“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes . This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.” Karen McQuillan
WaPo Hides Donors’ Migration Money Motive in Anti-Trump Opposition
The Washington Post produced a three-byline, 2,150-word article on tech investors’ conflicts with former President Donald Trump but did not mention the overriding, all-important divide over migration.
The November 12 article is titled “Why Silicon Valley billionaires like Peter Thiel turned against Trump.”
However, the article does not mention voters’ rational support for Trump’s popular promise to curb what investors want — more wage-cutting, rent-spiking migration of foreign consumers, renters, and workers.
The article said:
Just two months before [the] Republican primary season kicks off in Iowa, [tech investor Peter] Thiel is one of several powerful Silicon Valley conservatives reevaluating their participation in politics. Tech heavyweights who helped ignite Trump’s candidacy have told close associates they feel alienated from the GOP and are casting about for a candidate who more closely aligns with their extreme pro-business agenda.
By excluding migration, the article suggests investors have broken with Trump over his claimed failure to reduce regulation. “‘Look at the major agencies. The FTC, the FDA. Did they have any less when Trump left office than when he started? The answer is no,’ said one of the advisers to major Silicon Valley donors.”
The failure to mention immigration “does seem like an absence, a gap, in the story,” said Mark Krikorian, the director of the Center for Immigration Studies.
He continued:
You would think a reporter would have asked because, if anything, Silicon Valley folks are, generally speaking, the boosters of immigration. If I were a reporter, one of the things that [I] would have asked is “How does the Republican Party’s stance on immigration have anything to do with your own changing attitudes?” Maybe they asked, but they got nothing worth reporting.
These days, there is much evidence that Silicon Valley investors strongly and rationally — from their self-serving perspective — oppose the GOP’s populist opposition to mass migration.
For example, the top-level FWD.us advocacy group for tech investors is loudly opposing Trump’s latest promises to curb illegal migration, according to three reporters at the New York Times:
“Americans should understand these [Trump] policy proposals are an authoritarian, often illegal, agenda that would rip apart nearly every aspect of American life — tanking the economy, violating the basic civil rights of millions of immigrants and native-born Americans alike,” Mr. [Todd] Schulte said.
Todd Schulte runs FWD.us — the very influential lobby group for billionaire investors founded by Mark Zuckerberg and many other Silicon Valley investors to push the failed “Gang of Eight” amnesty bill in 2013.
FWD.us lobbies because investors recognize that Wall Street’s stock values spike when the federal government skews the economy by importing more renters, consumers, and cheap workers, regardless of the pocketbook damage to ordinary Americans.
The breadth of investors who founded and still fund FWD.us was hidden from casual visitors to the group’s website, but copies exist at the other sites.
Other investors cite migration as a reason to walk away from the GOP’s populists.
“Let me say the quiet part out loud: Trump supporters need to move on from Trump. And from Trump-style politics,” said an April 2022 statement from Jeff Giesea, another tech investor who backed Trump in 2016. He wrote:
I look back on the Trump era with mostly negative emotions. On the one hand, the American political establishment needed a wake-up call to listen to voices it had forgotten. Trump succeeded as a sort of wrecking ball and court jester. He forced necessary conversations and electoral reconfigurations.
…
[But] Many of the issues and grievances that fueled Trump in 2016 remain. Immigration is a mess. The country still lacks basic sovereignty. Bold, forward-looking policies around healthcare, energy, and education remain to be seen. Middle Americans are still underserved and taken for granted by our government.
Billionaires are also abandoning Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who promoted himself as a competent governor who could bridge the GOP’s pro-migration donors and low-migration voters:
The right-wing venture capitalist David Sacks was a major DeSantis backer, hosting the launch of DeSantis’s presidential campaign on X, formerly Twitter, in the spring. But in recent months, Sacks has soured on DeSantis, according to two people familiar with his thinking, and has thrown fundraisers for rivals Vivek Ramaswamy and Robert F. Kennedy Jr, then running as a Democrat.
Many polls show that the party cannot accept the investors’ demands for more and more migration, no matter how much money the investors dangle in donations.
For example, immigration is the top issue for 26 percent of Republican voters, according to a poll by Reuters announced on November 7. The 26 percent score is four points above the 22 percent who said the closely related economic issue is the most important.
Swing voters also oppose migration. In October, for example, a majority of the Democrat-leaning Jewish community in New York agreed that migration is more of a burden than a benefit.
Curiously, the Washington Post’s do-not-mention-migration article mentioned Republican presidential candidate and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley just once — even though she is getting funds from Silicon Valley investors while promising them an immigration giveaway.
In September, Politico reported on Haley’s investor donors:
They include billionaire WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum, who has donated $5 million to a super PAC supporting her campaign, venture capitalist Tim Draper, who gave $1.1 million, and million-dollar donor Steven Stull, another venture capitalist, according to Federal Election Commission filings.
“We need to [think about immigration] based on merit. We need to go to our industries and say, ‘What do you need that you don’t have?'” Haley told supporters in New Hampshire on November 2. “So think agriculture, think tourism, think tech, we want the talent that’s going to make us better.”
Yet the Washington Post suggested that Haley is getting donations from investors because of her foreign policy record. It quoted Keith Rabois — a general partner at Thiel’s venture firm Founders Fund who backs Haley — saying, “DeSantis hasn’t demonstrated sophisticated expertise in foreign policy and the economy.”
The article cited investor support for Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy but declined to explain his pro-investor immigration and trade policies.
On the Democrat side, President Joe Biden and his deputies have lavished Silicon Valley investors with favors and giveaways since well before the 2020 election.
In October, Breitbart News reported more Biden giveaways to high-tech investors:
President Joe Biden told his deputies Monday to import more foreign graduates for the Fortune 500 white-collar careers needed by indebted U.S. graduates and their families.
The directive is described in a White House fact sheet outlining the directive, “Executive Order on Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence.”
…
Biden is “setting up another wave of indentured servitude workers,” responded Kevin Lynn, the founder of U.S. TechWorkers.
The visa programs include the infamous H-1B program, which grants roughly 200,000 three-year work permits each year to low-skill and mid-skill foreign graduates.
The programs “are used to bring in ordinary [mid-skilled foreign] workers to not only displace Americans but allow [CEOs and investors] to control these people during their entire tenure in the country,” Lynn said. The CEOs and university presidents can control their indentured workers by dangling the hope of green cards and the threat of exile back home, he said.
There should be little surprise when reporters at establishment sites fail to follow the money in migration, said Krikorian. “It’s not so much because [Washington Post owner and high-tech investor] Jeff Bezos is telling them what to do — it’s because they’re in a newsroom where peer pressure would militate against that,” he said.
“In fact, they’re pre-selected [by hiring managers] to not even think about that question,” he added.
Many reporters for the New York Times post many excellent articles about the economic abuse and poverty of migrants, such as child labor and rising rents, but the top editors are pro-migration, so the newspaper does not connect the dots and describe the pocketbook damage of migration to ordinary Americans.
Ordinary Americans — especially black Americans — enjoyed a long and steady rise in prosperity after Congress curbed migration in 1925, but lobbyists persuaded Congress to reopen migration in 1965, double it in 1990, and largely open the border in 2021. The result has been a colossal transfer of wealth from ordinary Americans over to CEOs, investors, and Wall Street.
The government’s migration stimulus for Wall Street policy greatly reduces U.S. innovation, imposes chaotic diversity on American society, and extracts human resources from many poor countries.
Biden’s Migrant Mobile App Frees 350K Foreign Nationals into U.S. — 3X the Population of Manchester, New Hampshire
President Joe Biden’s migrant mobile app has released more than 350,000 foreign nationals into the United States since its debut in January of this year, new data reveals.
The latest Department of Homeland Security (DHS) data shows that Biden’s “CBP One” app, where eligible foreign nationals in Mexico can schedule appointments at the U.S.-Mexico border, released over 44,000 foreign nationals into American towns last month.
Venezuelan migrants browse the CBP One mobile app searching for an appointment to enter the United States outside the temporary stay of the National Migration Institute (INM) in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua state, Mexico, on May 5, 2023. Under the intense desert sun, among sand and brush, hundreds of migrants crossed the Rio Grande from Mexico on the rumor that the United States would let them in. But their hopes were dashed as they fell prey, once again, to misinformation. Falsehoods and deceptions add to the ordeal of these people, first to reach the border through Mexico and then to obtain asylum in the United States. (Photo by HERIKA MARTINEZ / AFP) (Photo by HERIKA MARTINEZ/AFP via Getty Images)
In total, from January through October, the app has freed 350,000 foreign nationals into the U.S. interior — a population three times the size of Manchester, New Hampshire, twice the size of Santa Rosa, California, and approaching the size of Cleveland, Ohio.
Records obtained by the Center for Immigration Studies in September found that DHS is releasing into the U.S. interior more than 99 percent of foreign nationals who schedule appointments at the border through the app.
Those freed into the U.S. interior are increasingly likely to quickly secure work permits to take American jobs thanks to an initiative announced by Biden’s DHS in September.
Months ago, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) grilled DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas over the mobile app, calling it a “Disney fast pass” for foreign nationals who otherwise would have no way to get into the U.S. interior.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
15 MILLION ILLEGALS HAVE BEEN USHERED OVER THE BORDER TO JOIN THE 50 MILLION ALREADY HERE.
PUSH 2 FOR ENGLISH AND WATCH THEM VOTE DEM FOR MORE!
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
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 (BOTTOM).
50 MILLION ILLEGALS IN OUR OPEN BORDERS WITH 15 MILLION ADDED BY GLOBALIST JOE BIDEN. YOU REALLY THINK THAT MIDDLE AMERICA CAN BE SAVED???
Behind Our Politics is the Existential Fight for the Middle Class
I was eating dinner with family over the weekend and everyone -- educated conservatives every one -- was for Nikki Haley. Then they asked me what I thought.
I told them I thought that the existential political fact of our time is that the ordinary middle class is being screwed. And that this was the policy of our ruling class, the educated class. I said that, while a retired man like me had enjoyed, since 2010, a 500 percent increase in my QQQ NASDAQ ETFs, and a 300 percent increase in my SPY S&P ETFs, the average person had seen only an 80 percent increase in income. And house prices had gone up 100 percent.
So the average person has gone nowhere since the bottom of the 2008-09 recession. But a retired baby boomer like me has done just fine.
I said that what I want is a president who will end the injustice being meted out to the ordinary middle class.
I said that I also want a president who will stop treating the lower class as helpless oppressed victims but as aspiring citizens that want and deserve to climb into the responsible middle class, as generations of aspiring Americans have done before them.
I said that I want a president who will smash the power of the educated class and the administrative state that crushes the American people with taxes and handouts and dysfunctional programs and foolish and trendy enthusiasms like the green energy transition. There are "Jobs for Gentry," the educated gentry, I said, but nothing for anyone else.
I did not say that I thought that Trump was the man to do that, or at least the man to get started on it.
But I think that Trump is probably the man we need: the man with the courage to take the fight to the enemy, the educated class ensconced in its government and education sinecures, the educated class wrecking the ordinary middle class from its power position in the administrative state and its regulatory bureaucracies.
Let us review the three things that I identified as Wrong with America.
The first is the power and the privilege of the educated class which has no benefit to anyone in America except the ruling class itself.
The second is the unjust war conducted by the educated ruling class on the ordinary white middle class.
The third is the unjust policy of maintaining the electoral support of the lower class -- in particular the Black lower class -- by handing out free stuff and discouraging the lower class from rising above its government-funded indigence.
Notice that all three things are the deliberate policy of the educated ruling class. Indeed, they are the obvious and sensible way of executing on its political formula, which is to give its educated supporters money and status, to humiliate and impoverish the ordinary White middle class, and to give its lower class supporters money in return for their vote.
Why does the educated ruling class award itself so much power and privilege? It is because the ruling class believes that, without that power, the ordinary middle class will exploit and humiliate the non-white lower class. This is a lie. The ordinary middle class, that I was observing over the weekend in Lancaster, PA, on the streets and in restaurants, and in a diner for Sunday brunch, is just not that interested in anything except getting on with life, work, family, friends, and Sunday brunch.
Why does the educated ruling class practice the cruel humiliation of the ordinary White middle class? It is because the educated ruling class believes that the ordinary White middle class is a caste of White oppressors that must be defanged and stripped of power in order to end the unjust oppression of the non-white lower class. This is a lie. The ordinary White middle class is not interested in power, or humiliation, or anything else connected with political power.
Why does the educated ruling class obsess about the oppression of the non-white lower class? It is because the educated ruling class believes, with religious faith, that without its support, the non-white lower class would descend into poverty and unjust subservience to the White oppressor class -- that you and I know as the ordinary White middle class. This is a lie. Even if it wanted to, the ordinary White middle class does not have the power to oppress anyone.
But never mind, say our lefty friends:
The class of people permanently deemed less powerful may inflict anything upon someone not in their group.
Of course, because the left "deems" that they are less powerful and are more oppressed.
And what do you do to the oppressors? According to lefty Slavoj Žižek: "the opposing class has to be destroyed."
Only, dear lefty friends, the only class without the power to "destroy" or "inflict" is the ordinary White middle class.
Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.
Image: DonkeyHotey
As unemployment in the black community climbs, Chicago Democrats hold a job fair for illegals
At the beginning of this month, a Chicago-based staffing agency partnered with a number of local Democrats to hold a job fair for around 400 open job positions, to a group of around 500 illegal aliens; from a Breitbart item on the news yesterday:
With interpreters provided for them, the migrants met with representatives in fields including health care, manufacturing, hospitality, logistics, and others.
The companies also offered help securing government services, legal papers, and even training and educational opportunities.
(“Chicago businesses offer 400 jobs to on-the-run felons” seems like a more accurate headline, because after all, the first act of these foreigners on our soil was a felonious one, and it’s a crime for which they’re not paying.)
Meanwhile, black Americans have the highest unemployment rate in the country; according to the latest national data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that number was 5.8% for October 2023. According to a September report from a local Chicago outlet, Chicago unemployment rates hovered around the national average, but among black residents? That number was a whopping 14.3%.
Now I mention the job statistics for the black community because that’s a large chunk of the Democratic voting bloc in Chicago, and three top-tier “partners” of the event were local Democrats: “Alderperson” (not Alderman) Andre Vasquez, “100% Pro-Choice” Kevin Olickal, and the far-left Hoan Huynh.
Well, congratulations to the black Chicagoans, because they’re getting exactly what they voted for, even though they probably didn’t realize it—they went to the ballot box for abortion, skin color, and “progress” and got more unemployment, more crime, and more betrayal. Illegals are the Chicago political machine’s newest crop of voters, of course they’re rolling out the red carpet to accommodate; getting these tens of thousands of people on the government dole means a new reliable voting bloc for years to come.
Just yesterday, Peter Von Buol, a longtime friend of AT sent me this video:
A Brandon Johnson supporter demanding he stop the buses from dropping off “immigrants” because they’re stealing all the handouts for which the blacks have been waiting… but still supporting him? Didn’t she ever hear the “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me” saying?
I also can’t figure out why the average leftist voter can’t figure out that corporations and businesses are money-making ventures, not charities. They’re not hiring illegals over Americans because they’re dedicated social justice warriors, they’re hiring illegals because it benefits the business.
Seamus Bruner Blows the Lid Off the Agenda of Billionaire ‘Controligarchs’
Members of the billionaire class have an agenda to control the masses and grow their own profits, Seamus Bruner reveals in his new book, Controligarchs: Exposing the Billionaire Class, their Secret Deals, and the Globalist Plot to Dominate Your Life.
Bruner, the director of research at Peter Schweizer’s Government Accountability Institute, spoke with SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily about Controligarchs, which hits bookstands Tuesday.
He began by reading the following quotation from billionaire David Rockefeller’s 2002 memoir, which Bruner used to open the first chapter of Controligarchs:
Some even believe we are part of a secret [club] working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as “internationalists” and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure–one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.
Bruner said he was “stunned” to discover that this quote is authentic.
“That’s the charge — conspiring against the United States. He stands guilty and is not just guilty. He’s proud of it,” Bruner said.
He also noted that the word “club” in brackets was his word choice. The word Rockefeller used was “cabal.”
“The word ‘club’ there in brackets is actually ‘cabal,'” Bruner said, explaining that he toned it down so as not to sound “too crazy.” But indeed, the original word is “cabal” rather than club.
Bruner explained that this supposedly good “club” of billionaires is the “most exclusive club in the world” with about 15 members. He recounted how in May of 2009, following President Barack Obama’s presidential victory, a dozen or so billionaires–including Bill Gates, David Rockefeller, George Soros, Ted Turner, Michael Bloomberg, Warren Buffett, Oprah Winfrey, and the heads of major corporations like Cisco, Blackstone Group, and Tiger Management– had a meeting at Rockefeller University in Manhattan “to figure out how they can pool their resources to spend on priorities that are important to them.”
At the time, they identified “overpopulation” as one of the major cause they could pour their resources into under the guise of green initiatives. This fear of “overpopulation,” Bruner explained, is what the green movement is really all about to them.
“They’re all very concerned that there’s too many of us around breathing their air. And out of that really grows a lot of this climate change hysteria, which is a central theme in the book,” he said, noting that climate change hysteria is also great way for them to get rich and also gain control of the masses.
LISTEN:
“The book proves, I think in great detail, is that climate change is a method of getting very rich and also gathering more and more control over the masses,” he said, explaining that with control comes profit.
“These guys have a god complex on steroids,” he said. “They’ve got more economic power than the U.S. and China, which are the two obviously wealthiest countries in the world. And it’s really more than just money that they control. You see this with tech influence in elections. They can steer all of society.”
He noted, for example, Bill Gates’ interest in gaining control of the public’s diet by buying up farmland and investing in alternate proteins.
“On the farm stuff, it’s not just the diversification of his holdings. He’s been investing in all of these alternative proteins and alternative fertilizers. And these companies hold the new patents, new monopolies over proteins and over food and over the fertilizers, and then he uses his influence to ban traditional forms of farming,” he explained.
Bill Gates speaks at a news conference during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, 0n May 25, 2022. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)
“When you hear Alexandria Ocasio Cortes say that the earth is going to end in 12 years because of cow flatulence, she didn’t just think that up or dream that up. That comes from a white paper funded by a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation or a World Economic Forum group,” Bruner continued.
Bruner also highlighted very revealing comments that hedge fund billionaire George Soros wrote about how he “fancied” himself “as some kind of god… If truth be known, I carried some rather potent messianic fantasies with me from childhood, which I felt I had to control, otherwise they might get me in trouble.” When Soros was asked about this quote by an interviewer in 2004, he said, “It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.”
“George Soros does not want an open society,” Bruner said. “He’s the kingpin of one of the largest dark money networks in politics, and nobody elected George Soros.”
Bruner also highlighted the technocracy movement, which he describes as an “inherently anti-democratic movement that says that the engineers and the scientists need to run society.”
“The peasants and the unwashed masses are not quite smart enough to make decisions for themselves,” he said of the movement, briefly touching on the dangers of Elon Musk’s neuralink and Microsoft’s 060606 patent, which he described as an “esoteric type technology … [a] blockchain, but it is effectively a chip in your body so that it’s a way of generating currency while you do certain activities.”
According to Bruner, these “Controligarchs” want to control people’s lives while expanding their own profits. Bruner said that this is why it is so important for people to “jealously guard your wallet,” “jealously guard your personal data, especially that of your kids,” and “talk to your legislators and Congressmen and tell them to ban your taxpayer money from funding these initiatives.”
Controligarchs: Exposing the Billionaire Class, Their Secret Deals, and the Globalist Plot to Dominate Your Life is available now is hardcover, e-book, and audiobook.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
KENNEDY TALKS ABOUT BLACKROCK CAUSING RENTS TO SOAR. BLACKROCK IS ONE OF BIDEN'S BIGGEST BRIBESTERS!
RFK Jr.: Home ownership is the foundation of a broad middle class.
Poll: Just 14% of Voters Say They’re Better Off with Joe Biden in Office
Less than 15 percent of voters believe they are better off with President Joe Biden as commander in chief, a Financial Times-University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business poll found Monday, increasing fears among Democrats that “Bidenomics” failed to deliver results.
- 14 percent of voters say they are better off financially now than when Joe Biden took office, the poll found.
- 70 percent of voters say Biden’s economic policies had either hurt the economy or had no impact.
- Among the 70 percent, 33 percent said the president’s policies hurt the economy a lot.
The poll revealed inflation was voters’ greatest financial stress:
- 82 percent of respondents said soaring price increases.
- 75 percent said inflation was the most significant threat to the U.S. economy in the next six months.
Inflation caused a majority of voters to change their essential and non-essential spending, the poll also found:
- 65 percent said they reduced non-essential spending, such as eating out and holiday purchases.
- 52 percent said they reduced spending on food or other everyday necessities.
- 52 percent said they know “a little” or “nothing” about “Bidenomics.”
“Every group — Democrats, Republicans and independents — list rising prices as by far the biggest economic threat . . . and the biggest source of financial stress,” Erik Gordon, a professor at Michigan’s Ross School, told the Times. “That is bad news for Biden, and the more so considering how little he can do to reverse the perception of prices before election day.”
The poll sampled 1,004 voters from November 2-7 with a 3.1 margin of error.
The poll comes after Democrats would reportedly advise Biden to “heave” so-called “Bidenomics” in the “dumpster,” Politico’s Jonathan Martin wrote Monday after interviewing dozens of Democrats and Never Trump Republicans.
“Attempting to make voters believe something they don’t is folly. Attaching your name to that strategy borders on masochistic,” Martin said of Biden’s economic policy term. “At a time when people are paying more for housing, gas and groceries, focusing on job growth and the unemployment rate is ineffective.”
Follow Wendell Husebø on “X” @WendellHusebø. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality.
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
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 (BOTTOM).
IT'S INFORTUNATE THAT SHOWALTER REFERENCES THE PEOPLE LIVING UNDER THE FREEWAY AS "BUMS". WHAT IF THEY WERE ALL HANDICAPPED? WELL, THEY ARE. WITH DRUGS THAT FLOW FROM CHINA, THROUGH NARCOMEX AND INTO CA's OPEN BORDERS HAS CAUSED MASSIVE ADDICTION HERE, AND ALL OVER THE COUNTRY!
The answer regarding Arizona’s swing lies in its neighbor to the west, California. Since 2012, California has overwhelmingly sent more transplants to Arizona than any other state. When surveyed, escaping Californians cite high taxes, high crime rates, unaffordable housing, out-of-control homelessness, and high unemployment rates as their top reasons for fleeing.
Who is responsible for creating such an alarming living environment within the state? California liberals. A November, 2020 report produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University stated that California has 395,608 regulatory restrictions. The sheer volume and scope of California regulations creates such a compliance nightmare that they kill entire industries, send housing prices to unattainable heights, and restrict even commonplace liberties for which conservative leaning states are known.
Piled onto California’s endless river of regulations are its nonsensical laws and policies. Twenty major metropolitan cities or counties in California have established laws, ordinances, regulations, or other practices that shield illegal immigrants from prosecution after committing a crime. These counties brazenly safeguard illegal immigrant criminals against deportation either through noncompliance or by refusing to hand them over to federal agencies such as ICE. With over $1.5 trillion in state and local government debt, California effectively has little money to spare for conveniences such as criminal incarceration. What do sanctuary cities and counties see as the alternative to handing illegal immigrant criminals over for deportation? Release them back into the general population, of course.
A massive fire at a homeless encampment beneath an underpass in downtown Los Angeles has shut down the 10 freeway indefinitely.
The fire occurred on Saturday in two storage areas beneath the freeway that also hosted a sprawling homeless encampment.
“The incident, which closed westbound and eastbound lanes of the busy freeway between Alameda Street and Santa Fe Avenue, will significantly affect traffic in the area, officials said at a news conference Sunday, without offering a timetable for reopening,” noted the Los Angeles Times.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said Angelenos should expect the freeway to be close for some time.
Firefighters look at the their Fire Engine 17 that got burnt in a massive pallet fire under I-10 Freeway overpass at 1700 block of East 14th Street on Saturday, Nov. 11, 2023 in Los Angeles, CA. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
Aerial views of the 10 Freeway a day after a large pallet fire burned below, shutting the freeway to traffic. (Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times via Getty)
Aerial views of the 10 Freeway a day after a large pallet fire burned below, shutting the freeway to traffic. (Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times via Getty)
“Unfortunately, there is no reason to think that this is going to be over in a couple of days,” she said. “We will need to come together and all cooperate until the freeway is rebuilt.”
Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom also declared a state of emergency to expedite the repairs, noting the “anxiety of millions and millions that live in this region.”
Roughly 300,000 vehicles travel the 10 freeway daily. As to when it can reopen, the Los Angeles Times described the process thusly:
Several things must occur before construction can begin — starting with an investigation into the cause of the fire. It is expected to be finished by 6 a.m. Monday. Mitigation of hazardous materials also needs to be completed before a detailed structural analysis of the damaged portions of the freeway can commence. Engineers will be inspecting the freeway’s columns and bridge deck.
This could be the most notable freeway closure in the Southland since the 1994 Northridge earthquake buckled portions of the 10 and other routes. The shutdown is expected to increase congestion on adjacent freeways where traffic is being diverted, among them the 5, 110 and 710.
California Transportation Secretary Toks Omishakin said the repairs will be a “significant” challenge. “This is not going to be an easy task for our structural engineers at Caltrans,” Omishakin noted.
Los Angeles saw a massive wildfire in 2017 that also sparked from a homeless encampment, burning through wealthy neighborhoods, and causing millions upon millions of dollars in damage.
“The fire that burned through one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the country last week started as a cooking fire at a homeless encampment, according to an investigation by the Los Angeles Fire Department,” the Times noted at the time.
“Homeless people had been living in the neighborhood — Bel-Air, in northwest Los Angeles — making their encampment near an underpass of the 405 freeway along Sepulveda Boulevard for several years,” it added.
Paul Roland Bois directed the award-winning feature film, EXEMPLUM, which can be viewed for FREE on YouTube or Tubi. A high-quality, ad-free stream can also be purchased on Google Play or Vimeo on Demand. Follow him on Twitter @prolandfilms or Instagram @prolandfilms.
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