That’s bad enough, but as Amazon expands its data services empire, its unjust business practices are setting the standard for the entire economy. And instead of using its profits to reward the working people who make Amazon work, the corporation pays politicians to do its bidding — rigging the rules of the economy to be better for Amazon but worse for our communities. The end result will be almost instantaneous delivery of a race-to-the-bottom economy that is bad for all of us.
Amazon needs its customers. But what are we getting in return? Sure, we get our packages. But we are also getting an unprecedented monopoly. Amazon's impact on our economy isn't just outsized — its a fundamental threat to our democracy. We can no longer wait to see if the company will voluntarily relinquish its power over our economy and alter business practices to avoid negatively impacting marketplaces, workers and neighbors. Consumers, working people, and communities have the power to set the terms and conditions for how Amazon conducts business now.
Through consumer regulatory boards, regional e-commerce commissions and community governance structures that center impacted people and workers, we can hold Amazon accountable. There’s no contradiction here. We may not all hold shares in Amazon, but we all have a stake. And it’s time we speak up and demand more.
Just like many of us who shop at grocery stores simultaneously pushed those stores to offer more organic and healthy options, just like many of us send our kids to public and private schools at the same time while pushing for those schools to be better and just like we vote and support certain elected officials at the same time we register our complaints and push them to do better, we can shop at Amazon while demanding the corporation do better — by consumers, workers, our country and our globe.
The fact is there should be more to Prime — especially for working people, our communities and our economy. And if those of us who are Prime members use our voice to demand more, we’ll get it.
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Concentrated
Corporate Power: Liberal Metropolises, Monopolies Increasingly Dominate U.S.
Economy
Drew
Angerer/Getty Images
23 Dec 201918
4:13
Metropolises
stationed in blue states and giant monopolies are increasingly dominating the
American economy with their concentration of corporate power, research finds.
Analysis
by Bloomberg News this
month revealed that just 31 counties in the
United States now make up more than 32 percent of U.S. gross domestic product
(GDP) despite only being home to about 22 percent of the nation’s population
and 26 percent of the workforce.
The report noted:
The nation’s economy is becoming
increasingly concentrated in large cities and by the coasts — and less so in
rural counties — spurring the question of whether rural areas will be
increasingly left behind. The growing concentration of the country’s economic
activity could impact a variety of things from infrastructure spending to labor
mobility, but it’s unclear how rural areas will fare as their share of economic
output continues to dwindle.
These 31 counties all include
metropolises like Los Angeles, California; New York City, New York; San
Francisco, California; Seattle, Washington; Chicago, Illinois; Miami, Florida;
and Houston, Texas.
(Screenshot via
Bloomberg News)
As a result, industries are
increasingly concentrated in these metropolises along the coasts. The
information and tech sectors, for example, are mostly settled in Silicon
Valley, California and San Francisco. The financial sector continues to have a
stronghold in Manhattan.
While the entertainment industry is
less concentrated in Los Angeles, it is not because of a growing foothold in a
smaller city or middle America state but rather because New York City has
increased its share of the industry.
The concentration of economic power
coincides with more concentration of corporate power as a handful of
multinational corporations and executives increase their shares of the market.
Extensive research by the Open Markets Institute
has detailed from pharmaceuticals to retail where just one or a few
corporations dominate whole industries in the U.S.
Open Market Institute researchers
write:
Today, a single corporation,
Walmart, controls 72 percent of warehouse clubs and supercenters in the entire
United States. In close to 40 metropolitan areas across America, Walmart sells
more than half of all groceries. Amazon, meanwhile, dominates e-commerce in
general, and many specific lines of business. The corporation, for instance,
sells 74 percent of all e-books and 64 percent of all print books sold online.
In drug stores, CVS controls nearly
60 percent of the industry, while Walgreens controls about 31 percent. In tech,
Google controls about 64 percent of desktop searchers and 94 percent of all
global and mobile tablet searchers.
With airlines, mergers have allowed
just four corporations — American Airlines, United Airlines, Delta Airlines,
and Southwest Airlines — to control about 80 percent of the market. The same is
true of rental car companies, where Enterprise, Hertz, and Avis effectively
controlling the entire market.
Sen.
Josh Hawley (R-MO) has said the concentration of economic power and
wealth must be
challenged by Republicans and Democrats in defense of America’s
working and middle class:
I think that we have here at the
same time that our economy has become more concentrated, we have bigger and
bigger corporations that control more and more of our key sectors, those same
corporations see themselves as less and less American and frankly they are less
committed to American workers and American communities.
“That’s turned out to be a problem
which is one of the reasons we need to restore good, healthy, robust
competition in this country that’s going to push up wages, that’s going to
bring jobs back to the middle parts of this country, and most importantly, to
the middle and working-class of this country,” Hawley continued.
John
Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
It isn’t just in America. The world as a whole is
pivoting. The dogmatic socialist established order is ending.
We enter the age of the Deplorables. The Deplorables are ascending in
America, with Trump, in Britain with Brexit, in Hong Kong, in much of Europe,
in Latin America, in Iran. Deplorables are the antidote to arrogant
globalist socialists. Deplorables
everywhere say “from now on we will make our own decisions.”
They are willing to
rend the fabric of this nation in order to protect their privilege and
lifestyle. While the vast majority of Americans will ultimately pay the
price, the current ruling class and their progeny will have far more to lose.
Deplorables Versus the
Ruling Class: A Global Struggle
Consider the age of monarchs. Squabbling barons select a
supreme ruler – a king or an emperor -- to suppress the squabbling. Peace
and prosperity return to the land. The king makes policy but he can’t do
everything. His minions take care of the details.
Minions mean bureaucracy. The bureaucracy grows.
The king grows old and dies. The dynasty continues. The bureaucracy
continues – always continues, and always grows. The bureaucracy becomes
an establishment kingdom unto itself. The bureaucracy grows in power and
serves its own interests. The king diminishes in power. The land
grows restless under the increasing regulatory tyranny and taxes.
Legitimacy –what the Chinese called the “mandate of heaven” -- is
lost and so is the dynasty.
Change the names and we are at the end of a similar cycle – a
cycle that began with the guillotine. This time it is a world-wide
cycle. The modern king is a modern tyrant – Stalin, Hitler, Mao were the
worst.
The socialist idea had been kicking around since the 18th century.
This seemingly plausible notion shaped the various Marxist evils of the
20th century. The Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Nazism, Fascism, and
today’s imperious European Union, are all socialist tyrannies of one degree or
another.
Bureaucratic agencies become ideal tools for tyrants. A
tyrant can point his agencies in a particular direction and unleash them.
They immediately glory in their new power. Horrors ensue. Nazi
Germany gave us the Holocaust and war. Stalin used betrayal.
Friends betrayed friends. Children spied on parents. During the
Soviet show trials of the 1930’s Stalin’s innocent victims were forced to
falsely confess in order to save the lives of their families. Fear
reigns.
Sound familiar? How about the FBI inducing General Flynn to
plead guilty in order to protect his son? Mao injected dark comedy by
unleashing hordes of children to humiliate their elders. No one was
safe. Fear reigns. Sound familiar? Antifa anyone? Black
Lives Matter anyone? Greta anyone? Mao lives!
The United States has become an undemocratic administrative state as well, but only by happenstance. In this country
Congress has ceded much of its power to unchecked regulatory agencies, allowing
them to write their own laws -- regulations which enable them to prosecute, and
persecute, anyone who might stand in an agency’s way. The agencies are
powers unto themselves -- judge, jury, and arresting police altogether.
Innocents are often victims.
It isn’t just the regulatory, or administrative, state that is the
problem. There is a growing sense that something is terribly wrong
throughout society – throughout progressive liberal society,
that is. How about needles in the street? How about sanctuary
cities, counties and states? How about the ruins of Detroit? How
about the weekly slaughter in Chicago? How about suppression of free
speech in academia? How about the corrupt liberal media? How about
big tech bias and censorship? It seems that our governments, and our
intellectual establishments both, no longer serve the average citizen.
They serve only a leftist political ideology, and themselves.
Worst of all, the political ideology that the establishment
promotes is antithetical to the native ideology of America. America was
founded as a society with spiritual values. True America is a society
where the family is paramount. It is a society where a person is rewarded
in proportion to his contribution. It is a society devoted to the
individual where the individual is inherently free because his rights derive
from the Creator not from the government. The purpose of government,
according to the American ideology, is to serve the
individual, not to be his master. The collection of individuals is to be
the master of the government. This is classical liberalism – now a
conservative ideal. It is the opposite of “progressive liberalism.”
The true American ideology cautions against granting power to any
bureaucratic establishment. In its ever increasing hunger for power the
establishment has gravitated to an alien progressive ideology – an ideology of
ever bigger government and government control. But the bossy progressive
Left increasingly forbids Americans to be Americans.
Political turmoil is the consequence. The barons are
squabbling. The Left openly advocates overthrowing the
Constitution. The Right counters with Donald Trump. The Left
politically assassinates him with impeachment. The Right, with centrist
allies, will reelect him anyway. The Mandate of Heaven has been removed
from the elitist establishment. It is passing to the Deplorables.
It isn’t just in America. The world as a whole is
pivoting. The dogmatic socialist established order is ending. We
enter the age of the Deplorables. The Deplorables are ascending in
America, with Trump, in Britain with Brexit, in Hong Kong, in much of Europe,
in Latin America, in Iran. Deplorables are the antidote to arrogant
globalist socialists. Deplorables everywhere say “from now on we will
make our own decisions.”
Hong Kong Deplorables protest extradition
bill (credit: Studio Incendo)
What is it with the Deplorables? What gives them such
power? Three things, I believe, are elevating them. Deplorables
are pragmatic. They are not wedded to any extreme
ideology. Deplorables will go with anything that works. It is no
wonder that the Deplorables began in America. For, as Americans we
inherit the pragmatism of our pioneering ancestors.
Second, the Deplorables adhere to the original American ideology
of free individuals. They reject the concentration of government power
that has accumulated over the past century.
The third energizer is a technological miracle – the
internet. Establishments everywhere fear the internet. And properly
so. For the first time we can instantly communicate across the
world. We can find like-minded people everywhere. We have
discovered just how very many people agree with us.
It follows that Deplorables are no longer just an American
phenomenon, the phenomenon resonates with people everywhere. People
around the world are much the same. They value their traditions and
customs. They value their families, their values, their spiritual
heritage. They value their nation. They resent the imposition of
intrusive government by strangers, by bureaucratic globalists. They are
becoming Deplorables.
Born in the still free parts of America, this new movement seems
destined to chart the course for the whole world -- for this century and
beyond.
The Mandate of Heaven no longer rests with the condescending
progressive bureaucratic establishment. It is passing back to the
people. It is passing to Deplorables everywhere in the world.
MULTI-CULTURALISM and the creation of a
one-party globalist country to serve the rich in America’s open borders.
“Open border advocates, such as Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, claim
illegal aliens are a net benefit to California with little evidence to support
such an assertion. As the CIS has documented, the vast majority of illegals are
poor, uneducated, and with few skills. How does accepting millions of illegal
aliens and then granting them access to dozens of welfare programs benefit
California’s economy? If illegals were contributing to the economy in any
meaningful way, CA, with its 2.6 million illegals, would be booming.” STEVE
BALDWIN – AMERICAN SPECTATOR
Josh Hawley: GOP Must Defend Middle Class Americans Against
‘Concentrated Corporate Power,’ Tech Billionaires
JOHN BINDER
The Republican Party
must defend America’s working and middle class against “concentrated corporate
power” and the monopolization of entire sectors of the United States’ economy,
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) says.
In an
interview on The Realignment podcast, Hawley said that “long
gone are the days where” American workers can depend on big business to look
out for their needs and the needs of their communities.
Instead,
Hawley explained that increasing “concentrated corporate power” of whole
sectors of the American economy — specifically among Silicon Valley’s giant
tech conglomerates — is at the expense of working and middle class Americans.
“One of
the things Republicans need to recover today is a defense of an open,
free-market, of a fair healthy competing market and the length between that and
Democratic citizenship,” Hawley said, and continued:
At the
end of the day, we are trying to support and sustain here a great democracy.
We’re not trying to make a select group of people rich. They’ve already done
that. The tech billionaires are already billionaires, they don’t need any more
help from government. I’m not interested in trying to help them further. I’m
interested in trying to help sustain the great middle of this country that
makes our democracy run and that’s the most important challenge of this day.
“You have
these businesses who for years now have said ‘Well, we’re based in the United
States, but we’re not actually an American company, we’re a global company,'”
Hawley said. “And you know, what has driven profits for some of our biggest
multinational corporations? It’s been … moving jobs overseas where it’s cheaper
… moving your profits out of this country so you don’t have to pay any taxes.”
“I think
that we have here at the same time that our economy has become more
concentrated, we have bigger and bigger corporations that control more and more
of our key sectors, those same corporations see themselves as less and less
American and frankly they are less committed to American workers and American
communities,” Hawley continued. “That’s turned out to be a problem which is one
of the reasons we need to restore good, healthy, robust competition in this
country that’s going to push up wages, that’s going to bring jobs back to the
middle parts of this country, and most importantly, to the middle and working
class of this country.”
While
multinational corporations monopolize industries, Hawley said the GOP must
defend working and middle class Americans and that big business interests
should not come before the needs of American communities:
A free
market is one where you can enter it, where there are new ideas, and also by
the way, where people can start a small family business, you shouldn’t have to
be gigantic in order to succeed in this country. Most people don’t want to
start a tech company. [Americans] maybe want to work in their family’s
business, which may be some corner shop in a small town … they want to be
able to make a living and then give that to their kids or give their kids an
option to do that. [Emphasis added]
The
problem with corporate concentration is that it tends to kill all of that. The
worst thing about corporate concentration is that it inevitably believes to a
partnership with big government. Big business and big government always
get together, always. And that is exactly what has happened now with the tech
sector, for instance, and arguably many other sectors where you have this
alliance between big government and big business … whatever you call it, it’s a
problem and it’s something we need to address. [Emphasis added]
Hawley
blasted the free trade-at-all-costs doctrine that has dominated the Republican
and Democrat Party establishments for decades, crediting the globalist economic
model with hollowing “out entire industries, entire supply chains” and sending
them to China, among other countries.
“The
thing is in this country is that not only do we not make very much stuff
anymore, we don’t even make the machines that make the stuff,” Hawley said.
“The entire supply chain up and down has gone overseas, and a lot of it to
China, and this is a result of policies over some decades now.”
As
Breitbart News reported, Hawley detailed in the interview how Republicans like former
President George H.W. Bush’s ‘New World Order’ agenda and Democrats have helped
to create a corporatist economy that disproportionately benefits the nation’s
richest executives and donor class.
The
billionaire class, the top 0.01 percent of earners, has enjoyed more than 15 times as much wage growth as the bottom 90 percent
since 1979. That economy has been reinforced with federal rules that largely
benefits the wealthiest of wealthiest earners. A study released last month revealed that the richest Americans are,
in fact, paying a lower tax rate than all other Americans.
John
Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
Tucker Carlson
Exposes D.C. ‘Conservatives’ for Doing Big Tech’s Bidding
Rich Polk/Getty
ALLUM BOKHARI
21 Dec 20190
3:53
Fox News host Tucker Carlson slammed establishment conservatives
for taking money from big tech companies to do their bidding, on Tucker
Carlson Tonight, Friday night.
The
popular host, known for his no-holds-barred denunciations of establishment
conservatives as well as Democrats, revealed massive spending by the
establishment conservative Koch Foundation to protect big tech in Washington.
Tucker
revealed that Americans for Prosperity, a “purportedly conservative group”
controlled by the Kochs, launched an ad campaign trying to stave off the
closing net of antitrust enforcement against Google and Facebook. The ads
targeted Republican and Democrat state attorneys general that were
investigating alleged antitrust violations by big tech companies.
The
Koch-funded group also targeted members of the Senate Judiciary Committee with
digital ads urging them to “oppose any effort to use antitrust laws to break up
America’s innovative tech companies,” reported Carlson.
The Fox
host ran through a laundry list of allegedly “conservative” D.C. think tanks
that take money from big tech, and often advocate against regulating them over
political bias or any other matter.
“In
all, the Koch network quietly spent at least $10 million defending Silicon
Valley companies that work to silence conservatives.”
Tucker Carlson Slamming Conservative Inc.
for Defending Big Tech
Tucker Calls Out
-Kochs
-Heritage Foundation
-American Conservative Union
-AEI
"Big Tech Companies silence Conservatives, Conservative Non-Profits try to
prevent the government from doing anything about it."
“Google
has given money to at least 22 right-leaning institutions that are also funded
by the Koch network,” reported Carlson.
“Those
institutions include the American Conservative Union, the American Enterprise
Institute, the National Review Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute,
the Heritage Foundation, and the Mercatus Center.”
Carlson
explained that this spending gets results.
“In
September of 2018, the Competitive Enterprise Institute and three other groups
funded by Google and the Kochs sent a joint letter to the Attorney General
at the time, Jeff Sessions, expressing grave concerns over the DoJ’s plans to
look into whether search engines and social media were hurting competition and
stifling speech.”
Carlson
also called out The Heritage Foundation, arguing that its shilling for big tech
meant that it “no longer represents the interest of conservatives, at least on
the question of tech.”
“A recent
paper by Heritage, entitled ‘Free Enterprise Is the Best Remedy For
Online Bias Concerns,’ defends the special privileges that Congress
has given to left-wing Silicon Valley monopolies. And if conservatives don’t
like it, Heritage says, well they can just start their own Google!”
This is
despite the fact that Google publicly snubbed the foundation last year,
canceling the formation of a planned “A.I ethics” council after far-left
employees of the tech company threw a hissy fit over the fact that Heritage
president Kay Coles James was set to be one of its members.
Are
you an insider at Google, Facebook, Twitter or any other tech company who wants
to confidentially reveal wrongdoing or political bias at your company? Reach
out to Allum Bokhari at his secure email address allumbokhari@protonmail.com.
Allum
Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News.
In truth,
the Golden State is becoming a semi-feudal kingdom, with the nation’s widest gap between middle and upper incomes—72 percent, compared
with the U.S. average of 57 percent—and its highest poverty rate. Roughly half
of America’s homeless live in Los Angeles or San Francisco, which now has the highest property crime rate among major
cities.
December 20, 2019
California
Preening
The Golden State
is on a path to high-tech feudalism, but there’s still time to change course.
“We are the modern
equivalent of the ancient city-states of Athens and Sparta. California has the
ideas of Athens and the power of Sparta,” declared then-governor
Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2007. “Not only can we lead California into the future
. . . we can show the nation and the world how to get there.” When a movie star
who once played Hercules says so who’s to disagree? The idea of California as a
model, of course, precedes the former governor’s tenure. Now the state’s
anti-Trump resistance—in its zeal on matters concerning climate,
technology, gender, or race—believes that it knows how to create a just,
affluent, and enlightened society. “The future depends on us,” Governor Gavin
Newsom said at
his inauguration. “And we will seize this moment.”
In truth, the Golden
State is becoming a semi-feudal kingdom, with the nation’s widest gap between middle and upper incomes—72 percent, compared
with the U.S. average of 57 percent—and its highest poverty rate. Roughly half
of America’s homeless live in Los Angeles or San Francisco, which now has the highest property crime rate among major
cities. California
hasn’t yet become a full-scale dystopia, of course, but it’s heading in a
troubling direction.
This didn’t have to
happen. No place on earth has more going for it than the Golden State. Unlike
the East Coast and Midwest, California benefited from comparatively late
industrialization, with an economy based less on auto manufacturing and steel
than on science-based fields like aerospace, software, and semiconductors. In
the mid-twentieth century, the state also gained from the best aspects of
progressive rule, culminating in an elite public university system, a massive
water system reminiscent of the Roman Empire, and a vast infrastructure network
of highways, ports, and bridges. The state was fortunate, too, in drawing
people from around the U.S. and the world. The eighteenth-century French traveler J. Hector St. John de CrèvecÅ“ur described the American as “this new
man,” and California—innovative, independent, and less bound by tradition or old
prejudice—reflected that insight. Though remnants of this California still
exist, its population is aging, less mobile, and more pessimistic, and its
roads, schools, and universities are in decline.
In the second half of the twentieth
century, California’s remarkably diverse economy spread prosperity from the
coast into the state’s inland regions. Though pockets of severe poverty
existed—urban barrios, south Los Angeles, the rural Central Valley—they were
limited in scope. In fact, growth often
favored suburban and exurban communities, where middle-class families,
including minorities, settled after World War II.
In the last two decades,
the state has adopted policies that undermine the basis for middle-class
growth. State energy policies, for example, have made California’s gas and
electricity prices among the steepest in the country. Since 2011, electricity
prices have risen five times faster than the national average. Meantime, strict land-use
controls have raised housing costs to the nation’s highest, while taxes—once
average, considering California’s urban scale—now exceed those of virtually every state. At the same time, California’s economy
has shed industrial diversity in favor of dependence on one industry: Big Tech.
Just a decade before, the state’s largest firms included those in the
aerospace, finance, energy, and service industries. Today’s 11 largest
companies hail from the tech sector, while energy firms—excluding Chevron,
which has moved much of its operations to Houston—have
disappeared. Not a single top aerospace firm—the iconic industry of
twentieth-century California—retains its headquarters here.
Though lionized in the
press, this tech-oriented economy hasn’t resulted in that many middle- and
high-paying job opportunities for Californians, particularly outside the Bay
Area. Since 2008, notes Chapman University’s Marshall Toplansky, the state has
created five times the number of low-paying, as opposed to high-wage, jobs. A
remarkable 86 percent of new jobs paid below the median income, while almost
half paid under $40,000. Moreover, California, including Silicon Valley,
created fewer high-paying positions than the national average, and far less
than prime competitors like Salt Lake City, Seattle, or Austin. Los Angeles
County features the lowest pay of any of the nation’s 50 largest counties.
No state advertises its multicultural bona
fides more than California, now a majority-minority state. This is evident at
the University of California, where professors are required to prove their service to “people
of color,” to the state’s high school curricula, with its new ethnic studies component. Much of California’s
anti-Trump resistance has a racial context. State Attorney General Xavier
Becerra has sued the administration numerous times over immigration policy
while he helps ensure California’s distinction as a sanctuary for illegal
immigrants. So far, more than 1 million illegal residents have received driver’s licenses, and they qualify for free health care, too. San Francisco now permits illegal immigrants to vote in local elections.
Such radical policies may
make progressives feel better about themselves, though they seem less concerned
about how these actions affect everyday people. California’s Latinos and
African-Americans have seen good blue-collar jobs in manufacturing and energy
vanish. According to one United Way study, over half of Latino households can barely pay their bills. “For
Latinos,” notes long-time political consultant Mike Madrid,
“the California Dream is becoming an unattainable fantasy.”
In the past, poorer
Californians could count on education to help them move up. But today’s
educators appear more interested in political indoctrination than results.
Among the 50 states, California ranked 49th in the performance of low-income students. In wealthy San Francisco, test scores for
black students are the worst of any California county. Many minority residents,
especially African-Americans, are fleeing the state. In a recent UC Berkeley
poll, 58 percent of black expressed interest in leaving California, a higher
percentage than for any racial group, though approximately 45 percent of Asians
and Latinos also considered moving out.
Perhaps the biggest
demographic disaster is generational. For decades, California incubated youth culture,
creating trends like beatniks, hippies, surfers, and Latino and Asian art,
music, and cuisine. The state is a fountainhead of youthful wokeness and rebellion, but that may prove short-lived as millennials leave. From
2014 to 2018, notes demographer Wendell Cox, net domestic out-migration grew
from 46,000 to 156,000. The exiles are increasingly in their family-formation
years. In the 2010s, California suffered higher net declines in virtually every
age category under 54, with the biggest rate of loss coming among the 35-to-44
cohort.
As families with children
leave, and international migration slows to one-third of Texas’s level, the
remaining population is rapidly aging. Since 2010, California’s fertility rate
has dropped 60 percent, more than the national average; the state is now aging 50
percent more rapidly than the rest of the country. A growing number of tech
firms and millennials have headed to the Intermountain West. Low rates of homeownership among younger people play a big role
in this trend, with California millennials forced
to rent, with little chance of buying their own home, while many of the state’s
biggest metros lead the nation in long-term owners. California is increasingly a greying
refuge for those who bought property when housing was affordable.
After Governor Schwarzenegger morphed into
a progressive environmentalist, climate concerns began driving state policy.
His successors have embraced California “leadership” on climate issues. Jerry
Brown recently told a
crowd in China that the rest of the world should follow California’s example.
The state’s top Democrats, like state senate president pro tem Kevin DeLeon,
Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti, and billionaire Democratic presidential
candidate Tom Steyer, now compete for
the green mantle.
Their policies have worsened conditions for many middle- and working-class Californians. Oblivious
to these concerns, Greens ignore practical ideas—nuclear power, natural gas
cars, job creation in affordable areas, home-based work—that could help reduce
emissions without disrupting people’s lives. Ultra-green policies also work
against the state’s proclaimed goal of building more than 3.5 million new housing units by 2025.
In accordance with its efforts to reduce car use, the state mandates that most
growth occurs in already-crowded coastal areas, where land prices are highest.
But in cities like San Francisco, the cost of building one unit for a homeless person surpasses $700,000. California’s
inland regions, though experiencing population gains, keep losing state funding for decrepit highways in favor of urban-centric, mass transit projects—yet transit
use has stagnated, especially in greater Los Angeles.
The state, nevertheless,
continues its pursuit of policies that would eliminate all fossil fuels and
nuclear power—outpacing national or even Paris Accord levels and guaranteeing
ever-rising energy prices. Mandating everything from electric cars to
electric homes will only drive more working-class Californians into “energy
poverty.” High energy prices also directly affect the manufacturing and
logistics firms that employ blue-collar workers at decent wages. Business
relocation expert Joe Vranich notes
that industrial firms account for many of the 2,000 employers that left the
state this decade. California’s industrial growth has fallen to the bottom tier of states; last year, it ranked 44th, with a rate of growth one-third to
one-quarter that of prime competitors like Texas, Virginia, Arizona, Nevada,
and Florida.
Similarly, the high energy
prices tend to hit the interior counties that, besides being poorer, have far
less temperate climates. Cities like Bakersfield,
capital of the state’s once-vibrant oil industry, are particularly hard-hit.
High energy prices will cost the region, northeast of the Los Angeles Basin,
14,000 generally high-paid jobs, even as the state continues to import oil from Saudi Arabia.
California’s leaders apply
climate change to excuse virtually every failure of state policy. During the
California drought, Brown and
his minions blamed the “climate” for the dry period, refusing to take
responsibility for insufficient water storage that would have helped farmers. When the rains returned and
reservoirs filled, this argument was forgotten, and little effort has been made
to conserve water for next time. Likewise, Newsom and
his supporters in the media have
blamed recent fires on changes in the global climate, but the disaster had as
much to do with green mandates against controlled
burns and brush clearance than anything occurring on a planetary scale. Brown joined
greens and others in
blocking such sensible policies.
Few climate advocates ever
seem to ask if their policies actually help the planet. Indeed, California’s
green policy, as one paper demonstrates,
may be increasing total greenhouse-gas emissions by pushing people and
industries to states with less mild climates. In the past decade, the state
ranked 40th in per-capita reductions, and its global carbon footprint is
minimal. Renewable energy may be expensive and unreliable, but state policy nevertheless enriches the
green-energy investments of tech leaders,
even when their efforts—like the Google-backed Ivanpah solar farm—fail to deliver affordable, reliable energy.
It’s not so surprising, given these
enthusiasms, that progressive politicians like Garcetti—who
leads a city with paralyzing traffic congestion, rampant inequality, a huge rat infestation, and proliferating homeless camps—would rather talk about becoming
chair of the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group.
Reality is asserting
itself, though. Tech firms already show signs of restlessness with the current
regulatory regime and appear to be shifting employment to other states, notably Texas, Tennessee, Nevada, Colorado,
and Arizona.
Economic-modeling firm Emsi estimates
that several states—Idaho, Tennessee, Washington, and Utah—are growing their
tech employment faster than California. The state is losing momentum in
professional and technical services—the largest high-wage sector—and now stands
roughly in the middle of the pack behind other western states such as Texas,
Tennessee, and Florida. And Assembly Bill 5, the state law regulating certain
forms of contract labor,
reclassifies part-time workers. Aimed initially at ride-sharing giants Uber and Lyft,
the legislation also extends to independent contractors in industries from
media to trucking.
At some point, as
even Brown noted,
the ultra-high capital gains returns will fall and, combined with the costs of
an expanding welfare state, could leave the state in fiscal chaos. Big Tech
could stumble, a possibility made more real by the recent $100 billion drop in the value of privately held “unicorn” companies,
including WeWork. If the tech economy slows, a rift could develop between two
of the state’s biggest forces—unions and the green establishment—over future
levels of taxation. More than two-thirds of California cities don’t have any funds set aside for retiree health
care and other retirement expenses. The state also confronts $1 trillion in
pension debt, according to former Democratic state senator Joe Nation. U.S. News & Report ranks California, despite the tech
boom, 42nd in fiscal health among the states.
And a rebellion against
the state’s energy policies is already under way. Recently, 110 cities, with total population exceeding 8 million, have demanded changes
in California’s drive to prevent new natural gas hookups. The state’s Chamber
of Commerce and the three
most prominent ethnic chambers—African-American,
Latino, and Asian-Pacific—have joined this effort.
Californians need less
bombast and progressive pretense from their leaders and more attention to
policies that could counteract the economic and demographic tides threatening
the state. On its current course, California increasingly resembles a model of
what the late Taichi Sakaiya called “high-tech feudalism,” with a small
population of wealthy residents and a growing mass of modern-day serfs.
Delusion and preening ultimately have limits, as more Californians are
beginning to recognize. As the 2020s beckon, the time for the state to change
course is now.
DEMOCRAT PARTY CORRUPTION
Their banksters and billionaires demand
wider open borders to keep wages depressed
"This is how they will destroy
America from within. The leftist billionaires who orchestrate
these plans are wealthy. Those tasked with representing us in Congress will
never be exposed to the cost of the invasion of millions of migrants. They
have nothing but contempt for those of us who must endure the consequences of
our communities being intruded upon by gang members, drug dealers and human
traffickers. These people have no intention of becoming Americans;
like the Democrats who welcome them, they have contempt for us." PATRICIA
McCARTHY
‘The
Left Case Against Open Borders’: Liberal Author Pans ‘Useful Idiots of Big
Business’
5:13
Progressives’
enthusiastic support for mass immigration has converted them into “useful
idiots” for the nation’s business elites, says a left-wing writer.
Today’s
well-intentioned activists have become the useful idiots of big business. With
their adoption of “open borders” advocacy—and a fierce moral
absolutism that regards any limit to migration as an
unspeakable evil—any criticism of the exploitative system of mass
migration is effectively dismissed as blasphemy. Even solidly leftist
politicians, like Bernie Sanders in the United States and Jeremy Corbyn in the
United Kingdom, are accused of “nativism” by critics if they recognize the
legitimacy of borders or migration restriction at any point. This open borders radicalism
ultimately benefits the elites within the most powerful countries in the world,
further disempowers organized labor, robs the developing world of desperately
needed professionals, and turns workers against workers.
Nagle
also argues that mass immigration operates extracts human talent from
developing societies for the benefit of wealthy, comfortable U.S. elites:
Advocates
of open borders often overlook the costs of mass migration for developing
countries. Indeed, globalization often creates a vicious cycle: liberalized
trade policies destroy a region’s economy, which in turn leads to mass
emigration from that area, further eroding the potential of the origin country
while depressing wages for the lowest paid workers in the destination country.
One of the major causes of labor migration from Mexico to the United States has
been the economic and social devastation caused by the North American Free
Trade Agreement (nafta). Nafta forced Mexican farmers to compete with
U.S. agriculture, with disastrous consequences for Mexico. Mexican imports
doubled, and Mexico lost thousands of pig farms and corn growers to U.S.
competition. When coffee prices fell below the cost of
production, nafta prohibited state intervention to keep growers afloat.
Additionally, U.S. companies were allowed to buy infrastructure in
Mexico, including, for example, the country’s main north-south rail line. The
railroad then discontinued passenger service, resulting in the decimation of
the rail workforce after a wildcat strike was crushed. By 2002, Mexican wages
had dropped by 22 percent, even though worker productivity increased by 45
percent.7 In
regions like Oaxaca, emigration devastated local economies and communities, as
men emigrated to work in America’s farm labor force and slaughterhouses,
leaving behind women, children, and the elderly.
Left-wing
servants of business elites spray claims of racism on the public to suppress
their rational and reasonable opposition to immigration exploitation,
Nagle argues:
The
immigration expansionists have two key weapons. One is the big business and
financial interests all working on their side, but an equally
powerful weapon—wielded more expertly by the left-leaning
immigration expansionists—is moral blackmail and public shame. People
are right to see the mistreatment of migrants as morally wrong. Many people are
concerned about the growth of racism and callousness toward minorities that
often accompanies anti-immigration sentiment. But the open borders position
does not even live up to its own professed moral code.
The
tacit alliance of the wealthy against the middle prompt some invective by the
Irish author;
In
the wealthiest nations, open borders advocacy seems to function as a fanatical
cult among true believers—a product of big business and free market
lobbying is carried along by a larger group of the urban creative, tech, media,
and knowledge economy class, who are serving their own objective class
interests by keeping their transient lifestyles cheap and their careers intact
as they parrot the institutional ideology of their industries. The truth is
that mass migration is a tragedy, and upper-middle-class moralizing about it is
a farce. Perhaps the ultra-wealthy can afford to live in the borderless world
they aggressively advocate for, but most
people need—and want—a coherent, sovereign political body to
defend their rights as citizens.
The
establishment’s economic policy of using migration to boost economic growth
shifts wealth from young people towards older people by flooding the market with cheap white-collar and blue-collar
foreign labor.
That flood of outside labor spikes profits
and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for
manual and skilled labor offered by
blue-collar and white-collar employees.
The
policy also drives up
real estate prices, widens wealth-gaps, reduces high-tech
investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’
schools and college education, pushes Americans
away from high-tech careers, and sidelines at least five million marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are
now struggling with opioid addictions.
Immigration
also pulls investment and wealth away from heartland states because coastal
investors can more easily hire and supervise the large immigrant populations
living in the coastal states.
AMERICA
UNRAVELS:
Millions of
children go hungry as the super- rich gorge themselves and ILLEGALS SUCK IN
BILLIONS IN WELFARE!
*
"The
top 10 percent of Americans now own roughly three-quarters of all household
wealth."
*
"While telling workers there is
“not enough money” for wage increases, or to fund social programs, both parties
hailed the recent construction of the U.S.S. Gerald Ford, a massive aircraft
carrier that cost $13 billion to build, stuffing the pockets of numerous
contractors and war profiteers."
Two
Americas: De Blasio's Amazon vs. Trump's Walmart
That the Democrat Party is now the party
of the rich is increasingly seen in its candidates. Forget the occasional
Ocasio-Cortez. A Democrat candidate is more likely to be someone like Illinois’
new governor, J.B. Pritzer, who promises to complete Illinois’ financial
collapse with single-payer insurance and a progressive income tax,
promising to persist until he runs out of other people’s
money:
Mayor Bill de Blasio cited his
"socialistic impulse" in describing an ideal world where New York
City government has control over all land and buildings in his city.
“I think people all over this city, of every
background, would like to have the city government be able to determine which
building goes where, how high it will be, who gets to live in it, what the rent
will be,” de Blasio said in a wide-ranging interview with New York Magazine. “I think there’s a socialistic impulse,
which I hear every day, in every kind of community that they would like things
to be planned in accordance to their needs.”
To each according to their needs -- gee,
where have we heard that before? One would be willing to believe De Blasio’s
socialistic impulses arises out of genuine, if wrongheaded, concern for the
working poor and the middle class, the people the Democrat “party of compassion”
is allegedly the champion of, if it were not for De Blasio’s
support for what some would call corporate welfare, welcoming cash-rich and
taxpayer-subsidized Amazon’s new HQ to New York City while closing its borders
to a Walmart invasion.
“Amazon is… part of the American economy,”
he continued. “I would ask every good progressive, every listener out there who
has a concern about Amazon: How many are using Amazon as part of their daily
lives? Whatever you like or dislike about Amazon, Walmart is an entirely
different universe in terms of the efforts they’ve undertaken to not only
undermine labor, small business, the environment… and obviously the politics of
[Walmart’s owners] the Walton family to add to it,” referring to the Waltons’
track record of funneling megabucks to conservative causes.
Funny that De Blasio has no objection to
the likes of billionaires Tom Steyer, Oprah Winfrey, and George Soros funneling
big bucks to liberal candidates and causes. One of the takeaways from the 2018
midterms was the morphing of the Democrats to the party of the rich as those
stinky Walmart shoppers lined up at Trump rallies. The GOP is now the party of
the working class, or the deplorable bitter-clingers of Hillary Clinton’s and
Barack Hussein Obama’s disdain. As deep state coup architect Peter Strzok infamously said in a text message to fellow agent
Lisa Page:
“Just went to a southern Virginia Walmart.
I could SMELL the Trump support.”
Who wants Walmart greeters and cashiers
moving to New York when you can have the high-rollers who work for
Amazon? Amazon promises to deliver 25,000 jobs with an average salary of
$150,000, which is a lot more than the average Walmart greeter or cashier
makes.
Wal-Mart gave people what they want at a
price they can afford. Those “mom-and-pop” stores De Blasio champions were
often inefficient, opportunistic price-gougers. Walmart believed a fair wage
was and is one agreed upon between employee and employer. No one was forced to
work or shop there. It was efficient, innovative, successful, and
non-union, and that is why it was and is hated for all these reasons. It is the
poster child for roll-up-your-sleeves capitalism.
Founded as a single five-and-dime store in
a small Arkansas town, its success story mirrors America’s. It is a poster
child for capitalism and the American dream. It is ironic that Wal-Mart
critics, who have long complained its employees live paycheck to paycheck,
forget that many of its customers also live paycheck to paycheck, and seek
quality merchandise at decent prices. They opposed “low” wages for Wal-Mart
employees while in effect supporting higher prices for Wal-Mart customers.
That the Democrat Party is now the party
of the rich is increasingly seen in its candidates. Forget the occasional
Ocasio-Cortez. A Democrat candidate is more likely to be someone like Illinois’
new governor, J.B. Pritzer, who promises to complete Illinois’ financial
collapse with single-payer insurance and a progressive income tax,
promising to persist until he runs out of other people’s
money:
This month saw the election of Jay Robert
"J.B." Pritzker as governor of Illinois. Pritzker, an heir to the
Hyatt hotel fortune, is worth an estimated $3.2 billion, and spent $171.5
million to get himself elected, according to Money magazine.
Another winner was Edward M.
"Ned" Lamont Jr., in the Connecticut governor's race. Lamont, an heir
to the J.P. Morgan banking fortune of his great-grandfather Thomas Lamont,
estimated his assets in 2006 at between $90 million and $300 million, and showed
reporters tax returns last month with income totaling $18 million over 5 years.
The winner of the election for governor of
Colorado, Jared Polis, filed financial disclosure forms as a member of the House of Representatives indicating
estimated wealth of more than $300 million.
Pritzker, Lamont, and Polis are all
Democrats…
Somehow, the wealth of Pritzker, Lamont,
and Polis has gotten less attention, perhaps because it doesn't so easily fit
the country-club Republican stereotype. Instead of writing about the limousine
liberals who are so rich they make the Trump cabinet look like a bunch of paupers,
the press has been obsessing about how a newly elected congresswoman from the Bronx,
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, can't afford to rent a place in Washington until she
starts collecting her congressional salary.
The socialism of the coastal elites of
which De Blasio is a leader is akin to the old Soviet politburo who lived very
well as they dictated what could be built and where, what people would make and
where and how they would live. Everyone was equal but some were more equal than
others.
I reject the Democrat Party of the rich in
favor of the GOP party of the working poor and the middle class, the deplorable
bitter clingers. God, how I love the smell of Walmart in the morning.
Daniel
John Sobieski is
a free lance writer whose pieces have appeared inInvestor’s Business Daily, Human
Events, Reason Magazine and the ChicagoSun-Times among
other publications.
Report:
‘Impeachment’ Billionaire Tom Steyer Prepares to Launch Presidential Bid
Spencer Platt / Getty
2:17
Left-wing billionaire Tom Steyer, who spent millions in the 2018
midterm elections pushing for the impeachment of President Donald Trump, is
preparing to launch a campaign for president in 2020, according to Politico.
Politico’s
Alex Thompson wrote Monday
evening:
The
former billionaire investor, climate activist and impeachment agitator Tom
Steyer will take several steps toward a 2020 presidential bid Tuesday.
That will
include a six-figure web ad buy on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram
along with a full-page ad in USA Today and other Gannett newspapers outlining a
political platform, a revamped TomSteyer.com, and the announcement of five town
halls across the country, the first of which will be in the crucial early
primary state of South Carolina, according to copies of the ad and platform
provided to POLITICO.
The first
town hall is set for Dec. 4 in Charleston, S.C., and the next will be in
Fresno, Calif., sometime in December, according to Aleigha Cavalier, senior
communications adviser for TomSteyer.com who also works for Steyer’s
climate-focused group NextGen America. There will be one town hall for each of
the “5 rights” on Steyer’s platform: the right to an equal vote, to clean air
and water, to learn with pre-K education through college, to a living wage, and
to health.
Steyer
has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on other Democrats’ campaigns in
recent years. He was the party’s top donor in 2014 — buying few wins but
allowing him to force the party to stage an all-night talk session about
climate change on the Senate floor.
In 2018,
he spent over $100 million on an effort to push for impeachment, reinforcing that message the day after the election in a New York Times op-ed.
DEMOCRAT PARTY CORRUPTION
"This is how they will destroy
America from within. The leftist billionaires who orchestrate
these plans are extravagantly wealthy. Those tasked with representing us in
Congress will never be exposed to the downside of the invasion of millions
of migrants, the crime or the financial burden. They have
nothing but contempt for those of us who must endure the consequences of our
communities being intruded upon by gang members, drug dealers and human
traffickers. These people have no intention of becoming Americans;
like the Democrats who welcome them, they have contempt for us." PATRICIA
McCARTHY
Democrat
Corruption is a Clear and Present Danger to America
On November 6, it seemed the Republicans
might hold their majority in the Senate and in the House. Sadly,
they lost their majority in the House. The mystery is why so many Democrat
candidates who are so obviously ethically challenged won in races that should
not have even been close.
How and why do Democrats continue to
vote for unqualified, dishonest candidates? Elizabeth Warren is a
proven liar, a cheat who claimed Native American heritage in order to get a job
at Harvard. Her baby, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, was
her plan to wield control over all bank and non-bank institutions without
Congressional interference. In short, she is a hard-left socialist who
means to control how Americans earn, spend and borrow money, how they use their
savings. Warren is a blight on the Constitution and the guaranteed
freedoms of US citizens. She is an advance operative for the socialist America
the left envisions.
Andrew Gillum, the left's choice to be
Governor of Florida, is the failed mayor of Tallahassee. He remains under FBI investigation for corruption. Given the
information about that investigation that has been released, he appears yet
another greedy and corrupt Democrat pol in the Hillary Clinton
mold. The stability of Tallahassee declined catastrophically under
his leadership; crime and murder rose drastically.
Gillum sold out his city for money, and
cries racism when confronted with his crimes. He should never have
been the candidate for the Governor of Florida but the left cares only about
race and power, not ethics or honor. For progressives, race trumps
everything else, even character. If Gillum wins after the cheating
Broward County is infamous for, Florida will suffer the slings and arrows that
are inevitable under politicians like Gillum. Why was this race even
close? Have half the nation's voters scuttled any semblance
of traditional values in order to win? Yes.
Then there is Robert Menendez, the
credibly accused pedophile senator of New Jersey. He should be in
prison but was saved by one juror in his corruption trial with whom he partied
after his win on November 6. Who votes for a man like this? There is plenty of proof that he
took bribes from a wealthy client for numerous favors, trips to the
Dominican Republic for sex with underage girls being one of
them. But New Jersey just re-elected this man. They too
have lost all sense of right vs. wrong.
Stacey Abrams, the still grasping
gubernatorial contender in Georgia, is a hard-left, anti-capitalist,
anti-Second Amendment candidate. She owes about $200K in credit card
debt and wants to run Georgia? She too is corrupt and
incompetent. She is also willing to cheat to win. Are Georgians
ignorant of her many, many negatives? If they are, they voted for her
anyway. Again, skin color trumps everything.
The left ignores fine men like John
James, who ran for
the House in Michigan against Debbie Stabenow. The
left ignored Eddie Edwards who ran in New Hampshire. Both men are
conservative African Americans. The American left today pretends
such candidates do not exist. They have ignored fine people like
James and Edwards as they have always ignored brilliant men like Thomas Sowell,
Shelby Steele, Walter Williams, Jason Riley, and Larry Elder. They
revile the brilliant Clarence Thomas. They don't like to be reminded
of men like Frederick Douglass or Booker T. Washington. Neither of them, like Sowell, Steele, Williams and
Elder ever promoted the idea that African Americans were or would be perennial
victims. Each of them advocated for quite the opposite, for
self-reliance and independence.
This notion of personal responsibility is
anathema to today's left; they need and promote subservience and dependency
among their flock of reliable but uninformed voters. This is why
they encourage the immigration of so many millions of illegal migrants. They
assume they will be able to win for them the right to vote. Judging
by the number of them who likely voted in the midterms, their plan is
succeeding.
This is how they will destroy
America from within. The leftist billionaires who
orchestrate these plans are extravagantly wealthy. Those tasked with
representing us in Congress will never be exposed to the downside of
the invasion of millions of migrants, the crime or the financial
burden. They have nothing but contempt for those of us who must
endure the consequences of our communities being intruded upon by gang members,
drug dealers and human traffickers. These people have no intention
of becoming Americans; like the Democrats who welcome them, they have contempt
for us.
Then there is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,
the thoroughly-ignorant-of-everything candidate who won her
district by 80%! This young woman knows nothing about how
any government works, let alone ours. She is hopelessly uniformed;
she knows even less about US history or the Constitution. She is
clueless about the economy. When asked how she would pay for all the
give-away programs she touts, she replied that that was a
"puzzling question"! "You just pay for it" she answers. She has no
idea; no idea about anything. She thinks she will be
"inaugurated" to the House! Most fourth graders know more
than she does about US history. And yet she is already
thinking about running for President! This is a wholesale indictment
of our politicized, dumbed-down system of education. Many of her
constituents are immigrants; we are obviously not educating them at
all. They voted for all the free stuff -- college, medical care,
basic income, housing, that Ocasio-Cortez has promised to
deliver. This is what socialist Democrats dream
about: perpetual power over a populace too ignorant to
rebel. American as founded is at grave risk.
In addition to ODasio-Cortez,
Gillum, Ilhan Omar, Abrams, Sinema,
who very likely cheated to
take the Arizona Senate seat, there is Linda Sanchez. Kirsten Gillibrand is a Hillary clone; she only cares
about her own political power. She speaks like a small child but is also
considering a run for the presidency. She was best pals with Bill
Clinton and Harvey Weinstein until they were politically
inconvenient. Amy Klobuchar, who embraced the vicious and obviously
false allegations against Judge Kavanagh, was re-elected! Like every
other Democrat member of the judiciary committee, she knew those accusations
were false, without a shred of corroboration, but her constituents re-elected
her! Who are these voters? How do they reconcile voting
for people willing to destroy a fine man for political purposes? She
is exactly who every Democrat member of that committee is, who every member of
the Democrat Party is: nothing more than power-hungry political
operatives out to ruin any and all opponents by any means
necessary. They are a clear and present danger to American as
founded.
Young people are no longer taught the
truth of American history. They are not taught the truth of the
Holocaust. Anti-Semitism
is acceptable, even promoted, by the Democrats. They
embrace Linda Sarsour and Louis Farrakhan without shame. Young people don't know that
communism killed over a hundred million people in the twentieth
century. Their calculated-by-leftists ignorance is
destroying our country. They try to sell the idea that gender is not a factor
of biology! They attempt to convince young people that climate
change is man-made (a travesty) and that global warming causes wild fires (a
lie). Having control over academia, they have willfully brainwashed
students for nearly two generations. Unless your children are a
strong-willed, independent thinkers, do not send them to college!
How and why the American left has devolved
into the kind of party one finds in a banana republic is a
mystery. That our media is so anxious to promote their corrupt
candidates and the low-brow tactics they employ is a tragedy. Do they do it because they can no
longer win by promulgating their Orwellian vision of a socialist state,
mandated equality of outcome? Perhaps. They will never
sell socialism to enough sentient Americans to win. They need
millions of uninformed voters to succeed.
We must not let them cheat their way to
power over the rest of us. Their ongoing vote fraud must be stopped
and the Democrats need to take a look at themselves and at what they have
become. It's not a pretty picture. What they have become threatens
to destroy the greatest nation on the planet and they are doing it on
purpose. They have nothing but contempt for the US as founded and
for those of us who love this country.
DEMOCRACY DIES IN A LEFTIST COUP
The best midterms that San Francisco donors could buy.
November 15, 2018
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism
Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer
focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
After President Trump took office,
the Washington Post announced its new motto, “Democracy dies
in darkness.” But it was the Washington Post, not Trump, that was
guilty of undermining democracy.
President Trump had been legitimately
elected by a majority of states. The Washington Post was an
establishment paper in a government city owned by a dot com robber baron.
There’s nothing more undemocratic than a paper owned by the richest man in the
world working to overturn an election.
There was just as little democracy to the
midterm elections in which wealthy donors from blue states and districts poured
money into local races in red and purple states and districts. San
Francisco and New York billionaires buying elections in Pennsylvania and Nevada
is not democracy. It’s oligarchy.
American elected officials were meant to
be elected by local communities to serve their needs. Instead the Left has
nationalized local races by exploiting its cultural power. And when that didn’t
produce the immediate results that it wanted, began overwhelming local
elections with huge piles of outside cash.
The midterm elections were the best
elections that San Francisco donors could buy.
Senate Democrats picked up $220 million in
out-of-state donations these midterms. That huge pile of cash also amounted
to sixty percent of their haul. The majority of Dem
Senate cash came from donors who weren’t living in the states they were running
in, but who were trying to buy elections for them.
That’s the Washington Post brand
of democracy.
It’s not just Senate races being bought up
by out-of-state donors. 45% of House Dem money came from out-of-state donors.
And when they didn’t succeed in buying a local election the first time, they
just kept on pouring in more money into a district until they got their way.
Last year, Democrats poured in $22.5
million into a special election in Georgia’s 6th congressional
district. 95% of the donations came from out-of-state donors.
Democrat Jon Ossoff received more donations from California than Georgia. Ossoff still lost to Rep. Karen Handel,
even though her donations amounted to only a fraction of his ActBlue bucks.
But the same donors just waited a year and
bought the seat for Lucy McBath in the midterms.
In October, Lucy McBath was appearing at
the Writers Guild Theater in Los Angeles hosted by Hollywood royalty like
Katzenberg, Tony Goldwyn and Cameron Crowe for a $500 a head fundraiser.
A large chunk of outside money behind
McBath came from Michael Bloomberg. McBath touted his gun control positions and
the New York billionaire’s front groups put $4.5 million behind his lackey.
There’s nothing democratic about Bloomberg
buying the 6th the way he once bought Gracie Mansion.
In Illinois' 13th Congressional District,
Betsy Dirksen Londrigan pulled in $1.7 million to Rep. Rodney Davis' $700K in a
three month period. And then outside groups poured in nearly as much again in
support of Londrigan. $300K of that money came from California.
In Nevada, out-of-state donors bought
Jacky Rosen a senate seat. 85% of the radical lefty candidate’s donations came from outside
the state. Of her 5 top donor zip codes, two were in New York, two in
California, including Palo Alto, and the odd zip code out was in Chevy Chase,
Maryland.
The media frequently airs complaints about
how little political power New York and California have per capita compared to
a handful of small states. These complaints are not only cynically specious,
they ignore the fact that between the media’s messaging force multipliers and
the bicoastal wealth being used to buy elections, political power has become as
concentrated as economic and cultural power.
And that’s the opposite of democracy.
The midterms weren’t a populist wave. They
were an angry tantrum by wealthy blue state donors who used their money to buy
local elections as payback for having their views ignored in 2016. Instead of
listening to the rest of the country, they set out to buy it, lock, stock and
barrel. They found experts, consultants, strategists, programmers and
organizers who would buy them other people’s elections.
Much of their money was wasted. Just ask
Beto O’Rourke and his $70 million war chest. But their hysterical frenzy of
spending made an undeniable impact. If you throw enough mud or money at an
election, eventually it sticks. The Democrat raised nearly $1 billion to take
the House.
And they took it.
$166.8 million was pumped into 30 House Democrat candidates. That’s compared to
$90.7 million for the Republican candidates in those races.
The most expensive midterm elections in
history paid off for Democrats. And there’s nothing democratic about that.
Democracy doesn’t die in darkness. It dies
in the glare of lefty media, lefty money and lefty power which strip away local
issues and local agency in Arizona, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Florida. Big
blue state donors bought the midterm elections to send a message to President
Trump. Many had been convinced by frenzied media hit pieces in papers like
the Washington Post that action was desperately urgent.
When the Washington Post,
the rest of the media and their long tail of ActBlue donors intervene in local
elections, it doesn’t uphold democracy. It drowns it in the bright actinic
glare of flashes and floodlights.
The media postures as a defender of
democracy, but corporate media is more naturally a defender of establishments,
of the nostrums and platitudes of the elites whom it serves and coddles. When
it interferes in elections, it doesn’t do so for the sake of the people, but
for the sake of its people.
Political elites mistrust the people and
use the media to manipulate popular elections into endorsing their unpopular
agendas. The mainstream media is an inherently undemocratic institution that
amplifies elite voices at the expense of local communities. It claims to be
democratic only because it reinterprets democracy to mean the political agendas
of the Democrats rather than those of the people.
Lefties often misuse democracy to mean a
set of values while actual democracy, the vox populi, is tarred as populism.
But democracy isn’t a set of social issues. It’s the power shift between the
voters and elected officials. Big media and blue state billionaires have
shifted that balance away from local voters by buying local elections and
seeking new voters when the old won’t vote their way.
If a few million in attack ads won’t
influence local voters, you register new ones. If that doesn’t work, then you
legalize felons. And if that won’t do it, there are the illegal aliens, and
voter and ballot fraud. Buy a few secretary of state races. Set up housing for out-of-state
college students. Sign up aliens to vote. And then even if the local voters
don’t vote your way, it won’t matter. They’ll have been outvoted.
This isn’t democracy. But it is how
Democrats have won some local races.
The shift away from local voters to a
national political infrastructure is undemocratic. But it neatly fits into the
larger leftist cause of centralizing all of politics (and all other areas of
life) in elitist strongholds. The partnerships between elitist leaders and
their local crony stakeholders act as a fig leaf for the dismantling of local
autonomy with performative diversity replacing representational democracy.
The Democrats have waged an undemocratic
war on democracy in the name of democracy. The midterms were the latest leftist
coup against democracy. And democracy lost to the Left.
THE BILLIONAIRE CLASS WAGES WAR ON AMERICA!
"GOP estb. is using the $5 billion border-wall fight to hide
up to four blue/white-
collar cheap-labor programs in lame-duck DHS budget. Donors are
worried that
salaries are too damn high, & estb. media does not want to
know."
MULTI-CULTURALISM
and the creation of a one-party globalist country to serve the rich in
America’s open borders.
“Open border advocates, such as Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, claim
illegal aliens are a net benefit to California with little evidence to support
such an assertion. As the CIS has documented, the vast majority of illegals are
poor, uneducated, and with few skills. How does accepting millions of illegal
aliens and then granting them access to dozens of welfare programs benefit
California’s economy? If illegals were contributing to the economy in any
meaningful way, CA, with its 2.6 million illegals, would be booming.” STEVE
BALDWIN – AMERICAN SPECTATOR
AS WALL STREET
PLUNDERS: A Nation of One Million Homeless and Overrun By Mexico’s Export of
“cheap labor”!
“But a series of
reports on CEO pay, bank profits and corporate cash released over the past week
reveal that corporate America and the financial oligarchy are wallowing in
record levels of wealth.”
MASSIVE TRANSFER OF WEALTH TO THE
RICH: YOUR DEMOCRAT PARTY AT WORK…. for Wall Street, Banksters, Billionaires
and LA RAZA.
“But a series of
reports on CEO pay, bank profits and corporate cash released over the past week
reveal that corporate America and the financial oligarchy are wallowing in
record levels of wealth.”
"America’s elites, now overwhelmingly
represented by the Democratic Party, have a single overriding interest: their
self-indulgent lifestyle."
Class
Conflict within the Democratic Party
Over many decades, the American Left, the
Democratic Party and their mutual propaganda arm, the self-styled “mainstream
media,” have successfully portrayed conservatives and the Republican Party as a
coalition of the wealthy and intolerant. Further, the Democrats and the
left have claimed that they are the true champions of the working or middle
class as they unceasingly fight to defeat and marginalize this evil
menace.
The reality, however, is that this cabal
has virtually no interest in defending or aiding the working class as they are,
in fact, the party of a bifurcated constituency: the wealthy and those
dependent on the largess of the government.
Of the fifty wealthiest congressional
districts throughout the country, the Democrats now represent forty-one. Of the remaining nine represented by Republicans, three
are in Texas, the only red state on the list of fifty districts. Not
coincidentally the residents of these same fifty districts are supposedly among
the most well-educated and sophisticated. This transformative process is
not a recent phenomenon as the trend began in the 1980’s and accelerated
rapidly in the early 2000’s.
America’s elites, now overwhelmingly
represented by the Democratic Party, have a single overriding interest: their
self-indulgent lifestyle. This is manifested in their mistaken belief that conservatives
(i.e. the “right”) are hell bent on enforcing their version of morality on the
nation, thus potentially calling into question the lifestyles of the rich and
solipsistic.
The veracity of this claim is immaterial
as it would require an element of deliberation not emotion -- a trait in
extremely short supply among the nation’s privileged class, nearly all of whom
have difficulty in generating an original thought due to the ill-education
rampant in America’s universities. Thus, the mindless accusations of
racism, misogyny and Fascism directed at the conservative rubes in middle
America are acceptable, and in far too many instances believed, particularly as
many had the temerity to vote for Donald Trump – who, although wealthy and Ivy
League educated, is considered the ultimate unsophisticated rube.
As conservatives are the dominant force in
the Republican Party and this nation cannot function politically with more than
two major political parties, the alternative is the Democratic Party. An
entity dominated by the American Left, an assemblage whose core philosophy is
antithetical to the interests of the wealthy and privileged. Yet,
determined to protect their lifestyles and vilify conservatives, they willingly
ally with the left and overwhelmingly support virtually any Democratic
candidate. In the recent 2018 mid-terms, Democratic House candidates
outspent their Republican opponents by a two to one margin thanks primarily to
this wealthy but myopic assemblage.
Their colleagues in the Democratic Party,
and the preponderance of the membership, are those dependent on the largess of
the federal and state governments. On the other hand, the growing segment
of the citizenry who are working and self-sufficient are increasingly joining
those who believe in limited government in migrating to the Republican Party--
a process that is accelerating with the policies and tactics of Donald Trump in
combating the entrenched left and their determination to culturally and
economically transform the nation. The Republican Party will inevitably
become the party of the working or middle class. As such, they could
potentially dominate the political agenda for the foreseeable future.
The left and the Democratic Party, in
order to offset this possibility, must aggressively seek to increase the number
of dependents by promoting the legalization and ultimate citizenship for untold
millions of illegal immigrants and promising all Americans cradle to grave
economic security. In order to enact this strategy to defeat the
Republicans, the left must have the active participation and financial support
of the nation’s wealthy-- which they have.
The Democratic Party has evolved into
essentially an incompatible two-tier class-driven entity encompassing the
nation’s wealthiest and the nation’s poorest. Nonetheless, it is at
present a convenient home for the elites to hold off the imaginary horde of
conservatives outside their gilded doors.
However, the voting numbers within the
party are overwhelmingly with those who generally support the leftist
philosophies of redistribution (e.g. socialized medicine and guaranteed
incomes) and curtailing of freedom (e.g. speech, assembly and religion).
While it may not manifest itself to the affluent who have cast their lot with
the Democrats, the redistribution of wealth must, by necessity, come from the
wealthy, as that is where the bulk of the nation’s wealth resides.
It is also this same small-in-numbers group that benefits the most from
freedom of speech and assembly.
Once fully embroiled in this marriage of
convenience, a divorce will be impossible as the co-inhabitant of the
Democratic Party, the dependent class, must continue grow in order to electorally
defeat the Republicans and protect the left’s agenda. Further, the
oversold expectations promulgated by the left will never be satisfied
regardless of how many promises are made or token redistributive programs are
enacted by the current ruling class. Only a complete transformation of
this nation into a failed socialist state will satiate the left, their acolytes
and their attendant army of dependency. A goal more in reach than ever
thanks to the inability of the nation’s elites to give a damn about the future
of the country.
There is not a more short-sighted and
self-absorbed group of citizens in this nation than the white, wealthy
well-educated urban and suburban voters. They are willing to rend the fabric of
this nation in order to protect their privilege and lifestyle. While the
vast majority of Americans will ultimately pay the price, the current ruling
class and their progeny will have far more to lose.
Dem
billionaires Steyer and Bloomberg already have spent a combined $200 million in
quest for presidency
Remember when the Democrats thought “money
politics” was a bad thing? That moral certainty started to crumble when Hillary
Clinton outspent Donald Trump by a factor of at least 2, and still went down to
defeat. And while vilifying Wall Street makes for good progressive
virtue-signaling, the Dems are now the party of plutocrats, buying with welfare
and money transfers the support of an underclass kept angry and dependent by
progressive policies that hamper job-creation and reward idleness and
dependency.
President Trump’s tax and regulations cuts
have boosted job growth and income at the lower end of the market, imperiling
this strategy, but that hasn’t stopped the billionaires lusting for power and
still welcome in the party. Maya King of Politico writes:
Together, Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg
have poured nearly $200 million into television and digital advertising alone,
with the former New York mayor spending an unprecedented $120 million in the
roughly three weeks since he joined the presidential race. That’s more than
double the combined ad spending of every single non-billionaire candidate in
the Democratic field this entire year.
“We’ve never seen spending like this in a
presidential race,” said Jim McLaughlin, a Republican political strategist who
worked as a consultant for Bloomberg’s mayoral bids in New York. “He has a
limitless budget.” (snip)
Steyer isn’t spending at the same
stratospheric levels as Bloomberg, yet with $83 million in ad buys so far, he’s
still far outpacing everyone other than his fellow billionaire. The next
highest spender on ads is Pete Buttigieg at $19 million.
Many readers know that political
consultants love campaign advertising because they get a percentage of the
spend in compensation, often 15%, which really adds up when a budget of $120
million is up for grab. And that’s just for 3 weeks.
Bloomberg is stiff-arming the early
primary states, but Steyer,who has been in the race much longer, is spending
gigantic sums in small and inexpensive media markets in the first 4 states:
Steyer is largely focused on the four
early voting states. He has spent nearly $37 million in Iowa, South Carolina,
Nevada and New Hampshire — much of it on digital ads. Since joining the race in July,
he’s more than doubled the combined ad spending of Buttigieg, Joe Biden, Bernie
Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in the early states.
Joel Pollak of Breitbart points
out that so far, the money hasn’t bought much:
…according to the RealClearPolitics national poll average, Bloomberg is languishing in fifth place, with 5%. Steyer
is doing even worse, in tenth place, with 1.5%.
I don’t think either man has a chance of
capturing the Dems’ nod, but they do have the potential to create mischief.
Steyer already bankrolled a push toward impeachment that succeeded in
forcing the House to vote out the lamest articles of impeachment in history.
And Bloomberg is planning to sink huge resources into not only his own
campaign, but into Democrat congressional races, where advertising can be far
more effective, since most voters have much less knowledge of their own
congressional candidates than they do of presidential races.
Scrooge McDuck's Money Bin has nothing on
the resources of Steyer or Bloomberg.