ALL TECH
BILLIONAIRES ARE DEMOCRATS BECAUSE THEY WANT AMNESTY. WITH EVERY ANESTY BILL
PUSHED THERE IS A HIDDEN RELEASE ON ALL CAPS ENABLING TECH BILLIONAIRES TO
IMPORT AS MANY FOREIGN TECH WORKERS THEY WISH.
SILICON
VALLEY ALREADY LOOKS LIKE A THIRD WORLD COUNTRY. EVEN BANKSTERS LIKE FEINSTEI’S
PAYMASTERS WELLS FARGO AND BANK OF AMERICA ONLY HIRES VISA INDIANS AND CHINESE!
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.
She sees a dark side of
Silicon Valley tech — U.S. engineers replaced by lower-cost H-1B visa holders.
All workers suffer, she said: The system unfairly pushes down salaries, while
foreign-born engineers remain heavily dependent on their employers.
Bay Area dissatisfaction: Rich, poor, young and old unhappy here
Poll: More residents now want to leave than stay
https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/02/23/bay-area-dissatisfaction-rich-poor-young-and-old-unhappy-here/
By LOUIS
HANSEN | lhansen@bayareanewsgroup.com |
Bay Area News Group
PUBLISHED: | UPDATED:
Bay Area residents — despite being swept up in an unprecedented
economic boom — are growing ever unhappier with the place they call home.
Nearly 3 in 4 residents think the quality of life in the Bay Area
has gotten worse in the last five years, according to a new poll of registered
voters conducted for this news organization and the Silicon Valley Leadership
Group. That marks an astonishing 10-point jump in dissatisfaction from last
year.
In another dramatic shift from last year, more residents are
thinking about moving, 47 percent, than staying, 45 percent. Nearly 10 percent
say they have definite plans to leave this year.
The survey unearths a remarkable paradox — high wages, an
expanding economy, record growth in home values, coupled with natural wonders
have failed to alleviate the crushing toll of longer commutes, spreading
homeless encampments, and budget-breaking prices for houses, apartments, childcare
and date nights.
Sara Leslie, a Bay Area native living in Los Gatos, sees the mounting stress in
her friends and family, made worse by rapidly changing neighborhoods and an
eroding sense of community. “I know so many people moving,” said Leslie, 46. “I
don’t see that the financial gain is worth the stress.”
Dave Metz of FM3 Research, which conducted the poll, said the high
levels of dissatisfaction are almost unprecedented given the region’s strong
economy. Last year, 44 percent of residents said they expected to leave in a
few years, while half expected to stay. The new survey follows a trend of
growing unrest found in 2016 and 2017 polls by the Bay Area Council, where
residents saying they planned to move grew from about 33 to 40 percent.
“Nobody is really happy with the way things are going,” Metz said.
The survey of 1,257 registered voters in five core Bay Area
counties reflects deep misgivings across the social strata — wealthy,
established homeowners, middle-class workers, poor people and younger residents
in apartments all sense a decline in their quality of life:
·
Rich and poor: About 77 percent of respondents making less than $60,000 and
74 percent making more than $120,000 felt the region was getting worse;
·
Political affiliation: Republicans (81 percent) and Independents (80 percent) were
more pessimistic than Democrats (70 percent)
·
Young and old: Roughly 76 percent of surveyed residents between the ages of
18 and 49 said the quality of life has declined, similar to those between 50
and 64 (73 percent) and over 65 (75 percent);
·
Homeowners and renters: And despite record gains in home values and personal wealth
since 2012, homeowners (73 percent) agree with renters (76 percent) that Bay
Area life has gotten worse.
Angst about the future also runs deep. About 65 percent of Bay
Area residents surveyed say the region is headed in the wrong direction, up
from 47 percent last year. Residents now are almost as worried about the
region’s future as the country’s future, with 72 percent pessimistic about the
direction of the United States.
Residents say they’ve grown frustrated with the inability of state and local
leaders to fix long-standing and obvious problems — homeless and RV camps
popping up along city streets, rising housing costs sinking the working poor
and middle class, and traffic and transit solutions running the bureaucratic gauntlet
for years until comatose or dead.
The poll reflects a growing concern about homelessness. This year,
nearly 9 in 10 residents called it an extremely or very serious problem, up
from 8 in 10 last year. “That is about as bright a flashing red light as you
can see,” said Metz.
“It’s the cumulative weight, like rock after rock placed on your
chest, that’s come to a breaking point for many of our neighbors, friends and
family members,” said Silicon Valley Leadership Group CEO Carl Guardino. “These
challenges won’t be solved overnight.”
Guardino is concerned that nearly 10 percent of residents say they
have concrete plans to move. They’ve decided other cities are better places to
live and work than the Bay Area.
“The choice we have is, are we going to fight or flight?” said
Guardino. “I still think our area is worth fighting for.”
Richard Hallsted, 62, recently retired as an operations manager
for a manufacturing company in the East Bay. He and his wife have lived in Palo
Alto for more than 40 years and raised their two daughters in the city.
During a recent family walk through their neighborhood, he saw
four homeless people pushing shopping carts along the streets. It was a new
sight in their community.
“What do you do?” Hallsted asked and sighed. “I don’t know. If you
built a bunch of condos on El Camino (Real), they couldn’t afford them.”
Hallsted feels the big issues — transit, infrastructure, fixing state pension
obligations — have been ignored by politicians more interested in small battles
and identity politics. “They need to get back to basics,” he said.
But even the litany of daily annoyances fails to dislodge many
long-term residents. Homeowners and those over 65 say they’re likely to stay
put.
Donald Prestosz, 71, a retired high school teacher and businessman
living in Half Moon Bay, said the Bay Area he has called home since 1969 has
become too liberal. He hates one-party, Democratic rule in Sacramento. “If you
don’t have diversity of thought,” said Prestosz, a Republican, “you’ll never
get anywhere.”
But Prestosz has no plans to leave his mobile home a short walk
from the ocean. His doctors and favorite golf courses are all nearby. He’s
sliced his handicap to 12. “My quality of life,” he said, “is great.”
Irene Yen, 55, a public health professor at UC Merced, bought her
home in north Oakland 20 years ago. The family raised their two sons and sent
them to very good public schools, she said. But she’s worried about public
employees and other workers getting priced out.
Much has changed — once a predominantly black neighborhood, her
community has gentrified as techies and other professionals priced out of San
Francisco move in. Yen loves the energy and plans to stay: “I have a lot
of affection for Oakland.”
For renters, the prospect of putting down roots in the Bay Area —
even if they grew up here — seems bleak. Roughly 6 in 10 renters say they
expect to move in the next few years.
Austin Rickli, 22, grew up in Antioch and Brentwood and expects to
finish his computer science degree at Sonoma State in a few months. Despite
good grades, low student debt and a marketable degree, his hopes of staying in
the Bay Area after graduation are waning.
Most entry salaries at smaller tech companies range around $50,000
— a healthy paycheck at a glance, but one quickly eaten up by rent and loan
payments, he said.
He could move back home, he said, but he might choose another
city. “I want to do anything in my power to start my own life,” Rickli said.
Many feel they’re reaching the breaking point.
Robert Nueding and his wife, Kelly, arrived in the Bay Area a
decade ago from central Ohio with optimism and career opportunities. But
in the last few years, Nueding, 38, lost his job at Walmart and his wife,
suffering from anxiety, left a well-paid position at Apple. They live in
an old RV with a roommate along the streets of Fremont.
“It’s just like being trapped in a corner,” said Nueding, who
holds a master’s degree in literature.
They considered moving back to their hometown, but jobs are scarce
and pay poorly. Nueding worries that a local school or university would not
hire a homeless person to teach classes, even as a substitute. “Until I have an
actual legal residence,” he said, “I feel homeless.”
Leslie, the Bay Area native in Los Gatos, lives with her husband
in a farmhouse in the foothills. Each has more than an hour-long commute on
good days.
Leslie has spent two decades in the tech industry and enjoys her
job. Her mother and sister have already been priced out in the past few years.
The Santa Cruz native would leave if other family members weren’t still here.
She sees a dark side of
Silicon Valley tech — U.S. engineers replaced by lower-cost H-1B visa holders.
All workers suffer, she said: The system unfairly pushes down salaries, while
foreign-born engineers remain heavily dependent on their employers.
Leslie said many of her friends, especially with young children,
are over-stressed. She sees them trying to ease the anxiety with prescription
medication and therapy just to navigate daily life.
Leslie rides her three horses or goes to the beach with her four
dogs to cope. But she’s not sure how much longer that therapy will work.
The poll of 1,257 registered voters in Alameda, Contra Costa, San
Francisco, Santa Clara, and San Mateo counties, was conducted by FM3 Research
for the Silicon Valley Leadership Group and Bay Area News Group. The poll,
conducted Jan. 11-19, has a margin of error of +/- 2.8 percentage points.
TRUMP’S
CRAP ON BORDERS AND HIS PRETEND WALL IS ONLY ONE MORE TRUMP HOAX!
Only a
complete fool would believe that Trump is any more for American Legal workers
than the Democrat Party for Billionaires and Banksters!
“Trump
Administration Betrays Low-Skilled
American Workers.”
The
latest ad from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) asks Trump
to reject the mass illegal and legal immigration policies supported by Wall
Street, corporate executives, and most specifically, the GOP mega-donor Koch
brothers.
Efforts by the big business
lobby, Chamber of Commerce, Koch brothers, and George W. Bush Center include
increasing employment-based legal immigration that would likely crush the historic wage gains that Trump has delivered
for America’s blue collar and working class citizens.
Mark Zuckerberg’s Silicon Valley investors
are uniting with the Koch network’s consumer and industrial investors to demand
a huge DACA amnesty
A handful of Republican and Democrat lawmakers are continuing to tout a plan that gives amnesty to nearly a million illegal aliens in exchange for some amount of funding for President Trump’s proposed border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
MULTI-CULTURALISM and the
creation of a one-party globalist country to serve the rich in America’s open
borders.
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/12/em-cadwaladr-impending-death-of.html
“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.
Tucker
Carlson Exposes D.C. ‘Conservatives’ for Doing Big Tech’s Bidding
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."
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!”
Evidence of big tech’s efforts to
co-opt establishment conservatives has been accumulating for some time. In
March, Breitbart News published leaked audio from a senior director of public policy
at Google, talking about using funding of
conservative institutions to “steer” the movement. Another part of the leaked
audio transcript was also revealed on Tucker Carlson’s show at the same time.
The Heritage Foundation has continued to defend big tech against efforts to strip them of
their special legal privileges, which were given
to them by Congress in the 1990s and are enjoyed by no other type of company.
This is despite the fact that Google
publicly snubbed the foundation last year, canceling the formation of a planned
“A.I ethics” council after far-left employees of the tech company threw a hissy fit over the fact
that Heritage president Kay Coles James was set to be one of its members.
Are you an insider at Google,
Facebook, Twitter or any other tech company who wants to confidentially reveal
wrongdoing or political bias at your company? Reach out to Allum Bokhari at his
secure email address allumbokhari@protonmail.com.
Allum Bokhari is the senior
technology correspondent at Breitbart News.
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 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.
The good
news: some Californians are waking up. A
recent PPIC poll found that increasing proportions of Californians believe
that the state is headed in the wrong direction—a figure that exceeds 55
percent in the inland areas. And voters dislike the
state legislature even more than they dislike Donald Trump. Newsom’s approval rating stands at 43
percent,
placing him toward the bottom among the nation’s governors. A conservative-led
campaign to
recall him is unlikely to succeed, but surveys reveal growing opposition
to the new tax hikes proposed by the legislature. There’s a growing concern about
the state’s expanding homeless population.
And a
rebellion against the state’s energy policies is already under way.
Recently, 110
cities,
with total population exceeding 8 million, have demanded changes in
California’s drive to prevent new natural gas hookups. The state’s Chamber of
Commerce and the three
most prominent ethnic chambers—African-American, Latino, and Asian-Pacific—have
joined this effort.
Californians
need less bombast and progressive pretense from their leaders and more
attention to policies that could counteract the economic and demographic tides
threatening the state. On its current course, California increasingly resembles
a model of what the late Taichi Sakaiya called “high-tech feudalism,” with a
small population of wealthy residents and a growing mass of modern-day serfs.
Delusion and preening ultimately have limits, as more Californians are
beginning to recognize. As the 2020s beckon, the time for the state to change
course is now.
OBAMA AND HIS BANKSTERS:
And it all got much, much worse after 2008,
when the schemes collapsed and, as Lemann points out, Barack Obama did not
aggressively rein in Wall Street as Roosevelt had done, instead restoring the
status quo ante even when it meant ignoring a staggering white-collar crime spree.
RYAN COOPER
The Rise of Wall Street Thievery
How corporations and
their apologists blew up the New Deal order and pillaged the middle class.
America has long had a
suspicious streak toward business, from the Populists and trustbusters to
Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. It’s a tendency that has increased over
the last few decades. In 1973, 36 percent of respondents told Gallup they had
only “some” confidence in big business, while 20 percent had “very little.” But
in 2019, those numbers were 41 and 32 percent—near the highs registered during
the financial crisis.
Clearly, something has
happened to make us sour on the American corporation. What was once a stable
source of long-term employment and at least a modicum of paternalistic benefits
has become an unstable, predatory engine of inequality. Exactly what went
wrong is well documented in Nicholas Lemann’s excellent new book, Transaction
Man. The title is a reference to The Organization Man, an
influential 1956 book on the corporate culture and management of that era.
Lemann, a New Yorker staff writer and Columbia journalism
professor (as well as a Washington Monthly contributing
editor), details the development of the “Organization” style through the career
of Adolf Berle, a member of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s brain trust. Berle argued
convincingly that despite most of the nation’s capital being represented by the
biggest 200 or so corporations, the ostensible owners of these firms—that is,
their shareholders—had little to no influence on their daily operations.
Control resided instead with corporate managers and executives.
Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the
Decline of the American Dream
by Nicholas Lemann
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 320 pp.
by Nicholas Lemann
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 320 pp.
Berle
was alarmed by the wealth of these mega-corporations and the political power it
generated, but also believed that bigness was a necessary concomitant of
economic progress. He thus argued that corporations should be tamed, not broken
up. The key was to harness the corporate monstrosities, putting them to work on
behalf of the citizenry.
Berle
exerted major influence on the New Deal political economy, but he did not get
his way every time. He was a fervent supporter of the National Industrial
Recovery Act, an effort to directly control corporate prices and production,
which mostly flopped before it was declared unconstitutional. Felix
Frankfurter, an FDR adviser and a disciple of the great anti-monopolist Louis
Brandeis, used that opportunity to build significant Brandeisian elements into
New Deal structures. The New Deal social contract thus ended up being a
somewhat incoherent mash-up of Brandeis’s and Berle’s ideas. On the one hand,
antitrust did get a major focus; on the other, corporations were expected to
play a major role delivering basic public goods like health insurance and
pensions.
Lemann
then turns to his major subject, the rise and fall of the Transaction Man. The
New Deal order inspired furious resistance from the start. Conservative
businessmen and ideologues argued for a return to 1920s policies and provided
major funding for a new ideological project spearheaded by economists like
Milton Friedman, who famously wrote an article titled “The Social
Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.” Lemann focuses on a
lesser-known economist named Michael Jensen, whose 1976 article “Theory of the
Firm,” he writes, “prepared the ground for blowing up that [New Deal] social
order.”
Jensen
and his colleagues embodied that particular brand of jaw-droppingly stupid that
only intelligent people can achieve. Only a few decades removed from a crisis
of unregulated capitalism that had sparked the worst war in history and nearly
destroyed the United States, they argued that all the careful New Deal
regulations that had prevented financial crises for decades and underpinned the
greatest economic boom in U.S. history should be burned to the ground. They
were outraged by the lack of control shareholders had over the firms they
supposedly owned, and argued for greater market discipline to remove this
“principal-agent problem”—econ-speak for businesses spending too much on
irrelevant luxuries like worker pay and investment instead of dividends and
share buybacks. When that argument unleashed hell, they doubled down: “To
Jensen the answer was clear: make the market for corporate control even more
active, powerful, and all-encompassing,” Lemann writes.
The
best part of the book is the connection Lemann draws between Washington
policymaking and the on-the-ground effects of those decisions. There was much
to criticize about the New Deal social contract—especially its relative
blindness to racism—but it underpinned a functioning society that delivered a tolerable
level of inequality and a decent standard of living to a critical mass of
citizens. Lemann tells this story through the lens of a thriving close-knit
neighborhood called Chicago Lawn. Despite how much of its culture “was
intensely provincial and based on personal, family, and ethnic ties,” he
writes, Chicago Lawn “worked because it was connected to the big organizations
that dominated American culture.” In other words, it was a functioning
democratic political economy.
Then
came the 1980s. Lemann paints a visceral picture of what it was like at street
level as Wall Street buccaneers were freed from the chains of regulation and
proceeded to tear up the New Deal social contract. Cities hemorrhaged
population and tax revenue as their factories were shipped overseas. Whole
businesses were eviscerated or even destroyed by huge debt loads from hostile
takeovers. Jobs vanished by the hundreds of thousands.
And
it all got much, much worse after 2008, when the schemes collapsed and, as
Lemann points out, Barack Obama did not aggressively rein in Wall Street as
Roosevelt had done, instead restoring the status quo ante even when it meant
ignoring a staggering white-collar crime spree. Neighborhoods drowned
under waves of foreclosures and crime as far-off financial derivatives
imploded. Car dealerships that had sheltered under the General Motors umbrella
for decades were abruptly cut loose. Bewildered Chicago Lawn residents
desperately mobilized to defend themselves, but with little success. “What they
were struggling against was a set of conditions that had been made by faraway
government officials—not one that had sprung up naturally,” Lemann writes.
Toward the end of the
book, however, Lemann starts to run out of steam. He investigates a possible
rising “Network Man” in the form of top Silicon Valley executives, who have
largely maintained control over their companies instead of serving as a sort of
esophagus for disgorging their companies’ bank accounts into the Wall Street
maw. But they turn out to be, at bottom, the same combination of blinkered
and predatory as the Transaction Men. Google and Facebook, for instance, have
grown over the last few years by devouring virtually the entire online ad
market, strangling the journalism industry as a result. And they directly
employ far too few people to serve as the kind of broad social anchor that the
car industry once did.
In
his final chapter, Lemann argues for a return to “pluralism,” a “messy,
contentious system that can’t be subordinated to one conception of the common
good. It refuses to designate good guys and bad guys. It distributes, rather
than concentrates, economic and political power.”
This
is a peculiar conclusion for someone who has just finished Lemann’s book, which
is full to bursting with profoundly bad people—men and women
who knowingly harmed their fellow citizens by the millions for their own
private profit. In his day, Roosevelt was not shy about lambasting rich people
who “had begun to consider the government of the United States as a mere
appendage to their own affairs,” as he put it in a 1936 speech in which he also
declared, “We know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous
as government by organized mob.”
If
concentrated economic power is a bad thing, then the corporate form is simply a
poor basis for a truly strong and equal society. Placing it as one of the
social foundation stones makes its workers dependent on the unreliable goodwill
and business acumen of management on the one hand and the broader marketplace
on the other. All it takes is a few ruthless Transaction Men to undermine the
entire corporate social model by outcompeting the more generous businesses. And
even at the high tide of the New Deal, far too many people were left out,
especially African Americans.
Lemann
writes that in the 1940s the United States “chose not to become a full-dress
welfare state on the European model.” But there is actually great variation
among the European welfare states. States like Germany and Switzerland went
much farther on the corporatist road than the U.S. ever did, but they do
considerably worse on metrics like inequality, poverty, and political
polarization than the Nordic social democracies, the real welfare kings.
Conversely,
for how threadbare it is, the U.S. welfare state still delivers a great deal of
vital income to the American people. The analyst Matt Bruenig recently
calculated that American welfare eliminates two-thirds of the “poverty gap,”
which is how far families are below the poverty line before government
transfers are factored in. (This happens mainly through Social Security.)
Imagine how much worse this country would be without those programs! And though
it proved rather easy for Wall Street pirates to torch the New Deal corporatist
social model without many people noticing, attempts to cut welfare are
typically very obvious, and hence unpopular.
Still,
Lemann’s book is more than worth the price of admission for the perceptive
history and excellent writing. It’s a splendid and beautifully written
illustration of the tremendous importance public policy has for the daily lives
of ordinary people.
Ryan Cooper
Ryan Cooper is a
national correspondent at the Week. His work has appeared in the Washington
Post, the New Republic, and the Nation. He was an editor at the Washington
Monthly from 2012 to 2014.
Report:
Big Tech Will Expand Further into Finance in 2020
JOSH EDELSON/Getty
5 Jan 202040
3:31
According to a recent report, the
Masters of the Universe in Silicon Valley have plans to further expand into the
world of finance in the new year — falling just short of opening their own
banks.
A recent report from CNBC
claims that Silicon Valley tech giants are likely to expand their business into
the world of finance even further in 2020, but many want to avoid the hassle of
becoming a fully-fledged bank. With Facebook announcing its own cryptocurrency,
Googles plans to introduce consumer bank account sin collaboration with
Citibank, and Apple’s new credit card in partnership with Goldman Sachs,
finance seems to be a major focus for tech firms.
CNBC writes:
Though their products are different,
both firms share something in common: they have no plans to become regulated
financial institutions like Citi or Goldman. While Big Tech — a group of
companies that includes Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple — will undoubtedly push deeper into finance this
year, their progress in banking will be “more of a slow creep than big
strides,” said Sarah Kocianski, head of research at fintech consultancy 11:FS.
“The big tech firms will continue to
add services that are peripheral to banking to their existing offerings,
without going full-stack banking,” she said. “The headache of getting, and
maintaining, a banking license would likely be considered too big a risk for these
companies. Instead, they will continue to operate with licensed partners.”
But, Accenture’s global payments lead, Sulabh Agarwal stated when asked
that it makes little sense for tech firms to become banks. “Do I expect them to
become banks? I don’t think so do. I expect them to create new services to
enhance their propositions,” Argawal stated.
Facebook is making moves on two
fronts in the world of finance, with its digital currency Libra and with its
payment processing platform Facebook Pay. CNBC writes:
“The theory goes that if 2 billion
people were to withdraw their deposits from the banking system and move them
into Libra tokens, you’d effectively have a run on the banks,” said Simon Taylor,
co-founder and blockchain lead at 11:FS. “Facebook is absolutely big enough for
that to be plausible, but whether or not it happens depends much more on what
consumer problem is being solved.”
Aside from libra, Facebook is also
consolidating its payment products under a new brand called
Facebook Pay. Uber, like its Southeast Asian competitor Grab, is moving further into finance with a division called Uber Money that houses a digital
wallet and upgraded payment cards. They’ll face competition from the likes of
Google Pay and Apple Pay in the U.S. and Chinese payment apps like Alipay and WeChat Pay.
E-commerce giant Amazon is already
in the process of lending out money but has yet to break into consumer banking.
It should be noted that Amazon at one point set up a student loan scheme in
2016 with Wells Fargo which shut down shortly afterward. Sarah Kocianski,
head of research at fintech consultancy 11:FS, stated that there
was “every reason to suspect they’ve learned from that.”
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart
News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on
Twitter @LucasNolan or email him at lnolan@breitbart.com
Exclusive–Mo
Brooks: ‘Masters of the Universe’ Want More Immigration to ‘Decrease Incomes of
Americans’
Bob Gathany / AL.com via AP
3:19
Rep. Mo Brooks
(R-AL) says the “Masters of the Universe” want more legal immigration to the
United States to further diminish the incomes of American working and
middle-class families.
In an exclusive interview with SiriusXM Patriot’s Breitbart News Tonight, Brooks said
recent demands to increase the number of foreign workers coming to the U.S. to
compete against American citizens for jobs is merely an effort by corporations
to deplete the earnings of Americans.
Brooks said:
I’m not a part of the Masters of the Universe crowd who thinks we
ought to be bringing in all this foreign labor and the reason for it is pure economics. This is the chance for Americans and lawful immigrants who are already here who are working
in the blue-collar trades, who are working in the places where
wages are not as high they ought to be, this is their chance to prosper. [Emphasis added]
And to the extent you import a lot of foreign labor, then you are
artificially increasing the labor supply which in turn means that you’re
artificially suppressing the wages of American families who are often hard-pressed to make ends meet So I
respectfully disagree that we need more foreign labor, to the contrary, I would like to see us reduce the foreign labor that comes into
America so that American families who are struggling to make ends meet, particularly those of us who are earning the least
amounts, would be better to take care of
their own families and less likely to be dependent on the welfare. [Emphasis added]
Brooks said Democrats support for mass legal immigration is
centered on the premise that increasing the number of foreign workers in the
U.S. will decrease Americans’ wages, thus forcing many into poverty and
becoming welfare recipients. This, Brooks said, is how Democrats create a permanent
dependent class of Democrat voters.
“Don’t get me wrong, [Democrats] want to decrease the incomes of
Americans so that they’re dependent on welfare,” Brooks said.
That makes them in turn likely Democrat voters and the best way to
do that is to have a huge surge in the labor supply, particularly illegal
aliens, that will depress their wages therefore creating more Democrats who are dependent on welfare at the same time as they
bring in illegal aliens who also under Democrat doctrine will be allowed to vote
and those types of voters, they’re also dependent on welfare. [Emphasis added]
“About 70 percent of illegal alien households are on welfare …
plus this is a bloc of voters that seems unusually susceptible to the racial
divisions that the Democrats advance,” Brooks said. “You have to look at the
big picture in all of this, and to me, we should not be importing as much
foreign labor as we are. We should be helping the least among us earn more and
importing foreign labor that suppresses wages is not the way to do that.”
Currently, the U.S. admits more than 1.2 legal immigrants
annually, with the vast majority deriving from chain migration, whereby newly
naturalized citizens can bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the
country. In 2017, the foreign-born population reached a record high of 44.5 million.
The U.S. is on track to import about 15 million new foreign-born voters in the next
two decades should current legal immigration levels continue. Those 15
million new foreign-born voters include about eight million who will arrive in
the country through chain migration, where newly naturalized citizens can bring
an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the country.
Breitbart News Tonight broadcasts live on SiriusXM
Patriot Channel 125 from 9:00 p.m. to Midnight Eastern (6:00 p.m.-9:00
p.m. Pacific).
MEXIFORNIA IN
METLDOWN: First,
illegal immigration is the problem. CA has spent hundreds of billions
on illegal aliens and their bills — public schools, free meals at
school, special bi-lingual teachers, healthcare, housing allowances,
low income energy assistance, aid to families with dependent children,
prisons, cops, courts, public defenders, welfare, food stamps, and
a hundred other gov handouts. And don’t forget lower college tuition
for illegal immigrants. WAYNE ALLYN ROOT
"When we hear stories about the
homelessness in California and elsewhere, why don't we hear how illegal aliens
contribute to the problem? They take jobs and affordable housing,
yet instead of discouraging illegal aliens from breaking the law, politicians
encourage them to come by lavishing free stuff on them with
confiscated dollars from this and future
generations." JACK HELLNER
CALIFORNIA
IS THE REASON WHY THE DEMOCRAT PARTY SHOULD BRING TERROR TO AMERICANS (Legals)
California
Economy, finance, and budgets
Beset by high housing
costs, crippling taxes, astronomical gas prices, wildfires, and rolling
blackouts, Californians are heading for the exits. That’s sparking anxiety in
places where these Golden State migrants are relocating. A mayoral candidate in
Boise, Idaho, recently suggested building a wall to keep out Californians, who
account for 60 percent of domestic migration into the growing state. The
election of increasingly progressive candidates in Colorado sparked talk there
of the “Californication” of the Centennial State.
Early
last year, the Dallas News described the
“California-ing” of North Texas, citing a study showing that 8,300 Californians
move to the area yearly. Texas governor Greg Abbott launched a petition titled
“Don’t California My Texas.”
Much of
this anxiety revolves around fears that the migrants will transform the
politics and culture of the places that they’re moving to—bringing an appetite
for big, intrusive government. But a new survey suggests that, while plenty
of people are looking to leave California, many are fleeing the state’s high
costs and politics and may not be interested in voting for the same things in
their new homes. The poll, by the Berkeley Institute of Governmental
Studies, found that 52 percent of California residents are considering
migrating. As these polls go, that’s exceptionally high, putting California in
the same category as some other states with very unhappy residents. A recent
poll in New Jersey, for instance, found that about 44 percent of its people are
looking to depart, while 50 percent of Connecticut residents indicated a desire
to leave the state in a 2014 Gallup poll, the highest figure among any state at
that time.
BLOG:
CALIFORNIA’S TAXES PAY FOR A MASSIVE MEXICAN WELFARE STATE. ON THE STATE LEVEL
LEGALS ARE FORCED TO SUPPORT $35 BILLION IN SOCIAL SERVICES TO ILLEGALS TO KEEP
THEM COMING AND VOTING DEMOCRAT FOR MORE.
COUNTIES
HAND OUT EVEN MORE WITH LOS ANGELES COUNTY HANDING ILLEGALS MORE THAN ONE
BILLION PER YEAR FOR THEIR ANCHOR BABIES. THIS SAME COUNTY HAS A MEXICAN
TAX-FREE UNDERGROUND ECONOMY CALCULATED TO BE IN EXCESS OF $2 BILLION PER YEAR.
Politicians
in high-tax states claim that taxes don’t drive people out, but their
constituents disagree: in the Berkeley poll, 58 percent of those considering
leaving California said that high taxes were one reason—second only to the 71
percent pointing to the state’s astronomical housing costs. Also high on the
list of reasons to go was the state’s political culture, which nearly half of
those thinking of getting out cited as a consideration. Though the poll didn’t
define “political culture,” Gallup ranks California—where the state legislature
and elected officials in many of the state’s cities have turned increasingly
progressive—as among the most liberal of states.
What set
the Berkeley poll apart is that it also asked residents their party affiliation
and how they characterized themselves politically—revealing a sharp divide.
Conservatives and moderates are the most unhappy with the state and most
anxious to leave. Liberals, by contrast, are mostly staying put, and some think
life in California is just great. Only 38 percent of Democrats said that they
were considering leaving, compared with 55 percent of independents and 71
percent of Republicans. Similarly, those characterizing themselves as “somewhat
liberal” were least likely to say that they want to go—fewer than four in ten
are considering leaving. But 53 percent of moderates, 66 percent of the
“somewhat conservative,” and 74 percent of the “very conservative” would like
to migrate. Political affiliation, in fact, was more of a predictor of who wants
to go or stay than other demographic information, such as race. The poll found,
for instance, that 56 percent of white residents and 58 percent of
African-Americans would like to leave; and 54 percent of men, compared with 50
percent of women, are thinking of going.
The
results also suggest, however, that a political revolution that reverses the
direction of California government is becoming increasingly difficult because
it’s experiencing the state version of the Curley Effect. That phrase, coined
by economists Edward Glaeser and Andrei Shleifer, describes how big-city mayors
like James Michael Curley in Boston in the early twentieth century and Coleman
Young in Detroit in the mid-to-late twentieth century managed to solidify their
political dominance, even as their cities deteriorated because their policies
drove out the people most likely to vote against them. That may explain why,
despite California facing rising homelessness, increasing drug use, outbreaks
of infectious diseases, blackouts, soaring housing costs, and high energy
prices, voters and elected officials endorse still-higher taxes and fees,
lighter penalties for crimes like drug use and shoplifting, and a government
takeover of bankrupt power company Pacific Gas & Electric.
In a
much-quoted interview last summer, California governor Gavin Newsom called his
state a positive example of where America was heading—proof, he said, that
multiculturalism and progressive social values can produce prosperity.
“California is America’s coming attraction,” he said. About half of California
begs to differ.
///
Ask for Something, Offer Nothing: California's Way of Struggling Out of
the Bag It Has Put Itself Into
By Dan Cadman on January 28, 2020
This
is how Vocabulary.com defines the word "Hutzpah":
(Yiddish) unbelievable gall;
insolence; audacity
Synonyms: chutzpa, chutzpah
Type of: cheekiness, crust,
freshness, gall, impertinence, impudence, insolence
the
trait of being rude and impertinent; inclined to take liberties
That's
the word I thought of when I saw this incredible January 22 headline from
Reuters: "California governor
seeks free surplus federal land to help house homeless".
Other recent
articles have centered on the fact that California's homeless and housing
crises are pretty much out of control. And much of the fault can be centered
on the last couple of feckless governors and California's equally feckless
legislature and top state officials such as Xavier Becerra, the state's
attorney general and a former member of Congress.
They have
enacted such a muddled web of laws, rules, and regulations impeding housing
development and growth that it is exceedingly difficult to construct homes
south of $1 million — and not very many people have that kind of money, despite
the hype of places like Silicon Valley.
BLOG: MEXIFORNIA IN METLDOWN: First, illegal
immigration is the problem. CA has spent hundreds of billions on
illegal aliens and their bills — public schools, free meals at
school, special bi-lingual teachers, healthcare, housing allowances,
low income energy assistance, aid to families with
dependent children, prisons, cops, courts, public defenders, welfare,
food stamps, and a hundred other gov handouts. And don’t forget lower
college tuition for illegal immigrants. WAYNE ALLYN ROOT
"When we hear stories about the homelessness in California
and elsewhere, why don't we hear how illegal aliens contribute to the
problem? They take jobs and affordable housing, yet instead of
discouraging illegal aliens from breaking the law, politicians encourage them
to come by lavishing free stuff on them with confiscated dollars from this
and future generations." JACK HELLNER
And so
homelessness has reached epic proportions. How have California and
municipalities reacted? By creating policies guaranteed to act as a magnet to
the homeless nationwide, and then decreeing that they will not enforce laws on
the books related to public urination and defecation, the dropping of needles
on curbs all over city streets, and on and on. It is no wonder that major
health issues are
cropping up all over the state.
It's also
no wonder that California is bleeding its middle class into other states so
quickly that it's likely to lose a
congressional seat as a result of the next census-driven apportionment. (One readily imagines some
California leaders saying, "No problem! We'll replace the population loss
with illegal aliens!")
Which leads
me to the point. This is an immigration-related blog, so let's focus there.
The nation's
most-populous state has done virtually everything it can to stymie federal
immigration enforcement, by:
·
Declaring
itself a sanctuary;
·
Permitting
illegal aliens to attend state schools at in-state rates, in preference over
U.S. citizens who happen to hail from some other state, such as Nevada next
door;
·
Enacting
the Safe Act to prevent cops from cooperating with ICE and CBP agents;
·
Filing
lawsuits at every opportunity to seek injunctions against immigration
enforcement and benefits policies (the border barrier, the "travel
ban", the public charge rule, the revised rules on when and where one may
seek asylum, ad infinitum); and even
·
Enacting
state laws that trample on federal supremacy over immigration matters by
attempting to prevent private employers from cooperating with ICE agents under
the threat of hefty fines or jail, and legislating prohibitions on the use of
private jails to detain illegal aliens.
So now the
state — which wants to substitute its wisdom for that of the federal government
in so many areas despite ample evidence it can't handle problems within
its own borders — is asking the federal government for a free handout?
Governor
Newsom is quoted as saying in a letter to Ben
Carson, secretary of Housing and Urban Development, "You could match our
commitment by similarly providing free surplus federal land to local
governments across the state so they can build housing for the homeless. ...
Emergency shelter solves sleep, and we agree this is an urgent priority. ...
But only housing and services solve homelessness."
What commitment?
I find myself
spinning this request out a little bit to try to envision it. Does anyone doubt
that illegal aliens hiding in the state's sanctuary borders would be among the
happy recipients of any state plan to deal with the homeless? And it's a sure bet
that there wouldn't be a quid pro quo: "give us free land and we'll
cooperate with your agents and officers."
It's also
doubtful that California's plans would be anything but haphazard once the land
grab has taken place. The ham-handed legislature hasn't shown itself effective
at doing anything worthwhile yet; no reason to put much faith in them now. And
would such land in fact ever end up being used for its avowed purposes? Or
would California's progressive and woke politicians act like politicians everywhere
and find a way instead to hand the land over to well-connected individuals and
corporate entitles who would in turn fill their campaign chest coffers? I'd put
money on that scenario.
But if by
some miracle state bureaucracies were left to do something with the land
according to their own plans, how would that likely turn out? Like large tent
camps of exactly the kind that Californian pols called "concentration
camps" when undertaken by the federal government to house the tidal wave
of humans flowing across our southern border, in no small measure because of
states like California?
"Hutzpah": unbelievable
gall; insolence; audacity.
American Flight:
California Exodus From Diversity Is Noted
02/13/2020
A+
|
a-
Here’s an update from California. It’s
still overtaxed and diverse — two factors that are connected because foreigners like big
government and
newbies require special services like English classes in school designed for
non-speakers.
Americans have largely quit moving to the
state and citizens are leaving, but immigrants still are
flooding in, shown by the 11 million foreign-born
residents as of 2017.
Here’s an update from Fox News reporter
William La Jeunesse:
WILLIAM LA JEUNESSE:
California is growing wealthier, more liberal, more expensive — forcing 52
percent of residents to consider leaving, including 71 percent who identify as conservative.
Many businesses already have — this company leaving LA for Texas which is set
to add three Congressional seats; California is losing one. . .
CEO Magazine calls
California America’s worst state for business; quality of life — the worst
according to US News. Add taxes, traffic, housing, energy costs — almost 700
companies left in the last two years. . .
Yet California is growing,
thanks to immigrants from abroad. Its diverse economy, among the world’s
largest, attracts more college grads than any other state. . .
Some super-rich and
retirees are leaving, but overall the state is gaining those that make over
$125 grand, losing those that make under 75.
No comments:
Post a Comment