Thursday, February 20, 2020

LA RAZA SUPREMACIST FASCIST MARK ZUCKERBERG EVADES TAXES BUT THEN WANTS THEM EVEN HIGHER IN MEXIFORNIA

Nonetheless, open border advocates, such as Facebook Chairman Mark Zuckerberg, claim illegal aliens are a net benefit to California with little evidence to support such an assertion. As the Center for Immigration Studies has documented, the vast majority of illegals are poor, uneducated, and with few skills. 

Mark Zuckerberg Funds a Plan to Turn California Into a Silicon Valley Ghetto

Facebook’s founder comes after California’s middle class.
 
Daniel Greenfield

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
Why do people live in California? The weather is nice and so are the property taxes.
Unlike a lot of blue states where property taxes make home ownership all but impossible for working class and even middle class families, California has the 16th lowest property taxes in the country. These low rates have allowed California homeowners and businesses who predated the dot com boom to survive in a state and in municipal areas that are rapidly becoming unaffordable to all but a small few.
While housing prices are skyrocketing, property taxes are fixed at the time of sale with assessments limited to 2% increases a year due to Proposition 13 or the People's Initiative to Limit Property Taxation.
The 1978 proposition dates back to a time when the state’s taxpayers protected their own financial interests. After a string of successful tax increases and debt hikes, Proposition 13 is on the chopping block. The choppers have been clever enough to introduce a partial repeal that will remove protections for commercial real estate while, for now, promising to preserve them for homeowners. But, it goes without saying, that Proposition 13 protection for homeowners will be the final stage of the assault.
Splitting the assault on commercial and residential real estate in two divides the opposition and allows it to be picked off separately by the oligarchy of unions, non-profits and dot coms that run California.
That’s why every other commercial on local television is either for Michael Bloomberg or the push to tax commercial properties at market value. The commercials are almost comically misleading, the most frequent offender features a supposed firefighter with a soul patch who claims that the money is needed to stop natural disasters from affecting schools. There are also ridiculous claims that the $11 billion in projected revenue is needed to save children from school drinking fountains tainted with lead.
Seven years ago, the Los Angeles Unified School District spent $1.3 billion to hand out 650,000 iPads to all its students, but, for some reason, didn’t get around to removing those lead pipes. California schools keep blowing through enough billions to finance a dozen small countries while always crying poverty.
And the guy behind many of those ads, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, is the 4th richest man in the world.  
With a net worth of over $79 billion, Zuckerberg could replace every pipe in California and not even notice the cost. But instead the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, the name of the charity and political organization of one of the world’s wealthiest couples, has spent $2.1 million to raise other people’s taxes even after Facebook had used Ireland as a tax shelter to avoid paying taxes in the United States.
Zuckerberg’s assault on Proposition 13 could wipe out small businesses in California as the tax increases from commercial real estate get passed down to small business tenants. Meanwhile Facebook is fighting the IRS in court over its Irish tax scam to avoid paying the $9 billion in taxes that it owes.
Facebook falsely claimed that its international headquarters was in Dublin even as an email by Sheryl Sandberg, its COO, admitted that it was a tax shelter and the "international headquarters" would be "tiny."  Instead of paying its taxes, Facebook’s CEO wants to raise taxes for small businesses.
Despite claims that this initiative is philanthropic, shifting the tax base from income tax to property tax would be personally profitable. The Facebook IPO was big enough to have had a significant impact on California’s budget. Zuckerberg was personally on the hook for $200 million. Other employees and investors were good for over $2 billion in state taxes. Additional stock sales the next year reportedly cost the Facebook boss billions in federal and state taxes. The Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative gets its funding from Zuckerberg’s Facebook shares. CZI is going to war against small business for its own profit.
So much for Mark’s charity.
California’s middle class gets wiped out while Mark Zuckerberg gets closer to that fabled $100 billion.
Schools and Communities First, the PAC funded by millions in dirty Facebook money, touts the backing of unions, the ACLU, Joe Biden, Cory Booker, and assorted radical leftist groups, but CZI is the one that really matters. The unions and politicians, two sides of the same crooked coin, are obviously in it for all the money that they can squeeze out of embattled California taxpayers. And, in its own way, so is CZI.
Wiping out property tax protections won’t hurt the big dot com firms like Facebook. But it will make it even harder for any prospective rivals to function in an area with impossible rents and the highest housing costs in the country. That’s why one startup was charging $1,200 in rent for bunk beds for aspiring Zuckerbergs who “want to focus on their startups”, but can’t actually afford to live there.
The pressures of commercial rents are already catastrophically punishing. Zuckerberg’s move to crush commercial real estate protections will significantly raise the cost of doing business for competitors without Facebook’s deep pockets, potentially reduce future income tax impacts on his own vast fortune and those of many Facebook employees, and leave behind chaos as Facebook expands elsewhere.
The dot com has shifted its strategy in the last two years from massive expansion in Menlo Park and San Francisco to Zuckerberg’s announcement to Facebook employees last year that the area is “tapped” and that the company would be expanding outside the Bay Area. And now that the area is “tapped”, Zuckerberg can nuke it from orbit and make sure that other companies will have trouble affording it.
Meanwhile Zuckerberg and Facebook get props for their social justice. That’s CZI’s mission statement.
The collateral damage from this Silicon Valley civil war will extend far beyond helping Zuckerberg’s net worth hit eleven figures, and the pressure cooker of the Bay Area which is on the verge of exploding.
The downward pressure of commercial property tax hikes will turn much of the rest of California into the Bay Area with impossible rents squeezing out small businesses and the people that depend on them. If you want to see the future of California, imagine a handful of dot coms, satellite startups, and the businesses owned by them, from Whole Foods to the leftovers of the entertainment industry, and gig economy delivery services making up the leftovers of the economy. And a whole lot of poor people living in housing subsidized by dot coms like Facebook, which dumped $1 billion into affordable housing, and taking tech vans for hundreds of miles to do grunt work for the tech masters of the universes.
The California Schools And Local Communities Funding Act is a dot com trojan horse that would turn the state into a Silicon Valley ghetto while wiping out the protections that made a middle class life possible.
Facebook has already transformed the virtual geography of social relationships. The Proposition 13 modification would have an equally devastating effect on the physical geography of California. And it’s a potential testbed for Zuckerberg’s initiatives that will extend far beyond California’s borders.
The Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative draws on nearly limitless funding and its subset, Chan-Zuckerberg Advocacy, has seen only limited use of its power to back a pro-crime initiative in Ohio and tax hikes in California. But fully unleashed, CZI could fundamentally reshape states and cities for the power and profit of one of the wealthiest men in the world. It’s already reshaping California. For the worse.


"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."


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.

California Preening

The Golden State is on a path to high-tech feudalism, but there’s still time to change course.
December 20, 2019
California
Economy, finance, and budgets
“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 Crèvecœur 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 
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 TexasTennesseeNevadaColorado, 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 NationU.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.
Joel Kotkin is the presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University and executive director of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His latest book is The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of UsHis book on the return to feudalism will be released next year.


Report: California ‘Entirely’ Responsible for Nation’s Rise in Homelessness

Frederic J. Brown / AFP / Getty
20 Dec 20192,076
2:41
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development reported Friday that the nation’s homeless population rose 2.7% as of January 2019, an increase it said was “entirely” driven by a rise of 16.4% in the state of California.
The Associated Press reported:
The Department of Housing and Urban Development is reporting its third consecutive increase in its homelessness projection, based on a summary of its annual report obtained by the Associated Press.
President Trump has been highly critical of the homeless problem in California, and HUD said the increase seen in its January snapshot was caused “entirely” by a 16.4% increase in the state’s homeless population.
“As we look across our nation, we see great progress, but we’re also seeing a continued increase in street homelessness along our West Coast where the cost of housing is extremely high,” HUD Secretary Ben Carson said. “In fact, homelessness in California is at a crisis level and needs to be addressed by local and state leaders with crisis-like urgency.”
In the January 2018 count, almost 553,000 people were counted as homeless. That number rose to about 568,000 this year.
The number of homeless veterans, and the number of homeless families with children, dropped.
It is not clear whether the rise in California is wholly California’s fault. Homeless people from other states often relocate to California, partly because the winter weather is more tolerable (though also because of generous welfare benefits).
President Donald Trump has proposed federal intervention in California to help solve the problem. HUD Secretary Ben Carson recently visited the state to assess the problem.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom told Breitbart News on Thursday evening that the homeless crisis is “an embarrassment, it is unacceptable. And we’ve got to own it, we’ve got to own up and solve it.”
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However, he has pushed back against federal intervention, saying more federal money is needed, but not federal control.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.



Adios, Sanctuary La Raza Welfare State of California    
A fifth-generation Californian laments his state’s ongoing economic collapse.
By Steve Baldwin
American Spectator
What’s clear is that the producers are leaving the state and the takers are coming in. Many of the takers are illegal aliens, now estimated to number over 2.6 million (BLOG: THE NUMBER IS CLOSER TO 15 MILLION ILLEAGLS). 
The Federation for American Immigration Reform estimates that California spends $22 billion (DATED: NOW ABOUT $35 BILLION YEARLY AND THAT IS ON THE STATE LEVEL ONLY. COUNTIES PAY OUT MORE) on government services for illegal aliens, including welfare, education, Medicaid, and criminal justice system costs. 
Liberals claim they more than make that up with taxes paid, but that’s simply not true. It’s not even close. FAIR estimates illegal aliens in California contribute only $1.21 billion in tax revenue, which means they cost California $20.6 billion, or at least $1,800 per household.
Nonetheless, open border advocates, such as Facebook Chairman Mark Zuckerberg, claim illegal aliens are a net benefit to California with little evidence to support such an assertion. As the Center for Immigration Studies has documented, the vast majority of illegals are poor, uneducated, and with few skills. How does accepting millions of illegal aliens and then granting them access to dozens of welfare programs benefit California’s economy? If illegal aliens were contributing to the economy in any meaningful way, California, with its 2.6 million illegal aliens, would be booming.
Furthermore, the complexion of illegal aliens has changed with far more on welfare and committing crimes than those who entered the country in the 1980s. 
Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute has testified before a Congressional committee that in 2004, 95% of all outstanding warrants for murder in Los Angeles were for illegal aliens; in 2000, 23% of all Los Angeles County jail inmates were illegal aliens and that in 1995, 60% of Los Angeles’s largest street gang, the 18th Street gang, were illegal aliens. Granted, those statistics are old, but if you talk to any California law enforcement officer, they will tell you it’s much worse today. The problem is that the Brown administration will not release any statewide data on illegal alien crimes. That would be insensitive. And now that California has declared itself a “sanctuary state,” there is little doubt this sends a message south of the border that will further escalate illegal immigration into the state.
"If the racist "Sensenbrenner Legislation" passes the US Senate, there is no doubt that a massive civil disobedience movement will emerge. Eventually labor union power can merge with the immigrant civil rights and "Immigrant Sanctuary" movements to enable us to either form a new political party or to do heavy duty reforming of the existing Democratic Party. The next and final steps would follow and that is to elect our own governors of all the states within Aztlan." 
Indeed, California goes out of its way to attract illegal aliens. The state has even created government programs that cater exclusively to illegal aliens. For example, the State Department of Motor Vehicles has offices that only process driver licenses for illegal aliens. With over a million illegal aliens now driving in California, the state felt compelled to help them avoid the long lines the rest of us must endure at the DMV. 
And just recently, the state-funded University of California system announced it will spend $27 million on financial aid for illegal aliens. They’ve even taken out radio spots on stations all along the border, just to make sure other potential illegal border crossers hear about this program. I can’t afford college education for all my four sons, but my taxes will pay for illegals to get a college education.


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