Carlson: Big Tech Engaging in Censorship on Coronavirus to Help Biden
9:40
Tuesday on Fox News Channel’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” host Tucker Carlson explained how big tech was working to help former Vice President Joe Biden’s election prospects through the censorship of doctors offering information counter to the prevailing wisdom dominating the mainstream media regarding COVID-19.
Carlson cited a live-streamed press conference carried
by Breitbart News on Monday as an example and compared the actions by those tech companies to the Communist Chinese.
Transcript as follows:
In an election year, everything significant that happens is about the election. So all these developments are, in fact, related. And here is the core question in every election: Who is up and who is down. As of tonight, the president is down double digits in the polls. There’s not much question about why that is. Americans are miserable. They’re stuck at home. They’re fearful. Millions of them don’t have jobs.
The percentage of Americans who believe our country is headed in the right direction has dropped off a cliff since this spring. Not coincidentally, that’s when a strange new virus from China began to spread among our population. The rise of COVID-19 tracks almost precisely the decline of Donald Trump’s approval number. The political lesson from this is clear: The more damage the Wuhan Coronavirus does to America, the harder it is for the president to get reelected.
That’s not speculation. It’s the most certain fact in politics. Every Democratic officeholder understands it. If the population remains terrified, Democrats will have more power in January. The Democratic party has every incentive to keep Americans afraid and off-balance. For the next 97 days, they plan to do that. That’s their entire campaign strategy, the only thing they’re running on.
Yesterday, the news site Breitbart posted a video of a group of physicians giving a press conference about medical advances in the fight against COVID. Some of the news the doctors delivered was hopeful because there is hopeful news to report. Seventeen million people saw that video. The president retweeted it. This enraged Democrats. Any scientific advancement that reduces the suffering of Americans in an election year is a threat to Joe Biden’s campaign.
They decided to pull the video off the internet. Fifteen years ago, that would have been absurd. You couldn’t have done it. This was America. You weren’t allowed to ban a news story just because it might hurt your candidate’s poll numbers. And in any case, there was no way to do it. There were too many news outlets then. No one could control them all. That has changed.
While the rest of us were sleeping — or in the case of so many of our senators, taking payoffs from Google — a tiny number of left-wing corporations took virtually complete control of all news and information in this country. Now, if Democrats want to erase a politically-inconvenient news story fewer than 100 days before an election, they can do it.
And they did do it. Big Tech censored science. They pulled the video of doctors in lab coats talking about coronavirus research, and they hid that video from the public. That’s exactly what the Chinese government so often does. Except when Silicon Valley erases your freedoms, they lecture you as they do it. They got all the ruthlessness of Chinese authoritarians but with double the self-righteousness — the American version.
Thankfully, this doesn’t apply to us at Fox News. We happen to work for one of the few mass media companies left in America that is not controlled by Facebook or Google. We can report the news honestly. Big tech can’t censor us, at least not right now. You’re not allowed to watch these physicians on YouTube tonight, but we can show them to you here, and we’re going to.
Here’s Doctor Bob Hamilton:
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
HAMILTON: I think it is important that all of us who are here today realize that our kids are not really the ones who are driving the infection. It is being driven by older individuals. And yes, we can send the kids back to school, I think, without fear.
We need to not act out of fear. We need to act out of science. We need to do it. We need to get it done.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: What you just heard isn’t some crackpot theory. It’s mainstream science. Increasingly, it represents the consensus among doctors and researchers around the world. Children are not meaningful vectors for the coronavirus. Worldwide, there is not a single recorded case of a student infecting a teacher with the virus. Not one case. And that’s why so many nations around the world are reopening their schools this fall. But not us. We’ve got a presidential election in November. Children must suffer so that Joe Biden can win that election. That’s the imperative driving our so-called “health” policy. But you can’t know that. So they pulled the video telling you that. Here’s another physician from the press conference called Doctor Stella Immanuel:
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
IMMANUEL: There is a cure for COVID. There is a cure for COVID is called hydroxychloroquine. It’s called zinc. It’s called Zithromax. And it is time for the grassroots to wake up and say, “No, we’re not going to take this any longer. We’re not going to die.”
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Doctor Immanuel’s claim is harder to endorse. Is hydroxychloroquine a “cure” for the coronavirus? We don’t know the answer. We do that that many frontline physicians around the world have prescribed it, and continue to. We’ve interviewed some of them. The drug appears to show promise in treating some early-stage patients. That’s good news. The science on hydroxycholoroquine isn’t settled either way. Science rarely is settled. That’s why it’s science — and not, for example, radical feminist theory. Science is constantly evolving, as we test and retest our assumptions against observed reality. That’s the whole point of science.
Unfortunately, reality is not the point of politics. Winning is the point of politics. So they scrubbed the video.
Here’s more of it:
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
IMMANUEL: My message to Dr. Anthony Fauci is when is the last time you put a stethoscope on a patient? That when you start seeing patients like we see on a daily basis, you will understand the frustration that we feel. You need to start feeling for American people like we, the frontline doctors, feel. I need to start realizing that. They are listening to you. And if they are going to you, you got to give them a message of hope.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: That last clip enraged them. Above all, you must never mock the sainted Anthony Fauci. Under no circumstances can you note that Fauci is very often a hypocritical buffoon, who refuses to admit what he clearly doesn’t know. If you say that out loud, they will cancel you. Fauci is too useful to the Biden campaign. His word must be law, even when it doesn’t make sense. Criticize Fauci, and you will disappear from the internet. And so, Dr. Immanuel disappeared from the internet.
Then Google’s countless toadies did the cleanup work, the ugly stuff. The Daily Beast attacked Immanuel for getting her medical degree in Africa and then suggested she believed in witchcraft. Because, you know, Africans do that. Political correctness is fine with The Daily Beast most of the year. But this is election season. Dr. Immanuel had to be destroyed. The Daily Beast was happy to help.
So were the think tank libertarians, including some still positing as conservatives. You saw them on Twitter, helpfully reminding you that this kind of censorship wasn’t really censorship because the government wasn’t doing it.
They didn’t explain why that distinction matters to anyone. In fact, censorship is always bad, whether it’s imposed by Congress, or by monopolies that only exist because they receive special carve-outs granted to them by Congress. It doesn’t matter. It’s always wrong. Censorship doesn’t improve public health. In fact, it threatens public health. The authorities responsible for containing this pandemic have failed. We know that. Some are trying their best, but they’ve frequently been wrong. We know that because it’s on tape. What we desperately in a crisis, especially in a crisis like right now, is we need are more voices in this conversation, not fewer. Remember when the Surgeon General told us this?
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JEROME ADAMS: What the WHO and CDC have reaffirmed that they do not recommend the general public wear masks (edit) Wearing a mask improperly can actually increase your risk of getting the disease.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
Masks are dangerous! That wasn’t very long ago. Now masks are mandatory. In other words, scientific consensus changes. That’s the point — as we learn more, our conclusions change. Legitimate scientists understand that. That’s called the scientific method. Big tech companies don’t care one way or another because their goal is to control the outcome of an election, not to protect public health. This isn’t about public health, and it’s not about science. It never was. It’s about power. And no one in the history of the word has had more power than Google and Facebook have right now.
We should have seen this coming. People who have power abuse that power and people who have absolute power abuse it absolutely, as we’ve learned.
Josh Hawley: GOP Must Defend
Middle Class Americans Against ‘Concentrated Corporate Power,’ Tech
Billionaires
JOHN BINDER
The
Republican Party must defend America’s working and middle class against
“concentrated corporate power” and the monopolization of entire sectors of the
United States’ economy, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) says.
In an interview on The Realignment podcast,
Hawley said that “long gone are the days where” American workers can depend on
big business to look out for their needs and the needs of their communities.
Instead, Hawley explained that increasing “concentrated
corporate power” of whole sectors of the American economy — specifically among
Silicon Valley’s giant tech conglomerates — is at the expense of working and
middle class Americans.
“One of the things Republicans need to recover today is a
defense of an open, free-market, of a fair healthy competing market and the
length between that and Democratic citizenship,” Hawley said, and continued:
At the end of the day, we are trying to support and sustain here
a great democracy. We’re not trying to make a select group of people rich.
They’ve already done that. The tech billionaires are already billionaires, they
don’t need any more help from government. I’m not interested in trying to help
them further. I’m interested in trying to help sustain the great middle of this
country that makes our democracy run and that’s the most important challenge of
this day.
“You have these businesses who for years now have said ‘Well,
we’re based in the United States, but we’re not actually an American company,
we’re a global company,'” Hawley said. “And you know, what has driven profits
for some of our biggest multinational corporations? It’s been … moving jobs
overseas where it’s cheaper … moving your profits out of this country so you
don’t have to pay any taxes.”
“I think that we have here at the same time that our economy has
become more concentrated, we have bigger and bigger corporations that control
more and more of our key sectors, those same corporations see themselves as
less and less American and frankly they are less committed to American workers
and American communities,” Hawley continued. “That’s turned out to be a problem
which is one of the reasons we need to restore good, healthy, robust
competition in this country that’s going to push up wages, that’s going to
bring jobs back to the middle parts of this country, and most importantly, to
the middle and working class of this country.”
While multinational corporations monopolize industries, Hawley
said the GOP must defend working and middle class Americans and that big
business interests should not come before the needs of American communities:
A free market is one where you can enter it, where there are new
ideas, and also by the way, where people can start a small family business, you
shouldn’t have to be gigantic in order to succeed in this country. Most people
don’t want to start a tech company. [Americans] maybe want to work in
their family’s business, which may be some corner shop in a small town …
they want to be able to make a living and then give that to their kids or give
their kids an option to do that. [Emphasis added]
The problem with corporate concentration is that it tends to
kill all of that. The worst thing about corporate concentration is that it
inevitably believes to a partnership with big government. Big business and
big government always get together, always. And that is exactly what has
happened now with the tech sector, for instance, and arguably many other
sectors where you have this alliance between big government and big business …
whatever you call it, it’s a problem and it’s something we need to address.
[Emphasis added]
Hawley blasted the free trade-at-all-costs doctrine that has
dominated the Republican and Democrat Party establishments for decades,
crediting the globalist economic model with hollowing “out entire industries,
entire supply chains” and sending them to China, among other countries.
“The thing is in this country is that not only do we not make
very much stuff anymore, we don’t even make the machines that make the stuff,”
Hawley said. “The entire supply chain up and down has gone overseas, and a lot
of it to China, and this is a result of policies over some decades now.”
As Breitbart News reported, Hawley detailed in the interview
how Republicans like former President George H.W. Bush’s ‘New World Order’
agenda and Democrats have helped to create a corporatist economy that
disproportionately benefits the nation’s richest executives and donor class.
The billionaire class, the top 0.01 percent of earners, has
enjoyed more than 15 times as
much wage growth as the bottom 90 percent since 1979. That economy has been
reinforced with federal rules that largely benefits the wealthiest of
wealthiest earners. A study released last month
revealed that the richest Americans are, in fact, paying a lower tax rate than
all other Americans.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on
Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
Tucker
Carlson Exposes D.C. ‘Conservatives’ for Doing Big Tech’s Bidding
Rich Polk/Getty
21 Dec 20190
3:53
Fox News host Tucker Carlson slammed establishment conservatives
for taking money from big tech companies to do their bidding, on Tucker
Carlson Tonight, Friday night.
The popular host, known for his no-holds-barred denunciations of
establishment conservatives as well as Democrats, revealed massive spending by
the establishment conservative Koch Foundation to protect big tech in
Washington.
Tucker revealed that Americans for Prosperity, a “purportedly
conservative group” controlled by the Kochs, launched an ad campaign trying to
stave off the closing net of antitrust enforcement against Google and Facebook.
The ads targeted Republican and Democrat state attorneys general that were
investigating alleged antitrust violations by big tech companies.
The Koch-funded group also targeted members of the Senate
Judiciary Committee with digital ads urging them to “oppose any effort to use
antitrust laws to break up America’s innovative tech companies,” reported
Carlson.
The Fox host ran through a laundry list of allegedly
“conservative” D.C. think tanks that take money from big tech, and often
advocate against regulating them over political bias or any other matter.
“In all, the Koch network quietly spent at least $10 million
defending Silicon Valley companies that work to silence conservatives.”
“Google has given money to at least 22 right-leaning
institutions that are also funded by the Koch network,” reported Carlson.
“Those institutions include the American Conservative Union, the
American Enterprise Institute, the National Review Institute, the Competitive
Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Mercatus Center.”
Carlson explained that this spending gets results.
“In September of 2018, the Competitive Enterprise Institute and
three other groups funded by Google and the Kochs sent a joint letter to
the Attorney General at the time, Jeff Sessions, expressing grave concerns over
the DoJ’s plans to look into whether search engines and social media were
hurting competition and stifling speech.”
Carlson also called out The Heritage Foundation, arguing that
its shilling for big tech meant that it “no longer represents the interest of
conservatives, at least on the question of tech.”
“A recent paper by Heritage,
entitled ‘Free Enterprise Is
the Best Remedy For Online Bias Concerns,’ defends the special
privileges that Congress has given to left-wing Silicon Valley monopolies. And
if conservatives don’t like it, Heritage says, well they can just start their
own Google!”
This is despite the fact that Google
publicly snubbed the foundation last year, canceling the formation of a planned
“A.I ethics” council after far-left employees of the tech company threw a hissy fit over the fact
that Heritage president Kay Coles James was set to be one of its members.
Are you an insider at Google,
Facebook, Twitter or any other tech company who wants to confidentially reveal
wrongdoing or political bias at your company? Reach out to Allum Bokhari at his
secure email address allumbokhari@protonmail.com.
Allum Bokhari is the senior
technology correspondent at Breitbart News.
In truth, the Golden State is becoming a semi-feudal kingdom,
with the
nation’s widest gap between middle and upper incomes—72 percent, compared
with the U.S. average of 57 percent—and its highest poverty rate. Roughly half
of America’s homeless live in Los Angeles or San
Francisco, which now has the highest property crime rate among major
cities.
December 20, 2019
California Preening
The Golden State is on a path to high-tech feudalism, but there’s
still time to change course.
“We are
the modern equivalent of the ancient city-states of Athens and Sparta.
California has the ideas of Athens and the power of Sparta,” declared then-governor
Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2007. “Not only can we lead California into the future
. . . we can show the nation and the world how to get there.” When a movie star
who once played Hercules says so who’s to disagree? The idea of California as a
model, of course, precedes the former governor’s tenure. Now the state’s
anti-Trump resistance—in its zeal on matters concerning climate, technology, gender, or
race—believes that it knows how to create a just, affluent, and enlightened
society. “The future depends on us,” Governor Gavin Newsom said at his
inauguration. “And we will seize this moment.”
In
truth, the Golden State is becoming a semi-feudal kingdom, with the
nation’s widest gap between middle and upper incomes—72 percent, compared
with the U.S. average of 57 percent—and its highest poverty rate. Roughly half
of America’s homeless live in Los Angeles or San
Francisco, which now has the highest property crime rate among major
cities. California
hasn’t yet become a full-scale dystopia, of course, but it’s heading in a
troubling direction.
This
didn’t have to happen. No place on earth has more going for it than the Golden
State. Unlike the East Coast and Midwest, California benefited from
comparatively late industrialization, with an economy based less on auto
manufacturing and steel than on science-based fields like aerospace, software,
and semiconductors. In the mid-twentieth century, the state also gained from
the best aspects of progressive rule, culminating in an elite public university
system, a massive water system reminiscent of the Roman Empire, and a vast
infrastructure network of highways, ports, and bridges. The state was
fortunate, too, in drawing people from around the U.S. and the world. The
eighteenth-century French traveler
J. Hector St. John de CrèvecÅ“ur described the American as “this new man,”
and California—innovative, independent, and less bound by tradition or old
prejudice—reflected that insight. Though remnants of this California still
exist, its population is aging, less mobile, and more pessimistic, and its
roads, schools, and universities are in decline.
In the second half of the
twentieth century, California’s remarkably diverse economy spread prosperity
from the coast into the state’s inland regions. Though pockets of severe
poverty existed—urban barrios, south Los Angeles, the rural Central Valley—they
were limited in scope. In fact, growth often favored
suburban and exurban communities, where middle-class families, including
minorities, settled after World War II.
In the
last two decades, the state has adopted policies that undermine the basis for
middle-class growth. State energy policies, for example, have made California’s
gas and electricity prices among the steepest in the country. Since 2011,
electricity prices have risen five
times faster than the national average. Meantime, strict land-use
controls have raised housing costs to the nation’s highest, while taxes—once
average, considering California’s urban scale—now exceed
those of virtually every state. At the same time, California’s economy has shed
industrial diversity in favor of dependence on one industry: Big Tech. Just a
decade before, the state’s largest firms included those in the aerospace,
finance, energy, and service industries. Today’s 11 largest companies hail from
the tech sector, while energy firms—excluding Chevron, which has moved much of
its operations to Houston—have disappeared. Not a
single top aerospace firm—the iconic industry of twentieth-century
California—retains its headquarters here.
Though
lionized in the press, this tech-oriented economy hasn’t resulted in that many
middle- and high-paying job opportunities for Californians, particularly
outside the Bay Area. Since 2008, notes Chapman University’s Marshall
Toplansky, the state has created five times the number of low-paying, as
opposed to high-wage, jobs. A remarkable 86 percent of new jobs paid below the
median income, while almost half paid under $40,000. Moreover, California,
including Silicon Valley, created fewer high-paying positions than the national
average, and far less than prime competitors like Salt Lake City, Seattle, or
Austin. Los Angeles County features the lowest pay of any of the nation’s 50
largest counties.
No state advertises its
multicultural bona fides more than California, now a majority-minority state.
This is evident at the University
of California, where professors are required to prove their service to “people
of color,” to the state’s high
school curricula, with its new ethnic studies component. Much of California’s
anti-Trump resistance has a racial context. State Attorney General Xavier
Becerra has sued the administration numerous times over immigration policy
while he helps ensure California’s distinction as a sanctuary for illegal
immigrants. So far, more than 1
million illegal residents have received driver’s licenses, and they qualify
for free
health care, too. San Francisco now permits illegal immigrants to vote
in local elections.
Such radical
policies may make progressives feel better about themselves, though they seem
less concerned about how these actions affect everyday people. California’s
Latinos and African-Americans have seen good blue-collar jobs in manufacturing
and energy vanish. According to one United
Way study,
over half of Latino households can barely pay their bills. “For Latinos,” notes
long-time political consultant Mike
Madrid,
“the California Dream is becoming an unattainable fantasy.”
In the
past, poorer Californians could count on education to help them move up. But
today’s educators appear more interested in political indoctrination than
results. Among the 50 states, California ranked 49th
in the performance of low-income students. In wealthy San Francisco, test
scores for
black students are the worst of any California county. Many minority residents,
especially African-Americans, are fleeing the state. In a recent UC Berkeley
poll, 58 percent of black expressed interest in leaving California, a higher
percentage than for any racial group, though approximately 45 percent of Asians
and Latinos also considered moving out.
Perhaps
the biggest demographic disaster is generational. For decades, California
incubated youth
culture,
creating trends like beatniks, hippies, surfers, and Latino and Asian art,
music, and cuisine. The state is a fountainhead of youthful
wokeness and rebellion, but that may prove short-lived as millennials leave. From
2014 to 2018, notes demographer Wendell Cox, net domestic out-migration grew
from 46,000 to 156,000. The exiles are increasingly in their family-formation
years. In the 2010s, California suffered higher net declines in virtually every
age category under 54, with the biggest rate of loss coming among the 35-to-44
cohort.
As
families with children leave, and international migration slows to one-third of
Texas’s level, the remaining population is rapidly aging. Since 2010,
California’s fertility rate has dropped 60 percent, more than the national
average; the state is now aging 50 percent more rapidly than the rest of the
country. A growing number of tech firms and millennials have headed to
the Intermountain
West.
Low rates of homeownership among younger people play a big role in this trend,
with California millennials forced to rent,
with little chance of buying their own home, while many of the state’s biggest
metros lead
the nation in long-term owners. California is increasingly a greying refuge for
those who bought property when housing was affordable.
After Governor
Schwarzenegger morphed into a progressive environmentalist, climate concerns
began driving state policy. His successors have embraced California
“leadership” on climate issues. Jerry Brown recently
told a
crowd in China that the rest of the world should follow California’s example.
The state’s top Democrats, like state senate president pro tem Kevin DeLeon,
Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti, and billionaire Democratic presidential
candidate Tom Steyer, now compete for the green
mantle.
Their
policies have worsened
conditions for
many middle- and working-class Californians. Oblivious to these concerns, Greens
ignore practical ideas—nuclear power, natural gas cars, job creation in
affordable areas, home-based work—that could help reduce emissions without
disrupting people’s lives. Ultra-green policies also work against the
state’s proclaimed goal of building more
than 3.5 million new housing units by 2025. In accordance with its efforts to
reduce car use, the state mandates that most growth occurs in already-crowded
coastal areas, where land prices are highest. But in cities like San Francisco,
the cost of building
one unit for
a homeless person surpasses $700,000. California’s inland regions, though
experiencing population gains, keep losing state
funding for decrepit
highways in
favor of urban-centric, mass transit projects—yet transit use has stagnated,
especially in greater
Los Angeles.
The
state, nevertheless, continues its pursuit of policies that would eliminate all
fossil fuels and nuclear power—outpacing national or even Paris Accord levels
and guaranteeing ever-rising energy prices. Mandating everything from electric
cars to
electric homes will only drive more working-class Californians into “energy
poverty.” High energy prices also directly affect the manufacturing and
logistics firms that employ blue-collar workers at decent wages. Business
relocation expert Joe
Vranich notes
that industrial firms account for many of the 2,000 employers that left the
state this decade. California’s industrial growth has fallen to the
bottom tier of states; last year, it ranked 44th, with a rate of growth one-third to
one-quarter that of prime competitors like Texas, Virginia, Arizona, Nevada,
and Florida.
Similarly,
the high energy prices tend to hit the interior counties that, besides being
poorer, have far less temperate climates. Cities like Bakersfield, capital of the state’s
once-vibrant oil industry, are particularly hard-hit. High energy prices will
cost the region, northeast of the Los Angeles Basin, 14,000 generally high-paid
jobs, even as the state continues to import
oil from Saudi Arabia.
California’s
leaders apply climate change to excuse virtually every failure of state policy.
During the California drought, Brown and his minions
blamed the “climate” for the dry period, refusing to take responsibility
for insufficient
water storage that would have helped farmers. When the rains returned and
reservoirs filled, this argument was forgotten, and little effort has been made
to conserve water for next time. Likewise, Newsom and his supporters
in the
media have
blamed recent fires on changes in the global climate, but the disaster had as
much to do with green mandates against controlled burns and brush
clearance than
anything occurring on a planetary scale. Brown joined greens
and others in blocking such
sensible policies.
Few
climate advocates ever seem to ask if their policies actually help the planet.
Indeed, California’s green policy, as one
paper demonstrates,
may be increasing total greenhouse-gas emissions by pushing people and
industries to states with less mild climates. In the past decade, the state
ranked 40th in per-capita reductions, and its global carbon footprint is
minimal. Renewable energy may be expensive and unreliable, but state
policy nevertheless enriches the green-energy
investments of tech
leaders,
even when their efforts—like the Google-backed Ivanpah
solar farm—fail
to deliver affordable, reliable energy.
It’s not so surprising,
given these enthusiasms, that progressive politicians like Garcetti—who leads a city with
paralyzing traffic congestion, rampant inequality, a huge
rat infestation, and proliferating homeless camps—would rather talk about
becoming chair of the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group.
Reality
is asserting itself, though. Tech firms already show signs of restlessness with
the current regulatory regime and appear to be shifting employment
to other states, notably Texas, Tennessee, Nevada, Colorado, and Arizona. Economic-modeling
firm Emsi estimates that
several states—Idaho, Tennessee, Washington, and Utah—are growing their tech
employment faster than California. The state is losing momentum in professional
and technical services—the largest high-wage sector—and now stands roughly in
the middle of the pack behind other western states such as Texas, Tennessee,
and Florida. And Assembly Bill 5, the state law regulating certain forms
of contract
labor,
reclassifies part-time workers. Aimed initially at ride-sharing giants Uber and Lyft, the legislation also
extends to independent contractors in industries from media to trucking.
At some
point, as even Brown noted, the
ultra-high capital gains returns will fall and, combined with the costs of an
expanding welfare state, could leave the state in fiscal chaos. Big Tech could
stumble, a possibility made more real by the recent
$100 billion drop in the value of privately held “unicorn” companies,
including WeWork. If the tech economy slows, a rift could develop between two
of the state’s biggest forces—unions and the green establishment—over future
levels of taxation. More than two-thirds
of California cities don’t have any funds set aside for retiree health care and
other retirement expenses. The state also confronts $1 trillion in pension
debt, according to former Democratic state senator Joe
Nation. U.S. News & Report ranks California, despite the tech boom,
42nd in fiscal health among the states.
And a
rebellion against the state’s energy policies is already under way.
Recently, 110
cities,
with total population exceeding 8 million, have demanded changes in
California’s drive to prevent new natural gas hookups. The state’s Chamber of
Commerce and the three
most prominent ethnic chambers—African-American, Latino, and Asian-Pacific—have
joined this effort.
Californians
need less bombast and progressive pretense from their leaders and more
attention to policies that could counteract the economic and demographic tides
threatening the state. On its current course, California increasingly resembles
a model of what the late Taichi Sakaiya called “high-tech feudalism,” with a
small population of wealthy residents and a growing mass of modern-day serfs.
Delusion and preening ultimately have limits, as more Californians are
beginning to recognize. As the 2020s beckon, the time for the state to change
course is now.
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