Saturday, August 22, 2020

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ANARCHY IN AMERICA SPREADS

 

Police: Multiple Arrests Made During Riot Outside Portland’s North Precinct

PORTLAND, OR - AUGUST 22: Protesters and Portland police clash while dispersing a crowd gathered in front of the Portland Police Bureau North Precinct early in the morning on August 22, 2020 in Portland, Oregon. Friday marked the 86th night of protests in Portland following the death of George Floyd. …
Nathan Howard/Getty Images
2:32

Nine people were arrested Saturday in Portland, Oregon, during a riot outside the North Precinct Community Policing Center.

The event that began Friday night resulted in heavy damage to police cars and injuries to officers, the Portland Police Bureau (PPB) said in a news release:

A crowd of 150-200 people gathered at Irving Park at 707 Northeast Fremont Street and began marching around 9:30p.m., blocking traffic. In the march, many individuals wore protective gear including helmets, eye protection, gas masks, and body armor. Some carried homemade wooden shields.
Officers placed unoccupied police vehicles parked on Northeast Emerson Street on the southwest side of the precinct and yellow police line tape across the road. That was done with the intention of keeping the crowd away from the building. In past protests there have been attempts to commit arson and burn the occupied building.

Journalist Andy Ngô tweeted video footage Saturday of the crowd outside the north precinct:

Police continuously warned the crowd not to enter city property. In response, rioters targeted the officers by throwing bottles, eggs, and green lasers in their eyes.

The crowd continued throwing objects and officers retreated out of sight in an effort to deescalate the situation:

Over the next three hours, individuals in the crowd pelted the police vehicles with softball-sized rocks, glass bottles, golf balls, ball bearings, metal railroad spikes (photo), and plastic eggs filled with paint (photo). There were also balloons filled with feces thrown on the cars and even a torn up street sign was used to vandalize the marked police cars (photo). Windows were broken and tires were deflated (photo).

The PPB eventually issued a warning that the event was being declared an unlawful assembly and ordered the crowd to move to the south:

Ngô shared footage of the moment officers began to disperse the crowd:

“Almost immediately the officers were pelted with objects including rocks. At 1:10 a.m., a riot was declared,” the PPB release said, adding that a vehicle tried to run over officers but was unsuccessful in injuring them.

However, one officer suffered a laceration to her leg when a rock was thrown, another officer sprained his ankle, and several others suffered bumps and bruises, the bureau stated.



 

The Democrats and anarchy

 

By Dennis Lund

 

It seems every Presidential Election is termed the ‘most important election of our lives’. It is a tired cliché that will not be repeated here. What will be said is; rarely have the implications posed by the choices been more distinct, or potentially impactful on the nation.

Actions taken by the Democrats has been made the choice stark and clear. Their far left tilt, the coronavirus response, and the aftermath of the George Floyd murder have afforded the nation a look at the true Democratic Party and what a Democratic victory would portend for the nation.

We have seen a logarithmic rise of a political movement, one that has gained power, through intimidation. It is a movement that brokers no dissent.

Recent events have played directly into the hands of the community organizers now dominating the Democratic Party. These events have also given exactly what the Democrats crave: unlimited power over our lives and absolute political subjugation to the radical elements within the party.

God help us if the Democrats again gain control over the “three branches of government: The Presidency, the Senate and the House,” to quote Representative Ocasio-Cortez.

Today’s Democratic Party has radically shifted in ideology. Evidence of this is the aforementioned representative from New York City.  Does anyone doubt that if not for her youth, she would be short listed for the VP slot?       

She is not the worst of what may be forthcoming should the Democrats run a clean sweep in November. Newt Gingrich last week spelled out the political repercussions.  If Biden, Pelosi and Schumer are in charge in 2021 get ready for this nightmare. These include:

  • Ending deportations
  • Open borders
  • Release of many prisoners
  • Abortions without restriction (and paid for by tax dollars)
  • Severe Gun Control
  • Expansion of the Supreme Court
  • Increased government regulations
  • Undoing anything done by President Trump

This scenario is indeed frightening.

The Democrats are willing to destroy America to achieve their ends. Trump is fighting to prevent this occurrence. The upcoming choice really is that basic.

We saw the real Democrats as they repeatedly lied in efforts to destroy Trump.

Their desperation was reflected in the COVID-19 lockdowns: Democrats blamed Trump for everything they could, be it actions taken or not taken.

The most severe controls over personal liberty were enacted by Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, a potential running mate for Joe Biden.

In a disgusting display of crass political gain we saw Pelosi try to exploit the COVID crisis to advance a far-left agenda.    

We got an additional look at a Democrat future in the reaction to the Floyd murder. Legitimate protests devolved into riots, which turned into a national trend.

The response by Democrats in power, at least those not supportive or empathetic, was weak, ineffective or nonexistent. Those ‘leaders’ are today’s Democrats and will populate a Biden administration.

Black Lives Matter now recognizes the potential destructive power of a mere threat of opposition to their cause. Cross them and you are out. Just like NBA announcer Grant Napear or Philadelphia Enquirer editor Stan Wischnowski and many others.   

 

Corporate America sees this as well and the donations are flowing in. Was this the true goal?

 

BLM is untouchable and are now kingmakers or breakers. Excluding the two major parties they are quite possibly the most powerful political force in the country.

We also saw Democrat failures in the Seattle take over. The governor did not care and the mayor thought it to be a street party and patriotic effort.

These are the new Democrats. These are the people we will get if Trump loses. Obama now seems moderate in comparison. Ponder that for a moment.

With Schumer and Pelosi in power, with radical elements like BLM and Ocasio-Cortez encouraged and unrestrained, BLM-approved legislation would pass with ease.

This needs to stop and it will not stop by electing what we are seeing rising from today’s Democrats.

The best way to stop this anarchy from spreading, as well as impacting national politics, is to re-elect Trump, retain the Senate, and regain the House.

The importance of your vote in November extends well beyond President Donald Trump, indeed our future will take a dark turn should we lose.

This needs to stop, but it will not stop by electing what we are seeing from today’s Democrats.

 


VATICAN - CORONAVIRUS HAS CREATED 100 MILLION NEW POOR AS TECH BILLIONAIRES DOUBLE THEIR WEALTH

 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.


Vatican: Coronavirus Lockdowns Have Created ‘100 Million New Poor’

Pope Francis addresses worshipers on June 21, 2020 during the weekly Angelus prayer from a window of the apostolic palace over looking St. Peter's square in the Vatican, as the city-state eases its lockdown aimed at curbing the spread of the COVID-19 infection, caused by the novel coronavirus. (Photo by …
ANDREAS SOLARO/AFP via Getty Images
3:04

ROME — The lockdowns established to counter the spread of the coronavirus have pushed 100 million more people into “extreme poverty,” Vatican News announced Saturday.

Citing reports from the Catholic relief organization Caritas Internationalis as well as from the World Bank, Vatican News said that the global health crisis continues to take a dire social and economic toll, noting that twice as many people — 100 million — have fallen into extreme poverty than were previously expected.

Underscoring the importance of the new “poverty virus,” Vatican News praised the work of doctors, scientists, and researchers to curb the impact of the Wuhan coronavirus while questioning whether “the political class” has worked equally hard to address the economic fallout of the disease.

The report goes on to cite Pope Francis in saying the time has come to reform “sick social structures” and grow “an economy of integral development of the poor and not of welfare.”

The response to the pandemic must therefore be twofold, it declares, again citing Francis. On the one hand, “it is essential to find a cure for a small but tremendous virus, which brings the whole world to its knees” while on the other hand, “we must cure a great virus, that of social injustice, inequality of opportunity, marginalization and lack of protection of the weakest.”

The report also cites the president of the World Bank, David Malpass, who has confirmed new, higher estimates of massive numbers of people around the world being dragged into abject poverty due to effects from coronavirus lockdowns, noting further that “the number could grow.”

“We had predicted this scenario as early as March, which means that the economic and food safety consequences could be even worse than the pandemic health emergency,” said Marta Petrosillo, director of communications at Caritas Internationalis, in an interview with Vatican News.

Curiously, however, it was Francis himself who said in late May that priority must to be given to persons rather than to the economy in responding to the coronavirus pandemic.

“I make an appeal: that nobody lacks healthcare,” the pope said during his Regina Caeli message last May 31. “Care for people, instead of saving for the economy. Care for people, who are more important than the economy.”

“We people are temples of the Holy Spirit, the economy is not,” the pontiff insisted.

While the pope has more than one proposed a dichotomy between opting for people and opting for the economy, it is not immediately apparent how this clean differentiation works. The economy does not exist independently of people and when people lose their jobs and their savings, it is these real people and those who depend on them who suffer.

Disregarding the effects of lockdowns on the economy may have seemed to benefit people in the short term, but it has proven terribly destructive in the long term.

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.

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.”

The Columbia Bugle  @ColumbiaBugle

 

 

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."

4,675

6:32 PM - Dec 20, 2019

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2,315 people are talking about this

 

“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.

Joel Kotkin

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 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 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 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.