America Faces No Greater Threat Than Joe Biden and the Democrat Party. Their Assault to Our Borders Is As Great As Their Assault to Free Speech and Free Elections
Saturday, April 15, 2023
SAN FRANCISCO - DEMOCRAT PARTY AT WORK - HEROIN ADDICT GIVES BIRTH ON SIDEWALK - Not a word out of the big mouths of Feinstein, Pelosi or Kamala Harris
WHILE THESE WOMEN WERE INSIDE TRADING, SUCKING BANKSTER BRIBES, PUSHING FOR JOE'S OPEN BORDERS AND ABORTION, THIS IS WHAT WAS HAPPENING ON THEIR BLOCK.
AND THEY COULD NOT GIVE A FUK!
San Franciscans face about a 1-in-16 chance each year of being a victim of property or violent crime, which makes the city more dangerous than 98 percent of US cities, both small and large. To put this in perspective, Compton, California, the infamous home of drug gang turf wars, and which today remains more dangerous than 90 percent of all US cities, is almost twice as safe as San Francisco.
A shocking video of a baby born on a San Francisco street highlights the city’s collapse.
Apparently, San Francisco mayor London Breed has been feeling downright smug about the fact that Cash App founder Bob Lee did not die at the hands of a random homeless person but, instead, was allegedly murdered by someone he knew. That would be a decent boast if San Francisco were an otherwise clean and well-run city…but it’s not. It’s still a decayed basket case, as is vividly illustrated by a widely circulated video showing a homeless woman and her baby moments after she gave birth on the street.
Bob Lee’s terrible death made headlines across America. The instant assumption was that, given San Francisco’s descent into a Dante-esque inferno of drugs, filth, and human degradation, he was the victim of a random street crime. However, yesterday, the San Francisco police arrested Nima Momeni, a tech consultant who knew Bob Lee.
Mayor Breed was pleased with the case’s outcome, which she claims proves that the city is in great shape and that it’s the perceptions about the city that are wrong. Her claim would surprise a lot of the city’s residents.
In June 2021, car break-ins had seen a 750% year-over-year increase. Half a year later, the local media were reporting that, in a single month, San Francisco had 3,000 car break-ins. In December 2022, a survey showed that more than half of San Francisco residents had been victims of theft or larceny, with car break-ins topping the list. Admittedly, that’s not violent crime, but it’s a quality-of-life problem.
San Franciscans face about a 1-in-16 chance each year of being a victim of property or violent crime, which makes the city more dangerous than 98 percent of US cities, both small and large. To put this in perspective, Compton, California, the infamous home of drug gang turf wars, and which today remains more dangerous than 90 percent of all US cities, is almost twice as safe as San Francisco.
This contention clashes with other outlets claiming in the wake of Lee’s death that San Francisco is a relatively safe city. However, as even the linked outlet admits, using woke, semi-literate English, there’s a “disconnect between San Francisco’s reasonable safety on paper and the lived experiences of the people who live there.” In other words, life there is dystopian and, I’m betting, most crimes don’t get reported because, with a “defund the police,” shrunken police department, and a prosecutor’s office that still hasn’t recovered from Chesa Boudin’s radical left tenure, doing so is a waste of time.
What really stands out about San Francisco isn’t the murders; it’s the homelessness:
These are the people who fill the streets and subways, leaving behind excrement, urine puddles, and drug paraphernalia, and who, along with the pro-shoplifters who plague San Francisco, even managed to drive away Whole Foods. They are broken people, and San Francisco is a broken society for incentivizing their presence there, rather than instituting a carrot-and-stick program of arrests and true treatment alternatives. However, with a giant homeless budget, the real money in San Francisco is in keeping the street people on the street.
Nothing more perfectly illustrates how broken San Francisco is than footage of a drug-addicted homeless woman giving birth on the streets of San Francisco, near the Tenderloin:
If the video doesn’t show well (and we have problems with Instagram embeds), you can see it here. The description says, “Woman gives birth on the street after smoking crack all afternoon according to the witness who filmed the video.”
That video is so horrible, it’s hard to believe it’s true. However, a local news outlet has verified that what’s shown in the video actually happened.
Of course, many women have had fast deliveries and found themselves on lawns or airplanes, or in cars or lobbies, giving birth. With this video, though, it’s easy to tell that this happened on the streets of the Tenderloin, just minutes away from Union Square, and that the woman was probably sitting on that piece of cardboard behind her when her water broke. To her credit, we can see that she cares about her baby’s life and well-being, so maybe there is hope for both of them.
But this is no way to run a once-great city in a once-great country. It’s like a snapshot of the downfall of Rome.
Mark down Tuesday, April 4, as the night Chicago died.
That’s when we learned that Second City voters narrowly elected Brandon Johnson as their next mayor. This is a city that was flattened during the reign of Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who lost in the first round of voting for Chicago mayor because she didn’t finish in one of the top two spots. Lightfoot, elected in 2019 after a career as a federal prosecutor who then held several appointed positions in Chicago, shut down the city for more than a year during COVID-19. She also bankrupted small businesses, allowed rioters to burn down whole neighborhoods, presided over the worst crime wave in 50 years and let the schools go to hell.
Now, the voters have selected Johnson. Elected to the Cook County Board of Commissioners in 2018, Johnson narrowly won the mayoralty of America’s third-most-populous city on April 4 over Paul Vallas, a former Chicago schools CEO and a Democrat who presented himself as a political moderate compared to the far-left Johnson.
The incoming mayor may turn out to be a worse mayor than Lightfoot. Johnson’s occupation is an organizer for the teachers unions. The unions spent several million dollars on the race. They got their man.
What this means is that Chicago’s municipal government will now be a fully owned subsidiary of the Chicago Teachers Union. (Can you imagine what the union contracts are going to look like?) This is a city where, in roughly two dozen schools, zero children can read or write at proficiency level.
Johnson said that crime and shoplifting from local schools are societal problems. And he may continue Lightfoot’s policy of not prosecuting people who rob stores — often owned by minorities.
It’s not just Chicago that has become a war zone. Portland, Seattle and San Francisco were not so long ago the crown jewels of the West Coast. They were said to be progressive cities that worked. No more. Now, they are unlivable. San Francisco is overrun with homeless people on seemingly every downtown street corner, feces on the sidewalks and trash everywhere.
In Portland, major businesses are pulling out in the aftermath of the takeover of the radical anarchists during COVID-19. Crime is so rampant that Walmart recently said “adios,” shutting down its last store. Rains PDX, a clothing store in Portland, shut down last November after a string of break-ins made it impossible to stay open. This printed sign pasted on the door says it all:
“Small businesses (and large) cannot sustain doing business, in our city’s current state. We have no protection, or recourse, against the criminal behavior that goes unpunished. Do not be fooled into thinking that insurance companies cover losses. We have sustained 15 break-ins … We have not received any financial reimbursement since the 3rd.”
For the first time, Seattle is losing population. To be “progressive,” Seattle is imposing a massive capital gains tax increase — socking it to the rich. So they are fleeing the city and Washington state.
One of the nation’s top demographers, Wendell Cox, has been analyzing the just-released Census Bureau data on county population. He found that “during the late 2010s and before the pandemic, population growth and domestic migration transitioned toward smaller metropolitan areas from larger ones. That outmigration is accelerating.”
The nation’s 10 largest counties have lost more than 1 million residents since 2019. The biggest losers have been the counties that are home to New York and San Francisco and Chicago’s Cook County. Even Los Angeles County, the nation’s most populous county, with just under 10 million people, is now contracting.
Welcome to the real-world impact of progressivism. Instead of worker paradises, the Left has transitioned our once-shining cities into slums, murder zones, homeless encampments and boarded-up stores. They have become cults of economic and political quackery — and tragically, few Democrats have the courage to speak out. They are worried about being called racists when the reality is that the victims — of terrible public schools, high murder rates and an anti-business creed — are the minorities they say they care so much about.
The three poisons of America’s leftist cities are 1) high taxes, 2) schools that don’t educate and 3) crime running rampant. As mayors such as Rudy Giuliani of New York City proved in the 1990s after the Big Apple had been driven to its knees, all it takes is committed leadership to fix these problems. Things can change quickly, as they did in Manhattan.
The fact that Chicagoans have elected not a reformer, but a deformer, suggests that inner-city residents still don’t get it — or they don’t care. Or they are all on the payroll of the city governments that are going bankrupt. Alas, our cities can’t be saved if the voters in these metropolises don’t want to be saved.
San Fran patrol special officer rips Pelosi's inaction over BLACK crime surge: She doesn't care
Among the 25 largest U.S. cities, San Francisco has had the highestproperty-crime rate in four of the most recent six years for whichdata is available, bucking the long-term national decline in suchcrimes that began in the 1990s. Property crimes declined in SanFrancisco during the first year of the pandemic, but rose 13% in2021. Burglaries in the city are at their highest levels since the mid1990s. There were 20,663 thefts from vehicles last year—almost 57a day—a 39% increase from the prior year, although still below therecord of 31,398 in 2017, according to the police.
Zusha Elinson
CUT AND PASTE YOUTUBE LINKS
Why Most Californians Aren't Happy with the State | Victor Davis Hanson
Migrant enclaves already are at the top of the U.S. lists for bad places to - 10 of the 50 worst places in America to live according to this list are in California, and all of them are famous for their illegal populations. MONICA SHOWALTER
The Root Cause of People Leaving California | Joel Kotkin
Yet, instead of addressing these problems and actually making life better for the 39 million Americans who currently live in California, Golden State lawmakers are focused on identity politics in the form of a comprehensive reparations plan that one California lawmaker says, “will be a blueprint for America.”
For starters, the CRTF seeks to provide all eligible Black Californians with a lump sum payment of $5 million. On top of that, eligible residents would also receive “free” college, “free” housing, and total debt forgiveness, among several other government goodies.
According to California Reparations Task Force Chair Kamilah Moore, “I hope that… this task force sets a precedent not only for what other states can do… but, of course, the federal government as well because it's primarily the federal government's responsibility. They are the entity that has the big enough purse, for instance, to close the wealth gap, and so I do think that the task force is headed in the right direction in terms of that precedent-setting.”
If Moore gets her wish, and other states follow California down the reparations road, the economic and social repercussions would be terrible. If the federal government were to embark on a similar quest, it would spell the end of America as we know it.
First, it must be stated that slavery never existed in California. In fact, California was a free state that fought alongside the Union against the Confederacy during the Civil War. That alone should make the reparations conversation in California moot.
Second, California (and every other state for that matter) does not have billions of dollars at its disposal to redistribute to a sliver of its population. Currently, California’s population is 39 percent Hispanic, 35 percent White, 5 percent Asian, and 4 percent Black. Is it fair to force 95 percent of Californians, all of whom had absolutely nothing to do with a reprehensible institution that was outlawed more than 150 years ago, to pay enormous sums of money to 4 percent of the population simply based on their skin color? Of course not. Actually, that is the very essence of racism.
Third, if California lawmakers really wanted to help its Black residents and close the wealth gap, one-time payments and other government handouts will not make the situation better, it arguably will make it worse.
Consider. Since the start of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “war on poverty,” the federal government has spent $22 trillion on various wealth redistribution programs. Yet, over that span, the rate of poverty remains unchanged.
Perhaps this is because giving some people other people’s money is an incentive for the former to remain indolent. In other words, government checks breed dependence on government.
On the other hand, if California lawmakers were actually interested in addressing the plight of many of the Black residents who live in the Golden State, they ought to take a forward-looking approach that would include an increased police presence, a tough on crime approach, lower taxes, fewer regulations, and commonsense policies that would make energy affordable and abundant.
And, if these same lawmakers were really audacious and genuinely wanted to throw a wrench into the cycle of poverty that has entrapped so many Black Californians, they would do everything in their power to ensure that universal school choice was the norm in the Golden State. It also would help if these so-called leaders addressed the elephant in the room: the breakdown of the Black family, which is arguably the biggest driver of poverty and so many other societal problems.
However, these are difficult conversations for leftist lawmakers, who always view more government wealth redistribution as the answer to everything. It is much easier for politicians to propose a superficial solution, like reparation payments, even though time has shown that giving people money doesn’t solve deep-seated, complex problems.
I hope the rest of the country does not follow California’s lead on this issue. Once upon a time, Americans flocked to California because it was the land of freedom and opportunity. Today, Americans are fleeing California because it has become the land of big government socialism and identity politics. Suffice to say, this is not the path that other states, or the federal government, want to tread.
Chris Talgo (ctalgo@heartland.org) is editorial director at The Heartland Institute.
Migrant enclaves already are at the top of the U.S. lists for bad places to - 10 of the 50 worst places in America to live according to this list are in California, and all of them are famous for their illegal populations. MONICA SHOWALTER
Kamala Harris announces what amounts to a stealth reparations plan
In a little-noted speech last week, VP Kamala Harris revealed that the federal government will be giving out gifts amounting to $1.7 billion dollars to “minority” businesses. This amounts to a stealth reparations plan, as the recipients likely will be predominantly Black. The Hill reports:
Vice President Harris on Monday announced $1.7 billion in grants for more than 600 community lenders to support small businesses, entrepreneurs, nonprofits, housing and commercial real estate as they seek to rebound from the coronavirus pandemic.
Harris announced the grants as part of the Treasury Department’s Community Development Financial Institutions Fund, saying that the loans will go to support local lending institutions that primarily serve minority communities, which may be hesitant to seek out a loan from a bigger bank. She said that the lenders will not need to pay back “not even a dollar of this investment,” and noting that the awards are grants, not loans.
“These banks predominantly do business in overlooked and underserved communities,” she said. “They know these communities. They understand these communities. And in particular, most importantly, they know and see the capacity of these communities.”
It is unclear where the money will come from, though there is still cash from Covid appropriations and the massive spending bills available.
Disguising the gifts, targeted on the basis of race, as loans that don’t have to be repaid is particularly obnoxious. What kind of lesson is it for budding entrepreneurs that you don’t have to repay money that you borrowed – because you have to approved racial identity?
[T]he U.S. Attorney in Philadelphia recently won a $1 million settlement for fraud in federal contracting for Disadvantaged Business Enterprises, or DBEs. Here’s a wild idea: Why not award construction funds based on merit, not claims of identity? (snip)
The DBE program, set up in the 1980s, steers money to small businesses that are at least 51% owned by “disadvantaged” persons. Women are “presumed disadvantaged,” along with people who are black, Hispanic, Native American, Asian-Pacific or Subcontinent Asian, although there are also limits on net worth and firm size. The government’s general goal is for 10% of its highway and transit funds to be spent with DBEs. But they’re supposed to do real work, not merely pass money through.
“This was precisely the case with the Platt Bridge project,” says a news release by the U.S. Attorney. In 2011, Hercules-Vimas Joint Venture won a $42.7 million painting job from Pennsylvania’s Department of Transportation. To meet the disadvantaged rules, it subcontracted Vertech International, a certified DBE. “While Hercules-Vimas represented to PENNDOT that Vertech was the paint supplier, the government alleges that it worked directly with Sherwin-Williams, a non-disadvantaged business, to deliver paint and materials to the project site. Vertech merely created invoices designed to conceal the fraud in exchange for a nominal fee.”
Principals from Vertech and Hercules-Vimas pleaded guilty in 2016 and 2017. The new $1 million settlement is with Sherwin-Williams, which the feds allege was a knowing participant. (snip)
So the DBE program raises the cost of construction, creates an ecosystem of make-work for certification and oversight, and provides easy pickings for scofflaws? The U.S. Attorney in Boston last week announced a $1.24 million settlement to resolve an alleged “fraudulent scheme” in an I-95 project.
Favoritism of any type, whether based on race, ethnicity, bribery, or political clout, is counterproductive. I am more and more convinced that the solution to racial disparities is in the reforming the education system and efforts to recognize the importance of and to instill functional social norms across underperforming groups.
NO, BLACK CRIME HAS KILLED OUR ONCE GREAT CITIES. BLACKS MAKE UP ONLY 8% OF THE POPULATION OF SAN FRANCISCO, BUT PERPETRATE 40% OF THE CRIMES (these are pre-covid stats and before the store looting and carjacking began).
Mark down Tuesday, April 4, as the night Chicago died.
That's when we learned that Second City voters narrowly elected Brandon Johnson as their next mayor. This is a city that was flattened during the reign of Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who lost in the first round of voting for Chicago mayor because she didn't finish in one of the top two spots. Lightfoot, elected in 2019 after a career as a federal prosecutor who then held several appointed positions in Chicago, shut down the city for more than a year during COVID-19. She also bankrupted small businesses, allowed rioters to burn down whole neighborhoods, presided over the worst crime wave in 50 years and let the schools go to hell.
Now, the voters have selected Johnson. Elected to the Cook County Board of Commissioners in 2018, Johnson narrowly won the mayoralty of America's third-most-populous city on April 4 over Paul Vallas, a former Chicago schools CEO and a Democrat who presented himself as a political moderate compared to the far-left Johnson.
The incoming mayor may turn out to be a worse mayor than Lightfoot. Johnson's occupation is an organizer for the teachers unions. The unions spent several million dollars on the race. They got their man.
What this means is that Chicago's municipal government will now be a fully owned subsidiary of the Chicago Teachers Union. (Can you imagine what the union contracts are going to look like?) This is a city where, in roughly two dozen schools, zero children can read or write at proficiency level.
Johnson said that crime and shoplifting from local schools are societal problems. And he may continue Lightfoot's policy of not prosecuting people who rob stores -- often owned by minorities.
It's not just Chicago that has become a war zone. Portland, Seattle and San Francisco were not so long ago the crown jewels of the West Coast. They were said to be progressive cities that worked. No more. Now, they are unlivable. San Francisco is overrun with homeless people on seemingly every downtown street corner, feces on the sidewalks and trash everywhere.
In Portland, major businesses are pulling out in the aftermath of the takeover of the radical anarchists during COVID-19. Crime is so rampant that Walmart recently said "adios," shutting down its last store. Rains PDX, a clothing store in Portland, shut down last November after a string of break-ins made it impossible to stay open. This printed sign pasted on the door says it all:
"Small businesses (and large) cannot sustain doing business, in our city's current state. We have no protection, or recourse, against the criminal behavior that goes unpunished. Do not be fooled into thinking that insurance companies cover losses. We have sustained 15 break-ins ... We have not received any financial reimbursement since the 3rd."
For the first time, Seattle is losing population. To be "progressive," Seattle is imposing a massive capital gains tax increase -- socking it to the rich. So they are fleeing the city and Washington state.
One of the nation's top demographers, Wendell Cox, has been analyzing the just-released Census Bureau data on county population. He found that "during the late 2010s and before the pandemic, population growth and domestic migration transitioned toward smaller metropolitan areas from larger ones. That outmigration is accelerating."
The nation's 10 largest counties have lost more than 1 million residents since 2019. The biggest losers have been the counties that are home to New York and San Francisco and Chicago's Cook County. Even Los Angeles County, the nation's most populous county, with just under 10 million people, is now contracting.
Welcome to the real-world impact of progressivism. Instead of worker paradises, the Left has transitioned our once-shining cities into slums, murder zones, homeless encampments and boarded-up stores. They have become cults of economic and political quackery -- and tragically, few Democrats have the courage to speak out. They are worried about being called racists when the reality is that the victims -- of terrible public schools, high murder rates and an anti-business creed -- are the minorities they say they care so much about.
The three poisons of America's leftist cities are 1) high taxes, 2) schools that don't educate and 3) crime running rampant. As mayors such as Rudy Giuliani of New York City proved in the 1990s after the Big Apple had been driven to its knees, all it takes is committed leadership to fix these problems. Things can change quickly, as they did in Manhattan.
The fact that Chicagoans have elected not a reformer, but a deformer, suggests that inner-city residents still don't get it -- or they don't care. Or they are all on the payroll of the city governments that are going bankrupt. Alas, our cities can't be saved if the voters in these metropolises don't want to be saved.
Census Data Shows Mass Exodus from Democrat-Run Cities to Red States
Counties overlapping Democrat-run cities such as Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York top the list of locales that have been losing population, while the biggest inflows of people have been to Arizona, Texas, and Florida, according to census data.
A Press Release by the United States Census Bureau revealed that the top county in terms of population loss was Los Angeles County, which lost 90,704 people over a one-year period from 2021 to 2022.
Elsewhere in California, Santa Clara County lost 15,650 people and Alameda County lost 14,840 residents.
Cook County Illinois, home to the city of Chicago, lost 68,314 people during the same period.
In New York, Queens County lost 50,112 people, Kings County lost 46,970 people, and Bronx County lost 41,143 people between 2021 and 2022.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – MAY 25: A view of a moving truck during the coronavirus pandemic on May 25, 2020, in the Queens borough of New York City. (Cindy Ord/Getty Images)
According to the Census Bureau, 68 percent of the largest counties in the United States experienced population gains.
The counties that had the largest inflows of new residents were Maricopa County, Arizona, which includes Phoenix, and Harris County, Texas, which has Houston as its county seat. Indeed, six of the ten counties that experienced the largest population gains were located in the Lone Star State, with Harris and five other counties experiencing an influx of 209,182 people in aggregate.
Other big winners in terms of population gain were located in the state of Florida. The Census Bureau reported the counties of Polk, Lee, and Montgomery together gained 92,848 people.
The Census Bureau noted that while a pandemic-era flight from big cities was a population boon to rural locales, this trend was more muted between 2021 and 2022. Instead, while some cities continued to lose residents, the major beneficiaries were different cities elsewhere in the country, particularly the south and west.
As Breitbart News noted, data from the Public Policy Institute of California suggested economic conditions, rising costs – particularly in housing – and the large homeless populations that roam some of California’s largest cities were major drivers of a population decline in the state, totaling roughly half a million people between 2020 and 2022.
Similarly, an Illinois Policy Institute analysis of data from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) found that between 2019 and 2020 the average person leaving the state earned over $30,000 more than the average person moving to the state.
The analysis also revealed that besides the adjacent states of Indiana and Wisconsin, the main states residents were fleeing to were Texas, Florida, and Arizona.
The report cited jobs, housing, and tax policy as the major factors driving residents to other states.
Notably, neither Texas nor Florida levies a state income tax, and Arizona taxes personal income at roughly half the Illinois rate.
RELATED — WATCH: Hawkins: ‘Nothing Is Changing’ — ‘Democrat-Controlled Cities Are Killing Fields’
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You can follow Michael Foster on Twitter at @realmfoster.
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