Sen Kamala Harris is a product of Silicon Valley's billionaires and will enforce their agenda in DC.Eg, she's an author of the S.386 bill that allows the Fortune 500 to hire more white-collar workers from India for jobs needed by America's college grads https://t.co/gKCuD9DH5z
— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) August 12, 2020
KAMALA HARRIS STATE OF CALIFORNIA
UNDER TECH-OPPRESSION AND SUPRESSION
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.
“Open
border advocates, such as Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, claim illegal aliens are
a net benefit to California with little evidence to support such an assertion.
As the CIS has documented, the vast majority of illegals are poor, uneducated,
and with few skills. How does accepting millions of illegal aliens and then
granting them access to dozens of welfare programs benefit California’s
economy? If illegals were contributing to the economy in any meaningful way,
CA, with its 2.6 million illegals, would be booming.” STEVE BALDWIN – AMERICAN
SPECTATOR
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
The Biden
Crisis
If you want to know why
early voting stinks, the burgeoning Biden crisis should inform you.
Estimates are that about 50 million Americans have
voted, as of this writing. That’s before or as the gravest scandal in the
history of presidential politics unfolds.
The allegations against
Joe Biden are stunning. They involve corruption and the risk of
treason. Influence-peddling with the Chinese, Russians, and Ukrainians, to
the tune of multimillions of dollars pocketed by Biden and his family.
The PRC, Putin, and others appear to have the goods on Biden. That makes
the former vice president subject to blackmail.
At Thursday night’s
presidential debate, NBC News’ Kristin Welker asked one softball question of
Biden about the burgeoning scandal:
“Vice President Biden,
there have been questions about the work your son has done in China and for a
Ukrainian energy company when you were vice president. In retrospect, was
anything about those relationships inappropriate or unethical?”
Biden responded, “Nothing
was unethical.”
But the evidence of
Biden’s treachery is trickling in, thanks to Hunter Biden’s laptop and the
emails and texts of associates. If voters elect Joe Biden president, the
nation lurches toward an unprecedented mega-crisis, the outcome of which is
unpredictable, but most certainly hazardous to the nation’s health.
The latest explosive
allegation is from a former Hunter Biden colleague, a guy named Tony
Bobulinski. From the Epoch Times, October
22, 2020:
The email published by
the Post details “remuneration packages” for several Hunter
Biden associates, including “850” for Hunter Biden and “500,000” for “James,”
an apparent reference to James Biden, the brother of former Vice President Joe
Biden.
The message, written by Hunter
Biden associate James Gilliar on May 13, 2017, goes on to detail “a provisional
agreement that the equity be distributed as follows:
20 H
20 RW
20JG
20 TB
10 Jim
10 held by H for the big
guy?”
Bobulinski said that the
“big guy” in the email was a reference to Joe Biden, the current Democratic
presidential nominee, while the “Jim” referred to James Biden, Joe Biden’s
brother.
Imagine this horror show:
On January 20, 2021, Joe Biden places his hand on a bible and is sworn in as
the nation’s 46th president. But the evidence of wrongdoing
continues to mount and is irrefutable. President Biden is terribly
compromised. The Chinese, at will, can drop the most incriminating
evidence of payoffs on an American president. The stakes for the U.S. are
high. At risk: the status of the South China Sea as international waters,
Taiwan’s independence, and trade protection for U.S. businesses and
workers. Otherwise, America’s ability to work with and promote U.S.
interests in concert with its allies and friends throughout Asia and across the
globe -- destroyed.
Never before in U.S.
history have we had a prospective president in such jeopardy. President
Bill Clinton, to anyone’s knowledge, was never compromised in this way with
America’s enemies -- and yes, the PRC is really a U.S. enemy.
Putin, who’s no friend, doesn’t pose the existential threat to the U.S.
that Xi Jinping does. Putin is principally an oligarch, seeking to enrich
himself and his allies, seeking opportunities to gain leverage in that
quest. Both are dangers to a vulnerable President Biden, but China is far
worse.
While conservative news
and alternative media outlets intrepidly expose Biden’s corruption and
compromise, the mainstream media not only buries revelations of Biden’s
perfidy, they dismiss honest efforts by the New York Post,
Fox News, and others to get to the truth. Whatever the mainstream media’s
sins, this will prove to be their greatest betrayal of a free press’s mission:
root out wrongdoing wherever it’s found – particularly in the highest places --
inform citizens, and speak truth to power. When the full extent and depth
of Biden’s corruption are understood by Americans, the mainstream news media
will suffer a mortal wound.
Big Tech, which has been censoring conservatives
on its platforms in the runup to the elections, has
famously shutdown the New York Post’s coverage
of Biden family corruption. There’s been
blowback from conservatives, and Senate
Republicans have voted to subpoena Jack Dorsey
(Twitter) and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)
to testify before Congress about their innocuously
named “content-moderation practices.”
Both social media giants
-- and YouTube -- have done their level best to censor speech about COVID --
when users’ opinions deviate from the narrative they’re hawking for
Democrats. They’re now attempting to put a lid on the Biden scandal,
hoping to run the clock until the polls close on November 3.
Not incidentally, Big
Tech are also crossing their fingers for a Biden election, because a President
Biden would squash any efforts to repeal social media’s Section 230 protection.
Antitrust action against Big Tech? Forget it. Big Tech is an ally
of Democrats and the left in wanting to restrict Americans’ freedoms.
Watch in the coming months as Democrats and the left talk up the PRC’s social credit system,
where “unacceptable” speech is censored, and behaviors monitored and penalized
if deemed inappropriate.
Joe Biden flat-out lied
about having no knowledge of his son’s Burisma dealings. Evidence is
showing that the former vice president not only had knowledge of his son’s
shady business activities, but played roles in those dealings. As the New York Post reported
on October 14, 2020:
Hunter Biden introduced
his father, then-vice president Joe Biden, to a top executive at a Ukrainian
energy firm less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials
in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company,
according to emails obtained by the Post.
Xi Jinping most certainly
stands to lose. China, having unleashed the COVID virus on the world, and
thanks to its exploitive trade practices, is finding U.S. public opinion sharply turning against it.
Shady business deals with Hunter Biden and skims from those deals by the “Big
Guy,” completely exposed, would strip any pretense about China’s intentions vis-à-vis the
U.S. Powerful interests in the U.S. stand to lose big.
A final note.
President Biden needn’t happen. Tens of millions of ballots remain to be
cast. The mainstream media’s and Big Tech’s censorship of Biden scandal
news is running smack against the “Streisand Effect.”
Hiding news, in this instance, only makes people curious to learn about
it. Help family, friends, and neighbors find the news about what is
developing into the worst scandal in presidential election annals. Help
reelect President Trump.
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.
Sold Out: How High-Tech Billionaires & Bipartisan Beltway
Crapweasels Are ScrewingAmerica's Best & Brightest
By Michelle Malkin and John
Miano
Mercury Ink, 480 pp.
Hardcover, ISBN: 1501115944, $16.80
http://smile.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1501115944/centerforimmigra
Kindle, 10644 KB, ASIN: B00VBW3SYQ, $14.99
Book
Description: The #1 New York Times bestselling
author and firebrand syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin sets her sights on
the corrupt businessmen, politicians, and lobbyists flooding our borders and
selling out America’s best and brightest workers.
In Sold Out, Michelle Malkin and John Miano reveal the worst
perpetrators screwing America’s high-skilled workers, how and why they’re doing
it—and what we must do to stop them. In this book, they will name names and
expose the lies of those who pretend to champion the middle class, while aiding
and abetting massive layoffs of highly skilled American workers in favor of
cheap foreign labor. Malkin and Miano will explode some of the most commonly
told myths spread in the media like these:
Lie #1: America is suffering
from an apocalyptic “shortage” of science, technology, engineering, and math
workers.
Lie #2: US companies cannot
function without an unlimited injection of the most “highly skilled” and
“highly educated” foreign workers, who offer intellectual capital and entrepreneurial
energy that American workers can’t match.
Lie #3: America’s best and
brightest talents are protected because employers are required to demonstrate
that they’ve made every effort to hire American citizens before resorting to
foreign labor.
For too long,
open-borders tech billionaires and their political
enablers have
escaped tough public scrutiny of their means and
motives. Sold
Out is an indictment of not only political corruption
in
Washington, but also the journalistic malpractice that enables it.
It’s time to
trade the whitewash for solvent. American workers
deserve
better and the public deserves the unvarnished truth.
She sees a dark side of Silicon Valley tech — U.S. engineers replaced by
lower-cost H-1B visa holders. All workers suffer, she said: The system unfairly
pushes down salaries, while foreign-born engineers remain heavily dependent on
their employers.
Bay Area dissatisfaction: Rich, poor, young and old
unhappy here
Poll: More residents now
want to leave than stay
https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/02/23/bay-area-dissatisfaction-rich-poor-young-and-old-unhappy-here/
Bay Area dissatisfaction:
It reaches every county — and more residents are planning to leave.
By LOUIS HANSEN | lhansen@bayareanewsgroup.com | Bay Area News Group
PUBLISHED: February 23, 2020 at 7:00 a.m. |
UPDATED: February 23, 2020 at 7:19 a.m.
Bay Area residents — despite being swept up in an unprecedented
economic boom — are growing ever unhappier with the place they call home.
Nearly 3 in 4 residents think the quality of life in the Bay Area
has gotten worse in the last five years, according to a new poll of registered
voters conducted for this news organization and the Silicon Valley Leadership
Group. That marks an astonishing 10-point jump in dissatisfaction from last
year.
In another dramatic shift from last year, more residents are
thinking about moving, 47 percent, than staying, 45 percent. Nearly 10 percent
say they have definite plans to leave this year.
The survey unearths a remarkable paradox — high wages, an
expanding economy, record growth in home values, coupled with natural wonders
have failed to alleviate the crushing toll of longer commutes, spreading
homeless encampments, and budget-breaking prices for houses, apartments,
childcare and date nights.
Sara Leslie, a Bay Area native living in Los Gatos, sees the
mounting stress in her friends and family, made worse by rapidly changing
neighborhoods and an eroding sense of community. “I know so many people moving,”
said Leslie, 46. “I don’t see that the financial gain is worth the stress.”
Dave Metz of FM3 Research, which conducted the poll, said the high
levels of dissatisfaction are almost unprecedented given the region’s strong
economy. Last year, 44 percent of residents said they expected to leave in a
few years, while half expected to stay. The new survey follows a trend of
growing unrest found in 2016 and 2017 polls by the Bay Area Council, where
residents saying they planned to move grew from about 33 to 40 percent.
“Nobody is really happy with the way things are going,” Metz said.
The survey of 1,257 registered voters in five core Bay Area
counties reflects deep misgivings across the social strata — wealthy,
established homeowners, middle-class workers, poor people and younger residents
in apartments all sense a decline in their quality of life:
·
Rich
and poor: About 77 percent of
respondents making less than $60,000 and 74 percent making more than $120,000
felt the region was getting worse;
·
Political
affiliation: Republicans (81 percent) and
Independents (80 percent) were more pessimistic than Democrats (70 percent)
·
Young
and old: Roughly 76 percent of
surveyed residents between the ages of 18 and 49 said the quality of life has
declined, similar to those between 50 and 64 (73 percent) and over 65 (75
percent);
·
Homeowners
and renters: And despite record gains in
home values and personal wealth since 2012, homeowners (73 percent) agree with
renters (76 percent) that Bay Area life has gotten worse.
Angst about the future also runs deep. About 65 percent of Bay
Area residents surveyed say the region is headed in the wrong direction, up
from 47 percent last year. Residents now are almost as worried about the
region’s future as the country’s future, with 72 percent pessimistic about the
direction of the United States.
Residents say they’ve grown frustrated with the inability of state
and local leaders to fix long-standing and obvious problems — homeless and RV
camps popping up along city streets, rising housing costs sinking the working
poor and middle class, and traffic and transit solutions running the
bureaucratic gauntlet for years until comatose or dead.
The poll reflects a growing concern about homelessness. This year,
nearly 9 in 10 residents called it an extremely or very serious problem, up
from 8 in 10 last year. “That is about as bright a flashing red light as you
can see,” said Metz.
“It’s the cumulative weight, like rock after rock placed on your
chest, that’s come to a breaking point for many of our neighbors, friends and
family members,” said Silicon Valley Leadership Group CEO Carl Guardino. “These
challenges won’t be solved overnight.”
Carl Guardino, President and CEO, Silicon Valley Leadership Group,
worries about how many people have definite plans to leave. (Gary Reyes/ Bay
Area News Group)
Guardino is concerned that nearly 10 percent of residents say they
have concrete plans to move. They’ve decided other cities are better places to
live and work than the Bay Area.
“The choice we have is, are we going to fight or flight?” said
Guardino. “I still think our area is worth fighting for.”
Richard Hallsted, 62, recently retired as an operations manager
for a manufacturing company in the East Bay. He and his wife have lived in Palo
Alto for more than 40 years and raised their two daughters in the city.
During a recent family walk through their neighborhood, he saw
four homeless people pushing shopping carts along the streets. It was a new
sight in their community.
“What do you do?” Hallsted asked and sighed. “I don’t know. If you
built a bunch of condos on El Camino (Real), they couldn’t afford them.”
Hallsted feels the big issues — transit, infrastructure, fixing
state pension obligations — have been ignored by politicians more interested in
small battles and identity politics. “They need to get back to basics,” he
said.
But even the litany of daily annoyances fails to dislodge many
long-term residents. Homeowners and those over 65 say they’re likely to stay
put.
Donald Prestosz, 71, a retired high school teacher and businessman
living in Half Moon Bay, said the Bay Area he has called home since 1969 has
become too liberal. He hates one-party, Democratic rule in Sacramento. “If you
don’t have diversity of thought,” said Prestosz, a Republican, “you’ll never
get anywhere.”
But Prestosz has no plans to leave his mobile home a short walk
from the ocean. His doctors and favorite golf courses are all nearby. He’s
sliced his handicap to 12. “My quality of life,” he said, “is great.”
Irene Yen, 55, a public health professor at UC Merced, bought her
home in north Oakland 20 years ago. The family raised their two sons and sent
them to very good public schools, she said. But she’s worried about public
employees and other workers getting priced out.
Much has changed — once a predominantly black neighborhood, her
community has gentrified as techies and other professionals priced out of San
Francisco move in. Yen loves the energy and plans to stay: “I have a lot
of affection for Oakland.”
For renters, the prospect of putting down roots in the Bay Area —
even if they grew up here — seems bleak. Roughly 6 in 10 renters say they
expect to move in the next few years.
Austin Rickli, 22, grew up in Antioch and Brentwood and expects to
finish his computer science degree at Sonoma State in a few months. Despite
good grades, low student debt and a marketable degree, his hopes of staying in
the Bay Area after graduation are waning.
Most entry salaries at smaller tech companies range around $50,000
— a healthy paycheck at a glance, but one quickly eaten up by rent and loan
payments, he said.
He could move back home, he said, but he might choose another
city. “I want to do anything in my power to start my own life,” Rickli said.
Many feel they’re reaching the breaking point.
Robert Nueding and his wife, Kelly, arrived in the Bay Area a
decade ago from central Ohio with optimism and career opportunities. But
in the last few years, Nueding, 38, lost his job at Walmart and his wife,
suffering from anxiety, left a well-paid position at Apple. They live in
an old RV with a roommate along the streets of Fremont.
“It’s just like being trapped in a corner,” said Nueding, who
holds a master’s degree in literature.
They considered moving back to their hometown, but jobs are scarce
and pay poorly. Nueding worries that a local school or university would not
hire a homeless person to teach classes, even as a substitute. “Until I have an
actual legal residence,” he said, “I feel homeless.”
Leslie, the Bay Area native in Los Gatos, lives with her husband
in a farmhouse in the foothills. Each has more than an hour-long commute on
good days.
Related
Articles
Leslie has spent two decades in the tech industry and enjoys her
job. Her mother and sister have already been priced out in the past few years.
The Santa Cruz native would leave if other family members weren’t still here.
She sees a dark side of Silicon Valley tech — U.S. engineers replaced by
lower-cost H-1B visa holders. All workers suffer, she said: The system unfairly
pushes down salaries, while foreign-born engineers remain heavily dependent on
their employers.
Leslie said many of her friends, especially with young children,
are over-stressed. She sees them trying to ease the anxiety with prescription
medication and therapy just to navigate daily life.
Leslie rides her three horses or goes to the beach with her four
dogs to cope. But she’s not sure how much longer that therapy will work.
The poll of 1,257 registered voters in Alameda, Contra Costa, San
Francisco, Santa Clara, and San Mateo counties, was conducted by FM3 Research
for the Silicon Valley Leadership Group and Bay Area News Group. The poll,
conducted Jan. 11-19, has a margin of error of +/- 2.8 percentage points.
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