Todd Schulte with FWD.us, a group that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg created to lobby on behalf of tech corporations, called the amnesty plan a “critical moment for immigration policy” and a “substantial step forward.”
Nonetheless, open border advocates, such as Facebook Chairman Mark Zuckerberg, claim illegal aliens are a net benefit to California with little evidence to support such an assertion. As the Center for Immigration Studies has documented, the vast majority of illegals are poor, uneducated, and with few skills. How does accepting millions of illegal aliens and then granting them access to dozens of welfare programs benefit California’s economy? If illegal aliens were contributing to the economy in any meaningful way, California, with its 2.6 million illegal aliens, would be booming.
Billionaire Mark Zuckerberg Funds Groups Staging Amnesty Marches
Mark Zuckerberg has funded many of the pro-migration groups now staging street marches for amnesties that would redirect more wealth and power to billionaires.
The Facebook CEO and his wife, Priscilla Chan, funneled their pro-amnesty donations via their Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the FWD.us advocacy group of wealthy West Coast investors.
Some of the donations went to groups in the WeAreHome campaign, which organized many of the street protests on May 1.
The deputy leader of FWD.us, Alida Garcia, sat on the campaign’s steering committee until she took a White House job in mid-March. The campaign announced March 19:
FWD.us Vice President of Advocacy and We Are Home Steering Committee member Alida Garcia is taking temporary leave to serve as the White House’s Senior Adviser for Migration Outreach and Engagement.
At least four of the 22 groups on the campaign’s steering committee have received money from the Zuckerbergs or FWD.us, including America’s Voice, CASA, the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA), and United We Dream.
Many of the groups were also supported during FWD.us’ expensive campaign to sway the Supreme Court’s 2020 decision on whether to let President Donald Trump end the DACA work-permit program.
On May 1, the We Are Home campaign announced:
Nationally, FIRM Action and We Are Home partners, including Faith in Action/LaRed, United Farm Workers (UFW), SEIU and others held more than 65 events, including marquee events in D.C., Chicago, Milwaukee, Seattle and Los Angeles.
Todd Schulte, the president of the FWD.us group, declined to answer questions from Breitbart News. But Schulte retweeted flattering images of May 1 marches that featured the We Are Home campaign, even though many of the events were so small that organizers were reluctant to show widescreen images:
Given the massive elite support for the campaign, the turnout in Washington D.C. was small:
The Zuckerberg-supported amnesty, worker importation, and population-expansion agenda is very unpopular outside the progressive movement, recent legal immigrants, and media newsrooms.
In an FWD.us polling memo by three Democrat polling companies, released March 2021, nervous legislators were advised:
It is better to focus on all of the aforementioned sympathetic details of those affected [by an amnesty] than to make economic arguments, including arguments about wages or demand for labor. As we have seen in the past, talking about immigrants doing jobs Americans won’t do is not a helpful frame, and other economic arguments are less effective than what is recommended above.
If successful, the billionaire-backed amnesty and immigration-expansion campaign would spike Wall Street values, shrink wages, discard U.S. graduates, boost housing prices, further skew job-creating investments towards the coastal states, reduce companies’ use of American-run labor-saving technology, and cement billionaires’ control over the technology sector.
The Zuckerbergs’ Facebook-created wealth is roughly $100 billion, according to Forbes.com.
The variety of investors who founded and funded FWD.us was hidden from casual visitors to the group’s website sometime in the last few months.
As investors, Zuckerberg’s investors gain from immigration because it provides investors with more lower-wage workers, high-occupancy renters, and government-funded consumers, ranging from children in K-12 classes to underpaid workers seeking food stamps to old people in government-run healthcare.
From 2013 to 2018, the Zuckerbergs have given at least $30 million to FWD.us and its non-profit education spin-off.In January, the Zuckerbergs’ charity group reported that it would provide $100 million over the next three years for advocacy by FWD.us on immigration issues:
FWD.us has played a critical role in the past few years in successfully protecting the DACA program, as well as fighting family separation and reuniting families, and will help lead the charge in 2021 to transform America’s immigration system into one that’s fair, modern and humane, and centered on a pathway to citizenship.
FWD.us reveals little about how it spends the money it gets from the Zuckerberg couple or from its own investor members. But on April 25, it acknowledged its support for the We Are Home campaign.
A coalition of immigration advocacy groups today announced a new $50 million campaign aimed at pressuring lawmakers from both parties to pass a pathway to citizenship. The effort, which comes as the White House is previewing how President Biden will recommit to passing a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers, PS holders, farm workers and other essential undocumented workers in Joint Address to Congress, includes a $30 million commitment from the “We Are Home” campaign led by advocacy organizations, as well as a $20 million commitment from a handful of other immigration groups including FWD.us.
On May 6, FWD.us announced a pro-amnesty campaign ad, saying:
The ad is running on TV as well as on digital platforms, and it is the first in a series of spots backed by a seven-figure buy – part of a $50 million effort by immigration advocacy groups to urge the swift passage of citizenship legislation.
The funding support from the super-wealthy Zuckerberg couple — and from FWD.us members — is complemented by indirect donations from other wealthy billionaires.
The New York Times outlined spending by Hansjörg Wyss, a Swiss billionaire who lives in the United States. His money flows into several dark money funds, which are then distributed to election campaigns and to street groups:
Between the spring of 2016 and the spring of 2020, [Wyss’] Berger Action Fund donated more than $135 million to the Sixteen Thirty Fund, which has become among the leading dark money spenders on the left, filings from the Internal Revenue Service and Federal Election Commission show.
One of the nonprofit groups managed by a for-profit consulting firm called Arabella Advisors, Sixteen Thirty donated more than $63 million to super PACs backing Democrats or opposing Republicans in 2020, including the pro-Biden groups Priorities USA Action and Unite the Country and the scandal-plagued anti-Trump group Lincoln Project, according to Federal Election Commission filings.
Another nonprofit managed by Arabella, the New Venture Fund, which is set up under a section of the tax code barring it from partisan political spending, received more than $27.6 million from the Wyss Foundation from 2016 through 2019.
The “We Are Home” campaign’s website says that “We Are Home is a project of the New Venture Fund. It is associated with a separate project, We Are Home Action, which is a project of Sixteen Thirty Fund.”
Big Tech, Koch Network Cheer Biden’s Amnesty to Flood U.S. Labor Market
Big tech’s lobbying arm and the Koch brothers’
network of donor class organizations are cheering
on President Joe Biden’s amnesty plan that would
pack the United States labor market with more
foreign visa workers for business to hire over
American graduates and professionals.
This week, Biden’s amnesty plan was introduced in Congress by Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) as Democrats look to increase foreign competition in the U.S. workforce while more than 17 million Americans are jobless.
Among other things, the plan would:
· Put nearly all illegal aliens in the U.S. on an eight-year path to citizenship
· Provide $4 billion in foreign aid to Central America
· Expand the U.S. labor market with more foreign visa workers
· Expedite green cards for foreign relatives, otherwise known as “chain migration”
· Potentially add 52 million foreign-born residents to the U.S. population
· Eliminate per-country caps, ensuring India monopolizes employment green cards
· Increase the Diversity Visa Lottery program where visas are given out randomly
· Provide green cards to foreign students who graduate in advanced STEM fields
· Bring already deported illegal aliens back to the U.S. to provide them amnesty
For Amazon, millions of newly legalized illegal aliens, foreign visa workers, and chain migrants who would be added to the U.S. labor market as a result of the plan are a boon to multinational corporations’ profits.
“Today’s immigration reform bill marks an important step in reducing the green card backlog, creating a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers & making our immigration system more efficient,” Amazon officials wrote in a statement. “We look forward working [with] the administration and Congress to advance these proposed solutions.”
Today's immigration reform bill marks an important step in reducing the green card backlog, creating a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers & making our immigration system more efficient. We look forward working w/ the administration & Congress to advance these proposed solutions.
— Amazon Public Policy (@amazon_policy) February 18, 2021
Specifically, aside from providing Amazon with more foreign visa workers to hire, the plan includes a green card giveaway that would create a green card system where only H-1B foreign visa workers are able to obtain employment-based visas by creating a backlog of seven to eight years for all foreign nationals.
The process would reward outsourcing firms and tech corporations for the decades of outsourcing American jobs to H-1B foreign visa workers.
Executives with the Libre Initiative, a Koch-funded organization, also praised the Biden amnesty plan as “an important first step” to securing the green card giveaway for corporations that they have also long lobbied for.
“There is broad support for proposals like a permanent solution for Dreamers, workforce visa reform, removing per-country caps, efficient border security measures and much more,” Daniel Garza with the Libre Initiative wrote in a statement:
Lawmakers should seize the opportunity and demonstrate that partisan gridlock will not keep the American public waiting another 30 years for congress to enact sensible, permanent solutions. We look forward to working with lawmakers to ensure that we can get nonpartisan, sensible solutions past both chambers and enacted into law.
Todd Schulte with FWD.us, a group that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg created to lobby on behalf of tech corporations, called the amnesty plan a “critical moment for immigration policy” and a “substantial step forward.”
“Congress has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to transform a long-failed and too easily weaponized immigration system,” Schulte wrote in a statement. “The time is now and we will seize this moment.”
Despite the business lobby’s insistence that there is a labor shortage, millions of Americans are out of work today and hundreds of thousands of U.S. graduates enter the labor market every year looking for white-collar professional jobs with competitive pay and good benefits.
Already, the U.S. admits about 1.2 million legal immigrants every year. Another 1.4 million foreign visa workers are brought in annually to take American jobs, many in white-collar professions. The latest data reveals that nearly 6-in-10 workers in Silicon Valley, California — the tech industry’s hub — are foreign-born.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
Tech Workers Flee San Francisco
Employees of tech companies in San Francisco, California, can’t leave the city fast enough, fleeing for the potential tech hubs of tomorrow such as Austin, Texas, and Miami, Florida. One former San Francisco exec said: “what else can God and the world and government come up with to make the place less livable?”
Miami Mayor Francis Suarez has been fielding inquiries from top executives in the tech world, such as Tesla CEO Elon Musk, and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, according to a report by NBC News.
The report added that the mayor has also met with former Google Chairman and Clinton lackey Eric Schmidt, and the chairman of Palantir, Peter Thiel, among others.
“There is absolutely no doubt that a big part of the reason why they are moving is that they feel that there is an inhospitable environment for regulation and taxation,” said Suarez.
Miami is not the only city experiencing this type of migration, as tech employees from San Francisco are fleeing to other states offering them better opportunities as well.
Tech workers living in San Francisco had once believed that the high rent, high taxes, long commute to work, and rude neighbors were worth it if they could live in “the epicenter of a boom that was changing the world,” reported SFGATE.
But now, in the wake of the pandemic, tech workers can’t flee the city fast enough, as spending months working remotely in other towns has shown them that the quality of life can be higher elsewhere.
“Tech workers and their bosses realized they might not need all the perks and after-work schmooze events. But maybe they needed elbow room and a yard for the new puppy. A place to put the Peloton. A top public school,” noted SFGATE.
And so they fled to more affordable places, like Georgia, and states with no income taxes, like Texas and Florida. The report added that the number one choice of relocation for people leaving San Francisco is Austin, Texas.
John Gardner, the founder and CEO of the remote personal training startup Kickoff — who fled San Francisco for Miami Beach — told SFGATE that he can’t help but wonder, “what else can God and the world and government come up with to make the place less livable?”
As for Mike Rothermel, a designer at Cisco who moved from the Bay Area to Boulder, Colorado, the tech worker said that he and his wife moved into a $1.3 million house that he “only saw on video for 20 minutes.”
“It’s a mansion compared to SF for the same money,” added Rothermel.
Justin Kan, who co-founded Twitch, tweeted to his followers in August last year, asking them where he should move.
“We’re selling our house and moving out of SF. Where should we go and why?” asked Kan.
We're selling our house and moving out of SF. Where should we go and why?
— Justin Kan (@justinkan) August 17, 2020
“Come to Austin with us. Growing tech ecosystem and Texas is the best place to make a stand together for a free society,” responded Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of software company Palantir.
Come to Austin with us. Growing tech ecosystem and Texas is the best place to make a stand together for a free society.
— Joe Lonsdale (@JTLonsdale) August 17, 2020
“You start to feel stupid,” said Sahin Boydas, the founder of a remote-work startup, of living in San Francisco. “I can understand the 1% rich people, the very top investors and entrepreneurs, they can be happy there.”
Boydas and his family ended up moving to Austin, where they were able to buy a five-bedroom home on an acre of land for the same price they were paying for their three-bedroom apartment in Cupertino, California.
‘We’re going to get a cat and a dog,” he said. “We could never do that before.”
Boydas also noted that his bills are lower, too, such as the water bill, trash bill, and the cost of dining out at a restaurant with his family — adding that he didn’t even know that there were no income taxes when he moved.
“I run payroll for myself, and when I saw zero, I called the accountant like there’s an error — there’s no tax line here,” said Boydas. “And they were like, ‘Yeah there’s no tax.'”
The report added that there are currently 33,000 members in a Facebook group called “Leaving California,” as well as 51,000 members in its sister group, “Life After California.” In the groups, people share photos of moving trucks, and links to property listings in new cities.
“When people decide to leave San Francisco, they usually don’t know where they want to go, they just want to go,” said Terry Gilliam, the founder of both Facebook groups.
Bear Kittay, the co-founder Good Money, echoed those sentiments, and even acknowledged that some people may find themselves relocating to “a place that is more conservative.”
“The things that make this city ill are not within my control to change,” said Kittay of San Francisco.
“A lot of people are choosing to go to places where there’s opportunity,” he added. “And maybe it’s a place that is more conservative and there can be an integration of dialogue.”
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.
HOME TO DIANNE FEINSTEIN, NANCY PELOSI, KAMALA HARRIS AND GAVIN NEWSOM
Adios, Sanctuary La Raza Welfare State of California
A fifth-generation Californian laments his state’s ongoing economic collapse.
By Steve Baldwin
American Spectator
What’s clear is that the producers are leaving the state and the takers are coming in. Many of the takers are illegal aliens, now estimated to number over 2.6 million (BLOG: THE NUMBER IS CLOSER TO 15 MILLION ILLEAGLS). The Federation for American Immigration Reform estimates that California spends $22 billion (DATED: NOW ABOUT $35 BILLION YEARLY AND THAT IS ON THE STATE LEVEL ONLY. COUNTIES PAY OUT MORE) on government services for illegal aliens, including welfare, education, Medicaid, and criminal justice system costs.
Liberals claim they more than make that up with taxes paid, but that’s simply not true. It’s not even close. FAIR estimates illegal aliens in California contribute only $1.21 billion in tax revenue, which means they cost California $20.6 billion, or at least $1,800 per household.
Nonetheless, open border advocates, such as Facebook Chairman Mark Zuckerberg, claim illegal aliens are a net benefit to California with little evidence to support such an assertion. As the Center for Immigration Studies has documented, the vast majority of illegals are poor, uneducated, and with few skills. How does accepting millions of illegal aliens and then granting them access to dozens of welfare programs benefit California’s economy? If illegal aliens were contributing to the economy in any meaningful way, California, with its 2.6 million illegal aliens, would be booming.
Furthermore, the complexion of illegal aliens has changed with far more on welfare and committing crimes than those who entered the country in the 1980s. Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute has testified before a Congressional committee that in 2004, 95% of all outstanding warrants for murder in Los Angeles were for illegal aliens; in 2000, 23% of all Los Angeles County jail inmates were illegal aliens and that in 1995, 60% of Los Angeles’s largest street gang, the 18th Street gang, were illegal aliens. Granted, those statistics are old, but if you talk to any California law enforcement officer, they will tell you it’s much worse today. The problem is that the Brown administration will not release any statewide data on illegal alien crimes. That would be insensitive. And now that California has declared itself a “sanctuary state,” there is little doubt this sends a message south of the border that will further escalate illegal immigration into the state.
"If the racist "Sensenbrenner Legislation" passes the US Senate, there is no doubt that a massive civil disobedience movement will emerge. Eventually labor union power can merge with the immigrant civil rights and "Immigrant Sanctuary" movements to enable us to either form a new political party or to do heavy duty reforming of the existing Democratic Party. The next and final steps would follow and that is to elect our own governors of all the states within Aztlan."
Indeed, California goes out of its way to attract illegal aliens. The state has even created government programs that cater exclusively to illegal aliens. For example, the State Department of Motor Vehicles has offices that only process driver licenses for illegal aliens. With over a million illegal aliens now driving in California, the state felt compelled to help them avoid the long lines the rest of us must endure at the DMV. And just recently, the state-funded University of California system announced it will spend $27 million on financial aid for illegal aliens. They’ve even taken out radio spots on stations all along the border, just to make sure other potential illegal border crossers hear about this program. I can’t afford college education for all my four sons, but my taxes will pay for illegals to get a college education.
THIS IS WHAT SENATOR DIANNE FEINSTEIN, NANCY PELOSI, KAMALA HARRIS AND GAVIN NEWSOM HAVE DONE TO THE ONCE GOLDEN STATE NOW A COLONY OF MEXICO!
FNC’s Carlson: Kamala Harris Is Bringing California-Style Governance to the Country — ‘You Should Pay Attention to That’
https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2020/12/24/fncs-carlson-kamala-harris-is-bringing-california-style-governance-to-the-country-you-should-pay-attention-to-that/
JEFF POOR
24 Dec 2020459
11:01
Wednesday on Fox News Channel’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” host Tucker Carlson warned the same leadership that has brought woes to California is coming to Washington, D.C. in the form of Vice President-elect Kamala Harris.
According to Carlson, California officials were using race tensions as a way to distract from the shortcomings of that governance.
Transcript as follows:
CARLSON: We make a lot of fun of the State of California on this show, you may have noticed, but we’re not really joking. California matters and not just because it’s our biggest state. What happens there is at some point almost certain to happen where you live.
Find a national trend that didn’t begin in California. There may be some, but there aren’t many. So if you want to know the future, or if you want to prevent it, look west. California is a roadmap for the rest of us and very often warning.
With that in mind, here is the bottom line on California. It’s falling apart.
Over the course of just the last several decades, California has gone from one of the richest places in the world to the poorest state in our country. More than a third of California’s population now hovers around the poverty line.
Even before COVID, over four million Californians were collecting food stamps. More than 150,000 people in California are homeless. They are everywhere. They’re living on the streets, in parks, under overpasses, in tents on the sidewalk.
Here’s Los Angeles just last month.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (voice-over): The homeless crisis in Los Angeles is getting worse local say with some encampments so big residents call them McMansion Tents. They’re driving away businesses, too; many of which are already struggling financially because of the pandemic.
This comes as the city sees a spike in violence with a 32% increase in shootings since last year. While police say financial stress from the pandemic is largely to blame, some criticize the leaders for once again being unable to control the issue.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: California didn’t always look this way, even recently. This is a human tragedy. It wasn’t caused by God or nature. It was caused by the selfishness and the stupidity of bad leaders and their bad policies.
If these leaders were judged by their performance, what they do, no big city politician in the State of California would have a job tonight. They know that, so they are working hard to make certain they’re not judged by those standards — rational standards.
Instead, they inflame racial wounds to try to keep the population distracted and divided, to keep the attention away from them and their failures.
Here, for example, is the shamefully incompetent mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti, just this summer.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MAYOR ERIC GARCETTI (D), LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA: When I talked about killers, I said, our collective — our collective burden here in this society is that we let black men and women die. I pointed at myself, we collectively have a choice of whether we will be those who heal or whether we will continue being the killers.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Yes. Whenever they start talking about collective responsibility, you know what they are really saying is, take the gaze away from me. It’s not my fault.
Garcetti wasn’t more specific when he talked about, we, the killers. It turns out there are killers in his city. They’re not collective. They’re individuals. They’re criminals. And there are a lot of them.
Under Eric Garcetti, crime in Los Angeles has skyrocketed and many innocent people have died as the result of that. But he is not mourning that. He is not giving speeches in their memory or apologizing for the policies he supported that led to their deaths, and neither by the way, is the city’s new head prosecutor, a man called George Gascon.
Gascon was elected with the backing of George Soros. Soros was the single largest donor to his campaign. He wouldn’t be the District Attorney without George Soros. And so George Gascon has, from his very first day in office done the bidding of his backer, Soros.
He has now announced he will be using the pretext of COVID to release still more criminals into the City of Los Angeles. Watch.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
AL SHARPTON, MSNBC HOST: Do you have a plan of giving priority in terms of vaccinations in the LA County correctional facilities?
GEORGE GASCON, DISTRICT ATTORNEY, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA: I don’t control the vaccination. But the point that we do have is we’re working to you know, expeditiously release as many people as we can, especially those who have been proven to be at high risk, vulnerable people and obviously people that are not a threat to society.
So we are going to try to remove as many people from that confinement. Justice is really about public health and keeping our community safe.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Oh, OK. So there’s the Soros puppet giving us a lecture on what justice means. Justice is not punishing the guilty, keeping the dangerous away from your children, it is not about enforcing laws. No, justice is making certain that criminals get critical government services before you do, before your parents do.
And that right there, that piece of tape and the attitude behind it distills the emerging politics of California, politics that you should be deeply afraid of, because when they come to your town, they’ll wreck your life.
And if we were to put it in one sentence, it’s this: those who contribute the least get the most. Got it? But don’t you dare complain about it, shut up and hate yourself in silence. That’s an order.
Meanwhile, California’s elected leaders divide the spoils. That’s their job: taking what other people built, giving it to themselves and to their supporters. And they divide the spoils, as is now official policy in the State of California in the most divisive, immoral possible way, along lines of color.
Here is Congresswoman Maxine Waters explaining what kind of person Governor Gavin Newsom should pick to replace Kamala Harris in the United States Senate.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REP. MAXINE WATERS (D-CA): He has a decision that he has to make, and I think that it will be a black woman. I think he understands that, you know, when Kamala Harris leaves, you know, the Senate, that’s only one black woman who was serving, and certainly it would be, you know, kind of, you know, unfair not to have at least another black woman replace her.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: This really is the high point of stupidity in this country’s history. Who cares what color your senators are, who cares what gender they are, you want good government, you want wise competent people in charge of the country, but that’s not what you’re getting because those aren’t the criteria.
In the end, you should know the Governor of California, Gavin Newsom appointed a man called Alex Padilla to replace Kamala Harris in the Senate. And when he did, no one debated whether Padilla might be a good senator, whether he might improve the schools or lower the cost of housing or brings bring jobs back. Instead, they argued about his race. That was the only thing they cared about.
Here’s the mayor of San Francisco, London Breed, who by the way is an utter buffoon, most famous not for improving San Francisco, but for defying her own lockdown orders in order to dine at the French Laundry in Napa.
Here’s that person explain that Padilla is a bad choice, because he is the wrong color.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MAYOR LONDON BREED (D), SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA: When you think about the history of this country, and the challenges that exist for African-Americans, especially African-American women in the Senate, definitely, this is a real, you know, blow to the African-American community, to African-American women, to women in general. It was definitely a surprise.
And it’s an unfortunate situation as we are trying to move this country forward and making sure that black lives truly matter.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: OK, so you have been a terrible mayor, you have hurt the city, which again, you did not build, you didn’t make San Francisco an impressive place that people wanted to move to. You made it worse. So you’ve disqualified yourself from any comment on government ever for the rest of your life. That’s the first thing.
The second thing is, the rest of us who sit by and let people say things like this on television without thinking and saying, whoa, wait a second, color and gender are irrelevant to good government. Thinking that way is poison. We’re not putting up with this garbage anymore.
We’re implicated in the destruction of the country if we sit back and let decisions get made along those lines. It’s such a destructive sideshow.
Meanwhile, the physical reality, the State of California, which is an actual place with tens of millions of actual people, 40 million, our most beautiful state, our most economically important state falls apart. No one is paying any attention because they are debating the color of the new senator.
But the electrical grid is failing. The power flickers on and off like a third world country. The state’s forests are so mismanaged, they keep catching fire and burning uncontrollably.
Climate change isn’t doing that, bad management is doing that.
Women — we care about women, really? Because women can’t jog in public parks for fear of being attacked by the mentally ill homeless. Does anyone care about them? No.
And for the privilege of all of this, for living in a state that’s literally collapsing around them, the residents of California pay the highest and the most burdensome taxes in the country. So guess what people who can are doing? You know the answer, they are leaving.
California’s largest export used to be advanced aerospace products. That was the economy of Southern California, that and the movies. They’re all gone now. Now, the state’s main export is population.
More than 40% of Bay Area residents tell pollsters they want to leave. Really? And that’s one of the happiest places in the state. And it’s no wonder the average rent price in a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco fell 20% in the last year. Why is that? Because no one wants to live there.
The most recent estimates show that California lost more than 135,000 people in the last year. Among those people, by the way, is Kamala Harris. She’s in Washington now, your capital, and she is bringing California-style governance to the rest of us. You should pay attention to that.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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