. Josh Hawley
Analysis conducted last year reveal that 71 percent of tech workers in Silicon
Valley are foreign-born, while the tech industry in the San Francisco, Oakland,
and Hayward area is made up of 50 percent foreign-born tech workers.
"This is how they will destroy America from within. The leftist billionaires who orchestrate these plans are wealthy. Those tasked with representing us in Congress will never be exposed to the cost of the invasion of millions of migrants. They have nothing but contempt for those of us who must endure the consequences of our communities being intruded upon by gang members, drug dealers and human traffickers. These people have no intention of becoming Americans; like the Democrats who welcome them, they have contempt for us." PATRICIA McCARTHY
“Behind the ostensible government sits
enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no
responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul
the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first
task of the statesmanship of today.” THEODORE
ROOSEVELT
Mark
Zuckerberg’s Silicon Valley investors are uniting with the Koch network’s
consumer and industrial investors to demand a huge DACA amnesty
The Heritage Foundation has continued to defend big tech
against efforts to strip them of their special legal privileges, which were given to them by Congress in the 1990s and are
enjoyed by no other type of company.
This is despite the fact that Google publicly snubbed the
foundation last year, canceling the formation of a planned “A.I ethics” council
after far-left employees of the tech company threw a hissy fit over the fact that Heritage president Kay Coles James was
set to be one of its members.
Are you an insider at Google, Facebook, Twitter or any other
tech company who wants to confidentially reveal wrongdoing or political bias at
your company? Reach out to Allum Bokhari at his secure email address allumbokhari@protonmail.com.
Google
Insider: Bombshell Book ‘Deleted’ Will ‘Shake the Foundations of Silicon
Valley’
31 Aug
20202,335
3:20
An upcoming book from Breitbart News investigative reporter
Allum Bokhari is set to “shake the foundations of Silicon Valley,” according to
a Big Tech source who has worked at numerous tech giants including Google.
The book, #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase
the Trump Movement and Steal the Election, will be published by Center Street on September 22, and is
currently available for preorder at Barnes & Noble and other retailers.
“When voters find out what big tech companies have done to
meddle in the coming election, they’ll be rightly furious” said the source, who
worked on key Google products for several years.
“The level of covert manipulation is breathtaking. Every
American who’s worried about the future of free and fair elections should read
this book.”
The book’s author, Allum Bokhari, has worked as a tech reporter
at Breitbart News since 2015. He has helped whistleblowers within Google,
Facebook, and YouTube release damning leaks exposing Big Tech’s political bias.
In 2018, he obtained “The Google Tape,” a one-hour recording of Google’s top executives reacting to the election of
Donald Trump in 2016. The most powerful people at the company, including
co-founder Sergey Brin, CEO Sundar Pichai, and chief legal officer Kent Walker
expressed dismay over Trump’s election, with Walker pledging to make the populist movement a “blip” in history.
Just over a month later, Bokhari obtained “The Good Censor,”
an 85-page document from within Google admitting to Silicon Valley’s “shift
towards censorship.” Sen. Ted Cruz later grilled representatives of Google
about the leak during a congressional hearing.
Bokhari also revealed the existence of YouTube’s “controversial
query blacklist,” a secret file used by the company to manipulate political
search results. The leak revealed that YouTube adjusted search results on terms
like “abortion” and “federal reserve” in response to complaints from left-wing journalists.
He also obtained Facebook’s “hate agents review” list — a hit
list of high-profile political figures that the platform considers potential
“hate agents.” Facebook keeps regular tabs on these people, including
monitoring their offline activities. The list included Candace Owens, Brigitte Gabrielle, and other prominent conservatives.
#DELETED, the product of Bokhari’s five
years of investigating Silicon Valley, reportedly reveals even more of Big
Tech’s secrets.
Sources and whistleblowers who work or have worked for Google,
Facebook, Twitter, and other tech giants were extensively interviewed for the
book. They reveal Big Tech’s secretive, AI-controlled methods to control and
manipulate information, methods that unlike overt bans and censorship, cannot
be readily observed by outsiders.
They also explain how virtually every Big Tech company was
pulled to the radical left after the 2016 election, with radical elements
within Google, Facebook, and Twitter now obsessively pursuing an overriding goal:
stopping Trump’s reelection.
#DELETED will be released on
September 22. Click
HERE to preorder.
Josh Hawley: GOP Must Defend Middle Class Americans Against
‘Concentrated Corporate Power,’ Tech Billionaires
JOHN
BINDER
The Republican Party must defend
America’s working and middle class against “concentrated corporate power” and
the monopolization of entire sectors of the United States’ economy, Sen. Josh
Hawley (R-MO) says.
In an interview
on The Realignment podcast, Hawley said that “long gone are
the days where” American workers can depend on big business to look out for
their needs and the needs of their communities.
Instead, Hawley
explained that increasing “concentrated corporate power” of whole sectors of
the American economy — specifically among Silicon Valley’s giant tech
conglomerates — is at the expense of working and middle class Americans.
“One of the things
Republicans need to recover today is a defense of an open, free-market, of a
fair healthy competing market and the length between that and Democratic
citizenship,” Hawley said, and continued:
At the end of the day,
we are trying to support and sustain here a great democracy. We’re not trying
to make a select group of people rich. They’ve already done that. The tech
billionaires are already billionaires, they don’t need any more help from
government. I’m not interested in trying to help them further. I’m interested
in trying to help sustain the great middle of this country that makes our
democracy run and that’s the most important challenge of this day.
“You have these
businesses who for years now have said ‘Well, we’re based in the United States,
but we’re not actually an American company, we’re a global company,'” Hawley
said. “And you know, what has driven profits for some of our biggest
multinational corporations? It’s been … moving jobs overseas where it’s cheaper
… moving your profits out of this country so you don’t have to pay any taxes.”
“I think that we have
here at the same time that our economy has become more concentrated, we have
bigger and bigger corporations that control more and more of our key sectors,
those same corporations see themselves as less and less American and frankly
they are less committed to American workers and American communities,” Hawley
continued. “That’s turned out to be a problem which is one of the reasons we
need to restore good, healthy, robust competition in this country that’s going
to push up wages, that’s going to bring jobs back to the middle parts of this
country, and most importantly, to the middle and working class of this
country.”
While multinational
corporations monopolize industries, Hawley said the GOP must defend working and
middle class Americans and that big business interests should not come before
the needs of American communities:
A free market is one
where you can enter it, where there are new ideas, and also by the way, where
people can start a small family business, you shouldn’t have to be gigantic in
order to succeed in this country. Most people don’t want to start a tech
company. [Americans] maybe want to work in their family’s business, which
may be some corner shop in a small town … they want to be able to make a
living and then give that to their kids or give their kids an option to do
that. [Emphasis added]
The problem with
corporate concentration is that it tends to kill all of that. The worst thing
about corporate concentration is that it inevitably believes to a partnership
with big government. Big business and big government always get together,
always. And that is exactly what has happened now with the tech sector, for
instance, and arguably many other sectors where you have this alliance between
big government and big business … whatever you call it, it’s a problem and it’s
something we need to address. [Emphasis added]
Hawley blasted the free
trade-at-all-costs doctrine that has dominated the Republican and Democrat
Party establishments for decades, crediting the globalist economic model with
hollowing “out entire industries, entire supply chains” and sending them to
China, among other countries.
“The thing is in this
country is that not only do we not make very much stuff anymore, we don’t even
make the machines that make the stuff,” Hawley said. “The entire supply chain
up and down has gone overseas, and a lot of it to China, and this is a result
of policies over some decades now.”
As Breitbart News
reported, Hawley detailed in the interview how Republicans like
former President George H.W. Bush’s ‘New World Order’ agenda and Democrats have
helped to create a corporatist economy that disproportionately benefits the
nation’s richest executives and donor class.
The billionaire class,
the top 0.01 percent of earners, has enjoyed more than 15 times as much wage growth as the
bottom 90 percent since 1979. That economy has been reinforced with federal
rules that largely benefits the wealthiest of wealthiest earners. A study released last month revealed that the richest
Americans are, in fact, paying a lower tax rate than all other Americans.
John Binder is a
reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
Tucker
Carlson Exposes D.C. ‘Conservatives’ for Doing Big Tech’s Bidding
Rich Polk/Getty
21 Dec 20190
3:53
Fox News host Tucker Carlson slammed establishment conservatives
for taking money from big tech companies to do their bidding, on Tucker
Carlson Tonight, Friday night.
The popular host, known for his no-holds-barred denunciations of
establishment conservatives as well as Democrats, revealed massive spending by
the establishment conservative Koch Foundation to protect big tech in
Washington.
Tucker revealed that Americans for Prosperity, a “purportedly
conservative group” controlled by the Kochs, launched an ad campaign trying to
stave off the closing net of antitrust enforcement against Google and Facebook.
The ads targeted Republican and Democrat state attorneys general that were
investigating alleged antitrust violations by big tech companies.
The Koch-funded group also targeted members of the Senate
Judiciary Committee with digital ads urging them to “oppose any effort to use
antitrust laws to break up America’s innovative tech companies,” reported
Carlson.
The Fox host ran through a laundry list of allegedly “conservative”
D.C. think tanks that take money from big tech, and often advocate against
regulating them over political bias or any other matter.
“In all, the Koch network quietly spent at least $10 million
defending Silicon Valley companies that work to silence conservatives.”
Tucker
Carlson Slamming Conservative Inc. for Defending Big Tech
Tucker Calls Out
-Kochs
-Heritage Foundation
-American Conservative Union
-AEI
"Big Tech Companies silence Conservatives, Conservative Non-Profits try to
prevent the government from doing anything about it."
2,315
people are talking about this
“Google has given money to at least 22 right-leaning
institutions that are also funded by the Koch network,” reported Carlson.
“Those institutions include the American Conservative Union, the
American Enterprise Institute, the National Review Institute, the Competitive
Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Mercatus Center.”
Carlson explained that this spending gets results.
“In September of 2018, the Competitive Enterprise Institute and
three other groups funded by Google and the Kochs sent a joint letter to
the Attorney General at the time, Jeff Sessions, expressing grave concerns over
the DoJ’s plans to look into whether search engines and social media were
hurting competition and stifling speech.”
Carlson also called out The Heritage Foundation, arguing that
its shilling for big tech meant that it “no longer represents the interest of
conservatives, at least on the question of tech.”
“A recent paper by Heritage, entitled ‘Free Enterprise Is the Best Remedy For
Online Bias Concerns,’ defends the special privileges that
Congress has given to left-wing Silicon Valley monopolies. And if conservatives
don’t like it, Heritage says, well they can just start their own Google!”
Evidence of big tech’s efforts to co-opt establishment
conservatives has been accumulating for some time. In March, Breitbart
News published leaked audio from a
senior director of public policy at Google, talking about using funding of conservative institutions to
“steer” the movement. Another part of the leaked audio transcript was also revealed on Tucker
Carlson’s show at the same time.
The Heritage Foundation has continued to defend big tech
against efforts to strip them of their special legal privileges, which were given to them by Congress in the 1990s and are
enjoyed by no other type of company.
This is despite the fact that Google publicly snubbed the
foundation last year, canceling the formation of a planned “A.I ethics” council
after far-left employees of the tech company threw a hissy fit over the fact that Heritage president Kay Coles James was
set to be one of its members.
Are you an insider at Google, Facebook, Twitter or any other
tech company who wants to confidentially reveal wrongdoing or political bias at
your company? Reach out to Allum Bokhari at his secure email address allumbokhari@protonmail.com.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at
Breitbart News.
December 20, 2019
California Preening
The Golden State is on a path to high-tech feudalism, but there’s
still time to change course.
“We are the modern
equivalent of the ancient city-states of Athens and Sparta. California has the
ideas of Athens and the power of Sparta,” declared then-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2007. “Not
only can we lead California into the future . . . we can show the nation and
the world how to get there.” When a movie star who once played Hercules says so
who’s to disagree? The idea of California as a model, of course, precedes the
former governor’s tenure. Now the state’s anti-Trump resistance—in its zeal on
matters concerning climate, technology, gender, or race—believes that it knows how to
create a just, affluent, and enlightened society. “The future depends on us,”
Governor Gavin Newsom said at his
inauguration. “And we will seize this moment.”
In truth, the Golden
State is becoming a semi-feudal kingdom, with the nation’s widest gap between middle and upper incomes—72 percent, compared
with the U.S. average of 57 percent—and its highest poverty rate. Roughly half
of America’s homeless live in Los Angeles or San Francisco, which now has the highest property crime rate among major
cities. California hasn’t yet become a
full-scale dystopia, of course, but it’s heading in a troubling direction.
This didn’t have to
happen. No place on earth has more going for it than the Golden State. Unlike
the East Coast and Midwest, California benefited from comparatively late
industrialization, with an economy based less on auto manufacturing and steel
than on science-based fields like aerospace, software, and semiconductors. In
the mid-twentieth century, the state also gained from the best aspects of
progressive rule, culminating in an elite public university system, a massive
water system reminiscent of the Roman Empire, and a vast infrastructure network
of highways, ports, and bridges. The state was fortunate, too, in drawing
people from around the U.S. and the world. The eighteenth-century French traveler J. Hector St. John de
Crèvecœur described the American as
“this new man,” and California—innovative, independent, and less bound by
tradition or old prejudice—reflected that insight. Though remnants of this
California still exist, its population is aging, less mobile, and more
pessimistic, and its roads, schools, and universities are in decline.
In the second half of the twentieth century, California’s
remarkably diverse economy spread prosperity from the coast into the state’s
inland regions. Though pockets of severe poverty existed—urban barrios, south
Los Angeles, the rural Central Valley—they were limited in scope. In
fact, growth often favored suburban and exurban communities, where
middle-class families, including minorities, settled after World War II.
In the last two decades,
the state has adopted policies that undermine the basis for middle-class
growth. State energy policies, for example, have made California’s gas and
electricity prices among the steepest in the country. Since 2011, electricity
prices have risen five times faster than the national average. Meantime, strict land-use
controls have raised housing costs to the nation’s highest, while taxes—once
average, considering California’s urban scale—now exceed those of virtually every
state. At the same time, California’s
economy has shed industrial diversity in favor of dependence on one industry:
Big Tech. Just a decade before, the state’s largest firms included those in the
aerospace, finance, energy, and service industries. Today’s 11 largest
companies hail from the tech sector, while energy firms—excluding Chevron,
which has moved much of its operations to Houston—have disappeared. Not a single top aerospace firm—the
iconic industry of twentieth-century California—retains its headquarters here.
Though lionized in the
press, this tech-oriented economy hasn’t resulted in that many middle- and
high-paying job opportunities for Californians, particularly outside the Bay
Area. Since 2008, notes Chapman University’s Marshall Toplansky, the state has
created five times the number of low-paying, as opposed to high-wage, jobs. A
remarkable 86 percent of new jobs paid below the median income, while almost
half paid under $40,000. Moreover, California, including Silicon Valley,
created fewer high-paying positions than the national average, and far less
than prime competitors like Salt Lake City, Seattle, or Austin. Los Angeles
County features the lowest pay of any of the nation’s 50 largest counties.
No state advertises its multicultural bona fides more than
California, now a majority-minority state. This is evident at the University of California, where professors are required to prove their service to
“people of color,” to the state’s high school curricula, with its new ethnic studies component. Much of
California’s anti-Trump resistance has a racial context. State Attorney General
Xavier Becerra has sued the administration numerous times over immigration
policy while he helps ensure California’s distinction as a sanctuary for
illegal immigrants. So far, more than 1 million illegal residents have received driver’s licenses, and they qualify
for free health care, too. San Francisco now permits illegal immigrants
to vote in local elections.
Such radical policies may
make progressives feel better about themselves, though they seem less concerned
about how these actions affect everyday people. California’s Latinos and
African-Americans have seen good blue-collar jobs in manufacturing and energy
vanish. According to one United Way study, over half of Latino households can barely pay their
bills. “For Latinos,” notes long-time political consultant Mike Madrid, “the California Dream is becoming an unattainable
fantasy.”
In the past, poorer
Californians could count on education to help them move up. But today’s
educators appear more interested in political indoctrination than results.
Among the 50 states, California ranked 49th in the performance of low-income students. In wealthy San
Francisco, test scores for black students are the worst of any California
county. Many minority residents, especially African-Americans, are fleeing the
state. In a recent UC Berkeley poll, 58 percent of black expressed interest in
leaving California, a higher percentage than for any racial group, though
approximately 45 percent of Asians and Latinos also considered moving out.
Perhaps the biggest
demographic disaster is generational. For decades, California incubated youth culture, creating trends like beatniks, hippies, surfers, and
Latino and Asian art, music, and cuisine. The state is a fountainhead of youthful wokeness and rebellion, but that may prove short-lived as millennials leave. From
2014 to 2018, notes demographer Wendell Cox, net domestic out-migration grew
from 46,000 to 156,000. The exiles are increasingly in their family-formation
years. In the 2010s, California suffered higher net declines in virtually every
age category under 54, with the biggest rate of loss coming among the 35-to-44
cohort.
As families with children
leave, and international migration slows to one-third of Texas’s level, the
remaining population is rapidly aging. Since 2010, California’s fertility rate
has dropped 60 percent, more than the national average; the state is now aging
50 percent more rapidly than the rest of the country. A growing number of tech
firms and millennials have headed to the Intermountain West. Low rates of homeownership among younger people play a
big role in this trend, with California millennials forced to rent, with little chance of buying their
own home, while many of the state’s biggest metros lead the nation in long-term
owners. California is increasingly a
greying refuge for those who bought property when housing was affordable.
After Governor Schwarzenegger morphed into a progressive
environmentalist, climate concerns began driving state policy. His successors
have embraced California “leadership” on climate issues. Jerry Brown recently told a crowd in China that the rest of the world should
follow California’s example. The state’s top Democrats, like state senate
president pro tem Kevin DeLeon, Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti, and
billionaire Democratic presidential candidate Tom Steyer, now compete for the green mantle.
Their policies have worsened conditions for many middle- and working-class Californians.
Oblivious to these concerns, Greens ignore practical ideas—nuclear power,
natural gas cars, job creation in affordable areas, home-based work—that could
help reduce emissions without disrupting people’s lives. Ultra-green policies
also work against the state’s proclaimed goal of
building more than 3.5 million new housing units by 2025. In accordance with
its efforts to reduce car use, the state mandates that most growth occurs in
already-crowded coastal areas, where land prices are highest. But in cities
like San Francisco, the cost of building one unit for a homeless person surpasses $700,000.
California’s inland regions, though experiencing population gains, keep
losing state funding for decrepit highways in favor of urban-centric, mass transit projects—yet
transit use has stagnated, especially in greater Los Angeles.
The state, nevertheless,
continues its pursuit of policies that would eliminate all fossil fuels and
nuclear power—outpacing national or even Paris Accord levels and guaranteeing
ever-rising energy prices. Mandating everything from electric cars to electric homes will only drive more working-class
Californians into “energy poverty.” High energy prices also directly affect the
manufacturing and logistics firms that employ blue-collar workers at decent
wages. Business relocation expert Joe Vranich notes that industrial firms account for many of the
2,000 employers that left the state this decade. California’s industrial growth
has fallen to the bottom tier of states; last year, it ranked 44th, with a rate of growth
one-third to one-quarter that of prime competitors like Texas, Virginia,
Arizona, Nevada, and Florida.
Similarly, the high
energy prices tend to hit the interior counties that, besides being poorer, have
far less temperate climates. Cities like Bakersfield, capital of the state’s once-vibrant oil industry, are
particularly hard-hit. High energy prices will cost the region, northeast of
the Los Angeles Basin, 14,000 generally high-paid jobs, even as the state
continues to import oil from Saudi Arabia.
California’s leaders
apply climate change to excuse virtually every failure of state policy. During
the California drought, Brown and his minions blamed the “climate” for the dry
period, refusing to take responsibility for insufficient water storage that would have helped farmers. When the rains
returned and reservoirs filled, this argument was forgotten, and little effort
has been made to conserve water for next time. Likewise, Newsom and his supporters in the media have blamed recent fires on changes in the global
climate, but the disaster had as much to do with green mandates against controlled burns and brush clearance than anything occurring on a planetary scale. Brown joined greens and others in blocking such sensible policies.
Few climate advocates
ever seem to ask if their policies actually help the planet. Indeed,
California’s green policy, as one paper demonstrates, may be increasing total greenhouse-gas
emissions by pushing people and industries to states with less mild climates.
In the past decade, the state ranked 40th in per-capita reductions, and its
global carbon footprint is minimal. Renewable energy may be expensive and
unreliable, but state policy nevertheless enriches the green-energy investments of tech leaders, even when their efforts—like the Google-backed Ivanpah solar farm—fail to deliver affordable, reliable energy.
It’s not so surprising, given these enthusiasms, that progressive
politicians like Garcetti—who leads a city with paralyzing traffic congestion,
rampant inequality, a huge rat infestation, and proliferating homeless camps—would rather talk about
becoming chair of the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group.
Reality is asserting
itself, though. Tech firms already show signs of restlessness with the current
regulatory regime and appear to be shifting employment to other states, notably Texas, Tennessee, Nevada, Colorado, and Arizona. Economic-modeling firm Emsi estimates that several states—Idaho, Tennessee,
Washington, and Utah—are growing their tech employment faster than California.
The state is losing momentum in professional and technical services—the largest
high-wage sector—and now stands roughly in the middle of the pack behind other
western states such as Texas, Tennessee, and Florida. And Assembly Bill 5, the
state law regulating certain forms of contract labor, reclassifies part-time workers. Aimed initially at
ride-sharing giants Uber and Lyft, the
legislation also extends to independent contractors in industries from media to
trucking.
At some point, as
even Brown noted, the ultra-high capital gains returns will fall
and, combined with the costs of an expanding welfare state, could leave the
state in fiscal chaos. Big Tech could stumble, a possibility made more real by
the recent $100 billion drop in the value of privately held “unicorn” companies,
including WeWork. If the tech economy slows, a rift could develop between two
of the state’s biggest forces—unions and the green establishment—over future
levels of taxation. More than two-thirds of California cities don’t have any funds set aside for retiree health
care and other retirement expenses. The state also confronts $1 trillion in
pension debt, according to former Democratic state senator Joe Nation. U.S. News & Report ranks California, despite the tech boom,
42nd in fiscal health among the states.
The good news: some
Californians are waking up. A recent PPIC poll found that increasing proportions of Californians
believe that the state is headed in the wrong direction—a figure that exceeds
55 percent in the inland areas. And voters dislike the state legislature even more than they dislike Donald Trump.
Newsom’s approval rating stands at 43 percent, placing him toward the bottom among the nation’s
governors. A conservative-led campaign to recall him is unlikely to succeed, but surveys
reveal growing opposition to the new tax hikes proposed by the legislature. There’s a growing
concern about the state’s expanding homeless population.
And a rebellion against
the state’s energy policies is already under way. Recently, 110 cities, with total population exceeding 8 million, have demanded
changes in California’s drive to prevent new natural gas hookups. The state’s
Chamber of Commerce and the three most prominent ethnic
chambers—African-American, Latino, and
Asian-Pacific—have joined this effort.
Californians need less
bombast and progressive pretense from their leaders and more attention to
policies that could counteract the economic and demographic tides threatening
the state. On its current course, California increasingly resembles a model of
what the late Taichi Sakaiya called “high-tech feudalism,” with a small
population of wealthy residents and a growing mass of modern-day serfs.
Delusion and preening ultimately have limits, as more Californians are
beginning to recognize. As the 2020s beckon, the time for the state to change
course is now.
Mark
Zuckerberg’s Silicon Valley investors are uniting with the Koch network’s
consumer and industrial investors to demand a huge DACA amnesty
The Heritage Foundation has continued to defend big tech
against efforts to strip them of their special legal privileges, which were given to them by Congress in the 1990s and are
enjoyed by no other type of company.
This is despite the fact that Google publicly snubbed the
foundation last year, canceling the formation of a planned “A.I ethics” council
after far-left employees of the tech company threw a hissy fit over the fact that Heritage president Kay Coles James was
set to be one of its members.
Are you an insider at Google, Facebook, Twitter or any other
tech company who wants to confidentially reveal wrongdoing or political bias at
your company? Reach out to Allum Bokhari at his secure email address allumbokhari@protonmail.com.
Google
Insider: Bombshell Book ‘Deleted’ Will ‘Shake the Foundations of Silicon
Valley’
31 Aug
20202,335
3:20
An upcoming book from Breitbart News investigative reporter
Allum Bokhari is set to “shake the foundations of Silicon Valley,” according to
a Big Tech source who has worked at numerous tech giants including Google.
The book, #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase
the Trump Movement and Steal the Election, will be published by Center Street on September 22, and is
currently available for preorder at Barnes & Noble and other retailers.
“When voters find out what big tech companies have done to
meddle in the coming election, they’ll be rightly furious” said the source, who
worked on key Google products for several years.
“The level of covert manipulation is breathtaking. Every
American who’s worried about the future of free and fair elections should read
this book.”
The book’s author, Allum Bokhari, has worked as a tech reporter
at Breitbart News since 2015. He has helped whistleblowers within Google,
Facebook, and YouTube release damning leaks exposing Big Tech’s political bias.
In 2018, he obtained “The Google Tape,” a one-hour recording of Google’s top executives reacting to the election of
Donald Trump in 2016. The most powerful people at the company, including
co-founder Sergey Brin, CEO Sundar Pichai, and chief legal officer Kent Walker
expressed dismay over Trump’s election, with Walker pledging to make the populist movement a “blip” in history.
Just over a month later, Bokhari obtained “The Good Censor,”
an 85-page document from within Google admitting to Silicon Valley’s “shift
towards censorship.” Sen. Ted Cruz later grilled representatives of Google
about the leak during a congressional hearing.
Bokhari also revealed the existence of YouTube’s “controversial
query blacklist,” a secret file used by the company to manipulate political
search results. The leak revealed that YouTube adjusted search results on terms
like “abortion” and “federal reserve” in response to complaints from left-wing journalists.
He also obtained Facebook’s “hate agents review” list — a hit
list of high-profile political figures that the platform considers potential
“hate agents.” Facebook keeps regular tabs on these people, including
monitoring their offline activities. The list included Candace Owens, Brigitte Gabrielle, and other prominent conservatives.
#DELETED, the product of Bokhari’s five
years of investigating Silicon Valley, reportedly reveals even more of Big
Tech’s secrets.
Sources and whistleblowers who work or have worked for Google,
Facebook, Twitter, and other tech giants were extensively interviewed for the
book. They reveal Big Tech’s secretive, AI-controlled methods to control and
manipulate information, methods that unlike overt bans and censorship, cannot
be readily observed by outsiders.
They also explain how virtually every Big Tech company was
pulled to the radical left after the 2016 election, with radical elements
within Google, Facebook, and Twitter now obsessively pursuing an overriding goal:
stopping Trump’s reelection.
#DELETED will be released on
September 22. Click
HERE to preorder.
Josh Hawley: GOP Must Defend Middle Class Americans Against
‘Concentrated Corporate Power,’ Tech Billionaires
JOHN
BINDERThe Republican Party must defend
America’s working and middle class against “concentrated corporate power” and
the monopolization of entire sectors of the United States’ economy, Sen. Josh
Hawley (R-MO) says.
In an interview
on The Realignment podcast, Hawley said that “long gone are
the days where” American workers can depend on big business to look out for
their needs and the needs of their communities.
Instead, Hawley
explained that increasing “concentrated corporate power” of whole sectors of
the American economy — specifically among Silicon Valley’s giant tech
conglomerates — is at the expense of working and middle class Americans.
“One of the things
Republicans need to recover today is a defense of an open, free-market, of a
fair healthy competing market and the length between that and Democratic
citizenship,” Hawley said, and continued:
At the end of the day,
we are trying to support and sustain here a great democracy. We’re not trying
to make a select group of people rich. They’ve already done that. The tech
billionaires are already billionaires, they don’t need any more help from
government. I’m not interested in trying to help them further. I’m interested
in trying to help sustain the great middle of this country that makes our
democracy run and that’s the most important challenge of this day.
“You have these
businesses who for years now have said ‘Well, we’re based in the United States,
but we’re not actually an American company, we’re a global company,'” Hawley
said. “And you know, what has driven profits for some of our biggest
multinational corporations? It’s been … moving jobs overseas where it’s cheaper
… moving your profits out of this country so you don’t have to pay any taxes.”
“I think that we have
here at the same time that our economy has become more concentrated, we have
bigger and bigger corporations that control more and more of our key sectors,
those same corporations see themselves as less and less American and frankly
they are less committed to American workers and American communities,” Hawley
continued. “That’s turned out to be a problem which is one of the reasons we
need to restore good, healthy, robust competition in this country that’s going
to push up wages, that’s going to bring jobs back to the middle parts of this
country, and most importantly, to the middle and working class of this
country.”
While multinational
corporations monopolize industries, Hawley said the GOP must defend working and
middle class Americans and that big business interests should not come before
the needs of American communities:
A free market is one
where you can enter it, where there are new ideas, and also by the way, where
people can start a small family business, you shouldn’t have to be gigantic in
order to succeed in this country. Most people don’t want to start a tech
company. [Americans] maybe want to work in their family’s business, which
may be some corner shop in a small town … they want to be able to make a
living and then give that to their kids or give their kids an option to do
that. [Emphasis added]
The problem with
corporate concentration is that it tends to kill all of that. The worst thing
about corporate concentration is that it inevitably believes to a partnership
with big government. Big business and big government always get together,
always. And that is exactly what has happened now with the tech sector, for
instance, and arguably many other sectors where you have this alliance between
big government and big business … whatever you call it, it’s a problem and it’s
something we need to address. [Emphasis added]
Hawley blasted the free
trade-at-all-costs doctrine that has dominated the Republican and Democrat
Party establishments for decades, crediting the globalist economic model with
hollowing “out entire industries, entire supply chains” and sending them to
China, among other countries.
“The thing is in this
country is that not only do we not make very much stuff anymore, we don’t even
make the machines that make the stuff,” Hawley said. “The entire supply chain
up and down has gone overseas, and a lot of it to China, and this is a result
of policies over some decades now.”
As Breitbart News
reported, Hawley detailed in the interview how Republicans like
former President George H.W. Bush’s ‘New World Order’ agenda and Democrats have
helped to create a corporatist economy that disproportionately benefits the
nation’s richest executives and donor class.
The billionaire class,
the top 0.01 percent of earners, has enjoyed more than 15 times as much wage growth as the
bottom 90 percent since 1979. That economy has been reinforced with federal
rules that largely benefits the wealthiest of wealthiest earners. A study released last month revealed that the richest
Americans are, in fact, paying a lower tax rate than all other Americans.
John Binder is a
reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
Tucker
Carlson Exposes D.C. ‘Conservatives’ for Doing Big Tech’s Bidding
Rich Polk/Getty
21 Dec 20190
3:53
Fox News host Tucker Carlson slammed establishment conservatives
for taking money from big tech companies to do their bidding, on Tucker
Carlson Tonight, Friday night.
The popular host, known for his no-holds-barred denunciations of
establishment conservatives as well as Democrats, revealed massive spending by
the establishment conservative Koch Foundation to protect big tech in
Washington.
Tucker revealed that Americans for Prosperity, a “purportedly
conservative group” controlled by the Kochs, launched an ad campaign trying to
stave off the closing net of antitrust enforcement against Google and Facebook.
The ads targeted Republican and Democrat state attorneys general that were
investigating alleged antitrust violations by big tech companies.
The Koch-funded group also targeted members of the Senate
Judiciary Committee with digital ads urging them to “oppose any effort to use
antitrust laws to break up America’s innovative tech companies,” reported
Carlson.
The Fox host ran through a laundry list of allegedly “conservative”
D.C. think tanks that take money from big tech, and often advocate against
regulating them over political bias or any other matter.
“In all, the Koch network quietly spent at least $10 million
defending Silicon Valley companies that work to silence conservatives.”
Tucker
Carlson Slamming Conservative Inc. for Defending Big Tech
Tucker Calls Out
-Kochs
-Heritage Foundation
-American Conservative Union
-AEI
"Big Tech Companies silence Conservatives, Conservative Non-Profits try to
prevent the government from doing anything about it."
2,315
people are talking about this
“Google has given money to at least 22 right-leaning
institutions that are also funded by the Koch network,” reported Carlson.
“Those institutions include the American Conservative Union, the
American Enterprise Institute, the National Review Institute, the Competitive
Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Mercatus Center.”
Carlson explained that this spending gets results.
“In September of 2018, the Competitive Enterprise Institute and
three other groups funded by Google and the Kochs sent a joint letter to
the Attorney General at the time, Jeff Sessions, expressing grave concerns over
the DoJ’s plans to look into whether search engines and social media were
hurting competition and stifling speech.”
Carlson also called out The Heritage Foundation, arguing that
its shilling for big tech meant that it “no longer represents the interest of
conservatives, at least on the question of tech.”
“A recent paper by Heritage, entitled ‘Free Enterprise Is the Best Remedy For
Online Bias Concerns,’ defends the special privileges that
Congress has given to left-wing Silicon Valley monopolies. And if conservatives
don’t like it, Heritage says, well they can just start their own Google!”
Evidence of big tech’s efforts to co-opt establishment
conservatives has been accumulating for some time. In March, Breitbart
News published leaked audio from a
senior director of public policy at Google, talking about using funding of conservative institutions to
“steer” the movement. Another part of the leaked audio transcript was also revealed on Tucker
Carlson’s show at the same time.
The Heritage Foundation has continued to defend big tech
against efforts to strip them of their special legal privileges, which were given to them by Congress in the 1990s and are
enjoyed by no other type of company.
This is despite the fact that Google publicly snubbed the
foundation last year, canceling the formation of a planned “A.I ethics” council
after far-left employees of the tech company threw a hissy fit over the fact that Heritage president Kay Coles James was
set to be one of its members.
Are you an insider at Google, Facebook, Twitter or any other
tech company who wants to confidentially reveal wrongdoing or political bias at
your company? Reach out to Allum Bokhari at his secure email address allumbokhari@protonmail.com.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at
Breitbart News.
December 20, 2019
California Preening
The Golden State is on a path to high-tech feudalism, but there’s
still time to change course.
“We are the modern
equivalent of the ancient city-states of Athens and Sparta. California has the
ideas of Athens and the power of Sparta,” declared then-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2007. “Not
only can we lead California into the future . . . we can show the nation and
the world how to get there.” When a movie star who once played Hercules says so
who’s to disagree? The idea of California as a model, of course, precedes the
former governor’s tenure. Now the state’s anti-Trump resistance—in its zeal on
matters concerning climate, technology, gender, or race—believes that it knows how to
create a just, affluent, and enlightened society. “The future depends on us,”
Governor Gavin Newsom said at his
inauguration. “And we will seize this moment.”
In truth, the Golden
State is becoming a semi-feudal kingdom, with the nation’s widest gap between middle and upper incomes—72 percent, compared
with the U.S. average of 57 percent—and its highest poverty rate. Roughly half
of America’s homeless live in Los Angeles or San Francisco, which now has the highest property crime rate among major
cities. California hasn’t yet become a
full-scale dystopia, of course, but it’s heading in a troubling direction.
This didn’t have to
happen. No place on earth has more going for it than the Golden State. Unlike
the East Coast and Midwest, California benefited from comparatively late
industrialization, with an economy based less on auto manufacturing and steel
than on science-based fields like aerospace, software, and semiconductors. In
the mid-twentieth century, the state also gained from the best aspects of
progressive rule, culminating in an elite public university system, a massive
water system reminiscent of the Roman Empire, and a vast infrastructure network
of highways, ports, and bridges. The state was fortunate, too, in drawing
people from around the U.S. and the world. The eighteenth-century French traveler J. Hector St. John de
Crèvecœur described the American as
“this new man,” and California—innovative, independent, and less bound by
tradition or old prejudice—reflected that insight. Though remnants of this
California still exist, its population is aging, less mobile, and more
pessimistic, and its roads, schools, and universities are in decline.
In the second half of the twentieth century, California’s
remarkably diverse economy spread prosperity from the coast into the state’s
inland regions. Though pockets of severe poverty existed—urban barrios, south
Los Angeles, the rural Central Valley—they were limited in scope. In
fact, growth often favored suburban and exurban communities, where
middle-class families, including minorities, settled after World War II.
In the last two decades,
the state has adopted policies that undermine the basis for middle-class
growth. State energy policies, for example, have made California’s gas and
electricity prices among the steepest in the country. Since 2011, electricity
prices have risen five times faster than the national average. Meantime, strict land-use
controls have raised housing costs to the nation’s highest, while taxes—once
average, considering California’s urban scale—now exceed those of virtually every
state. At the same time, California’s
economy has shed industrial diversity in favor of dependence on one industry:
Big Tech. Just a decade before, the state’s largest firms included those in the
aerospace, finance, energy, and service industries. Today’s 11 largest
companies hail from the tech sector, while energy firms—excluding Chevron,
which has moved much of its operations to Houston—have disappeared. Not a single top aerospace firm—the
iconic industry of twentieth-century California—retains its headquarters here.
Though lionized in the
press, this tech-oriented economy hasn’t resulted in that many middle- and
high-paying job opportunities for Californians, particularly outside the Bay
Area. Since 2008, notes Chapman University’s Marshall Toplansky, the state has
created five times the number of low-paying, as opposed to high-wage, jobs. A
remarkable 86 percent of new jobs paid below the median income, while almost
half paid under $40,000. Moreover, California, including Silicon Valley,
created fewer high-paying positions than the national average, and far less
than prime competitors like Salt Lake City, Seattle, or Austin. Los Angeles
County features the lowest pay of any of the nation’s 50 largest counties.
No state advertises its multicultural bona fides more than
California, now a majority-minority state. This is evident at the University of California, where professors are required to prove their service to
“people of color,” to the state’s high school curricula, with its new ethnic studies component. Much of
California’s anti-Trump resistance has a racial context. State Attorney General
Xavier Becerra has sued the administration numerous times over immigration
policy while he helps ensure California’s distinction as a sanctuary for
illegal immigrants. So far, more than 1 million illegal residents have received driver’s licenses, and they qualify
for free health care, too. San Francisco now permits illegal immigrants
to vote in local elections.
Such radical policies may
make progressives feel better about themselves, though they seem less concerned
about how these actions affect everyday people. California’s Latinos and
African-Americans have seen good blue-collar jobs in manufacturing and energy
vanish. According to one United Way study, over half of Latino households can barely pay their
bills. “For Latinos,” notes long-time political consultant Mike Madrid, “the California Dream is becoming an unattainable
fantasy.”
In the past, poorer
Californians could count on education to help them move up. But today’s
educators appear more interested in political indoctrination than results.
Among the 50 states, California ranked 49th in the performance of low-income students. In wealthy San
Francisco, test scores for black students are the worst of any California
county. Many minority residents, especially African-Americans, are fleeing the
state. In a recent UC Berkeley poll, 58 percent of black expressed interest in
leaving California, a higher percentage than for any racial group, though
approximately 45 percent of Asians and Latinos also considered moving out.
Perhaps the biggest
demographic disaster is generational. For decades, California incubated youth culture, creating trends like beatniks, hippies, surfers, and
Latino and Asian art, music, and cuisine. The state is a fountainhead of youthful wokeness and rebellion, but that may prove short-lived as millennials leave. From
2014 to 2018, notes demographer Wendell Cox, net domestic out-migration grew
from 46,000 to 156,000. The exiles are increasingly in their family-formation
years. In the 2010s, California suffered higher net declines in virtually every
age category under 54, with the biggest rate of loss coming among the 35-to-44
cohort.
As families with children
leave, and international migration slows to one-third of Texas’s level, the
remaining population is rapidly aging. Since 2010, California’s fertility rate
has dropped 60 percent, more than the national average; the state is now aging
50 percent more rapidly than the rest of the country. A growing number of tech
firms and millennials have headed to the Intermountain West. Low rates of homeownership among younger people play a
big role in this trend, with California millennials forced to rent, with little chance of buying their
own home, while many of the state’s biggest metros lead the nation in long-term
owners. California is increasingly a
greying refuge for those who bought property when housing was affordable.
After Governor Schwarzenegger morphed into a progressive
environmentalist, climate concerns began driving state policy. His successors
have embraced California “leadership” on climate issues. Jerry Brown recently told a crowd in China that the rest of the world should
follow California’s example. The state’s top Democrats, like state senate
president pro tem Kevin DeLeon, Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti, and
billionaire Democratic presidential candidate Tom Steyer, now compete for the green mantle.
Their policies have worsened conditions for many middle- and working-class Californians.
Oblivious to these concerns, Greens ignore practical ideas—nuclear power,
natural gas cars, job creation in affordable areas, home-based work—that could
help reduce emissions without disrupting people’s lives. Ultra-green policies
also work against the state’s proclaimed goal of
building more than 3.5 million new housing units by 2025. In accordance with
its efforts to reduce car use, the state mandates that most growth occurs in
already-crowded coastal areas, where land prices are highest. But in cities
like San Francisco, the cost of building one unit for a homeless person surpasses $700,000.
California’s inland regions, though experiencing population gains, keep
losing state funding for decrepit highways in favor of urban-centric, mass transit projects—yet
transit use has stagnated, especially in greater Los Angeles.
The state, nevertheless,
continues its pursuit of policies that would eliminate all fossil fuels and
nuclear power—outpacing national or even Paris Accord levels and guaranteeing
ever-rising energy prices. Mandating everything from electric cars to electric homes will only drive more working-class
Californians into “energy poverty.” High energy prices also directly affect the
manufacturing and logistics firms that employ blue-collar workers at decent
wages. Business relocation expert Joe Vranich notes that industrial firms account for many of the
2,000 employers that left the state this decade. California’s industrial growth
has fallen to the bottom tier of states; last year, it ranked 44th, with a rate of growth
one-third to one-quarter that of prime competitors like Texas, Virginia,
Arizona, Nevada, and Florida.
Similarly, the high
energy prices tend to hit the interior counties that, besides being poorer, have
far less temperate climates. Cities like Bakersfield, capital of the state’s once-vibrant oil industry, are
particularly hard-hit. High energy prices will cost the region, northeast of
the Los Angeles Basin, 14,000 generally high-paid jobs, even as the state
continues to import oil from Saudi Arabia.
California’s leaders
apply climate change to excuse virtually every failure of state policy. During
the California drought, Brown and his minions blamed the “climate” for the dry
period, refusing to take responsibility for insufficient water storage that would have helped farmers. When the rains
returned and reservoirs filled, this argument was forgotten, and little effort
has been made to conserve water for next time. Likewise, Newsom and his supporters in the media have blamed recent fires on changes in the global
climate, but the disaster had as much to do with green mandates against controlled burns and brush clearance than anything occurring on a planetary scale. Brown joined greens and others in blocking such sensible policies.
Few climate advocates
ever seem to ask if their policies actually help the planet. Indeed,
California’s green policy, as one paper demonstrates, may be increasing total greenhouse-gas
emissions by pushing people and industries to states with less mild climates.
In the past decade, the state ranked 40th in per-capita reductions, and its
global carbon footprint is minimal. Renewable energy may be expensive and
unreliable, but state policy nevertheless enriches the green-energy investments of tech leaders, even when their efforts—like the Google-backed Ivanpah solar farm—fail to deliver affordable, reliable energy.
It’s not so surprising, given these enthusiasms, that progressive
politicians like Garcetti—who leads a city with paralyzing traffic congestion,
rampant inequality, a huge rat infestation, and proliferating homeless camps—would rather talk about
becoming chair of the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group.
Reality is asserting
itself, though. Tech firms already show signs of restlessness with the current
regulatory regime and appear to be shifting employment to other states, notably Texas, Tennessee, Nevada, Colorado, and Arizona. Economic-modeling firm Emsi estimates that several states—Idaho, Tennessee,
Washington, and Utah—are growing their tech employment faster than California.
The state is losing momentum in professional and technical services—the largest
high-wage sector—and now stands roughly in the middle of the pack behind other
western states such as Texas, Tennessee, and Florida. And Assembly Bill 5, the
state law regulating certain forms of contract labor, reclassifies part-time workers. Aimed initially at
ride-sharing giants Uber and Lyft, the
legislation also extends to independent contractors in industries from media to
trucking.
At some point, as
even Brown noted, the ultra-high capital gains returns will fall
and, combined with the costs of an expanding welfare state, could leave the
state in fiscal chaos. Big Tech could stumble, a possibility made more real by
the recent $100 billion drop in the value of privately held “unicorn” companies,
including WeWork. If the tech economy slows, a rift could develop between two
of the state’s biggest forces—unions and the green establishment—over future
levels of taxation. More than two-thirds of California cities don’t have any funds set aside for retiree health
care and other retirement expenses. The state also confronts $1 trillion in
pension debt, according to former Democratic state senator Joe Nation. U.S. News & Report ranks California, despite the tech boom,
42nd in fiscal health among the states.
The good news: some
Californians are waking up. A recent PPIC poll found that increasing proportions of Californians
believe that the state is headed in the wrong direction—a figure that exceeds
55 percent in the inland areas. And voters dislike the state legislature even more than they dislike Donald Trump.
Newsom’s approval rating stands at 43 percent, placing him toward the bottom among the nation’s
governors. A conservative-led campaign to recall him is unlikely to succeed, but surveys
reveal growing opposition to the new tax hikes proposed by the legislature. There’s a growing
concern about the state’s expanding homeless population.
And a rebellion against
the state’s energy policies is already under way. Recently, 110 cities, with total population exceeding 8 million, have demanded
changes in California’s drive to prevent new natural gas hookups. The state’s
Chamber of Commerce and the three most prominent ethnic
chambers—African-American, Latino, and
Asian-Pacific—have joined this effort.
Californians need less
bombast and progressive pretense from their leaders and more attention to
policies that could counteract the economic and demographic tides threatening
the state. On its current course, California increasingly resembles a model of
what the late Taichi Sakaiya called “high-tech feudalism,” with a small
population of wealthy residents and a growing mass of modern-day serfs.
Delusion and preening ultimately have limits, as more Californians are
beginning to recognize. As the 2020s beckon, the time for the state to change
course is now.
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