Friday, October 16, 2020

JOE BIDEN SUCKS OFF WALL STREET - THEY KNOW WHAT OBAMA AND BIDEN DID FOR BIG BANKSTERS!

 

THE LOOTING OF AMERICA:

BARACK OBAMA AND HIS CRONY BANKSTERS set themselves on America’s pensions next!

 http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2015/04/obamanomics-assault-on-american-middle.html

 

The new aristocrats, like the lords of old, are not bound by the laws that apply to the lower orders. Voluminous reports have been issued by Congress and government panels documenting systematic fraud and law breaking carried out by the biggest banks both before and after the Wall Street crash of 2008.

Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and every other major US bank have been implicated in a web of scandals, including the sale of toxic mortgage securities on false pretenses, the rigging of international interest rates and global foreign exchange markets, the laundering of Mexican drug money, accounting fraud and lying to bank regulators, illegally foreclosing on the homes of delinquent borrowers, credit card fraud, illegal debt-collection practices, rigging of energy markets, and complicity in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme. 

NO PRESIDENT IN HISTORY SUCKED IN MORE BRIBES FROM CRIMINAL BANKSTERS THAN BARACK OBAMA!

This was not because of difficulties in securing indictments or convictions. On the contrary, Attorney General Eric Holder told a Senate committee in March of 2013 that the Obama administration chose not to prosecute the big banks or their CEOs because to do so might “have a negative impact on the national economy.”

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-bankster-owned-president-citigroup.html 

This is a further shift leftward by Wall Street from the last election cycle, when between 50 percent and 52 percent of the contributions through mid-year 2017 from J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America went to Republicans. Those banks sent between 37 percent and 45 percent of the contributions to Democrats.

Joe Biden Rakes in More than $50M from Wall Street, Including from Soros

NEW YORK, NY - MARCH 04: Traders work the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on March 4, 2020 in New York City. The news of Democratic presidential candidate, former Vice President Joe Biden's delegate lead after the Super Tuesday primaries helped the market rebound and close at …
David Dee Delgado/Getty Images
3:01

Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden is raking in tens of millions of dollars from Wall Street, weeks away from the November 3 election against President Trump.

In the last few months, Biden’s campaign and his fundraising committees have “benefited from big money contributions from finance leaders on Wall Street and across the country,” according to a new report by CNBC.

Wall Street donors to date have spent more than $50 million to help get Biden elected, as they view his candidacy as a return to the economic status quo, which has often spelled economic decline for Main Street.

CNBC reports:

The joint committees, which raise money for the Biden campaign, the Democratic National Committee and state parties, are being fueled, at least in part, by Wall Street executivesThose committees accept six-figure contributions. [Emphasis added]

People in the financial industry have largely favored Biden, spending more than $50 million to back his candidacy, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, compared with more than $10 million for Trump. [Emphasis added]

Some of those Wall Street donors to Biden include President Obama’s former Treasury Department secretary Tim Geithner, who contributed $150,000 to the Biden Action Fund in August. Geithner, while in the Obama administration, coordinated to slash pensions for roughly 20,000 Delphi workers in the midst of the auto bailout for General Motors (GM).

Wall Street executives Antonio Gracias and Jonathan Shulkin each delivered $300,000 to Biden’s campaign in August, while venture capitalist John Doerr donated more than $355,000 to the Biden Action Fund in the last three months.

Likewise, Wall Street investor Jonathan Soros, the son of billionaire left-wing mega-donor George Soros, gave a little less than $145,000 to Biden in the third quarter, while Wall Street venture capitalists and investors John Doerr, Stephen Mandel, and Pete Muller gave Biden nearly $1.5 million.

In the third quarter, alone, the Biden Action Fund got more than $4 million from Wall Street donors, with huge donations from executives at the Blackstone Group, JPMorgan Chase, The Carlyle Group, and Kohlberg Kravis & Roberts.

Wall Street and nearly all of the nation’s biggest banks have lined up to support Biden and his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), against Trump’s economic nationalist agenda. Goldman Sachs and Moody’s Analytics each released reports to investors indicating their backing of a “blue wave” on election day as the biggest net gain for the financial industry.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder

Likewise, Wall Street is behind Biden’s plan to hugely expand legal immigration levels, beyond already historical highs at 1.2 million green cards and 1.4 million visa workers a year.

Biden has elated Wall Street so much that for the first time in a decade, more financial executives are donating to Democrat candidates than Republicans, the latest Center for Responsive Politics analysis reveals.

 

CNN: ‘All the Big Banks’ on Wall Street Backing Joe Biden Against Trump

SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images

28 Sep 20203,632

3:20

Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden is raking in Wall Street cash from all the big banks at five times the rate of President Trump, a CNN report admits.

An analysis by CNN found that “all the big banks are backing Biden” against Trump, with the former vice president taking a larger margin of Wall Street donations than even failed Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton did in 2016.

CNN reports:

The securities and investment industry donated just $10.5 million to Trump’s presidential campaign and outside groups aligned with it, according to a new tally by OpenSecrets. It has sent nearly five times as much cash, $51.1 million, to Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. [Emphasis added]

That means Trump is losing the fundraising race among Wall Streeters by a slightly greater magnitude than in 2016. During that cycle, former New York Senator Hillary Clinton and groups aligned with her raised $88 million from the securities and investment industry, while Trump took in just $20.8 million. [Emphasis added]

But a CNN Business analysis of OpenSecrets research shows that Biden is beating Trump in fundraising from all of America’s big banks — in some cases by wide margins. [Emphasis added]

At the big banks — which saw little-to-no consequences for their role in the 2008 financial crisis — Biden is sweeping up donations from employees by huge margins. At Goldman Sachs, for example, Biden has raised more than $156,000, while Trump has taken less than $12,000.

JPMorgan Chase employees have given three times as much campaign cash to Biden as Trump. Biden has taken nearly $380,000. At Morgan Stanley, Biden has taken more than twice as much as Trump, taking nearly $258,000 from the bank’s employees compared to Trump’s $96,010.

Despite pitching himself as a defender of blue-collar Americans, Biden has not only been widely backed by Wall Street but also by wealthy residents on Park Avenue.

Biden’s campaign has raised over $1 million from donors living on Park Avenue, according to Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings, as Breitbart News reported. This is more than eight times the $127,000 raised by the Trump campaign from the same area.

This month, Biden touted Wall Street’s support for his plan to abolish America’s suburbs by seizing control of local zoning laws to construct housing developments and multi-family buildings in neighborhoods. Likewise, Wall Street is behind Biden’s plan to hugely expand legal immigration levels, beyond already historical highs at 1.2 million green cards and 1.4 million visa workers a year.

Biden has elated Wall Street so much that for the first time in a decade, more financial executives are donating to Democrat candidates than Republicans, the latest Center for Responsive Politics analysis reveals.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.

Likewise, Wall Street is behind Biden’s plan to hugely expand legal immigration levels, beyond already historical highs at 1.2 million green cards and 1.4 million visa workers a year.

Biden has elated Wall Street so much that for the first time in a decade, more financial executives are donating to Democrat candidates than Republicans, the latest Center for Responsive Politics analysis reveals.

 

Joe Biden’s Campaign Is 


Awash in Wall Street Cash

AP Photo/Patrick Semansky

2 Jun 202080

4:01

Joe Biden has adopted the anti-Wall Street rhetoric of some of his former rivals for the Democrat nomination, but that has not stopped him from collecting an enormous war chest of campaign cash from the financial sector.

Biden on Tuesday said that America “wasn’t built by Wall Street bankers and CEOs, it was built by the great American middle class.”

Eamon Javers

@EamonJavers

 

 · 6h

Replying to @EamonJavers

Biden: “The president held up the Bible at St. John’s church yesterday. I just wish he opened it once in a while.”

Eamon Javers

@EamonJavers

 

Biden: “If it weren’t clear before, it’s clear now: This country wasn’t built by Wall Street bankers and CEOs, it was built by the great American middle class.”

63

7:22 AM - Jun 2, 2020

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Securities industry employees, a close proxy for Wall Street, have donated $29,703,244 to Biden’s campaign or to political committees supporting his campaign for the presidency, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. The sector is the second-largest source of campaign contributions to Biden’s campaign, coming only after Democrat Party and left-wing organizations.

Donald Trump, by contrast, has only received around $6,320,861.

Biden has also received far more campaign cash from employees of J.P.Morgan ChaseBank of AmericaMorgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs than his Republican rival, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. For example, Biden has taken more than 6 times as much money from J.P. Morgan Chase employees than Trump.

Employees at those four firms have donated a total of $508,259 to Biden’s campaign, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics. Morgan Stanley was the biggest contributor to Biden of the group, with donations totaling $171,274.

Trump has received just $27,981 dollars from Morgan Stanley employees. J.P. Morgan employees have contributed $23,942. Bank of America employees given $40,448. Goldman’s contributions add up to a grand total of $4,211, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics. A total of $96,582, less than one-fifth of Biden’s take.

Political contributions from Citigroup were unavailable at the time of publication.

The campaign cash from the big Wall Street banks have poured into Democrat coffers in the 2020 election cycle. Slightly more than 58 percent of Goldman’s contributions to Congressional candidates have gone to Democrats. More than 62 percent of Morgan Stanley’s contributions went to Democrats. Bank of America was nearly even, with 49.9 percent going to Republicans and 49.6 percent going to Republicans. J.P. Morgan favored Democrats by nearly 60 percent to 30 percent, with 10 percent going to independent candidates.

This is not a function of just giving to the majority party. Goldman’s contributions favor Democrats in the House and Republicans in the Senate, while Morgan Stanley’s and J.P. Morgan’s favor Democrats in both. Bank of America contributors favor Republican candidates for the House and Democrats in the Senate.

When measured by contributions to all federal candidates, all four skew Democrat. J.P. Morgan’s contributions are the most tilted, with 73.4 percent going to Democrat candidates, and Bank of America’s the least, with 58.5 percent going to Democrats. Morgan Stanley tilts 67.9 percent Democrat. Goldman lean is 61.28 Democrat.

This is a further shift leftward by Wall Street from the last election cycle, when between 50 percent and 52 percent of the contributions through mid-year 2017 from J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America went to Republicans. Those banks sent between 37 percent and 45 percent of the contributions to Democrats.

 

 

TWITTER LOCKS SWAMP KEEPER TRUMP'S ACCOUNT

Twitter Locks Trump Campaign Account Less than 3 Weeks Before Presidential Election

Jack Dorsey and Twitter employees
@Jack/Twitter
2:25

Twitter locked the account of @TeamTrump, an official Trump campaign account, citing the same policy it used to ban links to the New York Post’s bombshell story on hitherto unrevealed links between Joe Biden and the Ukrainian gas giant Burisma.

Mike Hahn, a social media manager for Team Trump, revealed the censorship in a tweet earlier today.

“Twitter has suspended ⁦ TeamTrump for posting a video calling Joe Biden a liar who has been ripping off our country for years, as it relates to the ⁦@nypost ⁩article” said Hahn. He added the suspension comes “19 days out from the election.”

According to the screen Hahn tweeted, the tweet violates the platform’s rules against “posting private information.”

TeanTrump is the official account of the Trump campaign. It has 2.2 million followers and plays a critical role in disseminating the campaign’s messages on Twitter. The fact that it is unable to post is a major advantage granted by Twitter to the Biden campaign.

This is the latest in a series of brazen actions by Twitter and other big tech companies. Yesterday, Twitter also locked the personal account of White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany.

Twitter is also labeling links to the website of the House Judiciary Committee as “potentially unsafe,” because Republicans on the Committee posted material from the New York Post’s story to the site.

The unprecedented censorship was catalyzed by a scramble to suppress the New York Post’s publication of material indicating that Joe Biden, while Vice President, met with an executive at Burisma, the Ukrainian gas giant for which his son Hunter Biden worked.

The former VP previously said, “I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.”

The meeting occurred in the same year that Biden, in his own words, pressured the Ukrainian government to fire a state prosecutor that had been investigating the company.

Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. His new book, #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election, which contains exclusive interviews with sources inside Google, Facebook, and other tech companies, is currently available for purchase.


Fear and uncertainty dominate Jackson Hole central bankers’ meeting


31 August 2020

The annual Jackson Hole conclave of central bankers, which concluded over the weekend, underscored the incapacity of global financial authorities to devise any policies either to bring about economic growth or counter the mounting contradictions in the financial system.

Reporting on the meeting, held in virtual format this year because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Financial Times noted: “It was the head of Singapore’s monetary authority who best summed up the biggest fear gripping the virtual Jackson Hole conference this year.

“‘We’re not going back to the same world,’ Tharman Shanmugaratnam warned.’”

The central initiative at the gathering was the decision by the Fed’s key policy-making body to maintain interest rates at their ultra-low levels for an indefinite period and keep pumping money into the financial system.

The decision, announced by the Federal Open Market Committee as the conclave opened and elaborated on in a keynote speech by Fed Chair Jerome Powell, was in effect a guarantee to Wall Street that its demand for “forward guidance”—lower interest rates for longer—would be met.

The Fed said it would no longer be guided by a 2 percent inflation rate limit in determining its interest policy, but would instead focus on an “average” rate of 2 percent, meaning that the cheap money regime could continue even if prices rose above that level.

As for dealing with the slump in the global economy—the most serious since the Great Depression—and combating the potential for further storms in the financial system following the market meltdown in mid-March, there were no answers, as underscored by the remarks of the Singapore finance minister.

“We’ve got to avoid a prolonged period of high levels of unemployment, and it’s a very real prospect,” he said. “It is not at all assured that we will get a return of tight labour markets even with traditional macroeconomic policy being properly applied.”

It was a significant comment because one of main themes in remarks by central bank chiefs was that monetary policy alone would not be sufficient to restore growth, and government intervention was needed to boost the economy. But, as Shanmugaratnam noted, even if “properly applied,” there were no guarantees of success.

According to the Financial Times, the notion that central bankers “need to face the reality of permanent upheaval and long-term economic damage” was the “main theme” of the event.

One of the most frequently cited academic papers produced for the meeting was prepared earlier this month by Colombia University academic Laura Veldkamp on the long-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The paper said that the biggest economic effects of the pandemic “could arise from changes in behaviour long after the immediate health crisis is resolved.” A potential source of such a long-lived change was a shift in the “perceived probability of an extreme, negative shock in the future,” and that “long-run cost for the US economy from this channel is many times higher than the estimates of the short-run losses in output.”

The paper continued: “This suggests that, even if a vaccine cures everyone in a year, the COVID-19 crisis will leave its mark on the US economy for many years to come.”

In other words, the pandemic was not only a trigger event, acting on the contradictions that had built up in the economy and financial system, but a transformative one as well.

With the Fed now having formally committed itself to the endless supply of cheap money to Wall Street, attention will turn to the European Central Bank (ECB), which is also conducting a strategic policy review, to see whether it goes down the same road.

While the governing council, under the presidency of Christine Lagarde, may be inclined to move in the same direction as the Fed, it would face certain opposition from Germany’s Bundesbank, which has expressed opposition to the easing of monetary policy.

A member of the governing council told the Financial Times, “we will look at it,” but the Bundesbank would be “very nervous” about it.

“We are not out of firepower by any means, and to be honest, it looks from today’s vantage point that we were too cautious about our remaining firepower pre-COVID,” he said, adding that there are times when we “need to go big and go fast.”

The actions of the Fed have done nothing to boost the real economy, as an increasing number of companies announce that temporary layoffs will be made permanent.

The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday that a survey conducted by Randstad RiseSmart found that “nearly half of US employers that had furloughed or laid off staff because of COVID-19 are considering additional workplace cuts in the next 12 months.”

This indicates that the pandemic has been a trigger for a major restructuring of employment conditions.

The effects of the Fed’s policies and the further monetary easing to come are focused on the stock market, with Wall Street indexes rising to the record levels they achieved in February. The main beneficiaries have been the high tech companies—Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet (the owner of Google) and Facebook—which together comprise more than a fifth of the Nasdaq index.

The extent of their rise and growing financial and monopoly power is indicated by the results of an analysis carried out by Bank of America Global Research, reported by the business channel CNBC. It found that the market capitalization of the major US tech firms, now standing at $9.1 trillion, was greater than the market capitalization of the entire European market, including the UK and Switzerland, at $8.9 trillion. In an indication of the massive shift that has taken place, the research note pointed out that in 2007, total European market capitalization was four times that of US technology stocks.

 

 

 

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."

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“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 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 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.

 

 

 

OBAMA AND HIS BANKSTERS:

And it all got much, much worse after 2008, when the schemes collapsed and, as Lemann points out, Barack Obama did not aggressively rein in Wall Street as Roosevelt had done, instead restoring the status quo ante even when it meant ignoring a staggering white-collar crime spree. RYAN COOPER

 

The Rise of Wall Street Thievery

How corporations and their apologists blew up the New Deal order and pillaged the middle class.

by Ryan Cooper

MAGAZINE

America has long had a suspicious streak toward business, from the Populists and trustbusters to Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. It’s a tendency that has increased over the last few decades. In 1973, 36 percent of respondents told Gallup they had only “some” confidence in big business, while 20 percent had “very little.” But in 2019, those numbers were 41 and 32 percent—near the highs registered during the financial crisis.

Clearly, something has happened to make us sour on the American corporation. What was once a stable source of long-term employment and at least a modicum of paternalistic benefits has become an unstable, predatory engine of inequality. Exactly what went wrong is well documented in Nicholas Lemann’s excellent new book, Transaction Man. The title is a reference to The Organization Man, an influential 1956 book on the corporate culture and management of that era. Lemann, a New Yorker staff writer and Columbia journalism professor (as well as a Washington Monthly contributing editor), details the development of the “Organization” style through the career of Adolf Berle, a member of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s brain trust. Berle argued convincingly that despite most of the nation’s capital being represented by the biggest 200 or so corporations, the ostensible owners of these firms—that is, their shareholders—had little to no influence on their daily operations. Control resided instead with corporate managers and executives.

Sen. Josh Hawley writing book: 'The Tyranny of Big Tech.'

 
 
 

NEW YORK (AP) — Sen. Josh Hawley is working on a book about one of the Missouri Republican's ongoing targets.

Simon & Schuster announced Friday that Hawley's “The Tyranny of Big Tech” will be released June 21. Hawley has frequently criticized Facebook, Twitter and other social media giants for everything from alleged anti-conservative bias to monopolistic control of the online market.

“At a time when these platforms are determining elections, banning inconvenient political views, lining politicians’ pockets with hundreds of millions of dollars, and addicting our kids to screens, I want to draw attention to the robber barons of the modern era,” Hawley said in a statement. “This is the fight to recover America’s populist democracy. That is why I am writing this book.”

Earlier this week, Hawley attacked Facebook and Twitter for limiting the spread of an unverified political story about Hunter Biden, son of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, that was published by the conservative New York Post. Soon after he was elected Missouri's attorney general, in 2016, he launched investigations into Facebook and Google for alleged antitrust and consumer protection violations.